Imagine an Italian army battalion during the cold war. With 300,000 soldiers, a command structure and a base near Venice, the Terzo Corpo designato d’Armata was the first line of defence against a Soviet invasion, and the very fact of its presence in the north of the country, it was hoped, would make the Russians think twice about marching into Italy. And it worked. The unit did its job. Except for one slight snag: it didn’t exist, and it never had.
The battalion was a bluff. There was a commander, and he had a little office and a small staff, but instead of training to repel the Reds, they created paperwork. This meant payslips, promotions, pensions for tens of thousands of soldiers who’d never existed, to be carefully leaked as a deterrent to would-be invaders. It’s a supreme example of Italian fantasia, a word whose meaning, John Hooper explains, “lies somewhere on the permeable frontier between imagination and creativity”. In The Italians, he sets out to explore the borders between the real and the seeming in Italian history and culture.
Italy, we know, is a land of contradictions. It’s a society oriented around the family, but also one that shows a remarkable degree of tolerance for extramarital affairs. In Italy, Vodafone offers a service called Alter Ego, which allows phone users to have two numbers on the one sim card – perfect for a cheating spouse. Catholic culture is deeply embedded in Italian society, but Italians’ actual religious beliefs often run counter to church doctrines: among the most popular saints is Padre Pio, the visionary Capuchin friar and mystic who wrestled with the devil, suffered the stigmata, could read minds and clashed with the Vatican to the extent that they stopped him from saying mass. Divination of various kinds – whether in tarot reading or the Neapolitan smorfia – remains popular. Many Italians are fiercely Catholic, though the character of that faith is often at odds with what’s taught in the catechism.
Italians are famous for living la dolce vita, but they consistently rate themselves among the least happy people in Europe. Their country is notorious for savage mob violence, but has a comparatively low level of violent crime. And in a country that has long been a watchword for fashion and elegance, somebody has to explain the bizarre popularity of metallic Puffa jackets in Italian men’s fashion.
While he dodges the Puffa jacket question, Hooper offers an enjoyable and eye-opening tour through modern Italy. Having spent years as a columnist on Italian affairs, here he sets out to repeat the achievement of his The New Spaniards, unpicking what’s bemusing and beguiling about a country that many of us know only superficially. It fits into a long tradition of English writing on Italy – English travellers have been rushing home and rushing into print from at least the 16th century. Recent English writing on Italy includes Tim Parks’s books; Tobias Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy, a quietly furious exploration of Italy’s seedier corners; and David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy, which offers a witty, non-linear history of the peninsula.
These are questions that intrigue the Italians themselves. Hooper models his investigation in part on Luigi Barzini’s 1964 book of the same title. Barzini wrote: “Italy is the snows of the Alps, the parching heat of Sicily, the mysterious Mafia, Fellini and Mastroianni, picturesque poverty, picturesque new wealth, archaic crafts, robot-run modern factories – but, above all, its people: friendly, shrewd, good-humoured and resigned to the worst.” At least as far back as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Machiavelli, Italians have been attempting to understand and to energise a country that often lacks a sense of itself as a unified nation.
If linguistic and political diversity pulls Italians apart – it was well into the 20th century before most Italians spoke Italian, rather than local dialect, as a first language – then perhaps they are brought together by a shared vocabulary. Hooper’s book functions in part as a glossary of these terms that permeate Italian culture. Campanilismo is crucial to understanding Italy’s many divisions: it refers to the fact that the strongest allegiances tend not to be to nation or region, but to their hometown and its campanile, or bell-tower. There is furbizia, which might loosely be translated as “cunning” or “sly”, but often carries a positive connotation. To be furbo is to be canny enough to navigate daily life to your own advantage. Dietrologia, literally “behind-ism”, is “the peculiarly Italian art of divining the true motive for, or cause of, an event”. In a country where public life is characterised by furbizia and fantasia, there’s a skill to learning what’s really going on.
There’s plenty here that’s strange or surprising, not least as regards gender relations and the place of women in modern Italy. I hadn’t known that Giorgio de Chirico, one of the founders of pittura metafisica (metaphysical painting) and one of the last century’s strangest and most exciting Italian artists, was once a judge on the Miss Italia contest, in which contestants were scored on (among other attributes) their chest, waist and hip measurements. Yet more sinister is the contemporary practice of circumventing labour laws by using what are called dimissioni in bianco – in effect, women are often asked to sign an undated letter of resignation when they begin a new job, so that their employers can let them go without penalty should they become pregnant. The practice is illegal, but still widely known.
Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier was one of 16th-century Europe’s biggest literary hits. At the heart of this guide to good courtly behaviour is the idea of sprezzatura. It’s a difficult term to translate, but probably best understood as a kind of studied carelessness in manner – an ease and grace in the courtier’s conversation and behaviour that covers up the effort of projecting an agreeable persona. The courtier should sweat blood in private and smell of roses in public. Today, the Italian obsession with bella figura – and the concomitant horror of brutta figura – lies on the same border between reality and representation.
Even truth is negotiable in Italy. Verità need not mean objective truth: rather, as Hooper explains, it can simply mean “version”. You have your verità, and I have mine. Silvio Berlusconi has one, his prosecutors another. Hooper’s is not the first attempt to understand the people of the peninsula, and its unwillingness to sugar-coat some of the less palatable aspects of contemporay Italian culture may make it few friends in Italy. Nonetheless, it’s a deft and enjoyable treatment of an endlessly fascinating topic – a verità worth hearing.
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