The Dark Heart of Italy (35 page)

It might simply have been an idle piece of graffiti, but ‘voices from the grave’ is Italians’ favourite poetic genre.
The Spoon River
Anthology
is, by a very long way, the best-selling poetry book in Italy. With its voices from the other side, the dead seem to be heard as they recount their simple, short lives. (When Pino Pinelli was finally laid to rest in 1980 – after his body had again been re-exhumed and examined for evidence – he was buried in the Anarchist section of the graveyard at Carrara, with an inscription from
Spoon River
.)
Spoon River
was also the cause of yet another nickname I had been given (to go alongside
Zio Tobia
and
Il
Calvinista
). At the beginning of one academic year, a couple of students referred to me as
Il Suonatore
, the ‘player’ or ‘musician’. They never explained why, and by the end of the year the whole class were happily giving me the bemusing epithet. It was eventually explained to me that Fabrizio De André, the plaintive Genovese singer, once issued an album of songs which were ‘liberal’ translations from the
Spoon River
anthology. The last song on the album is called
Il Suonatore Jones
:

(The English by comparison sounds rather dull: ‘I’ve seen liberty wake up/ every time I have played/ for a rustle of girls/ at a dance/ for a drunken friend’.) His life finishes ‘in nettled fields… with a broken flute and a raucous laugh and so many memories…’ The fact that students (who all year had shown no inclination to read any poetry) had however devoured
Spoon River
and all its musical adaptations, said a lot about their aesthetic tastes.

Even Italy’s fourth estate – its bureaucracy – has its own way of
doing death. I’ve often heard stories of people who have mistakenly been ‘killed’ in the bureaucratic system. It’s nothing sinister, simply the usual gremlins in the system. Since existence within the bureaucracy is often more important than being physically alive, it’s actually quite useful (if you’re behind on your income tax), but more serious if you’re expecting to receive a pension. The alternative to bureaucratic elimination is to keep someone artificially, bureaucratically alive. It’s a sort of resuscitation, in which if a relative is still alive in the bureaucratic sense, there can be all sorts of tax benefits for you (lower bills on the utilities depending on ‘residence’; the number of houses you own and so on). For years I paid bills that were addressed to someone who had died years previously. The practice is vaguely morbid, but is very common. Because of the malfunctioning bureaucracy, until recently hundreds of thousands of dead Italians (the ‘dead electors’) were making their posthumous political opinions felt. Since they were still ‘alive’ in the annals, they could still (or their relatives could still) cast their vote.

The accommodation of
I Morti
has always been a major architectural event. Tombs and sepulchres and catacombs have always been ostentatious. They even became the country’s top tourist attractions. The beginning of the Via Appia, the road which heads out of the capital towards Brindisi, used to be the chosen place of Romans for a Sunday stroll, there to enjoy and admire new mausolea which lined both sides of the road. A vital part of the Grand Tour was to search out the tombs of famous poets (despite the fact that many, including Virgil’s and Nero’s, were probably fakes). Dante’s tomb at Ravenna is still an important stop-off for modern travellers, and the catacombs in Palermo are probably more visited than any other site in Sicily.

November 1, the day before
I Morti
, is another national holiday, the day on which it’s traditional to visit ancestors in their cemeteries. (Towards the end of October bones suddenly start appearing in the Parma patisserie. The day of
I Morti
is an opportunity not just to mourn, of course; it’s also culinary tradition. The bones,
pastry-coated with garish cream, represent the bones of the dead.) As every Italian schoolchild knows from reading the country’s most famous poem, ‘The Sepulchres’, Napoleonic law was responsible for Italy’s breathtaking cemeteries. His
codici
decreed that burials had to take place outside the city walls. The result across Europe was the phenomenon of vast, out-of-town graveyards. Unlike Britain, where burial was more usually within church grounds, huge suburbs for the dead grew up outside Italian cities. They are the country’s most beautiful, serene sites.

In Genoa, for example, the cemetery of Staglieno is built on a hill towards the north-east of the city. On November 1 I went along as a tourist. Since thousands of Genovese were visiting the cemetery, the florist outside must have made half his annual salary within a few hours. There were four trucks selling bouquets to the queues of mourners. The cemetery’s centrepiece is an arcaded square which leads you to the pantheon. The inscription in Latin above the entrance reads: ‘To the glory of God and to the memory of the illustrious
Genovesi
.’ It’s at Staglieno that Giuseppe Mazzini is buried, next to his mother, in a low, leafy temple. The inscriptions are political rather than religious. Today there are about two dozen fresh bouquets laid out. David Lloyd George, in 1922, left the inscription: ‘To the champion of the oppressed people and the prophet of European brotherhood.’ (The irony is that Mazzini, like Dante and many others now lauded as political or poetic heroes, died exiled from his city. He was, at the time of his death, living under the assumed name of John Brown in Pisa.) In the English part of the cemetery there’s the gratitude of the Empire to Italians in the Great War: ‘The British Empire will always remember, together with those of her children who have fallen for her, those of Italy who gave their lives during the Great War of 1914–1918.’

Genoa is a grandiose example. The following year I went to one of the smaller rural cemeteries outside Parma. Because it was for less illustrious souls, it appeared like a complex of giant filing cabinets.
I Morti
are slotted into place, and then rotated according to age and rent in deep walls that are often three or four metres high.
The funeral itself involves plasterers sealing off the end of the opening to the file, called the
loculo
, the ‘niche’. It might sound soulless, but it isn’t: the dead can still be visited, you know where to find them. Almost all the headstones (in reality, the edge of the filing cabinet) carry photographs. On the day of
I Morti
you go and visit your ancestors, and can even look at your own slot, already booked in the family’s allocated space. The point is that the dead are on display. Even in death, there’s a careful presentation, and even the rigid hierarchies of Italian society survive. The more grand the family, the greater the burial space. Not content with a filing cabinet spot, some build their own temples or shrine. It’s the ultimate in posthumous one-upmanship: ‘Look what I built before I died.’ The cost of marble slabs, arranged to form a temple about the size of a garden shed, often mean that people save for decades just to have the appropriately grand resting place. Silvio Berlusconi has even built his own mausoleum in the grounds of his Arcore estate. It’s designed along the lines of an Etruscan necropolis. Inside are 36 burial slots, reserved for members of his family and his business and political partners.

