The Secrets of Italy Read online

  ALSO BY CORRADO AUGIAS, AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH

  The Secrets of Rome:

  Love and Death in the Eternal City

  First published in hardcover in the United States of America in 2014

  by Rizzoli Ex Libris, an imprint of

  Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.

  300 Park Avenue South

  New York, NY 10010

  www.rizzoliusa.com

  Originally published in Italy as I Segreti d’Italia

  Copyright © 2012 RCS Libri S.p.A., Milano

  Translation Copyright © 2014 Alta L. Price

  This ebook edition © 2014 RCS Libri S.p.A., Milano

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publishers.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-4275-9

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Translator’s Note

  A Preface, of Sorts

  1. Italians as Seen from the Outside

  2. Italians as Seen from the Inside

  3. Leopardi in Rome

  4. Palermo, on the Border Between Two Worlds

  5. The Discovery of the South

  6. Paradise and Its Devils

  7. He Lingered a Little, Then Left the World

  8. The Good Duchess

  9. Milan, Both Good and Bad

  10. Last Judgments

  11. The Invention of the Ghetto

  Notes

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The most recent in a long line of books centering on the specificity of place and the way history, culture, and literature intertwine, Corrado Augias’s The Secrets of Italy is best read as a meandering stroll through time, in the company of some curious characters. Like his previous books on Rome, London, Paris, and New York, this is a series of essays highlighting unique episodes in Italian history. Because the scope has been broadened from one specific city to an entire country, introductory chapters on Italy as a whole lead into the discussions of individual places and people.

  The author is a distinguished journalist, essayist, former parliamentary representative, and television host who aims to make history accessible and bring literature to life for the average twenty-first-century citizen. He has provided notes and sources for many of his references, and in addition to providing English publication information where available, I have added notes where more details would be helpful. Naturally, the original presumed a fair amount of knowledge most non-Italians would be unfamiliar with, so I strove to provide the necessary background without intruding on the author’s work. Notes aside, it is our hope that the main text stand on its own, as a personal musing enriched by excerpts from the work of other writers.

  A final word on terminology and perspective: because Italy is a relatively young country, many of the events discussed here did not technically take place in Italy—rather, they happened in the many territories that predated unification. Italy as we currently know it was only unified in 1861, and to this day many of its residents feel it remains a rather divided country in terms of political, linguistic, and cultural differences. Therefore, I have maintained the author’s references to “the Italian peninsula” in pre-1861 passages so as to respect that historic distinction. The many chapters of this book skip around from North to South and East to West, drawing connections and highlighting the unique aspects of each area. Italy exists in the heart and mind as much as it does on the geographic map, and I hope this translation offers the reader new insight into its most intriguing corners.

  —ALP

  A PREFACE, OF SORTS

  I’d like to begin with an episode that perhaps still holds some significance. It’s a distant memory but is seared into my mind with the clarity often granted to recollections of childhood events, especially those that took place at epic moments. The Villa Celimontana in Rome is a gorgeous place where not many people go. Unfairly, it is less famous than the Villa Borghese or the Janiculum, which is a shame because its lanes dotted with ancient Roman ruins, its woods, the hidden little obelisk, the palazzo that houses Italy’s Geographic Society, and the hill overlooking the gigantic remains of the Baths of Caracalla all help make it one of the enchanted places that the city offers those who know how to find them. It’s one of the many spots in Rome where neoclassic and romantic canons intertwine, becoming indistinguishable from one another.

  As its name implies, the villa is located atop the Caelian, a hill once covered by vineyards that the prominent Mattei family transformed into a peaceful rural garden oasis in the sixteenth century. The main entrance is next to the basilica of Santa Maria in Domnica (also known as Santa Maria alla Navicella), one of the ancient early Christian basilicas that are so much more beautiful than the more lavish baroque ones that ended up becoming the city’s stylistic hallmarks. I highly recommend it.

  In June 1944 American troops had set up camp in the villa. It was solidly fenced off, looming atop a wall overlooking the Via della Navicella, so it was a natural choice for stationing troop quarters. Up sprouted tents, shacks, the ever-present flagpole waving the Stars and Stripes, bugle calls—everything that comes with a military encampment. That flag was also the first flag I ever saw at half-mast, and my mother explained why: “Their president has passed away,” she said. So it must have been April 1945, since the 12th of that month marked the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man who had held the country together through endless war.

