The Secrets of Italy Read online

  The natural question, at this point, would be to ask how in the world the attempted revolution of 1799 and the revolt of 1943 had opposite endings, with the former turning out to be a total failure and the latter resulting in relative victory. The two events betray stark differences in terms of their historic time period, political context, armies on the ground, the duration of conflict, and the presence or absence of the masses’ support. History, including historic fiction, pushes us to try to compare the two circumstances, but in this case that is not possible, with the exception of one key aspect: There is a degree of coherence hidden within the social mechanisms at work, and their tendency to repeat themselves sometimes allows us to read them as behavioral constants.

  The late eighteenth-century intellectuals aiming to establish a republic were asking illiterate masses to make a profound political decision involving a demanding series of changes, all of which was too advanced for your average Neapolitan back then, who viewed such propositions as just a bunch of highfalutin hot air. But 1943 was a different matter—it was a rapid, violent flare-up, the enraged rejection of an occupation that had been not only arduous, but utterly stupid to boot. Colonel Schöll’s comportment in Naples exhibited the same blindness Pontius Pilate displayed in the ancient Roman province of Judaea; both were incapable of understanding what kind of people they were dealing with.

  In 1799 there was a prospect of enacting radical change, the end of a monarchy—of that particular Bourbon monarchy. But just a few years earlier in Paris, the French Revolution had turned into the Reign of Terror, and the king and queen had been guillotined in public.12 Naples was under the reign of Ferdinand IV and his wife Maria Carolina of Austria (a stronger ruler than her husband), sister of the beheaded Marie Antoinette. In light of those recent tragedies, the term republic easily assumed the same sinister air that twentieth-century people later associated with the word communism.

  To the contrary, in 1943 it was all too easy to think that nothing could be worse than that blind, cruel, hopeless German occupation, no one worse than its hardened, precise, merciless soldiers. The year 1799, in all respects, promised revolution; 1943, on the other hand, brought true revolt. It did not matter what would come after; the only thing of any importance was putting an end to what was going on, no matter what it would take, no matter what the price to pay.

  Once upon a time in Italy there was a phenomenon known as maschere, “masks.” This term referred not to the carnival masks you might be familiar with; rather, it described the characters who embodied—in their repetitive gestures, vices, and tics—a specific region or city, keeping its ancient traditions alive. Maybe guise is the term that best captures the sense of these stock characters. A few examples: Arlecchino (Harlequin) was a maschera from Bergamo’s commedia dell’arte, an astute, ribald, agile servant with a talent for playing tricks and pranks; his accomplice Brighella was equally slick; his mistress Colombina (Colombine) was yet another sly servant. Bolognese theater boasted Dottor Balanzone, a know-it-all busybody; Piedmontese theater had Gianduja, a peasant with a penchant for good food and drink; Venetian theater starred the stingy, rich, senile Pantalone; and Roman theater had Rugantino, a quarrelsome braggart ready to flee at a moment’s notice. For centuries on end these stock characters brought to life countless interwoven plots and intrigues, broke and reinforced every rule, and generally entertained, as the barkers outside the theater claimed, young and old alike. Naples, too, had its own, who was in turn one of Italy’s most famous: Pulcinella (Punch), born in the sixteenth century, or perhaps even earlier, was a descendant of the ancient Roman shows known as Atellan Farces, filled with fun, scurrilities, and copious sex. He traditionally wears a large white cassock and a black mask with a long nose, leaving only his mouth uncovered; he is often portrayed with a protruding belly, and sometimes as a hunchback. He is simultaneously both stupid and clever, he seems like a devil but can also be an angel, he knows he is in a tough spot but also knows he will eventually get out of it, somehow, with some game, some twist, some imbroglio, and that it will all end with a huge feast of macaroni. He talks, shouts, dances, sings, flails about, and gesticulates; but he also often spends a long time without making a move, lazing about, sleepily resting, all the while ready to pounce like a cat to catch whatever prey chance might have to offer. He is an amicable, amusing, generous character, ready to share whatever it is he has stolen with his companions in both adventure and misfortune. But he is also no stranger to betrayal and sudden sadness, whereupon he begins to philosophize, looking for a way out through dream or song.