Before Italy became, for foreigners, a symbol of the vitality of life (the Edwardian stereotype), it was a symbol of the opposite: the land of the dead or the dying. Henry James had called Venice ‘the most beautiful of tombs’. ‘Nowhere else,’ he wrote, ‘has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and remembrance…’ The other-worldly quality of the floating ghost-town of Venice meant that James saw it as a kind of Avalon, a place where bodies were carried in gondolas to their resting place:

Italy’s ‘old age’ made it the natural place for mourning writers to visit during and after the First World War. For Modernists it became imagined as a metaphoric mausoleum, a place where they
could come to examine what it meant to be old and to die. James Joyce wrote ‘The Dead’ in Trieste. Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice
, in which ‘the pale and lovely summoner’ smiles and beckons man to his death, was just the most obvious example of the genre.

Given its civil wars, though, death in Italy is often more divisive than communal, and memorials and mourners are sometimes acutely politicised. On one of the walls in the main square in Bologna there’s a collage of all the partisans from the city who died in the 1943–45 civil war. It’s like looking at an auditorium of the fallen: a wall of hundreds of black and white faces watching you, almost defying you to challenge their political creed. There are often little vases of flowers left there, or else candles are lit. That in itself is enough to tell you where the political loyalties of the city lie. In fact, the odium between right and left, which became militarist in the 1970s, now finds its most acute expression in the bickering over the wording of memorials. A mile away, outside the station in Bologna, the clock is permanently stopped at 10.25. There was a move by the railway authorities recently to get the clock working again, but the plan was shelved because of a local outcry. 10.25 was the time at which the bomb ripped through the waiting room of the station in 1980, killing 85 people. A little later, revisionists wanted to etch the word ‘Fascist’ from the memorial to those who died; the move – either a worthy attempt to heal wounds, or else a rude attempt to whitewash history – was blocked by the city’s (
Forza Italia
) mayor. It’s like that monument in Pisa: ‘Anarchist killed by police at an anti-Fascist rally’: provocative as much as it is conciliatory.

Connected to the politicisation of death is its aestheticisation. Death in Italy has frequently had its aesthetic edge, especially in the country’s terrorism. Non-Italian writers had hinted at the mesmerising quality of violence and terror – Yeats wrote of the ‘terrible beauty’; Shelley about the ‘tempestuous loveliness of terror’ – but it was Umberto Eco who really analysed the politics of death, and thereby gave a political dimension to the ways in which Italian death and terrorism had become attractive and almost longed-for.
He discerned not only that death had become aestheticised and adored; he identified the necrophilia as profoundly Fascist:

The taste for killings and martyrs was, for Eco, Fascism in its purest form. The beautification of terrorism in Italy, perceived by generations of writers, was for him more telling than any professed political dimension. Fascism meant adoring and serving death, be it as the slayer or as the slain:

Fascism, for Eco, was political nihilism: a desire for martyrdom, a servitude to death.

Related to that aestheticisation of death is the notion of a
bella
morte
, of a ‘beautiful death’. It’s surely unique to Italy and certainly a strange adjective to use. We might say ‘peaceful’ or ‘painful’ death, but in Italy it would be ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’. If you’re arguing amongst southerners, one of the most brutal insults is to talk about their
mortacci
, their ‘ugly dead’.

It is only now that I realise that ‘beauty’ as it’s understood in Italy simply doesn’t exist in English. A
bella morte
is a moral as much as aesthetic judgement: it implies that someone died in an elegant, righteous way, probably neither in poverty nor in pain. It doesn’t, clearly, imply that the corpse was particularly attractive. Only now do I realise how wrong I have been. I used to think, when I first arrived here, that the Italian obsession with beauty was the negation of morality; that the beautification of everything and everyone was so obsessive that good and bad got left behind. Now, thinking about
bella morte
, I finally understand that
the notion of beauty in Italy is a conflation of aesthetics and ethics. I finally understand that Burckhardt quotation, suggesting that Italians have ‘outgrown the limits of morality and religion’. The beauty syndrome isn’t the vanity and superficiality I thought it was; it’s a means, much more nuanced than the moralising of northern Europe, to identify who someone is.

To say someone is ugly isn’t only a physical judgement, it’s a moral one. Ugliness implies in Italian repulsion, which isn’t only an analysis of visual presentation. It’s an analysis also of someone’s worth, their ‘goodness’. A
bell’uomo
isn’t only a good-looker (literally a ‘beautiful man’), he’s also a ‘good man’, someone who is attractive as a person. Because the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are so rarely used, beauty is the litmus paper by which everyone is judged. It’s more sophisticated than morality because, in some strange way, it is more comprehensive. A description of beauty covers more ground than goodness, it includes more characteristics; not just righteousness, but civility, dignity, stature and so on.
Bellissimo
isn’t used just for appearances, but for
il gesto
, the ‘gesture’. Someone doesn’t do a ‘good’ deed, they do a ‘beautiful’ one. It’s like the old Greek idea of
kaloskagathos
: beauty and goodness are, rather than mutually excluding opposites, actually the same thing.