  But the memory I wanted to share is a different, earlier one. It was a Sunday and the air was neither cool nor hot, so it was probably sometime around the fall of 1944 when, with the occupation over, the city began trying to come back to life. My mother held my hand as we walked home past the Villa Celimontana after visiting a friend. A festive group of American soldiers leaned out over the top of the wall, dressed in neat uniforms with crisp folds in their freshly ironed shirts. I was used to seeing Italian infantrymen with loosened or sagging greaves, in uniforms of uselessly heavy, coarse cloth. The Americans’ freshly ironed shirts, robust khaki belts, and the scent of soap, tobacco, and brilliantine all struck me as the absolute paragon of elegance—indeed, of true wealth. It looked like they were having a great time up there. One by one they drew cigarettes from their packs and tossed them down to the street—one cigarette, another cigarette, then another—taking their sweet time between one toss and the next. A crowd of young Italian men stood at the foot of the wall; at each toss they dashed forward, pushing toward the spot the cigarette would land. It was part play, part brawl, part competition, and all tumult. My mother crossed the street, pulling me away; perhaps I turned to watch, and the scene quietly lay in some corner of my mind all these years.

  Many years later, on yet another Sunday, I took my daughter to the zoo. In front of one of the cages a group of people, also festive, were tossing nuts to the monkeys inside. Their gestures echoed those of the soldiers and the distant memory surfaced. Not that I was at all comparing the poor young Romans of ’44 to monkeys—rather, the memory emerged because the roles each played were based on similar behaviors: a mixture of complicity and sheer enjoyment, competition and play, on one side as much as on the other.

  Then, after yet more years had passed, as I was working on a history of Rome I happened across a few magnificent lines from the sixth book of the Aeneid. Aeneas has encountered his father’s shadow and tries in vain to embrace him. Anchises then explains his theory of the cycles that govern the universe, prophesies great descendants, and adds that other populations will ris
e to glory in the arts and sciences. The Romans, on the other hand, will rule the world thanks to the wisdom of law: Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos; “Remember, Roman, it is for you to rule the nations with your power (that will be your skill), to crown peace with law, to spare the conquered, and subdue the proud.”1

  The Americans certainly spared us Italians following a senseless war that we’d thrust upon them in a moment of thoughtless insanity. But in my memories those carefree soldiers, bored by having to spend Sunday in the camp instead of out on the town in their freshly pressed shirts, cruising for girls, had perhaps unconsciously found a way to show, with just a few cigarettes, who had really won the war and who had lost, despite our ambiguous relationship as last-minute “Allies.”

  Parcere subiectis indeed—the conquered are to be spared, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun with them.

  “Secrets” is a weighty and complicated word. And the idea of “secrets of Italy” is even more so, given all the things that have happened in this country over the centuries. Entire libraries wouldn’t suffice to cover it all. But in our case the word “secrets” should be stripped of some of its strength and brought down to size. Of Italian history’s countless secrets we could choose just one, the secret of secrets, which might best be summed up in a deceptively simple question: Why did things turn out the way they did? Why has the Italian peninsula witnessed so many twists and turns, so many manias, misfortunes, and missed opportunities? And why, on the other hand, has this little patch of land—cast crookedly into the middle of the Mediterranean, along the dangerously ambiguous border between the Balkans, North Africa, and Europe—been populated more than so many others by so many geniuses? What is it that makes Italy such a special country, one that has caught foreigners’ attention since time immemorial, at times inspiring admiration and at others sparking hostility and ridicule? In other words, why has the story of this nation been so eventful, so controversial? Italy’s international status fluctuates much like the stock market: It can reach remarkable highs, but it can also plummet.

  The first people responsible for such uncertainties are Italians themselves, who don’t always have a clear idea of their potential. Who are the Italians, exactly? The emigrants who disembarked on faraway shores shouldering bundles of rags? Those who, for a pittance, accepted the most menial and dangerous jobs? Or the brilliant architects, the great fashion designers, the superb artists who garnered the admiration of the whole world? There is no other people—at least not in Europe—that has embodied such distant extremes. This is the real secret, the one that encompasses (almost) all the others. How might we try to describe it?

  Italy is a country made up of cities. Be they large or small, glorious or obscure, they all deserve some attention, if for no other reason than for the charged past they preserve—some would even say an excess of past. If you rob France of Paris or Great Britain of London, not much remains. But if you rob Italy of Rome there’s a lot left. Indeed, within the story of a whole nation lie a hundred stories of its hundred cities, stories not only in the metaphorical sense, but in the literal sense: the stories told through the characters and plotlines of literature.

  Our voyage begins, for that very reason, with two exceptional books centered on lead characters that profoundly influenced the collective Italian consciousness. Are they pages of history? Technically speaking, no; but they might well be even more important, because the human archetypes they portray are ageless stand-ins for possible Italians; they can be found among present-day Italians, and it’s not uncommon to run into them on the bus or read about them in the papers.

