The Italians (44 page)

In the capital, the authorities used what the media termed the “Roma emergency” to enforce the closure of all unauthorized encampments and move their occupants to fenced, Roma-only camps away from residential areas. As several human rights organizations have complained, this is not only discriminatory on grounds of race, but it also makes it virtually impossible for the Roma to find and keep regular jobs that would allow them to integrate with the rest of Italian society. In 2013, the Court of Cassation ruled that the law that had imposed a state of emergency was indeed discriminatory and overturned it. But the judges’ ruling seems to have made precious little impact on official policy.

The “Roma emergency” fed into a wider controversy over the link between immigration and crime. Berlusconi and his allies stressed the connection in all their electoral campaigns during the 2000s. Official figures did indeed show a disproportionately high level of arrests among foreigners. But the crime rate among immigrants who had regularized their situation was no greater than in the rest of the population. As might be expected, the problem was largely confined to those who were still illegal and did not have the right to take up regular work.

Only very recently have politicians begun to acknowledge publicly the vital role that immigrants play in a society with one of the world’s lowest birth rates and fastest aging populations. Without their contribution, the imbalance between the number of Italians contributing to the welfare system and the number drawing pensions and benefits from it would soon become unsustainable. Contrary to popular opinion, moreover, immigrants do not take jobs from the native workforce. For the most part, they do work that native Italians are reluctant to do, or which they are not qualified for; the skilled jobs in the construction industry done by Albanians are one example. A Bank of Italy study found that the effect of immigration has been to push Italians into more qualified work, increasing their earnings.
⁶

This is not the only area in which Italians, like many others, have a skewed perception of immigrants and immigration. In 2012, a think tank commissioned a poll in which people were asked, among other things, to estimate the number of foreigners in their midst. The average response was between one and two million, which was less than half the real figure. Respondents also overestimated the number of illegal immigrants and grossly underestimated the contribution made by immigrants to the national output. Though at the time foreigners accounted for about 8 percent of the population, they were producing more than 12 percent of Italy’s GDP.
⁷

Epilogue

E benché fino a qui si sia mostro qualche spiraculo in qualcuno, da potere iudicare che fussi ordinato da Dio per sua redenzione, tamen si è visto da poi come, nel più alto corso delle azioni sua, è stato dalla fortuna reprobato. In modo che, rimasa sanza vita, espetta qual possa esser quello che sani le sue ferrite . . .

Although lately some spark may have been shown by one, which made us think he was ordained by God for our redemption, nevertheless it was afterward seen, at the height of his career, that fortune rejected him; so that Italy, left as without life, waits for him who shall yet heal her wounds . . .

Niccolò Machiavelli

F
ew countries are as comprehensively associated with happiness as Italy. Just the mention of its name brings to mind sunny days, blue skies, glittering seas; delicious, comforting food; good-looking, well-dressed people; undulating hills topped with cypress trees; museums crammed with much of the best of Western art. So it may come as a surprise to discover that a lot of evidence suggests that the Italians themselves are unhappy. A slew of polls inspired by economists’ growing interest in noneconomic measures of well-being have found high levels of dissatisfaction among them.

Surveys in 2002 and 2004 of the fifteen countries then making up the European Union suggested that Italy was the unhappiest of them all. Judged by the broader criterion of “life satisfaction,” it was fourth from the bottom.
¹
Subsequent attempts to gauge life satisfaction in 2007 and 2011 produced similar results: Italy scored lower than any of the other EU-15 countries in the first survey and was third from last in the second (though several of the states, mostly ex-Communist, that joined the union after 2004 produced even lower ratings).
²

Italians certainly had one good reason for feeling miserable: they were becoming poorer. The decade in which Silvio Berlusconi dominated Italy’s public life was disastrous for the economy. Toward the end of the period, there was a moment when the only two countries with a worse economic performance were Haiti, which had been hit by a devastating earthquake, and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. By 2011, when Berlusconi left office, Italy’s real GDP per head, the conventional measure of average prosperity, was lower than it had been in 2000, the year before he took power.
³

In other ways too the country had slipped back. There were signs, for example, that despite the spread of digital technology in the 2000s, bureaucracy was getting worse, not better. One study concluded that the time spent by Italians queuing for public services had increased over the ten years to 2012. In post offices, the average waiting time had increased by 39 percent.
⁴

The problems were not all of Berlusconi’s making. Like other countries in Southern Europe, Italy had adopted the euro without fully appreciating that it meant competing on a level playing field with the other members of the single currency zone, including Germany. In the past, Italy had been able to restore its competitiveness and keep its exports booming by means of devaluation. After it joined the eurozone, that was no longer possible. Unlike Spain and Portugal, moreover, Italy was saddled with an extraordinary high level of public debt. For the most part, this was the result of the Italians having given themselves a modern welfare state without building an economy strong enough to afford one. But it was also the price of a fair amount of waste and corruption.

The economy was thus in pretty bad shape when it was hit by the shock waves from the euro crisis in 2009. As unemployment climbed, bankruptcies mounted and Italy’s elderly ruling class showed no sign of surrendering power, the reaction of many of the brightest young people was to flee. Between 2003 and 2014, the number of Italians who emigrated more than doubled. In the last of those years, more than half were men and women under the age of thirty-five.
⁵
Whereas back in the 1950s and 1960s the Italians who left for other parts of Europe were mostly unskilled or semiskilled, the most recent wave of emigrants has been made up largely of graduates seeking opportunities in the labor markets of Britain, America, Canada, Germany, Scandinavia and elsewhere.

