The Dark Heart of Italy

Tobias Jones

New York: North Point, 2003. ISBN: 0-86547-724-8. Pp. 314, index

Mr Jones begins the foreword with a quote by Stendhal who deplored the superficial travelers that confine their descriptions to the astonishing artistic legacy, the romance of the countryside, the impressive architecture and monuments, the sunny beaches and the alluring mountains, not to mention the restless hedonistic lifestyle of the Italians. A legacy of the Grand Tour's whirlwind descent into the never-ending vortex of the beautiful and the sublime, this experience of Italy is wont to command the visits of the vast majority of travelers even today (it did for me). But this is not what Mr Jones wants to write about. As a British ex-pat who has lived in Italy for many years making his living in the journalism trade, he has seen another side of the wonderful country, a side much darker and sinister, a side that locals only talk about in whispers even while accepting its perverse and pervasive influence on their lives, a side that everyone knows exists but few dare to acknowledge.

It is not just the side where the Mafia of Sicily and the Camorra of Naples, the usual suspects in everything that is shady, have gripped magistrates and politicians in their tentacles. It is a side much harder to grasp and much more insidious than that. It is an Italy where nothing is ever known for certain, where investigations of age-old crimes drag on interminably without ever reaching a historical conclusion, where everyone is simultaneously guilty and innocent, where politics and terrorism present a volatile backdrop to the unbelievable grab of power by Mr Berlusconi. It is a place where truth is fluid, forever tantalizingly out of reach, but where the reality of its absence is keenly felt from the shoddy construction of buildings that are prone to collapse to football fixing scandals, from the unholy marriage of militant academics and politicians with big business to the stagnant economy ruled by an ever ageing gerontocracy that denies the young the prospect of a career unless it's in the public sector that is as inefficient as it is invasive.

In some of this (e.g., the expectation that the government is responsible for a great many things), the Italians are much like the rest of Western Europeans. In others (e.g., the firm belief that the government is corrupt), they are a lot like fellow Southerners like Spain. And yet in others (e.g., the nearly total control of the media by a Prime Minister), they are in a class by themselves. With all these similarities, the differences become that much more interesting, and it is these differences that Mr Jones sets out to explain.

The book reads more like a personal vendetta against Mr Berlusconi than an unbiased account, but I think Mr Jones ought to be forgiven the occasional lapse that sometimes makes his account too dark. Throughout the ten essays, he points an accusing finger to the perennially innocent (and declared so by courts or, failing that, by laws he passes) Il Cavaliere. But even while doing that, Mr Jones maintains that the answer is not that simple, for Berlusconi is a relatively recent phenomenon and is perhaps a logical culmination of processes that stretch back to the years before the Unification. Even today, Italy is a patchwork of former city-states, republics, and duchies in which one identifies more readily with the campanile of one's native city than with a wider national identity. The prosperous North, with its legacy of riches from the middle ages and with its traditions of self-government and liberty is still in opposition to the poorer South with its experience of unified authoritarian rule by a dizzying succession of Spaniards, French, and Germans, not to mention Muslims. A conflict between one's town and the next, moves up into a conflict between one region and another, and leaves a country that is still polarized where people still speak native dialects despite the supposed rule of the Tuscan version of the language.

It is language that illustrates the contradictions of the Italian character for Mr Jones. It is beautiful. Not just mellifluous (something to which I, as a non-speaker, can readily attest: listening to Italian is like listening to music) but also incredibly dense and ornate: a simple letter takes ages to write for one cannot just get to the point, as a Brit is wont to, but must engage in all sorts of verbal acrobatics until the final product is so Baroque, it resembles a libretto for a grand opera more than the business correspondence that it is. In all of this, subservience to higher ups forms a constant undercurrent, a ritual in which one pays homage to his would-be patron much like the ancient Romans did. And if anything, the tendency is even more pronounced when said patron is a public servant supposedly doing his job. This ostensible groveling, however, combines with a hard-nosed realism that borders on cynicism, making it all a charade of such magnitude, it is hard to believe that people maintain the facade. But maintain it they do, even to the extent that the flowery expression bury actual meaning so deep that it is often lost, and one is left wondering whether the beautiful words that just rolled over him had any content whatsoever.

This, Mr Jones maintains, is what the quest for truth is like in Italy: it stops somewhere along in the hierarchy of power, it is buried in an avalanche of extravagant claims and counter-claims (naturally all prettily decked in astounding turns of metaphor), it is asserted and contradicted until one finds refuge in a simple conspiracy theory which is as convincing as it is thoroughly impervious to proof with its circular reasoning. The Italians (like the Bulgarians, by the way) have one word for 'story' and 'history' and so the distinction that an English-speaker would make between a make-believe fantasy and something based on verifiable facts would be lost on them. In a very post-modernist way, history is just a species of a story, it is to be revised periodically in accordance with the precepts of whoever happens to be in power. Orwell was wrong about one thing: one does not need a totalitarian society's Ministry of Truth to make blackwhite the order of the day, one only needs to deny that black or white exist, and then impudently claim that all is grey but one's grey is in fact white while the opponent's grey is in fact black. This makes rewriting history so much easier for no rewrite is at all necessary: everything remains grey.

In all truth, Mr Jones often falls prey to what he criticizes most: his book is a wonderful read but one may be forgiven if at the end one is left with a view of Italy that is like an impressionist painting: a vague outline of something that, upon closer inspection, disintegrates into a series of incomprehensible blots. Mr Jones begins by trying to assert that although Berlusconi is to blame for the current state of affairs in the country, his rise to power was predicated on fundamental characteristics of Italian society, and as such it is the Italians themselves who are probably responsible for that anyway. But in the final analysis, I did not know what to make of it: on one hand, we have the villain, but on the other, he may not be as guilty after all. And heaping blame on an entire polity effectively makes everyone innocent. So perhaps we should just shrug and wonder how come the trains still run on time (they mostly do) while toilets at train stations close two hours before the departure of the last train for the night (which accounts for the foul smell on the tracks). Naturally, all of this contradictory material is presented in an eminently readable package, making this book, supposedly so far from the regular traveler's account of Italy, fit the general pattern nicely. Mr Jones is way too fascinated with the country to make any sense of it. And how can anyone blame him for that?

December 9, 2006