The Italians (5 page)

The island of Sicily was subsequently lost to the Crown of Aragon, the state in northeastern Spain that included modern-day Catalonia. But in the fifteenth century a king of Aragon, Alfonso V, reunited the island (and Sardinia) with the mainland. After the Crown of Aragon merged with the Crown of Castile, southern Italy became a dominion of the new Kingdom of Spain, the realm that would soon be ascendant in the Mediterranean and far beyond.

The unity of the south under a succession of foreign rulers contrasted sharply with the fragmentation of the north. But after a series of catastrophes in the fourteenth century, notably the Black Death, economic activity there recovered and gradually reacquired momentum. It was during this period too that the first great Renaissance works of art and literature made their appearance in Siena and Florence.

As Harry Lime rightly observed, Italians produced some of their greatest cultural achievements in precisely those periods in which they were in greatest peril.
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The prosperity and emerging cultural brilliance of the states that replaced or absorbed the communes masked the acute danger they were in. By the middle of the fifteenth century, at the height of the Renaissance, northern Italy was split into more than a dozen states. Farther south, the pope’s temporal authority was severely circumscribed by the power of local nobles.

For as long as the Holy Roman Empire held a cloak of protection over the whole of northern and central Italy, its inhabitants were safe from all but one another and the odd irate emperor. For all intents and purposes, however, the cloak had been cast off in the days of Frederick II, and just as the Italy of the fifth and sixth centuries had been a tempting prize for the Ostrogoths and Lombards, so the Italy of the fifteenth century—the land of the Renaissance and the richest territory in Europe—became an irresistible lure for the new nation-states that were starting to challenge the Holy Roman Empire for dominance of the continent.

It is often said that the Germans have never recovered from the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, that the brutality of that momentous clash between Protestant and Catholic armies hard-wired into their national character a sense of insecurity that they have never been able to shake off. Something not so very different could be said of the so-called Italian Wars that began in 1494, when a French army marched onto the peninsula. For almost sixty years, French, Spanish, German and Swiss armies crisscrossed Italy against a background of dizzyingly complex diplomacy that involved popes, foreign monarchs, the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and the rulers of Italy’s tragically divided and competing states.

In 1527, the violence peaked in an attack on Rome that shocked the whole of Europe. Some twenty thousand mainly German (and Lutheran) troops poured through the walls of the city at the start of an eight-day orgy of destruction that has come to be known as the Sack of Rome. Churches were pillaged. Nuns were raped. Priests were murdered. Noble houses were torched. Priceless classical treasures were smashed or looted. Romans thought to be wealthy were tortured so they would hand over their riches, and if they proved to have none they too were butchered. Nearly a quarter of the population was killed.

The Italian Wars were scarcely the first to be waged on the peninsula in order to settle foreign scores. Nor were they necessarily more destructive than those that preceded them. But they were uniquely humiliating. They revealed in the most savage way the Italians’ inability to sink their differences and work together for their common good. They put a ruinous and bloody end to the most culturally illustrious era of Italy’s history. And they ushered in another in which much of the north would join the south under foreign yokes. In the end, it was not the French but the Spanish—already masters of the south—who emerged as the dominant power. Under the treaty that put an end to the fighting, the extensive territories of the Duchy of Milan were given to Spain. Venice retained its independence, as did the other Italian duchies and republics. But in the new era of big, centralized nation-states hungry for empire, their freedom of maneuver was severely limited.

Though it was far from obvious at the time, the sixteenth century also marked the start of Italy’s economic decline relative to other parts of Western Europe. There was more than one cause, but probably the most important were the changes that were taking place in the pattern of world trade. The routes across the Atlantic had already begun to carry far more traffic and generate far greater wealth than those in the Mediterranean, while the Far East would soon replace the Near East as a source of imports for the increasingly wealthy nations of Western Europe.

The new political order imposed at the end of the Italian Wars was to remain in place for another 150 years. But that did not mean the intervening period was peaceful. In the first half of the seventeenth century Italy was the scene of several more wars, most involving the increasingly self-assertive Kingdom of Savoy. The conflicts that would determine its fate in the next century, on the other hand, were fought outside the peninsula. But that only drove home the point that the Italian states had become pieces in a chess game in which the important moves were made on other parts of the European board. Austria now supplanted Spain as the main arbiter of the peninsula’s destiny, though it subsequently lost the south to the Spanish branch of the Bourbon dynasty.

Thereafter, Italy’s political geography remained substantially unchanged until 1796, when Napoléon Bonaparte, whose ancestry was more Italian than French, became the latest of many generals to lead his troops over the Alps. If only for a few years, the French were the masters of Italy. Napoléon redrew the boundaries of the various little states and gave them names borrowed from the classical past (so Tuscany, for example, became the Kingdom of Etruria).

Once the revolutionary wave had passed, the old order—as in most of the rest of Europe—was restored. The Spanish Bourbons, by now thoroughly Italianized, were given back the southern mainland and Sicily. Fiercely conservative, authoritarian and promonarchy, the leaders of early nineteenth-century Europe wanted no truck with republics. Two were snuffed out in the settlement that followed the Napoleonic wars. Genoa went to the House of Savoy, whose realm included Sardinia, Piedmont on the eastern side of the Alps, and Savoy on the western side. Venice, proudly free for more than a thousand years, was handed to Austria, together with its extensive hinterland and what remained of its empire. The Austrians also got back the lands of the old Duchy of Milan. They thus gained control of most of northern Italy, and held on to it until the Risorgimento.

