Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (38 page)

But not even the leaders of the fledgling Italian Republic who populated those circles ate their fill. King Vittorio Emanuele III had fled on September 9, 1943. The last king of the House of Savoy, Umberto II, went into exile on June 13, 1946. Their residence, the Palazzo Quirinale, had gone to the president of the new Italy, along with all its contents, which did not include anything edible. The inlaid Florentine credenzas were empty when the new tenants moved in. Faced with these difficulties, the first Republican government decided to dispatch an expedition to the presidential estates of San Rossore, to extract pine nuts from pinecones that had fallen to the ground in the royal park.
²
Undersecretary Pietro Baratono was given full authority to inventory the royal treasures that had been requisitioned. Appearing in the inventory is a bag of Santo Domingo coffee, bought on the black market back in 1943 for the personal use of King Vittorio Emanuele III. Although the bag had been in the pantry for two years, it gave off such an enchanting aroma that Baratono recounts having had a spell of dizziness, accustomed as he was, during the war years, to the disgusting surrogate
ciofeca
(a poor-quality wine or any repulsive beverage). The shortage of food was so severe that before leaving Italy on September 9, 1943, the queen mother, Elena of Savoia, nicknamed
la Pietosa
(the compassionate one), asked to bring with her into exile carrots and turnips planted by the court staff in the garden's flower beds.
³

During the government of Ivanoe Bonomi (June 18, 1944, to December 10, 1944), when parties and receptions were held at the ministry, a liveried servant would lean over to whisper in the ear of every guest to whom he offered the tray of meatballs: “Two, Mr. Minister.”
⁴
Giuseppe Saragat (1898–1988), future chairman of the constitutional assembly and president of the republic from 1964 to 1971, in 1944 found himself in prison in Rome: he had been arrested for anti-Fascist activities. His cellmates recall that he captivated their imagination by describing different types of food products (see “
Ingredients
”) and ways to cook them (see “
Preparation Methods
”).

When Luigi Einaudi became president of the Republic in 1948, he ordered food supplies brought from his personal estates in Piedmont for government receptions. This aroused conflicting reactions in the press. Believing that the food issue should not be resolved in that way, a caricature artist portrayed the president and his honor guard as bottles of exclusive Nebbiolo. The caricaturist was tried for contempt against the person of the president.

Despite such excesses, the food crisis was confronted with great vigor internationally. It was the United States that fed Italy and the entire part of Europe that remained free from Soviet occupation. In September 1947, the first American Victory ship arrived in Italy and the Italian government received alimentary assistance, gratis, in the form of
9,200 tons of wheat. The formal ceremony for the consignment was orchestrated by American ambassador James Clement Dunn. Embarrassed, and realizing to what extent national pride was wounded by these charitable acts, the Italian prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi, accepted the gift on behalf of Italy and delivered a speech.

Similar ceremonies (even notably more pompous) were repeated time and again. The first ship had been intended as emergency assistance. Soon afterward, however, the ERP (European Recovery Program), or Marshall Plan, took effect, having already been approved in June 1947 (the acronym ERP was much ridiculed by the Left, who called the beneficiaries of American aid “ERPivores” in contrast to herbivores). The U.S. program called for conveying to Italy (which it did) food commodities worth almost $1.5 million, among them flour or wheat, essential for the production of pasta, and milk, oil, jam, and chocolate. Ambassador Dunn skillfully played the extraordinary political cards that he'd been dealt. U.S. ships landed in Italy every day. And when they reached a round number, like a hundred, propagandistic initiatives quickly unfolded. These “hundredth” ships docked each time in a different Italian port, selected on purpose. The one-hundredth ship landed in Civitavecchia, the two-hundredth in Bari, the three-hundredth in Genoa, the four-hundredth in Naples, the five-hundredth in Taranto. The band would play, speeches would be given, and newsreels rolled.