  A lot has been written about Rome and Milan, Italy’s two capitals, so it’s hard to find a new angle, an aspect that hasn’t been examined in great depth. Hard, but not impossible. Major cities are like huge warehouses filled with stories, and in such places even the walls talk. We’ll hear about Rome from none other than Giacomo Leopardi, who was a guest of his mother’s relatives in their vast, run-down residence during the restoration period, a tough time in which the papal government was recovering from the revolutions of the late eighteenth century and the great, irreverent, blasphemous poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli earned his living as a papal censor. We’ll hear about Milan, on the other hand, from a perspective that might seem marginal but isn’t, through a freeze-frame taken right after 1945 as the Milanese, and Italians in general, proved capable of emerging from their mourning and from the ruins with a drive that forever changed the face of the country, not to mention its character. The sheer energy and vision of those years seem incredible when viewed from the midst of the opaque mediocrity, shortsightedness, and resignation that have characterized the early twenty-first century. But both the energy and the vision were very real. People might’ve been dressed in worn-out clothes, so threadbare it was scary, but they nevertheless worked together to rebuild it all: homes, factories, their culture, and the civil framework, aided by the miracle of a new constitution.

  Then there’s the large territory that was once called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which became known as il Mezzogiorno, the South, after 1861. These pages harbor some real surprises for many readers. For example, various accounts and parliamentary surveys filed soon after unification expose how anxious officials and functionaries from Piedmont who’d just arrived down South were wondering how much of a commitment it would be, how many resources it would take to improve living conditions in those impoverished regions. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification in 2011 a few books of “Southernist” bent, so to speak, wrote that the Piedmontese collected significant government funds from southern banks and transferred the money to the North, thereby condemning the South to perpetual underdevelopment. If that’s true, it’s certainly grave—but the situation is grave no matter how you look at it. Having a huge treasury and nevertheless keeping the population in the desperate conditions they were found in upon Garibaldi’s arrival, with illiteracy rates verging on 87 percent, is certainly no less grave than the supposed transferral of those funds up to Turin.

  Take a city like Parma, which fortune seems to have smiled upon given its geographic position, revenue streams, and high-quality local products. Despite all that, over the last few years a series of somewhat insane events has shaken its foundations. First came the Parmalat scandal, which undermined one of the city’s largest, most successful companies.2 Only a huge tide of uncontrolled madness could have so deeply crushed the company’s “ingenuous” founder. Then came a municipal administration that fell far below all expectations, led by an unconscionably carefree fop, to say nothing of the widespread corruption and money tossed to the wind. This streak of insanity wasn’t limited to a single person and a few cronies—it infected so much of the general population that they actually elected that mayor. In reaction another administration came in, one that might be innovative or maybe just eccentric, but either way it stands a fifty-fifty chance of either becoming a model for the future or turning out to be a devastating disillusion. And yet Parma’s past is filled with people and events that made it one of the most fascinating little courts in Europe, a mythical place of the spirit, as Stendhal so clearly understood when he conjured up Fabrizio del Dongo, a leading man of world literature. Once again it’s just such high-caliber texts that offer us one possible portrait of the idealized city.

  The way in which the Republic of Venice—aptly known as la Serenissima, the “most serene”—fell into decline is a painful exemplar; in the pessimistic periods that current events sometimes foist on us it’s tempting to view Venice as a stand-in for Italy as a whole, crippled by its inability to overcome caste-based selfishness, unable to see beyond the narrow horizon of short-term interest even during the deepest times of crisis. Venice was gambled away by Napoleon, ceded to Austria as part of the machinations he carried out to create the Cisalpine Republic. It’s possible that, in retrospect, that swap had
a degree of farsightedness, and could almost be seen as a preamble to the country’s ultimate unification; to look on the bright side, that wasn’t the worst aspect of the deal. The worst part was the way in which the handover, or betrayal, was carried out: the doge was scared witless; the city’s nobles were spineless; the populace was powerless; and on top of it all came contradictory orders, complete inertia, and a retreat like so many others in Italian history, echoed on October 24, 1917, and again on September 8, 1943. The pages penned by Ippolito Nievo in his great novel Le confessioni di un italiano (literally “Confessions of an Italian”) are quite eloquent, and offer a terribly precise account of the human side of such tragedy.3

  Palermo is a different matter—every city in Italy has its own particular history, and Palermo’s was shaped by a different sea, far from the shores of the upper Adriatic. I’m not talking about the Palermo of the mafia and the murderous attacks that fill the newspapers; our real interest lies in the ancient events that anticipated the city’s present day, in the streak of folly that, once again, is concretely visible, beginning with the nobles who wandered amid luxurious yet decadent mansions and, like a bunch of spoiled children, squandered their family fortunes on gambling and women of all sorts—dancers, cabaret singers, demimondaines. Here the folly goes far beyond the individual level, and is best explained as a result of Sicilians’ internal “crazy cord,” a phenomenon many authors, from Pirandello to Sciascia, have written about.4

  The city of Palermo is steeped in a dark religiosity with somber Spanish roots, a religiosity that can also be unbridled at times, its old traditions hung on to for so long that they’ve become a part of the people’s collective identity, transformed into second nature. Ernst Bloch once wrote that there are places that have an excess of past, where there is not only a past that is over and done with, but also a still living, not yet discharged past—and therefore a “future in the past” as well.5 He certainly wasn’t writing with Palermo in mind, but his theory does apply to the Sicilian capital, since a real surplus of past is visible all over the city.