  Of all the quintessential Italian stock characters, Pulcinella is the richest, most intense, and most nuanced. His roots run deep into the terrain underlying the city and its common folk, some of the liveliest in all the Mediterranean. Indeed, too lively according to some—so lively they are apt to ignore even the most basic rules governing collective behavior, the kinds of rules that make it possible for all of us to deal with one another on a daily basis. Neapolitans’ vivacity lets individuals’ energy explode, boundless, as blood boils and quick, impatient thoughts arise in the face of life’s many obstacles, be they people or laws; whatever gets in the way, person or law, is to be gotten rid of or deftly circumvented. A lot of what is both good and bad about Naples, a lot of its vitality, enchantment, and damnation, all comes together behind the mask of Pulcinella.

  For a few centuries Naples was a true capital, certainly more so than Rome, which had been reduced to a veritable village, its population a mere 250,000 (70 percent of whom were illiterate) when it became a part of unified Italy. Rome was overrun by backward-looking clergy who lived off the Church’s accumulated wealth, surrounded by neglected territories ridden by malaria and brigands. Sure, it had its glorious ruins, but even those were in terrible shape, stripped of every last bit of marble or iron ready to be reused by residents who had shed any pretense of dignity and respect for ancient craftsmanship. Naples, on the other hand, enjoyed its rank as a bona fide capital and carried out its role with a culture that, at least for a while yet, held its standing among the main courts of Europe.

  The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had a convoluted political history, as its name implies. It included the present-day regions of Abruzzo, Campania, Basilicata, Molise, Apulia, Calabria, Sicily, and a good portion of southern Latium (the district of Gaeta). One of the kingdom’s peculiarities was that King Ferdinand, from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 onward, held two crowns, reigning as Ferdinand IV in Naples and as Ferdinand III in Palermo. Another curiosity: his relative territories were referred to as “on this side” and “on that side” of “the lighthouse,” meaning on the mainland or on the island side of the lighthouse marking the Strait of Messina.13

  The island itself was referred to as Sicilia ulteriore, and the peninsular part of the territory was called Sicilia citeriore, which combined to create, voilà, “two Sicilies” encompassing a total of twenty-two provinces: fifteen on the mainland, seven on the island.14 Over the years a few fleeting attempts at unifying the crown and its various territories had been made, but they were ultimately brought together only after the Congress of Vienna.

  Today the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has become the (in)famous Mezzogiorno, the southernmost, least developed, most problematic part of the Italian peninsula. The area has been subjected to numerous attempts at development that rarely ever succeeded. Countless narratives, essays, articles, books, and political initiatives have centered on this very area—and from that heap of pages, words, and proposals a few significant studies have surfaced, almost always sparking heated debate.

  In 1958 the American sociologist Edward C. Banfield published a book titled The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, wherein he advanced the hypothesis that the village in Basilicata he had studied at length was characterized by an ethos he termed “amoral familism.”15 In such a society, individuals maximize the immediate material advantages of their family to the detriment of the broader community. It is as if their world e
nded at their own doorstep. According to Banfield such behavior has anthropological and cultural causes, and is relatively unrelated to economic structure. In other words, in a backward society like the one he describes, the poor and the rich behave the same way, because both come from a “culture” that is more prevalent than class distinctions. A rich man might construct a villa without bothering to observe local building codes, whereas a poor man might cobble together an illegal shack. “Amoral familists” develop behaviors that are not community oriented because they have no faith in collective society or its individual members; they cooperate with others only if they stand to make personal gain. So amoral familism is the opposite of civic-mindedness, the condition created when a community considers its own “social capital” a “public good” that establishes shared rules and values, inspiring faith in a collective that everyone (or most people) identifies with, including its historical and value-based characteristics. Thus social capital becomes a shared characteristic, held together by a shared history and the network of relationships between individuals. According to Banfield, all those things are lacking in the backward societies of southern Italy.

