Does anybody remember La Fenice in Venice, the famous opera house which was burned to a shell in January 1996? Almost four years later and notwithstanding a host of well-intentioned promises, La Fenice is still little more than a burnt-out shell in which scaffolding and construction equipment stand rusting.
Bureaucratic formalities are partly to blame. An even bigger problem has been a bitter and lengthy legal battle involving rival companies tendering for the reconstruction project.
Good news is at hand, however. In mid-November, La Fenice cleared the final bureaucratic hurdle standing between it and the restart of a reconstruction project due to see the opera house finished for October 1st, 2001. Just as well, too, that La Fenice means the phoenix. Rising from the ashes, even if a little tardily, can be taken for granted.
Two weeks before La Fenice got its long overdue green light, the state-controlled electricity company, ENEL, made an initial public offering of 35 per cent of its shares. A record 3.8 million Italian savers plus a host of international institutional investors jumped onto the ENEL bandwagon, in the process pushing the overall market capitalisation of companies listed on the Borsa Italiana to €569 billion, thus seeing Milan overtake Amsterdam to become Europe's fifth-largest stock market.
Not for nothing did economic commentators label the ENEL privatisation (or semi-privatisation, since the state still retains a 65 percent controlling interest) a historic moment for Italy.
The privatisation and the reconstruction of La Fenice might appear to have little in common, being merely fragments in the complex mosaic of the Italian labyrinth. However, the juxtaposition of an innovative, heavily subscribed privatisation scheme with seemingly inexcusable public mal-administration says much about the blend of historical problems, contemporary contradictions and cautious optimism with which Italy moves, albeit shakily and tardily, into the new millennium.
Modern Italian society is nothing if not one in a state of flux. On the economic front, an until-recently heavily protected economy in which state holdings accounted for more than 52 per cent of GDP is fast coming to terms with the open market economics of euro-land. The privatisation of ENEL is just one of many - Alitalia, Telecom Italia, Autostrada, ENI, to name but the biggest, have already gone down the same road.
Such huge economic changes are inevitably not without painful social consequences. As the state reduces its presence in the economy, so too has the old concept of il posto fisso, the permanent and pension-able state job, begun to look like a thing of the past. For instance, the spectacular purchase of Telecom Italia by Olivetti in a hostile take-over bid last spring is set to cost more than 30,000 jobs.
Survey after survey highlights this social unease, with Italians putting unemployment (currently at 11.4 per cent) at the top of their list of major concerns. A 1.3 per cent growth rate for 1999, as forecast by the government, and further rates of 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent for the next two years, as forecast by Bank of Italy governor Antonio Fazio, would suggest that this relatively high level of unemployment is destined to hang on in there well into the new millennium.
On the political front, things are, if anything, in an even greater state of flux. The ancien regime of (mainly) Christian Democrats and Socialists that fell apart in 1992, brought down both by Tangentopoli corruption scandals and the fall of Eastern bloc communism, has been replaced by an uneasy political landscape in which two fractious coalitions, one headed by the former communist party and the other by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, present more the semblance than the substance of bi-polar democracy.
With smaller parties continuing to exercise undue influence - the role of ex-president Francesco Cossiga's UDR party in the formation of the current centre-left government led by Massimo D'Alema in October 1998 makes the point - the issue of institutional and electoral reform continues to hang like an awkward spectre over all political life.
While such reforms continue to generate much talk and little action, the ancien regime has even raised its head again. Firstly, in a historic October judgement, seven-times prime minister Giulio Andreotti was acquitted of the charge of mafia collusion.
A few weeks later, disgraced former socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi, a fugitive from Italian justice now living in Tunisia, asked that he might be allowed to return to his native land as "a free man", i.e., with the slate wiped clean. Even though Craxi's request has, thus far, been turned down, there is no denying the fact that political forces, especially those on the centre-right, want to introduce some form of Tangentopoli amnesty.
Meanwhile, the centre-left government lacks both the political will and the electoral strength to do anything about one of the great anomalies of contemporary Italian politics, i.e., the fact that the leader of the opposition and ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi still controls (and uses for his own political ends) a huge media empire that includes three nation-wide TV channels.
While issues such as electoral and institutional reform and the above Berlusconi conflict of interest greatly concern politicians and political commentators, Italians themselves rate organised crime and immigration as much more pressing problems, according to the 1999 annual report by social and economic think tank, Censis.
While broad-spread popular support (not always mirrored by the political classes) for the historical problem represented by the state's fight against the Mafia is nothing new, Italy's slow transformation into a multi-racial, multi-ethnic society (there are now more than one million migrant workers from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe living in Italy) represents one of the big challenges of the next millennium.
For Censis boss, Giuseppe Di Rita, "Italy is a bit dead . . . we don't know how to account for the past, how to interpret the present while we are unwilling to project ourselves into the future."
Paddy Agnew can be contacted at pagnew@aconet.it