IN SEARCH OF ITALY:Could it be that Italians are better with the pencil and drawing board than with the pen and jotter?
WALKING past the Scuderie del Quirinale museum one sunny Roman morning last spring, it was hard not to notice the queues of would-be visitors patiently waiting for their turn to step inside and see arguably the most successful of all the many Caravaggio exhibitions held last year to mark the 400th anniversary of the great maestro’s death.
By the end of its run last year, the Caravaggio show had attracted more than half a million visitors.
The point about those visitors, too, was that, while there were obviously some tourists in there, this was a predominantly home town crowd. Put it another way, Italians love and respect a good exhibition.
Seeing the crowds gathered outside the Scuderie del Quirinale (literally, the stables of the Quirinale Palace, once the Rome “home” of popes but now, of course, the official residence of the state president) reminded me of all the various Italian exhibitions I have seen over the years, not just in the obvious iconic “cultural” centres of Florence, Rome and Venice but all over the country.
If there has been one common denominator, it is that the Italian art-loving public tends not only to be reasonably discreet and well-behaved (by and large) but also gives the impression of being not only enthusiastic but also well informed. Often I have come out of a successful show thinking to myself, well this lot know their art.
The ironic aspect of this is that on the same morning I walked past the Quirinale, I had just got off a suburban train on which, as usual, few people seemed to be reading a book. Some of my fellow passengers, admittedly, were reading newspapers but they were nearly all of the freebie handout, train station variety.
Whenever you hear Italian publishers (Feltrinelli, Mondadori, etc) discuss the state of their industry, they almost always complain about the fact that Italians do not read nearly as much as fellow EU citizens. Doubtless, this has something to do with high illiteracy rates in Italy. (In 2005, there were still six million Italians totally illiterate).
Last summer, Censis, the national research data institute, produced another of those reports which claimed that the numbers of Italians who read a newspaper are on the decline. Only 34.5 per cent read a newspaper at least three times a week, giving Italy one of the lowest newspaper and magazine readership levels in Europe. Book readership, they claimed, has dropped to 56.5 per cent. (Although Italy still has almost 3,000 publishers pumping out more than 60,000 new titles a year)
Not surprisingly, in this context, researchers regularly tell us that 75-80 per cent of the population rely on television rather than newspapers for their daily news. Whilst as many as three million viewers will tune in for the prime time news bulletin on La 7, which is the third terrestrial TV choice after state broadcaster RAI and the Berlusconi channels, authoritative dailies such as La Repubblicaor Corriere Della Seratend to have sales between 500,000-600,000.
Put simply, the (hardly original) point I am making is that Italians’ best cultural instincts tend to be more visual than literary.
For example, this is a moment when Italian educational standards understandably give rise for concern – in the World University rankings Bologna at 176 is the highest listed Italian university (by comparison TCD is at 52 and UCD at 114), while the OECD’s PISA project consistently places Italy well down the field when it comes to assessments of maths, sciences and reading literacy.
Yet seemingly poor education standards do not stop Italy being an obvious world leader when it comes to an area such as fashion and design – witness the various Armanis, Versaces and Valentinos.
Could it be that Italians are a lot better with the pencil and drawing board than with the pen and jotter?
Given the standards set by those Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo types, there is probably a logic to this.
The Italian "eye" is an all-seeing beast. In his splendid autobiography Love And War In The Apennines, English prisoner of war Eric Newby recalls the unexpected difficulties encountered by prisoners of war in Italy.
He says the POW, almost always dressed in approximate clothing, always stood out in an Italy where everyone, including train inspectors, would notice everything, from his socks to the quality of his shirt material. Thus trying to pass off as an Italian and melt into the crowd proved not so much difficult as impossible.
That attention to wardrobe detail, not to say sartorial elegance, has never deserted Italians – north, south, east or west. Italy remains a country where an old-fashioned concept of the conformist “well dressed” manages to survive despite invasion by the globalised transatlantic culture of shades, tracksuit bottoms and runners.
The Italian eye, not to mention “ear”, can be an unforgiving customer as witnessed by the often impossibly high standards expected at high (and low) cultural temples such as Milan’s La Scala opera house or its San Siro football stadium.
When it comes to what Bertie Wooster used to call “getting the bird”, there is nowhere quite like Italy. Standards are standards, all thoroughly unified.
Series concluded