The Dark Heart of Italy (19 page)

The new generation of voters, though, those who have lived with Mediaset’s Benny Hill programming since infancy, know of no other form of television (and, as a consequence, the youth vote is an integral part of Berlusconi’s success). When I tell some of my
Leghisti
students (those who sympathise with the Northern League), or the southern ones who sympathise with the National Alliance, that I really only watch RAI programmes, and then only after midnight, they are often appalled. ‘But it’s boring and Bolshevik,’ they say. It’s often only black and white documentaries at that hour, I’m reminded. That’s the degree of hypnosis that Mediaset has achieved. It has turned viewers into
guardoni
, oglers. Its tinsel titillation is gripping: take the semi-pornographic Italian version of Big Brother, or else programmes like
Miracoli
(the weekly slot on the latest miracles) or
Proposta
Indecente
(‘indecent proposal’). The assault on anything measured or literary is such that the English word ‘fiction’ is now used in Italian to describe only saccharine TV drama. The best-selling magazines on the newsstands are those glossies with TV listings like
Sorrisi
e
Canzoni
(‘Smiles and Songs’, owned of course by Silvio Berlusconi).

In that ideological vacuum, Mediaset’s greatest gift to its owner has been to promote the one thing for which he will always be admired: his wealth. Almost all the quiz shows are built around the opportunity to make money. Every evening, on every channel, millions, sometimes billions, of lire are lit up in bright lights, as the bikinis flirt with the excited member of the public, on the verge of pocketing a small fortune. Given the number of zeros on banknotes, another imported programme-format is called ‘Who Wants To Be A Billionaire?’ Lead items on the news are about which tobacconist sold the winning ticket for the lottery this week. Bingo, a game that is not exactly cutting edge in Britain, has recently become a highly fashionable Italian sport. All of which creates an environment in which someone’s wealth, and all its
apparel, become the hallmark of that person’s worth. In marked difference to Britain, the yardstick by which people are judged isn’t class but money. Boasting about money becomes like bragging about sexual conquests: it’s important that everyone ‘knows’. If someone enquires after your ‘stock’ in Italy they’re inquiring after your wealth, not your breeding. In the end it’s obvious that the nation’s richest man will become, almost subliminally, the country’s most seductive politician.

It’s what has been called the ‘sequin syndrome,’ a disease which makes Mediaset seem caught in a 1980s, yuppie timewarp. Slowly it has begun to influence more than just the values of Mediaset. RAI, the state television network, has colluded in the cultural implosion: with a (largely ignored) licence fee which is only about £40, and with a subsequent turnover of 2,640 million euros compared to the BBC’s more than 5,000 million, it has had to follow Mediaset’s example and churn out glitzy variety shows to survive the ratings battle (called, in Italian,
lo share
). It, too, runs adverts every ten minutes. Its financial difficulties are then exacerbated because parochial sing-alongs have little international appeal, and thus never generate revenue from abroad.

The problem has become so acute that, in one of her very rare outbursts,
la signora Ciampi
, wife of the President of the Republic, recently said that Italian TV is by now
deficiente
, ‘half-witted’. One magazine recently denounced ‘the degree of servility shown by our television chatterers, ineffable adorers of men of power and above all of the landlord of all televisions,’ adding that by now that attitude had become ‘a booring, snarling servility’, ferociously loyal to its leader.

Pasolini and piety are unlikely bedfellows, but by now one can see his point about television eroding the country’s Catholic piety. The real tragedy, as nostalgic Italians often grumble, is that the country has witnessed a cultural collapse. Talk to anyone brought up in the 1950s or 1960s and they will say that all the hallmarks of the country – its intelligence, its beautiful language, the Catholicism, the style, even that simmering, cinematic erotica – have been eroded by television.

