The Italians (39 page)

“No. I’m talking about the people,” he said. “Just look. Everything you need to know about Italy is there before your eyes.”

It was winter and there was scarcely a tourist in sight. The Romans had reoccupied the Piazza Venezia. And it was a riot of confusion, even more frenzied than at the height of summer. There were people crossing the square on foot at every conceivable angle, blithely ignoring the pedestrian crossings.
Motorini
^*
and cars, vans and buses roared past within inches of them, swerving left and right and avoiding one another by inches too. Some of the vehicles being gunned around the square on that chilly afternoon were so-called
macchinette,
microcars with 50cc engines that you can drive in Italy as soon as you turn fourteen (or even if you have lost your license because of reckless or drunken driving).
Macchinette
can easily be adjusted to go well over their legal maximum speed of forty-five kilometers per hour and have about twice as many accidents as ordinary cars. In the midst of this chaos, a lone policeman stood on a raised plinth attempting to direct the traffic. Every so often a motorist—usually a
motorino
rider
^*
—would pretend not to have noticed his upraised hand and continue into one of the streets leading off the square, prompting a volley of whistles from other police officers standing nearby. Pulled over to the side of the road, the
motorino
rider would soon be engaged in a heated dispute with the cops, pleading his innocence with upturned palms and the desperate expression of one who has been cruelly misunderstood.

What we were gazing down on was precisely the Italy that Mussolini had in mind when, sitting in his office behind that famous balcony, a German asked him if it was difficult to govern the Italians. “Not at all,” he replied. “It is simply pointless.”
¹

Delve into any of the lanes near the Piazza Venezia and you will soon pass a sidewalk café that—although this may not be obvious—was never authorized to be one. The way it would have been done is as follows: you acquire your café; then, after a few months, you set out a couple of flower pots outside; if no one objects, you replace them with tubs that have bigger plants or even little trees inside; if that passes unnoticed, you are ready to set out a table and a couple of chairs between the tubs and the door to your café; then another, then another, until you are ready to box in the entire area with a line of shrubs and maybe even some chains strung between posts to protect what is, by law, public property, but which by now looks as if it belongs to the café. At this point, and it may have taken you years to get this far, you are ready to top off the project with an awning and perhaps some transparent plastic or glass walls to protect your customers during the winter. Inch by inch, step by step, you have succeeded in doubling the size—and profitability—of your café.

The Italian way is to do first and ask permission later, if at all. The principle has been applied to literally millions of home improvements and extensions that no local official would dream of approving, unless perhaps given a
bustarella
(literally, a “little envelope”) tightly packed with banknotes. And not just that. It has been applied to the construction of entire houses, even neighborhoods. In 2007, a small town consisting of fifty buildings housing more than four hundred flats was discovered near Naples. The whole thing was
abusivo
(the term applied to a construction project that lacks official approval). The environmental group Legambiente once calculated that all together 325,000 buildings in Italy were
abusivi. “Fatta la legge, trovato l’inganno,”
as the Italians say: no sooner is a law made than a way around it is found.

Look more closely, though, and you will see quite another side of Italy. As mentioned earlier, all sorts of other things are rigidly disciplined in private life.
^*
It is one of the great paradoxes: Italians will not obey laws, yet they will adhere—and with steely rigidity—to conventions. Just look at the way people sunbathe. In most other countries, you arrive at the beach to find people scattered around higgledy-piggledy. But that only applies in Italy to so-called
spiagge libere
(“free beaches”). The majority of beaches look like something a North Korean commissar might have dreamed up: row after row of identical loungers with identical sunshades and perhaps an aisle in the middle giving access to the waterfront. Not that anyone can just walk down it and into the sea. Entrance is controlled by the owners of the
stabilimento balneare
that has charge of that stretch of the beach. Some
stabilimenti balneari
(literally, “bathing establishment”)
are run by local authorities, but the majority are private concerns (though usually with a license issued by the town or city council).

Only when a law happens to lie close to the blurred frontier that separates it from being a convention is there a good chance it will be respected. In 2005, for example, the authorities decided to slap a ban on smoking in public places. No one thought the Italians would pay it the slightest notice. But in the months leading up to the introduction of the ban the idea got around that it was a pretty sensible measure and might even do something to improve people’s health. When it came into effect at the start of 2006, from one day to the next people stopped smoking in restaurants, bars and other establishments on the banned list. By some semimiraculous process, a law had turned into a convention and everyone was ready to respect it.

The response to the smoking ban prompted commentators at the time to ask just how anarchic their compatriots really were. My own answer goes back to the many years I lived among another supposedly anarchic people, the Spanish. I well remember the bedlam of the Madrid traffic, and in particular the double parking. But in those days—as in much of Italy today—the fines were derisory. And in any case, they were seldom collected. Only if you left your car blocking the entrance to a maternity hospital, say, and then walked off to watch a football match could you expect to run foul of the law. Since then, fines have been increased to the point at which they can make a painful impact on household budgets. What is more, ways have been found to ensure they are collected. The result is that, even on Saturday nights, you can drive around the center of Madrid without seeing a double-parked vehicle. What has made the difference is quite simply the threat of punishment. Daunted by the prospect of stiff penalties, the anarchic
madrileños
have become law-abiding motorists. In most parts of Italy, on the other hand, no such measures have been imposed and the accent is still to a far greater extent on forgiveness rather than retribution.
^*

Not far from Piazza Venezia lies Via Arenula. At the bottom, just by the river Tiber, stands an imposing building that a large plaque proclaims to be the “Ministry of Pardon and Justice.” It is no longer officially known as such, the “Pardon” having been dropped from the title in 1999. But the thinking that inspired the name of the ministry lives on. To outsiders, the Italian system of criminal justice can often seem as if it were set up with no other purpose than to make sure people are let off.

