The Dark Heart of Italy (15 page)

Piecing together Insabato’s curriculum vitae as a terrorist was fairly simple. He was an adherent of NAR, the far-right
Nuclei
Armati
Rivoluzionari
, and of
Terza
Posizione
, in the 1970s. He was arrested in 1976 when, at the age of seventeen, he fired a pistol against one of the offices of the Communist party in Rome. More recently, in 1992, during a football match between Lazio and Torino, he ostentatiously burnt the Israeli flag, shouting
ebrei
ai
forni
, ‘Jews to the ovens’. Just days before the bomb against
Manifesto
he had attended, on the occasion of Jorg Haider’s invitation to the Vatican, a rally in favour of the Austrian politician, carrying a Palestinian flag.

On its defiant front page (entitled
Siamo
Qui
– ‘We’re Here’) the day after the attack,
Manifesto
blamed the attack on the ‘cultural humus which has allowed the neo-Fascists to be cleared through customs and which has offered them political legitimacy …’ Inside, the editorial continued the attack, suggesting that Insabato was the product of ‘the hypocritical right of Fini and Berlusconi which has never had the courage to deal with its bloody history, as has – with difficulty and pain – a part of the non-institutional left. This is the result. The sewer is still there, with its great unpunished and its little soldiers …’ That robust response from the target of the attack was to be expected, but most other political commentators follow the same line: Insabato, after all, graduated from the same crucible of neo-Fascism – the
Movimento Sociale Italiano
– as did many of the political leaders of Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance. Many have gone in different directions to Insabato, changing political livery and party names; but in the days and weeks after the bomb it emerged that there was barely a political party on the right which didn’t have some link to Insabato, or which hadn’t offered him a platform for his opinions. He emerged as an
integralista
cattolico
, a member of the ‘Christian Militia’. He had frequently attended rallies of another party of the far-right,
Forza
Nuova
. Most significantly he had, in January 1995 in Rome’s Hotel Ergife (where Pino Rauti was launching his new political party), taken the microphone and declared: ‘We need to remember that the real enemy is Zionism, that Jewish sect which tries with every means to dominate the world.’ Insabato, though, was swiftly branded a
cane
sciolto
, an ‘unleashed dog’, by the far right.

More subtly, many suggested that politicians were responsible for the ‘new terrorism’ not directly, but indirectly: with all the finger-pointing, the hysterical ‘Fascist!’ and ‘Communist!’ jeers of the pre-election fever, politicians had unwittingly given rogue terrorists a sense of purpose and a rhetoric they understood. Such was the analysis, albeit more muted, offered by the
Procuratore
della Repubblica
in Milan shortly after the bomb there: ‘We had hoped,’ said Gerardo D’Ambrosio, ‘that the resort to bombs for political purposes was finished … unfortunately it’s not so …
Every time the political exchanges get more bitter one can always expect that someone will try to exploit the situation …’ Italian terrorism, lamented the then Prime Minister, Giuliano Amato, is ‘a volcano which is never spent’. Another magistrate, investigating the new Red Brigades, called Italy’s terrorism: ‘an underground river … which suddenly re-emerges evermore violent.’ Terrorism in Italy, he said, is ‘almost physiological’.

For decades bemused historians and sociologists have analysed
Italy’s terrorist phenomenon. Many have echoed the line that ‘terrorism
does not invent, but rediscovers, recycles and
readapts
that
which is already in the womb of the nation
,’
4
suggesting that there’s
something uniquely Italian about the country’s terrorism. Many of
the early studies of the
anni di piombo
thus suggested that the country
had a ‘psychosis of the bomb’. Ever since the
Risorgimento,
the
argument went, the country had had a culture of violence that was
‘living and important’. According to that theory, the historical roots
of the
anni di piombo
were clear: in 1894 the French President had
been killed by Italian Anarchists, as were, later, the Spanish Prime
Minister and the Empress of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1900
Umberto I was assassinated; in 1921, in a theatre in Milan, another
bomb claimed the lives of more than twenty people. In 1928, eighteen
were killed during an attempt to assassinate another Italian
monarch. Violence, from the
Risorgimento
to the
Resistenza,
had
been the catalyst for every important turning point in Italian history.
‘No other industrialised society,’ wrote one academic in the
Rivista
Storica Italiana in 1980, ‘has seen a terrorist phenomenon which, for
duration … diffusion and rootedness can compare to that of Italy.’
‘Violence has mesmerized us,’ wrote another academic; the anni di
piombo were simply the latest example of Italy’s ‘aestheticisation of
violence … rendered photogenic, if not exactly accepted, conferred
with that fascination which is at the root of its hypnotic power …
’
5

Others discerned what was called
‘Cattocomunismo’,
t
he quas
i-
religious, millenarian zeal of the terrorists. These evangelicals, having
lost their orthodox faith, were still attempting to ‘realise the other
world in this world’, to pass ‘from an exigency of Christian totality to
Marxist totality’. One left-wing guru had, for example, spoken of
Communists as a race born of a ‘virgin mother’, and of his political
group as a ‘combatant religious order’. ‘The need,’ wrote one journalist,
‘for total and definitive answers, the rejection of doubt, are at the
same time Catholic and Communist
.’

