The Italians (22 page)

At all events, it is highly likely that somewhere nearby you will also find a
cornicello
or
cornetto
—a hornlike charm, often made of red coral or plastic and employed throughout Italy to ward off the evil eye. Italy’s Catholicism coexists with a remarkable amount of superstition. Tarot reading is hugely popular.
^*
Near the main square of most Italian cities you will usually find a lane in which figures are sitting hunched on foldaway stools as they turn the cards for their anxious clients. Several minor TV channels show nothing but tarot readings for hours on end. Naturally enough, since it is constantly at risk of a volcanic eruption, the capital of superstition is Naples. The city is home to a unique race of ghosts, known as
munacielli
or
monacielli,
and probably the birthplace of the
smorfia
(which means “grimace,” though the word may derive from the name of Morpheus, the classical god of dreams). The
smorfia
is a table of numbers from one to ninety, each of which is assigned to a variety of objects, creatures, body parts, actions, concepts and types of person. It is widely used in Naples to place lottery bets according to what crops up in real life or the punter’s dreams. Corresponding to eighty-eight, for example, are “ebony,” “revenue stamp,” “a dance with children” and “the testicles of His Holiness.”

Some members of the clergy may agonize over the disparity between Catholicism as it is taught from the catechism and the beliefs of a nation that overwhelmingly defines itself as Catholic. But there would seem also to be a considerable gap between official Church teaching and its interpretation by the pope’s representatives on the ground in Italy. In 2007,
L’Espresso
sent reporters to twenty-four churches around the country with instructions to confess to what the Vatican would doubtless consider sins. A journalist posing as a researcher who had received an offer to work abroad on embryonic stem cells was told that “of course” he should take the job. And when another claimed to have let a doctor switch off the respirator that kept her father alive, the response was “Don’t think any more about it.” The only issue on which the confessors toed the Vatican’s line was abortion.

It is a moot point, though, whether the magazine’s findings were evidence of insubordination, doctrinal illiteracy or the simple humanity of men faced with moral dilemmas that they themselves would never have to confront in person. By and large, Catholicism makes greater allowance than Protestantism for human frailty, and it has doubtless contributed toward much that is commendable in Italy: compassion, a reluctance to judge and a readiness to forgive—all themes that will recur in later chapters of this book.

But Catholicism also infantalizes (and not just in Italy). One of the bones of contention at the origin of Reformation was whether the faithful had a right to seek their own salvation through direct access to the Scriptures or whether, as the Catholic Church insisted, they needed the mediation of priests. The man who is ultimately responsible for telling you how to live your life is God’s personal representative on earth. And in Italian the pope is known as
il Papa,
which is a mere accent and a capital letter away from being
il papà,
“the father.” His bishops talk of their flocks, with the implication that the faithful are sheep. And priests address parishioners who may well be older than them as “my son” or “my daughter.”

Italy has been exposed to Catholicism more than any other country, so it is hardly surprising that, for example, Italian has no word for “accountability,” or that the phrase in Italian that equates most closely to “something will turn up” is
qualche santo provvederà:
“some saint or other will take care of it.” Nor is it surprising that relations between the sexes in Italy still bear the imprint of a religion that has long held strong views on the roles that are suitable for men and women.

CHAPTER 10

Le Italiane—
Attitudes Change

Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man.

E. M. Forster in
Where Angels Fear to Tread

W
hen she was seven or eight years of age, a young girl was taken by her parents to a pretty mountain village east of the city of Trento, near to the blurred line that separates Italian speakers from German speakers in that part of the far north of the country. The girl’s family still owned the house in which her great-grandparents had lived, though by then it was unoccupied. In a corridor hung the photograph of a young woman. Her father explained to the girl that it was Clorinda, her great-aunt who “had been killed in the war.” As the years went by, the girl often thought back to that fleeting encounter with the past until one day, when she was at school and by then in her midteens, she put the name of her grandmother’s sister into an Internet search engine. It was only then that she discovered that Clorinda Menguzzato had been a heroine, posthumously awarded her country’s highest award for valor.
¹

Clorinda’s story would make a Hollywood movie. A farm girl from the picturesque village of Castello Tesino, she joined the Gherlenda partisans’ battalion and was given the nom de guerre of Veglia. Whereas most of the women who joined the Italian resistance made their contribution as nurses or messengers, Clorinda actually fought alongside the men, including the man she loved, Gastone Velo. When he was wounded, she and Velo decided to make for a hamlet where Clorinda’s family owned a house. But they were stopped on the way and arrested. What happened then would not make for the sort of happy ending beloved by Hollywood producers.

The Germans and their Italian Fascist associates tortured the nineteen-year-old girl for four nights straight. But nothing they did would get her to reveal the whereabouts of her comrades in arms. According to the citation that accompanied her Medaglia d’oro al valore militare, toward the end of her ordeal Clorinda told her tormentors: “When I can no longer bear your torture, I’ll sever my tongue with my teeth so as not to speak.” The commandant even unleashed his German shepherd on her. But Clorinda—“the lioness of the partisans,” as the citation called her—never broke. In the end she was taken out of the village, more dead than alive, and shot. Her body was tossed over a cliff, where it landed in the branches of a tree. It was recovered by the parish priest of Castello Tesino, who had Clorinda dressed for burial in the sumptuous traditional garb of her village.