Italy’s most renowned corporate troubleshooter, Guido Rossi, once said that his country’s worst maladies were “the rejection of rules and an aversion to change.”
⁶
It is hard to disagree. But these are not necessarily immutable characteristics. In recent years, for example, Italians have been coerced into being more respectful of the rules of the road. In 2003, Berlusconi’s then transport minister introduced a system whereby drivers are allotted a certain number of points that are deducted if they are caught breaking the law; if they lose enough of their points, they lose their license too. This and other measures have succeeded in bringing about a drastic reduction in road deaths. By 2012, the number of fatalities had almost halved.
⁷
There are also reasons for cautious optimism about Italians’ willingness to change. As mentioned earlier, while this book was being written, a thirty-nine-year-old prime minister was appointed to govern the country, and he selected a cabinet in which half the ministers were women.

Not the least of the tasks facing Matteo Renzi and others of his generation will be to give Italy a new dream—a new source of inspiration for, and confidence in, the future. Italy is certainly not the only country to have found itself bereft of a dream. For years after the loss of its empire, my own country, Britain, drifted aimlessly until for better or for worse (that debate continues) Margaret Thatcher gave it the free-market ethos that has permeated its economy and society ever since.

Italy under Mussolini also had an imperial dream, which was swept away during the Second World War. It was replaced by several new ideas. One was anti-Fascism, which extended to the nation as a whole the aura of the partisan movement. Another was Atlanticism: Italy became one of America’s most steadfast allies in Europe during the Cold War, perhaps even more so than Britain. After 1957, when Italy joined the European Economic Community (EEC) as a founding member, the Atlanticism fused with a growing Europeanism. As recently as 2010, polls were showing that Italians’ trust in the EU institutions was even greater than that of Germans.

To some extent, Italian Europeanism, like Italian Atlanticism, was self-interested. Just as it had made a lot of sense to do the bidding of the United States, a country that had extended to Italy the benefits of the Marshall Plan, so it was natural to be enthusiastic about a union of neighboring states that offered Italy a vast new market for its products, not to mention generous subsidies for its poorer regions. Entry into the EEC was followed two years later by a burst of economic growth that lasted until 1963. The average annual increase in GDP during those years was 6.3 percent.
⁸

But there was, I think, another and nobler reason for Italians’ enthusiasm for the European project. It is often said that the French and the Germans threw themselves into the task of building a new Europe because it held the promise of an end to the wars that had devastated their countries three times in less than a century. But it is seldom remarked that Italians had a similar motive, having also been the victims of military conflict with other Europeans, and over a much longer period of their troubled history.

Recent years have seen dark shadows cast across all of the ideas that sustained Italy through the Cold War. Anti-Fascism was the first to go—killed off in 1994 by the election of Berlusconi’s first government, which included the political heirs of neo-Fascism. Italy’s special relationship with the United States has yet to recover from the setback it suffered after 2001, as many Italians recoiled in dismay from the policies adopted by President George W. Bush and his decision to invade Iraq. Italy’s Europeanism too has suffered greatly from the crisis in the eurozone: between May 2007 and November 2012 the proportion of Italians who said they tended not to trust the EU institutions almost doubled, from 28 percent to 53 percent.
⁹

By the beginning of 2012, Italy’s morale had reached perhaps its lowest point since the Second World War. The year before, the country had seemed to be heading toward default on its huge debts as investors’ confidence in the Berlusconi government’s ability to manage the economy sank and the interest rates on Italy’s government bonds soared. When on January 13 the
Costa Concordia
—an Italian liner skippered by an Italian captain—crashed into the rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio and capsized, leading to the loss of thirty-two lives, it seemed to many like a metaphor for the failure of an entire society.

There are two ways of looking at what lies ahead. The view of many Italians, and particularly those of middle age or above, is that their country is doomed to relative decline: that the boom years of the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s were little better than a mirage, that Italians will never be able to hold their own in a German-dominated eurozone and that while their country may not become poorer in absolute terms, it will continue to lose ground to its neighbors in Europe.

“We are an old country,” a distinguished political commentator once said to me over lunch. “The best we can hope for is to manage the decline.”

A similar view was put forward by another renowned journalist and author in a recent work with the despairing title
Poco o niente: Eravamo poveri. Torneremo poveri
(“Little or Nothing: We Used to Be Poor and We’ll Go Back to Being Poor”).
¹⁰

The more optimistic approach was expressed more than five hundred years ago by Machiavelli in the same passage that contains the quote that opens this final chapter: “In order to discover the virtue of an Italian spirit, it was necessary that Italy should be reduced to the extremity that she is now in.”

In 2014, the country’s self-esteem was given a much needed boost when an Italian film,
La grande bellezza
(
The Great Beauty
), won the Oscar for best film in a language other than English. Paolo Sorrentino’s movie focuses on one Jep Gambardella, who has sacrificed his career as a novelist to become the kingpin of Rome’s decadent, vulgar social life. At times, his mind reaches back to an incident in his youth in which—the last frame before the final credits suggests—he was unable to give physical expression to his first real love, a metaphor for his literary impotence.