In December 1947, the
Exiria
, the four-hundredth ship carrying U.S. humanitarian aid, tied up at the festively decorated dock of the port of Naples. The prow of the ship displayed the image of President Roosevelt where a figurehead had once stood.
⁵
Ambassador Dunn held three grains of wheat in his hand: the first was symbolically presented to De Gasperi, the second to the Archbishop of Naples, the third to a simple dockhand picked out of the crowd. Then the ambassador cradled a baby in his arms, a small Neapolitan
sciuscià
(orphan). The orphaned child was given not a symbolic grain, but a whole sack of flour and two crates of canned food.

The five-hundredth ship arrived in the port of Taranto two weeks before the momentous political elections scheduled for April 17, 1948, when the fate of Italy was to be decided in the heated contest between Christian Democrats and Communists. Each side's chances of winning were nearly identical. After the victory of the anti-Fascist Resistance, half of Italy was made up of former partisans and their relatives; entire regions (Romagna, Emilia) were preparing to vote for the Communist Party. On the day the five-hundredth ship arrived in Taranto, Ambassador Dunn gave a speech that delivered an onslaught that was even more decisive to Italian public opinion than the preceding ones. Dunn summarized the results of all the food commodities delivered by America over several months: 800,000 tons of wheat, more than half the total volume of the nation's consumption!
1,800 tons of pasta! 6,900 tons of fats, 1,150,000 tons of vegetables . . .
⁶

All these food products corresponded to the Italians' traditional rations. If Italians felt uncomfortable, it was because national pride had been offended. Protests over aesthetics and taste arose later on, when Coca-Cola and McDonald's came into the picture.

On April 16 of the same year, 1948, posters were put up in all the piazzas in Italy declaring that if the Communist Party won a majority of votes in the following day's elections, American supplies of food to Italy would cease. The Communists had already raised the issue with their Communist Party comrades in the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union itself had been brought to its knees. Still, the Soviet Communists had already offered their Western comrades whatever help they could: in February 1948, the Soviet ship
Baku
had delivered several hundred tons of wheat to the port of London. This cargo was meant for British Communists. “If the Soviet ship
Baku
,” an anonymous commentator wrote, “on its course from east to west were followed by hundreds of other ships, laden with grain, minerals, petroleum, and materials for exchange, all controversy over the Marshall Plan would end. Neither Europe nor Italy would have any reason to prefer wheat from Minnesota to wheat from the Ukrainian
kolchoz
[collectives].”
⁷

But the wheat in the Ukrainian
kolchoz
wasn't even enough for people there to live on, and the
Baku
remained an isolated case, as history shows.

At rallies, the Christian Democrats spoke in a simple, straightforward way: “Don't think . . . that with [Communist leader] Togliatti's speeches you'll be able to flavour your
pastasciutta
. All intelligent people will vote for De Gasperi because he's obtained free from America the flour for your spaghetti as well as the sauce to go on it.”
⁸

In the elections of April 1948, the Christian Democrats won a majority and defeated the Socialists and Communists, who had formed a coalition as the Popular Democratic Front. This victory left its mark on the history of Italy for the next fifty years. In those fifty years, ideological and political protest against U.S. interference in European internal affairs, typical of Socialist youth groups, often took the form of “anti-American food” propaganda
⁹
and rejection of “American gifts,” namely, the new food products that came to Europe from the United States after the war, especially the most obvious: Coca-Cola, potato chips, and McDonald's.
¹⁰

In fact, Coca-Cola was demonized in postwar Soviet propaganda. Though later, during the Moscow Olympics of 1980, a few symbols of the West (temporarily) entered the Soviet Union—including Pepsi-Cola, which even began to be produced in limited quantities—at the time it was actually forbidden to so much as name Coca-Cola. It is no accident that Gabriel García Márquez described Russia as a country of “22,400,000 square kilometers without a single Coca-Cola advertisement”: such is the
title of his travel notes written on the occasion of the International Youth and Student Festival of 1957. In Paris in the years 1948–52, demonstrators in the squares went so far as to overturn trucks carrying bottles of Coca-Cola. In Italy, both Communists and nostalgic Fascists came to suspect that human bone dust was part of the recipe for Coca-Cola. Having encountered consumers' instinctive resistance, the Coca-Cola Company conducted an offensive in Italy, sparing no means, bombarding viewers with television commercials even at Christmastime and attempting to bury
aranciate
(orangeades),
spume
(effervescent soft drinks),
gazzose
(fizzy drinks), and
chinotti
(bitter-orange drinks) in the landfill of history.

