The Secrets of Italy Read online

  As legend has it, the door was either locked shut or stuck so it would not open, so Paolo Grassi, who was born in Milan to an Apulian family, gave it a good hard kick. It gave way, revealing a scary sight. The soldiers of the Muti corps were known for their cruelty, and had turned the former theater’s dressing rooms into prison cells. Chilling invocations, prayers, and traces of blood covered the walls.

  Paolo Grassi was twenty-eight years old, Giorgio Strehler twenty-six. They both had theatrical experience, but neither had any idea they were about to establish a tradition. Grassi became the model for all major Italian theatrical impresarios to come, and Strehler forever revolutionized the art of theatrical direction throughout the peninsula. Together, the two founded the country’s first modern public theater.

  It took immense courage to decide, almost on the spot, to take those bare, sinister spaces and turn them into a real theater. The stage was tiny—just six yards deep by five yards wide—it had no wings, and only a laughable lighting system. But there were a lot of courageous people back then, both in Milan and all across Italy. La Scala had been rebuilt in record time, and on Saturday, May 11, 1946, just a year after Liberation, it reopened with Arturo Toscanini directing the opening concert of all-Italian composers: Puccini, Arrigo Boito, Rossini, and Verdi. Naturally, the set list included Verdi’s “Te Deum” and the chorus from Nabucco, “Va, pensiero,” which for the first time since the Risorgimento made a comeback to once again move people’s hearts and inspire hope for the future.

  Right as Grassi gave that door his energetic kick, equally courageous men were at work in Parliament. They had been elected on June 2, 1946, and a year and a half later they had drafted a new constitution. It constituted the best system of guarantees and civil liberties the Italian peninsula’s inhabitants had ever had—a more thorough defense against the abuse of power than at any other point over the course of their troubled history. One of its first articles (the ninth), read: “The Republic promotes cultural development, as well as scientific and technical research. It shall protect the Nation’s landscape, as well as its historical and artistic heritage.”

  It is simply put, in dry language—but considering the context, it took a particularly enlightened set of minds to draw up an article granting such importance to the role culture and research play, and to defend the natural landscape as part of Italy’s cultural and artistic heritage at a time when much of the country still lay in pieces and its trains moved in fits and starts. It was an utterly unprecedented principle and foresaw, several decades before certain kinds of industrial damage were even possible, the pollution that unfortunately came all the same.

  One of the miracles of the “Reconstruction” following the terrible ravages of the war was its awareness that not only the houses, streets, factories, public buildings, electrical infrastructure, and railways had to be solidly rebuilt, but that cultural sites and initiatives also had to be revamped. Such sensitivity was crucial, if Italy was ever to recover from the blindness and fury through which Fascism and the occupation wrought their havoc, stunting the country’s conscience and openness, holding it back and steering clear of healthy debate. Many of the city’s cultural centers—the Società Umanitaria, the Casa della Cultura, the Centro Ambrosianeum—were reopened, and the Museum of Science and Technology was founded as well. Angelo Rizzoli, who had grown up poor and worked as a typesetter before becoming a publisher, launched the BUR imprint (Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli), a series of small paperbacks printed in tiny type on cheap paper, recognizable by their gray covers. It was a stroke of genius, and its catalog showcased literature from around the world at prices within everyone’s reach.

  The creation of Milan’s Piccolo Teatro (literally, “Little Theater”) was part of this overall climate. Strehler once wrote: “We must sweep the old stuff from the stage and produce works that speak to our time, replace the ‘dictatorship of the great actor’ with the abilities of a great director. The recent rediscovery of democracy makes the liberation of the theater even more urgent than before.”1

  Grassi expanded on that concept to aim for not just a theater that respected its directors’ visions, but one that could serve and satisfy “a collective need, a civic duty, becoming a key public service on a par with the subway and firefighters.”2 It was to be a teatro stabile, a “stable theater” with a fixed group of actors, but that idea of stability would go well beyond the theatrical company itself: it would become a city institution, a resource set up not for the purpose of making money, but rather to give the community what it needed to live an existence that was something more meaningful than mere material subsistence.

  This overturned two cultural traditions in one fell swoop: the eighteenth-century tradition centered on producers who regarded theater as a money-making commercial venture; and the artistic tradition centered on often capricious lead actors who simply followed their own whims. Instead, this new theater would focus on staging works through unified criteria, emphasizing the mise-en-scène and, ultimately, its direction.

  There used to be a famous anecdote about a great nineteenth-century showman who waltzed into his dressing room just before the evening’s performance and asked the stage manager, “What is tonight’s performance?” “Hamlet, sir.” “Well then, bring me the black costume.” This perhaps ungenerous anecdote nevertheless captures a certain climate, a lazy habit, an approach to theater that remained unchanged through the first few decades of the twentieth century.

