The Italians (15 page)

CHAPTER 7

Life as Art

L’unica gioia al mondo è cominciare. È bello vivere perché vivere è cominciare, sempre, ad ogni istante.

The world’s only joy is beginning. It is wonderful to live, because living is beginning, always, at every instant.

Cesare Pavese

T
yson was trouble on four legs.

A huge-jawed brute, his forebears had been bred to fight in the pits of old. Unfortunately, no one ever managed to get across to Tyson that those days were over. He was ready to take on any dog in the neighborhood. His owners assured us he was perfectly friendly with human beings. But that
verità
wore thin on the day my wife tried to stroke him and only just managed to pull back her hand in time.

Others might have had difficulty in seeing Tyson’s qualities. But his owners adored him. And as he grew old and infirm they lavished progressively greater attention on him. It is hard to overstate their selfless devotion to their pet.

As time passed, it became equally hard to resist the thought that they might have been doing Tyson a favor if they put him out of his misery. Night after night, he was taken out and—barely able to stand, let alone walk—he was encouraged with infinite patience to drag himself, paw over shaky paw, into the street to relieve himself. In the end, even that became impossible and Tyson was finally put to rest.

His case was by no means exceptional. A foreign vet I knew said that Italian owners were noticeably more reluctant than, say, Britons or Americans to have their pets euthanized. They extend to animals, in other words, a belief that has immense weight in Italy: that life is so precious it must be prolonged and protected in all circumstances and to the very last.

One way in which this shows up is in opposition to capital punishment. No matter how conservative in other aspects an Italian politician may be, he or she is likely to be as appalled as the most fervent radical by the sorts of executions that are common occurrences in the United States. Occasionally the case of some unfortunate American on death row is given publicity, perhaps in a magazine article or a television documentary, and it becomes a national scandal in Italy. Sometimes the prisoner facing execution is an Italian American. Often there is a doubt over the condemned person’s guilt. But not always. After the case is brought to light, a barrage of letters and e-mails is loosed off at a doubtless bemused state governor and, as the days and hours tick away toward the moment of execution, growing pressure is brought to bear on politicians in Italy and Italy’s diplomats in Washington to lobby for a reprieve. When, as usually happens, the campaign proves to be in vain, there is a sense of national outrage. However disunited Italians may be in other respects, on this issue they think almost as one.

Why? The obvious answer is Roman Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. But is it the right one? The Church’s “theology of life” is a comparatively recent evolution in its thinking, which has served to ensure that its attitude to capital punishment is consistent with its doctrine on such matters as artificial birth control, in vitro fertilization and stem cell research. But the fact is that executions were commonplace in the old Papal States, and the Vatican City State did not get around to abolishing the death penalty
^*
until 1969—123 years after Michigan, the first U.S. state to do so.

It could be argued that, since Italians have had such an overwhelming influence on the Catholic Church, it is their reverence and enthusiasm for life that has shaped the Vatican’s teaching and not the other way around. The first state in modern times to abolish the death penalty was an Italian one, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in 1786. The day on which the death penalty was dropped from its penal code, November 30, was declared a public holiday in Tuscany in 2000. The ruler of Tuscany at the time was an Austrian, but he was inspired to enact his reform by an Italian, Cesare Beccaria, who has a claim to have been the world’s first penologist. The short-lived Roman Republic was the next state to do away with executions, in 1849, and the Republic of San Marino was not far behind.

The view that life is infinitely precious goes hand in hand with Italians’ determination to live it to the full. As much as possible is done to improve on mundane reality, minimize what is dull, maximize what is agreeable and generally file off the rough edges of existence.

Flattery is all pervasive. Imagine you have just got into a taxi in Rome and are going to a street that not everyone has heard of. You give the name of the street to the driver and he says something like, “I know it—it’s the one that runs between Via Settembrini and Via Ferrari.” A Londoner in the same situation might answer, “Exactly.” A New Yorker might say, “Right.” But in Italy it would be positively curmudgeonly not to exclaim,
“Bravo!,”
the term for “well done,” which literally means “clever.” The driver has been flattered and it is now incumbent upon him to make the rest of the journey as pleasant an experience as possible. In the same way, all women are automatically
belle
and the genuinely pretty ones are
bellissime
.

This very Italian talent for dusting life with a thick layer of stardust is deployed liberally throughout the year. But perhaps it comes to the fore with greatest effect during Lent. In the Catholic tradition, this is meant to be the grimmest forty days in the calendar—a time of repentance and self-denial leading up to the commemoration of Jesus’s trial and agonizingly painful death. But in Italy it never seems to be quite that bad.

First of all, as in many other countries, there is Carnival—a brief spell of self-indulgence before the long weeks of abstinence. This is when, in Italy, you see small children on the streets dressed up in a range of bizarre outfits: some as princesses, others as ghouls, superheroes, pirates and so on. Depending on the calendar, Carnival falls some time in the period from early February to early March, and the children’s costumes introduce a touch of color to one of the more doleful phases of the year.

