ITALY: This enjoyable book follows an established tradition: British man of letters moves to Italy, gets involved with natives (even to the point of marrying one), and writes about his beautiful, baffling, enigmatic new home.
Tobias Jones settled in Parma, taught English at the university, travelled around the country, wrote a diary for the London Review of Books. He enjoyed the surface attractions of Italian life, took a healthy interest in the Parma football team, and was well accepted and popular in his immediate social circle. However, he noticed that all is not as it seems. Political life, in particular, is dodgy, and the epitome of all dodginess turns out to be one Silvio Berlusconi, recurrent Prime Minister and multibillionaire. The Silvio leitmotiv emerges piecemeal as the author embarks on a sequence of thematic excursions through topics such as bureaucracy, religion, terrorist show-trials, rigged football matches, the soft-porn soft-headedness of Italian TV with its small platoon of "personalities" endlessly recycled through venal game-shows and singalongs, the fall of the First Republic and the irresistible rise of Forza Italia, conspiracy theories and subversive plots among the ruling kleptocracy, planning scandals, and the Italian cult of death (which, being British, he finds a bit overdone).
Jones takes a three-stranded approach to his work. The first strand is personal: eyewitness observation, casual meetings, interviews with notable personalities, attendance at significant events. Then there are slices of historical summary, interpolated in long italicised passages throughout the book. The final strand consists of well-selected references to relevant texts from Italian literature and the writings of previous grand tourists. But the three strands of the book do not quite combine into a single thread, and Jones ends up falling elegantly between several stools. His personal odyssey is somewhat desultory, and told with a certain coy reticence. His ragazza becomes his fidanzata; his female students find him fascinating; his friends play football and make epigrammatic remarks which drive him to further explorations. We get fragments and sketches rather than a composite portrait of the first-person narrator, and much the same is true of his depiction of Italy. He is deeply interested in recent Italian politics, in an impressionistic way.
The biggest celebrity he gets to interview is Adriano Sofri, an ageing revolutionary intellectual serving a 22-year sentence on flimsy evidence for the 1982 murder of Luigi Calabresi, a policeman who was himself implicated in the murder of an anarchist suspected of involvement in a bombing in 1969. But the Sofri interview is presented in offhand mode. Jones is not a hard news man. If he were not equally modest in his self-presentation, his "casual observer" stance could get seriously irritating.
Still, he's a good observer, a pleasant writer, and usually moves beyond the stereotypes. He does somewhat perpetuate the myth of the dolce far niente, though, whereas in fact most Italians work harder than us northerners, and their simulation of leisure is an elaborate illusion. Some of Italy's ideological conflicts may be less violent and less significant than they appear to him, while the role of organised crime in the Italian economy (the real "Dark Heart of Italy") would bear further serious investigation. And Italian TV was rubbish long before Berlusconi. The quivering cleavages, cookery shows, dancing girls, the homophobia, the fawning political interviewers, the simpering clerics - these are not new. Of course Berlusconi is the supreme media manipulator and trivialiser of the national culture. His photo-hagiography, distributed to all Italian households before the 2001 election, started with his horoscope. (Libra, since you ask.) Jones examines his record and concludes, sensibly: "It's ridiculous to say that Italy isn't a democracy. Then again, it seems equally ridiculous to say that it is."
What real harm has Berlusconi done to Italy? In some ways, less than you might think. He can be generous: he has argued for clemency for Adriano Sofri. He sometimes seeks to uphold democratic standards: the brutal cops who felt free to batter sleeping protestors after the Genoa G8 summit could conceivably face charges for their crime. Silvio is not a totalitarian dictator. Apart from a few vindictive moves against individual journalists, the media adulation he demands is not much more than was formerly given to Christian Democrat leaders. His main long-term victim, oddly enough, is probably big business. By passing self-serving laws to protect commercial fraud, Berlusconi has downgraded Italy's business credibility and relegated his country's economy to the second division. But that's what the people voted for.
Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin is Head of Italian at Trinity College, DublinCormac Ó Cuilleanáin