  In short, Milan was the first place to foster a more socially aware theater, one that really holds a mirror up to reality, one capable of catering to the public’s intelligence and sensitivity rather than its fickle moods. To once again borrow Strehler’s words: “Theater can be contemporary even when it stages the classics, the works that are our guiding lights as we journey into history and the artistic experience.”3 But there is another equally important aspect that should be emphasized. Amid the misery of those years, as the city slowly came back to life, Milan’s municipal council somehow found the energy, wherewithal, and money to fix up the small theater on Via Rovello and allow the city’s new public theater to finally open. The idea was first announced in the January 26, 1947, issue of the Corriere della Sera, and it opened less than four months later, on May 14, fixed up in a hurry, just like La Scala.

  Grassi and Strehler had hoped to open with a great sixteenth-century classic, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Mandrake. The author, famous for having invented political science with The Prince, wrote this text in five acts in 1518. Its basic plot is Boccaccioesque, with the usual cheeky prankster playing a hoax to get up a woman’s skirt and mock her gullible husband. Callimaco burns with love for Lucrezia, but she is married to a simpleton named Nicia. The couple would like to have a child, but has no luck. Callimaco poses as doctor who has just come to town from Paris, and says he has the solution: a mandrake potion that will make the woman fertile, but will kill the first man who sleeps with her. Nicia is clearly puzzled, so Callimaco immediately offers his next solution: he suggests finding some poor bloke out on the street, getting him to sleep with her, and then sending him for a walk—to go off and die. Nicia eagerly accepts, and although Lucrezia is reluctant at first, her confessor—Fra’ Timoteo, in cahoots with Callimaco—convinces her it is for the best. The “poor bloke” they find on the street is, of course, none other than a freshly disguised Callimaco, whose ruse enables him to enjoy the beautiful Lucrezia. After their union he reveals himself to her and professes his love.

  This archetypal plot continued entertaining audiences through the end of the nineteenth century, and was then passed on, virtually unchanged, into the new medium of comedic film. The trope of the cuckold and his beautiful, sexually frustrated, available wife has been a source of comedy since ancient Greek times, and if the Assyro-Babylonians ever staged plays they would almost certainly have had a similar plot, just like everyone else. But The Mandrake could not be staged in Milan; the Church considered it blasphemous because the priest chara
cter is a sinful enabler. That said, Machiavelli’s opinion of Italians’ religiousness is clearly spelled out in his other works, too.

  At that point they fell back on Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, in which Strehler himself played the part of Alyosha. This makeshift solution had two positive results: the show was memorable; and it set the tone for the theater’s future path, devoted to socially engaged plays, especially the works of Bertolt Brecht. I think it is safe to say that Strehler’s productions of Brecht’s work are the best, even on an international level.

  That assessment also stems from my personal experience. Once, when I was just over twenty, I went for a Sunday-afternoon stroll along Via Nazionale in Rome. Passing in front of the Teatro Eliseo, I stopped to read the poster for that evening’s performance, Brecht’s Schweik in the Second World War. I had a vague idea of who Brecht was, but I had never heard of Strehler. The title, in particular, piqued my curiosity. I bought a ticket for the nosebleed section, and my love for the theater was born that night. I had no idea that a stage setting could so powerfully convey the sinister idiocy of a regime (in that case, the Nazis’ Third Reich) and at the same time capture, with ironic precision, the lucky stupidity of a man who is always about to be cornered but invariably manages to get off scot-free thanks to his imbecility. I later found out that literature and film are full of guys like this, who strut unharmed amid the whir of bullets (real or metaphorical) whizzing by all around them, simply because they fail to grasp what is actually going on.

  Although Strehler had been forbidden to stage The Mandrake, he made up for it by finding a play with an equally “secular” spirit for the 1962–63 season. This one, Brecht’s Life of Galileo, did not have the same echoes of Boccaccio, and had a more tragic tone. The great Tino Buazzelli played the title role, as he had in Schweik. A frenzied anticipation built up before the show’s debut, and it once again sparked controversy, especially among Catholics. Strehler had tended to every single detail: the sets and costumes were by Luciano Damiani; Hanns Eisler did the musical score; and Donato Sartori designed the masks. Postwar Italy gave us only two directors capable of stirring up such high expectations: Strehler in theater and Fellini in film. On the eve of the premiere the special Sunday edition of the Corriere della Sera dedicated one of its famous full-page illustrations to the work. Paolo Grassi had a hand in its success as well. Despite keeping a close watch on the budget, he kept the theater closed for forty-three days straight, so as not to hinder rehearsals. No one had ever done such a thing before, and I doubt anyone has done it since. Nowadays such a decision would be utterly inconceivable. But it was worth it. Of all the plays I have seen in my time, Life of Galileo remains one of the dozen-odd shows that, both in Italy and abroad, truly left its mark.