Carnevale,
like every other festival in the Italian calendar, also brings with it a range of seasonal delicacies like
sfrappole
(thin strips of pastry that are fried and sugared) and
castagnole
or
frittelle
(little doughnuts sprinkled with sugar and filled with crème pâtissière). These hypercalorific delights are meant to be swept from the shops once Lent begins, yet somehow they remain temptingly available for weeks after Ash Wednesday, only starting to disappear once Saint Joseph’s Day is firmly within sight.

The feast day of Mary’s husband always falls in Lent and is marked by Catholics as a day of abstinence on which meat is kept from the table. But—at least in the south, from Rome downward—the deprivation is alleviated more than a little by the appearance of
zeppole:
baked cream puffs, often topped with candied fruits. By the time the last
zeppole
have been consumed, the end of Lent is nigh.

Before it is reached, however, there is the bleakest day in the Christian calendar to be got through—Good Friday, when altars are stripped of their adornments, priests officiate in black and no bells are rung. This most sorrowful of festivals is a public holiday in many countries that Italians regard as semi-heathen, including Britain, Denmark and Sweden. It is also a national festival in several others that do not even have majority Christian populations, including Indonesia. But in Italy, it is just another day. The shops are open, as are the banks and theaters. And you cannot help but wonder whether this is not because Good Friday is the day of the year Italians consider most
brutto
.

At all events, once it has been got through, the nation is ready for Easter Sunday and the celebration of the Resurrection, the joys of chocolate eggs and a whole new range of seasonal delicacies, including the
colomba,
an Easter cake shaped like a dove, Neapolitan
pastiera,
and
pizza pasquale,
a cheese-flavored sponge enjoyed in Umbria and other parts of central Italy.

Life, in other words, is returning pleasantly to normal. And in many respects, normal life in Italy—at least in the way it has evolved in recent decades—is decidedly pleasant. There is the beauty of the cities and the countryside, the elegance of the clothes and, of course, the sunshine.

“Più tosto che arricchir, voglio quiete,”
wrote the poet Ariosto: “Rather than riches, I want tranquillity.” And for the most part his compatriots have taken the same view. Italians are certainly not lazy. Many work extremely hard, particularly in family businesses. But it is rare for them to view work as anything but a necessary evil. A survey commissioned by the weekly newsmagazine
Panorama
in 2006 found that two-thirds of Italians would give up their work if they could be guaranteed the relatively modest sum of €5,000 a month. In the same way, retirement is usually seen as entirely positive. There seems to be none of the fretting that goes on in Anglo-Saxon societies about how to cope with a loss of identity. I have known plenty of Italians who have gone into retirement, and sometimes I have bumped into them in the street or when they have made a return visit to the offices where they worked. Not once have I heard any of them express anything but unmitigated delight at no longer having a job.

I have been a guest at two separate Italian newspapers and in neither was anything much done to make the experience of work more enjoyable. There seemed to be a generalized acceptance that this would be futile. Apart from maybe a round of drinks at Christmas, there were none of those events that in British and American offices are intended to boost corporate morale and forge team spirit. Nor, most strikingly, were there any rites of passage. When the time came for employees to retire, they simply disappeared. One day they were there at their desk. The next day they were gone. There was no little party in the boss’s office to say, “Thanks and all the best for the future,” no collection among the staff to pay for a farewell present, not even a note on the corkboard to record the fact that, after ten, twenty or maybe even thirty years with the company, Giulio or Giulia was leaving. He or she just went. Like Lewis Carroll’s Snark, they “softly and suddenly vanished away.”

It is all of a piece with the razor-sharp line that most Italians draw between work and leisure. I sometimes like to take a report or other document with me to lunch so I can read it at leisure over my food. But on more than one occasion, I have been approached by Italian workmates in a state of dismay mingled with disapproval.

“That’s a very bad habit, you know,” said a senior newspaper executive when he saw me leafing through some papers over a bite to eat in a café near the office. Lunches, like other meals, are sacred occasions on which those sitting at the table should be concentrating only on the food and wine set before them or enjoying the conversation.

But then, if leisure is prized by Italians, the everyday pleasure of eating is hallowed. “I once overheard a conversation in an Italian train between two businessmen who were strangers to each other,” the British cookery writer Elizabeth Romer wrote. “For the entire two-hour journey they discussed with passion their particular way of making
spaghetti alla carbonara
and other pasta sauces.” Anyone who has lived in Italy will have had the same experience. At one level, cuisine for Italians is what the weather is for Britons: a suitable topic for conversation between strangers that avoids the risks associated with politics, religion and football. But not entirely. Sometimes you hear impassioned arguments that, as the disputants draw close enough to be understood, turn out to be about, say, the use of
pancetta dolce
(unsmoked bacon) as opposed to
pancetta affumicata,
which is the smoked variety. If the issue at stake is the use, in place of
pancetta,
of
guanciale,
which is made with the pig’s cheeks, then things can get really quite acerbic. In central Italy, there are those who, one feels, would rather lose a month’s wages than admit that
bucatini all’amatriciana
can be made with anything other than pork jowl.