Meanwhile those who are blasé about a political leader owning so much of the mass media chuckle when they read about British scandals. ‘What’s all this about spinning?’ I was once asked by someone who has a subscription to the
Times Literary Supplement
. ‘What are spin-doctors?’ I began to explain that certain people in Britain are rather worried about the slant the government can put on a story, the ‘spin’, thereby obscuring the reality. The result around the table was general hilarity: ‘Is that all? You British are so prudish. Blair doesn’t own three television channels, production companies, video outlets, dozens of magazines and a national broadsheet, does he?’

A few years before I arrived in Italy, there had been a full-blown revolution. An entire political class had been removed. The way the country worked, economically and politically, was within the space of a few months completely turned around. Like any revolution, ‘Clean Hands’ meant different things to different people. For some it was the long-yearned for, blissful overthrow of the despotic regime that had ruled Italy for almost fifty years. For others, the hands of the revolutionaries were not ‘clean’ but very bloodied, having caused the deaths of dozens of innocent Italians who had dedicated their lives to the service of the Italian Republic. Clean Hands was (like the Slaughter Commission or the Sofri case) another of those historical case studies that was being fiercely debated in the run-up to the General Election. The way Clean Hands was seen by the electorate would almost certainly determine the outcome of the election, not least because one of those running for the highest office, Silvio Berlusconi, had first championed, and then been ‘persecuted’, by those revolutionaries. He had become an
indagato
eccellente
(one of the ‘illustrious accused’). Thus, he was the advocate of the ‘restoration’, desperately wanting to portray Clean Hands as nothing more than an
interregnum of crazed Communists and bloody revolutionaries.

As usual, the debate was so confusing and contorted, that the only way to understand what was going on was to approach it in the first person. At least that way I felt that I was laying a thread of wool so that, when I had glimpsed the inside of Italy’s economic maze, I could safely find my way out into the light once more.

The Italians invented capitalism. Or at least, in Pisa and Florence and various other city states, they invented the modern banking system based upon the extension of credit. It’s still a country of bankers and instinctive, creative entrepreneurs. In Parma alone there are forty-two different banks, and that’s before you start counting their various branches. Banks are like political parties and television channels: there’s no end to the available choice (even if, in the end, they all look the same). In a large city, there will probably be a few hundred banks on offer. And, as with politics (like the ‘white’ Christian Democrats, ‘black’ Fascists, ‘red’ Communists), financial status is expressed in a prismatic language. ‘At the green’ means skint. ‘In the red’ is the same as English, but – the most commonly heard colour – ‘in the black’ means unofficial, untaxed and untraced.

If you believe the statistical rhetoric (and it all depends on how big you believe that ‘black’ to be), Italy effected the
sorpasso
– the overtake – of the British economy in 1987 (its GNP was 5,998 billion dollars, compared to Britain’s 5,474). It’s easy to understand how it happened: cars, clothes and food. Emilia-Romagna, the region which includes Parma and Bologna and which specialises in those products, has the highest per capita income in Italy. (The irony is that the richest province is the buckle on Italy’s ‘red belt’. Many of the brilliant entrepreneurs in the area are die-hard Communists who happily gather in the piazzas for the regular rallies and the waving of the hammer and sickle.) Driving between the two cities on the A1 motorway you will see, at one lay-by, a sculpture of a flying car. Cars drive the economy, hence the ‘overtake’ expression. At Bologna airport there’s normally a new engine or piston-system displaying the native genius for engineering. Within a radius of a
few kilometres are the factories of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati.

If you stop off in Reggio-Emilia you’ll find the home of Max-Mara, the famous clothing empire, whilst nearer Parma lining every road there will be a little outlet selling Parma ham or Parmesan cheese. In fact, it’s apparently as profitable to break into a cheese factory as it is a bank: every few months I read in the
Gazzetta di Parma
about a cheese heist in which a band of robbers has broken into a Parma cheese production centre, and stolen the round ingots of cheese. (The generic word for the hard, gritty cheese is
grana
, which also doubles as the word for money.) On the outskirts of the town are the red and white chimneys of Barilla, the world’s largest pasta factory. Nearby is Parmalat, the large dairy enterprise with outlets across the globe.