  The tragedy is centered on the abjuration the great scientist was forced to recite before the Inquisition on June 22, 1633, in order to save his own life. He was almost seventy. Kneeling on the bare stone, wearing penitential garb, he recites a humiliating negation of his scientific discoveries. It sounded something like this:

  [A]fter an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine … Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this vehement suspicion, justly conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church, and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me.4

  A church parish in Milan held a vigil to pray that the play not go on stage. In the end, it was a success not only for Italian theater, but for European theater as a whole. Brecht’s portrayal implies that Galileo agreed to recant, and betrayed the scientific truth, solely in order to stay alive and continue his experiments. Just thirty-three years earlier the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had refused to abjure, was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori. Galileo, therefore, is portrayed as a hero of Machiavellian dissemblance—but only up to a point. Later on he seems to realize that entering into pacts with the powers that be is too risky, lest injustice and oppression contaminate the disinterested logic of science.

  Brecht had rewritten the ending several times. In August 1961 a wall rose up to split Berlin (and, by extension, the world) in two for almost thirty years. Then came the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear disaster seemed imminent. The playwright sought to weave two major themes into his finale: the power and responsibility scientists hold, as well as the freedom of research. It was probably a mistake, because toward the end the two themes muddy the waters a bit, and the play’s overall meaning gets a little bogged down. But, over a half-century later, the final scene remains etched in my mind: Galileo is under house arrest. Despite constant surveillance by the Inquisition, he manages to finish one of his most important works, the one that earns him the title “father of modern science”: Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences, relating to mechanics and motion. He entrusts the text to one of his students, who gets it printed outside papal territory up in the Netherlands.

  The theater on Via Rovello is only one example of the sheer vitality of a country that had seemed dead at the end of the war but instead managed to pull itself back up and start walking, even running. Several times over the course of history Italians have given a name to this phenomenon, talking about the Renaissance in the sixteenth century and the Resurgence in the nineteenth. A similar idea applies to the years after 1945 as well, as factories resumed production and the Italian aesthetic revolutionized industrial and furniture design, fashion, food, and technological innovations worldwide. Never, in modern times at least, had Milan and Italy had known such creative ferment—it felt like something from another era.

  But the relative “purity” of that sudden momentum did not last long. The breath of fresh air and enthusiasm that had brought the country back to life gradually vanished. The slow spread of a higher quality of life than Italians had ever before experienced also favored the spread of corruption: for the first time in recent history, political ambitions and crime began to intertwine.5

  Around the same time that Life of Galileo was hitting the stage Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, La dolce vita, also premiered, and Pier Paolo Pasolini followed up his book Ragazzi di vita (Hustlers) with his first film, Accattone. Fellini was spit at during his film’s premier in Milan, and Pasolini was indicted for obscenity.

  All three of these artists worked in different, complementary registers, and all three were censored in one way or another. The Church went after Strehler and Fellini, and Pasolini was pursued by what was somewhat lazily referred to as the borghesia benpensante, the “well-intentioned, conformist bourgeoisie”—a class we might actually miss nowadays, since the acts of the well-intentioned, conformist bourgeoisie can be compensated for, whereas the acts of the ill-intentioned have no remedy.

  In any case, artists were the ones who first saw the dangers posed by increased standards of living, consumerism, the loss of certain values (be they old-fashioned or otherwise), and the sudden, feverish obsession with money and consumption. They were especially insidious in a country as culturally fragile as Italy, which was ill prepared to cope with the shock of modernity.

  Strehler, Fellini, and Pasolini are all dead, and they never had a chance to see how correct their intuitions were. They did not live to see how things ended up. We have, and all we can say is that they were right. Many attempts have been made to understand why the postwar momentum faded so quickly, never to return. A definitive answer has yet to be found—maybe there is none.

  I h
ave touched on theater and film, two highly significant yet relatively marginal fields when compared with the many other phenomena that ensured the country’s recovery after the war, ushering in a veritable economic boom. Italy’s industrial production grew as never before, along with everything else feeding into the famous gross domestic product, the index that measures a country’s standard of living by mixing both positive and negative forces into a single equation—people’s general well-being, health, education, exchange, and trade, as well as traffic accidents, on-the-job injuries, speculation, and crime. Everything that can be bought and sold is factored into the GDP. Separating the bad from the good would mean picking and choosing, and that would in turn imply some degree of moral and political judgment; such things fall outside the domain of economics, so all eyes remain glued to the ambiguous and sometimes deceptive GDP.

  No matter what you think of the postwar boom, Milan was long the engine behind it, earning the city the title “Italy’s moral capital”—a moniker that today, after all that has happened, sounds a tad too emphatic. While Rome was Italy’s political and bureaucratic capital, Milan was its real capital, the place the entire country’s standard of living largely depended upon.

  If we set aside Fiat (based in Turin) and the network of small and medium-sized enterprises that were sprouting up all around the country, a large part of the GDP was produced in Milan or thanks to Milan. Not only heavy industry, but also the lighter, sometimes intangible industrial activities like fashion, product design, architecture, photography, and graphic design. Those represented the visible, important face on the bright side of the coin. But that coin also had another, darker side, which we shall discuss shortly.