  Another noteworthy book is Making Democracy Work, published by the American sociologist Robert Putnam in 1993.16 Over a period of twenty years Putnam (and his colleagues Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti) studied the way various Italian regions work, roughly modeling his approach on the one employed many years before by Alexis de Tocqueville as he prepared his famous text Democracy in America. The idea was to analyze how the new regional administrations, which were fundamentally identical but operated within vastly different environments, would act across the peninsula’s various regions. Their research centered on how local traditions of social association, civic engagement, and cooperation would influence political action. Once again, the results showed significant differences between the central/northern and southern regions. Moreover, in retrospect it seems obvious that Campania and Piedmont established substantially different administrative approaches.

  Putnam, like Banfield, emphasizes the greater or lesser presence of “civic sense” as it affects the functioning of government, citizens’ participation, and the correct use of public money. Any time scholars try to rank Italy’s regions, for each and every issue regions like Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, Umbria, and Tuscany are always in the lead, while Calabria, Campania, and Sicily always bring up the rear. When researchers look for possible causes, they usually look to the local history of each specific place. In the South, for example, Putnam asserts that public life is organized hierarchically. Very few people make decisions with an eye to the collective good. In such places, people’s interest in politics comes not from civic commitment, but rather stems from a sense of deference toward others or outright careerism and profiteering. Almost no one is involved in social or cultural associations. Corruption is considered the norm, even by politicians, and truly democratic ideas are viewed with cynicism.

  Putnam goes on to observe that the North, however, exhibits greater, more intense interpersonal ties, and these stronger “civic communities” are the result of historically rooted, ancient municipal institutions. It is as if the North was somehow better able to reconcile individual and family interests with those of the broader community.

  Back in the South, from the Middle Ages onward there has been little sense of shared, civic-minded experience. As a result, the North developed horizontal relationships between citizens through mutual exchange and cooperation, whereas relations in the South remained vertical—that is, between subjugated individuals and those in power.

  All these conclusions have been strongly criticized. Researchers have been accused of setting up a hypothesis that, taken to their extremes, could easily escalate into anthropological profiling or outright racism. It has also been noted that such studies ignore the more recent causes of underdevelopment in the South, everything from the rest of the country’s exploitation of the area to its imposition of a hasty industrialization that such areas, now plagued by the pollution of chemical plants and steel factories, were neither ready for nor able to accommodate. In light of recent discoveries, we might well add that over the last few decades both North and South have jointly hammered the last nail into the coffin by colluding to smuggle toxic waste southward, where gangs of local criminals dispose of it, poisoning everything from the topsoil to the groundwater table.17

  One of the more noteworthy studies of these phenomena was led by the Italian anthropologist Carlo Tullio-Altan. His book La nostra Italia (“Our Italy,” 1986) gives great weight to familism, understood as the root of certain values and behaviors, virtually to the exclusion of other forces. In other words, familism establishes its own realm of values, which almost always oppose those of the city and, even more important, the nation. Altan goes a step beyond Banfield, and views Italian familism as a veritable moral metaphysics capable of directing people’s behavior to benefit their own families at the expense of the broader society’s interests. Empirical proof of this hypothesis can be seen in the attitudes of political leaders like Umberto Bossi who—while claiming to be a true padano, or at least a “non-Italian”—when it comes to their own families and children, act like the staunchest of southern godfathers.18