Seeing those businesses in action, the most obvious anomaly of the Italian economy is that, other than a handful of enormous companies like Fiat, enterprises are usually what’s called SME (small-medium enterprises). The engine of the country’s economy are often minute, local, family-run businesses which produce those textiles or foodstuffs or expert engineering. The percentage, for example, of the workforce employed in companies with less than ten employees is, in Britain, 7.2%, in America it’s only 3.0. In Italy, the figure is 23.3%.
1
There’s still – it’s obvious when you walk around the narrow backstreets of any city – an artisan class that produces, in small outlets, the finest objects of the Italian economy: the furniture, the
prosciutto
, the suits and so on. Quite apart from their deserved economic success, these small enterprises give the country an other-worldly atmosphere because they’re still involved in the old-fashioned art of manufacturing. Unlike Britain and its tertiary economy of financial services and management consultants, in Italy people still make things. Go into any of the tiny artisan grottos and before you even see the intricately blown glass or the marbled paper or decorative tiles, you’re hit by the scent of oil, sawdust, the smell of a cooking kiln. In fact, supermarkets are a rarity: each shop is specialised, selling only tobacco or perfumes or newspapers.

There’s another thing that you notice about the economy at the lowest level. There’s a kind of generosity which means that people exchange presents in the way that the British shake hands. It’s part of that
tessuto
sociale
, the ‘social fabric’, which invariably seems better knit in Italy than anywhere else. Every time you meet a friend, they will offer you something, regardless of whether you’re at their house or yours, or just passing each other on the pavement: a new CD, some piece of pottery they’ve found, a new crate of wine they want to share. Such is the extravagant generosity amongst friends that there’s an old-fashioned exchange of merchandise in which the whole notion of money is almost an irrelevance.

When money does come into the equation (perhaps because of that preponderance of small enterprises) there’s another thing about the Italian economy that you immediately notice. It’s a cash society. Because of the confusing number of banks and documents, there’s clearly a feeling that traceable transactions – receipts, Visa-slips or cheque-book stubs – are inconvenient. Cheques are hardly ever used. Paying with plastic is impossible in many places. If you are buying a table or an overcoat, even paying the bill in a restaurant, you’ll often be asked whether you’re paying in cash or not. If so, the prices are almost always
trattabili
, negotiable. That, of course, is the case in any country, but in Italy even adverts for houses worth hundreds of millions of lire announce through various euphemisms that they’re ready to reduce the cost if payment is in
contanti
, in ‘countables’. If you negotiate a job contract, a percentage of the sum will often be offered under the counter.

The dependence upon cash slowly alerted me to something else, which was the complete reverse of the generosity amongst friends and family. There is, unfortunately, nowhere else in the world where the words
imbroglio,
truffa
and
inganno
(fraud, swindle and deception) are so often needed. I haven’t seen him for years, but there used to be a man on stilts who I would see every day in Piazza Garibaldi. He would be shouting at the passers-by, many of whom stopped to listen to him, nodding in
sympathy as his spittle fell on the pavement. There, by the base of his two-metre stilts, were long letters and documents that announced the injustice to which he had fallen victim. He was, apparently, quite famous, performing daring stunts across the country to publicise his plight. Listening to him was like those forays in the post office when I first arrived in Italy. Everyone seemed to have their own story of a scam or rip-off they had suffered. When one person started talking about their mishap, half a dozen others would chip in and start recounting their own swindle which was similar or possibly even worse.