The end of the Cold War, and the not-unrelated eclipse of the
Christian Democratic party, have given studies a new dimension,
contextualising the
anni di piombo
within an international framework.
Against the backdrop of the Warsaw Pact and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Italy has been seen as a border territory,
on a knife-edge between the two sides. The reasons for what has been
called a ‘tragic frontier experience’ were both geographical (Italy
being seen as literally on the front-line) and political (the country
had the largest Communist party in the western world, winning 19%
of the vote in 1946, and thereafter increasing its polling at every election
until its peak in 1976 with 34.
4
%). The consequence was that Italy
was subject to a McCarthyism that made the original, American
version appear very mild by comparison
.

Thus, historians have written of post-war Italy as being ‘on the
nerve-front between the West and Communism, for the entire Cold
War under constant observation, and its democracy ever under
surveillance’. If the terrorism of the 1960s and
1970s
was chilling, it
was because that violence was a reflection of the Cold War, isolated
examples of a greater global conflict. As such, the acts of terrorism
were ‘signs of war, fragments of a planetary war fought underground
which every now and again surfaced with its horror, its devastating
potential … to destroy all that it touched: peace, the democratic confrontation,
the truth … surfaced and moved on, leaving behind
blood and darkness …
’
6

In that respect, Italy has been compared to Germany, another
country torn in two by the
‘spaccatura dell’Europa’,
by the rift of
an entire continent. The difference being that Italy witnessed ‘an
invisible iron curtain, crossing populations, classes and consciences’
which ‘shattered’ the unity of the country into ‘two political, civil
and moral realities … almost two
countries
’
7
. Whereas in
Germany a wall had become a very literal, concrete example of a
divided nation, in Italy the cleavage was ever more subtle and submerged.
The clandestine nature of the armed struggle was, in fact,
revealed to the Italian parliament in 1990, when Giulio Andreotti
announced that ever since 1945 there had been a military presence
on the peninsula called
Gladio
(the so-called ‘stay behind’ of Allied
troops); subsequent investigations revealed that weaponry and
personnel from much of the anni di piombo overlapped with that
of
Gladio.

An equally serious problem was that Italy’s post-war foreign policy
zigzagged unpredictably, swerving from philo-Arabic policies
(Colonel Gaddafi had even become one of
Fiat’s
major shareholders)
to support for Israel. The timing of Italian slaughters was often
uncannily close to similar events on what the President of the
Slaughter Commission called the chessboard of the Mediterranean,
especially in the Middle East. Thus, according to some, Italy’s
anni di piombo
weren’t only a result of the Cold War, but also of the
Arab-Israeli conflict
.

The role of parliament during the period was also decisive.
Parliament was described as a
‘conventio ad excludendum’,
an
imperfect two-party system in which one party was permanently in
power, and the other permanently excluded. Either that, or the opposition
was fatally accommodated, becoming part of the ‘constitutional
arch’, the political ‘marriage’ of opposing parties: there was the ‘opening
to the left’ (involving Socialists) or the ‘historic compromise’ (involving
the Communists). The Christian Democrats were thus described by
Leonardo Sciascia as ‘invertebrate, available, conceding, and at the
same time tenacious, patient, grasping; a type of octopus which knows
how gently to embrace dissent to return it, minced, into consensus.’
Opposition was, effectively, impossible. Thus, some commentators on
the armed struggle used the birth of British
parliamentarianism
as an
example of what exactly was wrong with Italy: quoting Thomas
Hobbes, writers such as Giorgio Galli saw the birth of the British parliament
as a means to contain a civil war. Verbal exchanges and the
alternation of parties replaced cruder confrontations as representative
democracy became ‘the game which impeded a civil war’. That such
exchanges were conspicuously absent in Italy meant that, in some
sense, the latent civil war never found itself absorbed, reflected or pacified
by parliament, and so raged on outside it
.

Whilst I was packing a bag to go back to Britain for Christmas a song came on the radio: it was the beautiful, lilting voice of Fabrizio De André, the country’s most famous and much-mourned singer–songwriter. The song, from 1973, is called
Il
Bombarolo
– The Bomber – and is, like its subject-matter, an integral part of the nation’s fibre. ‘Intellectuals of today,’ go the lyrics, ‘idiots of tomorrow, give me back my brain, which I only need between my hands. Acrobatic prophets of the revolution, today I’ll do it by myself, without lessons … I’ve chosen another school. I’m a bomber …’

And yet, whilst I was packing, the strange thing was that I didn’t really want to go home. I wanted to see friends and family, but it was somehow an incredible wrench to leave Italy, even only for a few days. I had become as
campanilista
(as attached to my local bell-tower) as everyone else. Even the thought of leaving Parma – nicknamed the
isola felice
, the ‘happy island’ of Italy – was worrying. I looked out of the window and saw it snowing, the large flakes jittering like molecules under a microscope. I could see the rooftop tiles turning from pink to white. On the street below, people were putting skis on their roof-racks. Then, just as I was about to leave for the airport, my next-door neighbour Lucia dropped by to give me a sackful of her hand-made
cappelletti
(the little pasta-wraps of Parmesan cheese which come served in a watery broth at Christmas) as if to remind me of all the good food I would be missing in northern Europe.

There was another thing I would inevitably miss over Christmas. The sheer beauty of the country. The stunning style, the visual panache, the obsession with
spettacolo
. That, I knew as I sat on the plane, was what I would have to write about next: the Italian aesthetic. Because there was one enigma which I had been wondering about for months: how is it that the country which has produced the greatest art in the Western world, which produced some of the best films of the twentieth century, now has the worst, most abysmal television on the planet?