The contribution of those such as Clorinda Menguzzato
^*
to the partisan campaign on which the new Italian Republic claimed to have been founded, together with the influence of the Communist Party in the period immediately after the war, meant Italian women could not be sidelined quite as rapidly and comprehensively as some would no doubt have liked.

Historically, the condition of women in Italy has varied enormously from one part of the peninsula to another, over time and between social classes. The seventeenth—and, even more, the eighteenth—centuries offer plenty of evidence for believing that the freedom available to upper-class women in Italy was at least as great as that enjoyed by their peers in other parts of Europe, and perhaps even greater. A highborn Venetian, Elena Cornaro Piscopia, is held to be the first woman ever to be given a PhD—by the University of Padua in 1678. The first woman to be offered an official teaching position in a European university was also an Italian: Laura Bassi, who became a professor at the University of Bologna in 1732 while still only twenty-one years of age. The eighteenth century in Italy also produced the poet, philosopher and physicist Cristina Roccati as well as another polymath, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, whose name lives on in that of the “witch of Agnesi,” a geometric curve.
^*
Agnesi also shares with Laura Bassi the distinction of having a crater named after her on Venus.

One of the most memorable characters to emerge from the pages of Goethe’s
Italian Journey
is a provocative young noblewoman he met in Naples in 1787, as sassy and assertive as any contemporary feminist.
^*
Yet when another traveler, Norman Douglas, journeyed through Calabria more than a hundred years later, he formed a rather different impression of the condition of women in southern Italy when he decided to take a shortcut over the hills above Bagnara:

A porter familiar with the tracks was plainly required, and soon enough I found a number of lusty youths leaning against a wall and doing nothing in particular. Yes, they would accompany me, they said, the whole lot of them, just for the fun of the thing.

“And my bag?” I asked.

“A bag to be carried? Then we must get a woman.”
²

The history of the women’s cause in Italy is similarly uneven, spells of rapid progress alternating with long periods of stagnation. The first Italian book that could be considered a feminist tract, Anna Maria Mozzoni’s
La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali
(“Woman and Her Social Relationships”), did not appear until 1864, seventy-two years after Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
and seventy-three years after Olympe de Gouges’s
La déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne
(“Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen”). Thereafter, however, the women’s movement in Italy caught up swiftly. By the early years of the twentieth century, Italy had its own suffragette movement, and around the time that Douglas was touring Calabria middle-class women in Rome and Milan were campaigning for the legalization of divorce.

What stopped the women’s movement in its tracks was Fascism. Mussolini summed up his ideas in 1932: “My opinion on [women’s] role in the state is in opposition to any sort of feminism. They ought not, of course, be slaves, but if I were to grant them electoral rights I would be ridiculed.” A few years later, just before the outbreak of war, Ferdinando Loffredo, a leading intellectual of the Fascist era, wrote that “women must go back to absolute subjection to men,” and in case his readers failed to get the message, he explained that that meant “spiritual, cultural and economic inferiority.”

Italy’s Fascist lawmakers and officials had long been practicing what Loffredo preached. Under Mussolini, women were banned from applying for senior posts in secondary education, the proportion of women on the staff of public and private enterprises was capped at 10 percent, and if a company had fewer than ten employees it could not hire women at all.

After the Second World War, all that Mussolini had stood for became suspect, if not wholly unacceptable, and one of the ways in which the dictator’s erstwhile adversaries could undo his legacy was by improving the status of Italian women. In 1945, women were given the vote, just one year after women in France. But as the Christian Democrats gradually established ascendancy over the Communists, Catholic ideas on the role of women became steadily more influential. For Pius XII, who had been selected pope in 1939, “the traditional limitation of female activity to the family circle was fundamental to public health and morality.” He explained that one reason the Church was ready to back workers seeking higher pay was so as to “redirect wives and mothers to their true vocation of tending the domestic hearth.” From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, successive governments worked hand in hand with the Church to propagate an ideal of Italian femininity akin to that which radiates from the plaster statues of the Madonna to be found in many a Catholic church, eyes raised toward the Lord and hands clasped in pious fervor.

Try as they might, though, the monsignors in the Vatican and the Christian Democrats in government never quite succeeded in turning back the clock. From an early stage, in fact, there was a striking dichotomy between, on the one hand, the ideal of Italian womanhood disseminated inside the country by its priests and politicians and, on the other, the altogether more complex images projected to the outside world, largely through the medium of film. The explosive Anna Magnani—known as
La Lupa,
or the “She-Wolf of Rome”—first brought to life in the neorealist films of the late 1940s a kind of Italian woman who was anything but meekly submissive. Magnani’s
italiane
were passionate, courageous, forceful and even sometimes violent. Giulietta Masina, Federico Fellini’s wife, gave perhaps her greatest performance as a tragically misused elfin prostitute in her husband’s Oscar-winning
Le notti di Cabiria
(“Nights of Cabiria”). The voluptuous Sophia Loren, whose career began to gain momentum as Magnani’s was reaching its height, added a further ingredient: explicit sensuality.
^*
In 1951, two years before the founding of
Playboy
magazine in the United States, Loren was acting in the nude for the French version of a film with the singular title
Era Lui . . . Sì! Sì!
(“It Was Him
 . . .
Yes! Yes!”) And over the next twenty years, notable Italian women stars such as Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano, Monica Vitti and Claudia Cardinale sashayed and smooched their way across the silver screen, leaving behind quite a lot of their clothing along the way.