I, too, sympathised because I had found myself, every few months, the victim of something similar, albeit much smaller. Incessant short-changing, clever financial scams, unorthodox payment methods and bizarre banking techniques all seemed to leave me out of pocket. Other peoples’
furberia
had reduced me ‘to the green’. There had been the time when, to avoid the hour-long queues in the post office, I had set up a direct debit between Telecom Italia and my bank. The next phone bill was, inexplicably, overcooked by about two million lire: half of which was thanks to Telecom’s inexplicable error, the other half because I had taken in a lodger who had been phoning what’s called
hard chat
on my phone. My bank paid the bill, but then billed me itself because I was suddenly hugely overdrawn. To recoup the money from Telecom Italia then involved so many hours of queuing that I (again naively) decided just not to pay the future bills since the money they owed me was greater than what I owed them. I had, of course, to pay the bank a ‘suspension of the direct debit agreement fee’, but then I was at liberty to not pay Telecom Italia until they had settled their debts. They duly cut off my phone line, and it would cost another 300,000 lire to get reconnected. It took seven months of bureaucratic queuing for that to happen. The costs from the whole episode were somewhere near £1,000.

I usually tried not to grumble about it, because the amounts I had lost only ran into a few million lire. Everyone else around me seemed to have been conned out of much greater sums, having been abandoned by business partners or persuaded to invest in
spoof businesses. As my blood reached boiling point, I would complain to various friends, who would then generously lend me their cars or their money, or else invite me to their country houses and sit me down to explain the way things work. ‘First,’ said Filippo, ‘there’s a reason that people you know in this country are amazingly generous. It’s because anyone who you
don’t
know will almost certainly try to be
furbo
with you. It’s them against us, and’ – he said as he poured us another glass of lemon liqueur – ‘we’re here to defend you, and vice versa.’ He started laughing: ‘But you, Zio Tobia, you’ve still got milk in your mouth’, which – suggesting you’re still at the suckling stage – is the Italian way of saying ‘you’re wet behind the ears’.

‘Never, ever, set up a direct debit in this country. Not unless you’ve been introduced to both the bank and the billers. Don’t ever put a cheque in the post, because you can’t trust the post, let alone the postman. You have to “play the game”. You have to join one side or the other, to have someone at your shoulders [which really means get some decent back-up]’. He said he would talk to ‘his friends’ to see if there were any jobs going.

That, I knew, would be a
raccomandazione
. Since the chances of applying at random for a job and getting it merely on merit are virtually nil, you have to accept the way things work and get parachuted into a cushy job having been heartily
raccomandato
. Thus, when you accept the kind advice and sit one of those competitions for a job, you will know that, despite a gymnasium full of thousands of hopefuls, the job is yours because it has already been piloted in your favour by friends. (Then, once you’ve got an almost normal job, you in turn will be expected, when organising a strict competition for future promotions, to cast a favourable eye on the ‘recommended’ candidates.) I duly got a job to teach at Parma university. Only at that point did my adventure within a parallel world begin. I discovered another bizarre world of bureaucratic absurdity. To teach at the university I had to be registered for VAT, which was only possible if I was registered as an Italian resident, which in turn was only possible if I had a
Permesso di Soggiorno
, a ‘sojourn permit’.

Two weeks before the start of the academic year, then, I was outside Parma’s
Questura per
Stranieri
, the ‘police office for foreigners’. Knowing the acute problem of queues in Italy, I arrived at seven-thirty, half an hour before the office opened. There were already about fifty people mingling on the pavement – Moroccan men holding hands, swapping cigarettes, a group of what I assumed were Eastern European women huddled together, lots of men from Africa wearing faded football shirts, their wives in lime green robes. Eight o’clock arrived and the antique door of the
Questura
was still shut.

Eventually the heavy door swung to, and a policeman – decked out in shades and epaulettes – ushered us in. When towards ten o’clock I arrived at the counter and shouted my request through bulletproof glass, I was given the application form for a sojourn permit. I went to the bar across the road and began filling in the form. More and more people came in, clutching their precious forms: Albanians, Ukrainians, Tunisians, Somalis. We passed around biros borrowed from the bar for the cost of a coffee. Jokes started flying around in pidgin Italian about how Albania, or Nigeria, was more efficient than this, and shouldn’t we all just go back to where we came from. By the time I had explained the form to various people, and filled in my own, the
Questura
was already shut.