And what happened? In their attempt to stand up to Coca-Cola, the three major political forces—Communists, Fascists, and Christian Democrats—paradoxically formed a united front.

Catholic religious authorities had from the outset cast a suspicious eye on the little bottle from overseas, whose feminine curves appeared as seductive and dangerous as the boogie-woogie. Moreover, every country priest understood very well that Coca-Cola threatened not only local morality but also local wine production. So the Christian Democrats in government stubbornly worked to push the imposition of high excise duties through parliament, to hinder the advance of this product in the supermarket chains that were opening across Italy.

The Fascists, in turn, hated Coca-Cola because it had come to Italy on the bayonets of their victors, because (like its brother, chewing gum) it threatened national popular values, and because it sowed depravity, mendicancy, and prostitution all around.

As far as the Communists were concerned, they, too, made the most extreme statements in their battle against Coca-Cola. The verses of the ballad singer Franco Trincale say it all:

 

For every Coca-Cola you drink
You've paid for a bullet for America,
And if the marine doesn't miss his mark
A Vietnamese comrade is killed.

 

This hostile attitude has become even more unyielding lately, in a time of anti-globalists and the World Social Forum. The World Social Forum declared July 22, 2003, “International Coca-Cola Boycott Day.” The proclamation boycotting the great multinational had been preceded a couple of years earlier by a more or less private media event, though significant for Italy: Silvio Berlusconi, leader of the Forza Italia Party, who at that
time (2001) was preparing to become prime minister for the second time, had proclaimed Coca-Cola one of the pillars of his movement, publicly declaring that “Coca-Cola has been a great symbol of liberty.” The newspapers reacted with intense agitation, publishing articles with eloquent titles such as “Coca-Cola from Vietnam to Silvio.”
¹¹

 

Moreover, a group of daring individuals decided to declare war against the multinational corporation and ban the sale of Coca-Cola in one locale at least. War was declared against the American soft drink by twelve members of the Turin city council. Fully aware of their limited capabilities with respect to the powerful corporation, they merely proposed banning Coca-Cola from the menus of buffets and cafeterias of City Hall and other city offices. Most likely this limited, though resolute, action would have passed unobserved, had Coca-Cola not been one of eleven official sponsors of the Winter Olympics that were to be launched in Turin in two months' time. The American corporation's contribution to the Olympic Games amounted to more than 10 million euros. A small scandal resulted. Turin's mayor, Sergio Chiamparino, held urgent talks with Coca-Cola's spokesperson in Italy, Nicola Raffa, assuring him that the city as a whole did not share the irresponsible idea put forth by several representatives of City Hall. The Olympic Committee was forced to release an official statement, stating that the organizers of the games could not do without the funding support of the sponsors. The newspapers published the indignant reaction of Deputy Sports Minister Mario Pescante, who said that Italy had once again made itself the laughingstock of the world.
¹²

 

The McDonald's chain has had a difficult time in Italy.
¹³
Some locations were boycotted and shut down: in September 2005, yet another McDonald's was forced to close in the Pergine Valley, in Trentino. Italian tourists considered it undignified to go there while vacationing in locations where the seductions of traditional cuisine abound, and foreigners alone were not sufficient to make it profitable. As if that weren't enough, the McDonald's restaurants are mistreated, forced to change the most sacred commodity, their logo. In the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the liveliest spot in Milan's historic center, a black and gold script was devised for McDonald's in the same style as the arcade's other shop windows. This was no doubt imposed by a city resolution obliging the shops in the Galleria to make the style of their signs “conform.”

Inside, instead of hamburgers, there are counters with brioches and slices of panettone, and they serve an excellent espresso. In such a place, one wonders what's left of McDonald's.