  Can such analyses ever suffice to explain the South’s perennial underdevelopment, or Naples’s emblematic decay? Even more important: are their primary assumptions even accurate? Any possible answer is necessarily hypothetical, and could easily be refuted by a different viewpoint. For example, in his latest book the historian Rosario Villari deploys many years of archival research to show that the history of Naples and southern Italy as a whole parallels the slow incubation of a reformist project, a “dream of freedom” (his book is titled Un sogno di libertà, Mondadori 2012), which has succeeded in engaging even the humblest members of the population. That is certainly a part of the overall picture, but on the whole the area’s prevailing traits seem so dissimilar from the rest of the country that people have even begun to talk about “two Italies.” Some time ago the Milan-based think tank Fondazione Edison summed up the situation as follows: “According to Eurostat data, Northern Italy has a higher per-capita GDP than the UK, while central Italy surpasses that of countries such as Sweden, Germany, and France.… The South, on the other hand, with its 20.7 million inhabitants, is the largest low-income area in all of Europe, comparable to that of Greece and Portugal combined.”19

  Is it possible for a country to remain truly “united” when its financial inequalities are so significant? The answer is not necessarily negative: economic performance is not everything, and by many other criteria Italians in both North and South share similar values and destinies. It is just a matter of knowing how to spot those other criteria.

  7.

  HE LINGERED A LITTLE, THEN LEFT THE WORLD

  Umbria is a special region. It is Italy’s sole landlocked region, and is also the only one that does not border another country; all other regions have at least one international border, on land or at sea. Its one million inhabitants make it one of the least populous, and its primarily hilly landscape is crossed by the Tiber, a medium-sized yet well-known river, and the Via Flaminia, an ancient consular road dating back to 220 B.C.E., which led from Rome to the Adriatic coast. At first glance, then, it would appear to be a region that lends itself to being bypassed, rather than lingering in for an extended stay. The fact that it is enclosed in a relatively small area (3,300 square miles total), as well as the gothic character of its towns—from the capital, Perugia, to Orvieto, perched atop a high rocky outcrop—gives Umbria an invariably authentic, ancient feel that is only rarely marred by an affected sense of complacency. Spoleto, Todi, Cascia, Gubbio, Norcia, Montefalco, and Montecastello di Vibio are little cities of various size, almost always built atop a hill. Each is different from the next, but all are enriched by some artistic treasure, be it the very urban fabric, the ancient stone structures of the historic city centers, the steeply winding cobblestone l
anes, the narrow spaces, or the surrounding countryside with its rolling hills, lush with olive groves, vineyards, and forests of oak and chestnut trees. The histories of other regions speak of domination and conquest, violence and clashes; not Umbria, where the most important military episode was the famous Battle of Lake Trasimene in 217 B.C.E., between Hannibal’s troops and Roman consul Gaius Flaminius Nepos’s legions. More than a battle, it was an outright massacre: Hannibal pulled off an almost Napoleonic maneuver by waging a surprise attack, striking the Romans from the sides as they were lined up to march, and were therefore particularly exposed. Thousands of Romans died that day.

  I have not mentioned Assisi yet because that is where we are headed. The view from the valley is impressive because Assisi rises in stages up the terraced slopes of Mount Subasio. And in Assisi, as in Jerusalem, you immediately get the feeling you are entering an extraordinary place, thanks to its unique colors, contours, the contrast between the mountains and the sky, and the foothills of the Sacred Convent, whose large arches support the town’s many houses, domes, steeples, and basilicas above.

  When Giovanni Bernardone, son of Pietro Bernardone, was born here in 1182, the scenery was obviously different—the woods were denser and there were fewer houses. But the transparency of the air and the many shades of colors were likely exactly as they are today, from the polished white of the main fortress to the green fields, shaded woods verging on black, and the intense blue of the summer sky.

  The story of Giovanni’s life has been told many times, though you probably know him by a different name, as I shall soon explain. The main events of his time on earth are well known, but—despite his fame—his undeniable allure remains intact, because his existence represents one of human nature’s most poignant enigmas. His mother was the one who named him Giovanni (John), but his father insisted on calling him Francesco (Francis), meaning “the Frenchman,” in honor of his connection to Provence, where he had become a successful textile merchant. Another hypothesis for the name is that Francis’s mother, Pica, was originally from Provence. Even as an adult, Francis sometimes used his mellifluous voice to sing in French.