Almost fourteen centuries elapsed between the deposing of the last Roman emperor in the West and the unification that followed the breaching of the Aurelian Wall near Porta Pia in 1870: sixty generations, more or less, of disunity and vulnerability to the whim of foreign rulers and the might of foreign armies.
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Such things leave their mark on a people.

CHAPTER 3

Echoes and Reverberations

Noi siamo prodotto del passato e viviamo immersi nel passato.

We are produced by the past and we live immersed in the past.

Benedetto Croce

I
had been based in Italy as a foreign correspondent for only a short time when I received a letter from a reader, forwarded to me from the newspaper in London. It was quite unusual in those days to get any sort of feedback. Email was still a novelty in the mid-1990s. If you wanted to register your objections (or, more rarely, pay a compliment) to a journalist, you had to go to the trouble of writing a letter with typewriter or pen, putting it in an envelope and taking it to a mailbox. Few readers bothered. Those who did so were usually either mentally disturbed, utterly delighted or furiously angry. This one was furiously angry.

Some weeks earlier, in what had been more of a literary flourish than a serious assessment, I had referred to Italy as being “charming but corrupt and chaotic.” It was that last word that had infuriated my British reader. How on earth could I claim it was chaotic? he asked. He had come to live in Italy a few months earlier and found that, on the contrary, life in Italy was infinitely better organized than in Britain. Having just returned to Rome from a trip to Naples, I found this more than a little baffling. But then I looked at the address at the top of the letter. The writer was living in Bologna. His Italy and my Italy were worlds apart.

He had based himself in a city that, in the Cold War years, the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) had turned into a showcase for Socialist government. As I was soon to discover when I visited Bologna myself, it was a place where not only did the buses run on time, but the passengers knew when they were going to arrive because of electronic displays at the bus stops. These had been installed in Bologna years before they made their appearance in other European cities (twenty years later they are only just now getting to Rome). I, by contrast, had been living and working for most of the time in the southern half of Italy—it has usually produced more news than the rest—and in a very different and more disorderly society. There, the buses were dilapidated and the drivers thought nothing of roaring over pedestrian crossings at which people were waiting on either side to cross the road.

Nor were the Communists’ ambitions for Bologna the only reason it was—and is—different from cities farther south. As you move north from Rome,
civismo,
which translates as “public spirit” or “social responsibility” or just “consideration for others,”
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increasingly becomes a reality. The public spaces in towns and the common parts of buildings become cleaner and tidier. There is more evidence of a sense of community.

Conventionally, Italy is divided into three parts: north, south and central. The center is usually taken to encompass the territories of the old Papal States with the addition of Tuscany. It is a convenient division for, say, meteorologists. But it is of little help in understanding the nature of the country. Bologna is in Emilia-Romagna. Rome is in Lazio. They are both in central Italy. Yet it is clear to anyone who spends more than a few hours in both cities that they exist on quite different planes.

An alternative division of the country emerged in the pages of a seminal book published in the 1990s by an American political scientist.
¹
Robert Putnam and his collaborators wanted to find out why some democratic governments succeed while others fail. So they looked at the records of Italy’s regional administrations and concluded that their performances correlated to a large extent with the degree to which individuals and institutions in each region had developed traditions of mutual cooperation and trust, and that those traditions were strongest in areas whose populations in the Middle Ages had experienced self-rule, often as communes. Putnam’s analysis implies a line that divides Italy into just two areas: north and south. Cities like Bologna, on the periphery of the old Papal States, which were in practice independent of direct rule from Rome for much of their history, would come within the north. His thesis may not account for everything. Matera in Basilicata, for example, is a city that exhibits a fair amount of
civismo
. But his book does highlight an important way in which Italy’s history has contributed to its diversity. There are others.

Government by foreigners has given a different flavor to different regions. In ancient times, Greek settlers established themselves on Sicily and in parts of the southern mainland, leaving an indelible mark on the local culture. Among other things, the name of the Calabrian mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, is thought to be of Greek origin. In Sicily, the Greek bedrock was overlaid with layers of Arab and Berber influence, which also touched parts of Puglia. The presence of Muslims over a period of centuries is often cited as an explanation for the traditionally low status of women in Sicily, and for the prevalence of so many dark-eyed, dark-haired beauties among the women of Puglia. Some Italians will tell you that, paradoxically, you are more likely to encounter a blond-haired or redheaded person on Sicily than on the mainland, and that that has to do with more than a century of Norman rule. What is certainly true is that the Spanish left their mark on the whole of the Mezzogiorno and are often blamed for having infused the southern upper classes with a contempt for work and an aversion to investment in anything but land. Precisely the opposite values have long held good in the north, which was repeatedly invaded by people of Germanic stock. The Goths and—probably to a much greater extent—the Lombards changed the ethnic composition of northern Italy and parts of the south as well. Austrian rule in the north in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is clearly visible in the
mitteleuropäische
look of the architecture of Milan and cities farther east. Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice bears witness to the influence of the Orthodox Christian east with which the Venetians traded profitably for hundreds of years.