Once indicted (and that sometimes requires a lengthy pretrial hearing), defendants get a trial and then an automatic right to two appeals—the first in a local court on the merits of the case and the second in the supreme court, the Court of Cassation, on the legal basis of the conviction or acquittal (because the prosecution too is entitled to appeal). It is only after this entire three-stage process has been exhausted that a defendant is considered “definitively convicted.” On average, it takes more than eight years. In a sixth of cases, it takes more than fifteen. And throughout the period from initial to final conviction, unless the defendant is alleged to belong to a mafia or has been accused of a very serious offense like murder or rape, he or she will usually remain at liberty.

Prison sentences, when they are eventually confirmed, are comparatively lenient. A study by the think tank Eures of the ten years to the end of 2004 found that the average sentence for murder was less than twelve and a half years, even though the minimum laid down in the penal code was twenty-one years. For the embezzlement of public funds, the average sentence was a year and four months—less than half the ostensible minimum of three years.

If the convicted criminal has reached the age of seventy during the many years of waiting for a definitive sentence, it is highly unlikely that he or she will actually go to jail. The same is true of many younger defendants whose offenses have been quashed in the meantime by a statute of limitations or by one of several instruments that the authorities deploy from time to time to create space in the prisons.

The most comprehensive of these is the
amnistia,
which extinguishes both the crime and the sentence. Understandably, there was a rash of amnesties after the Second World War to ensure, for instance, that people were no longer going to be put on trial for having tried to subvert Mussolini’s dictatorship. But over the next four decades Italian governments granted no less than thirteen more amnesties—some general, others confined to a specific category of offense or those carrying a sentence of less than a certain number of years.

Since 1990, there has been a preference for the
indulto
(pardon), which quashes the sentence but not the crime. There have been three. But their effects have been—and continue to be—greater than that modest figure might suggest. In many other legal systems, amnesties and pardons apply only to those who have already been jailed. But in their Italian versions they cover any offense committed before the date on which they are promulgated, even if the person who has committed the offense has not yet even been tried, let alone sentenced or jailed. When Silvio Berlusconi was definitively convicted for the first time—of tax fraud in 2013—he was given a four-year jail sentence. But seven years earlier a pardon had been granted by the then center-left government that wiped three years off the sentences for offenses committed before it was declared. So the former prime minister’s jail term was immediately reduced to one year. And since he was over the age of seventy, he was given a choice between house arrest and community service. Other, less famous Italians will continue to benefit from the 2006 measure for years to come.

One of the reasons Italians are so willing to try their luck at flouting the planning regulations (and dodging taxes) has been the existence of yet another form of legal forgiveness. This is the
condono.
Every so often the government of the day will approve a measure that allows Italians to pay a relatively small fine in return for having their debts to the state wiped out or getting official sanction for an illegal conversion or building. Some
condoni
have been applied to both tax dodging and illegal construction. In recent decades, a
condono
has been declared about once every five years.
^*

They are popular with governments because they give the treasury an instant cash infusion. But the effect is to encourage Italians in their already well-consolidated belief that they can get away without having to pay taxes or seek permission for building projects. It also means that eyesores in protected areas like beaches, national parks and even archaeological sites remain on the landscape, having been fully legalized. Recent governments have foresworn the
condono
as a means of squaring the public accounts. But it remains to be seen whether future administrations will be as virtuous.

For an example of leniency, it would be hard to better the story of what happened after the media floodlight swiveled away from Italy’s biggest ever corruption scandal.
Tangentopoli
caused a sensation far beyond Italy’s frontiers. Because so many people were involved, the arrests were on a scale never before seen in Italy and perhaps not in any country outside the Communist Bloc. I was living elsewhere in 1992 when the first unhappy suspect was led away in handcuffs and I well recall the mounting incredulity and excitement of the reporting from Italy as one distinguished captain of industry after the next was slung into jail to cool his heels alongside others who, until the police knocked on their doors, had been the arbiters of their city’s, region’s or even country’s fortunes.

More than 5,000 people were placed under investigation, of whom 2,735 were indicted in Milan alone. Another 1,785 cases were sent to other jurisdictions either before or after indictment and what happened to them has never, so far as I am aware, been systematically researched. The outcome of the proceedings in Milan, however, has been examined in detail.
²
Ten years after the start of the first investigation, more than one-sixth of the cases were still awaiting an initial verdict, a fact that speaks volumes about the pace of Italian justice. Roughly another one-sixth had ended in verdicts of not guilty. But of the remaining two-thirds, almost none had resulted in a prison sentence. Some of the defendants had died in the meantime. A large number plea-bargained their way to reduced sentences, which meant they did not actually have to go to jail. Others opted for a fast-track trial and obtained similar concessions. In quite a few cases—also about one-sixth of the total—the charges had to be dropped after being timed out by a statute of limitations. Two years earlier, at a time when many of the trials initiated in the early 1990s were coming to an end,
Corriere della Sera
reported that out of the thousands of men and women who were caught up in the
Tangentopoli
investigations, only four were actually in prison.
³

Indulgence spreads like a fine layer of soothing balm over many other areas of Italian life. Politicians who lose elections seldom vanish to go off to write their memoirs in the way they do in other societies. The principle of “up or out” so beloved of Americans has no place in Italian politics. A few years or even months later, the defeated candidate pops up on a TV chat show, sometimes at the head of a new party he has just founded, and soon resumes his career as if nothing had happened. Public employees caught embezzling or pilfering taxpayers’ money may be tried and convicted. But they are not automatically dismissed as a result.