PENGUIN BOOKS
THE ITALIANS
Luigi Barzini was born in 1908 and, like his father before him, quickly became one of the most distinguished Italian journalists of his generation. Educated in Italy and in America at the Columbia School of Journalism, he started work on the old New York World. He returned to Italy in 1930 and, working for Corriere della Sera, he covered most international stories of the succeeding decade from the conquest of Ethiopia to the wedding of the Duke of Windsor. During the Japanese war against China he was on board the U.S.S. Panay when it sank, and was decorated by the U.S. Navy for his aid to the survivors. In 1940 he was arrested and confined for activities considered hostile to the Italian régime. He began working again when the allies entered Rome in 1944, editing and publishing two dailies and, later, weekly magazines. In 1958 and 1963 he was elected to Parliament as Deputato of the Italian Liberal Party from Milan.
In later years he devoted himself to writing plays and books, including Americans Are Alone in the World, From Caesar to the Mafia, O America and The Impossible Europeans (which was published in Penguin as The Europeans). He died in 1984.
Penguin Books
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Hamish Hamilton 1964
Published in Penguin Books 1968
17
Copyright © Luigi Barzini, 1964
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-014-193322-1
Acknowledgements
Foreword
1 The Peaceful Invasion
2 The Eternal Pilgrimage
3 The Fatal Charm of Italy
4 The Importance of Spectacle
5 Illusion and Cagliostro
6 The Other Face of the Coin
7 Cola di Rienzo or the Obsession of Antiquity
8 Mussolini or the Limitations of Showmanship
9 Realism and Guicciardini
10 The Pursuit of Life
11 The Power of the Family
12 How to Succeed
13 The Probleme del Mezzogiorno
14 Sicily and the Mafia
15 Fornovo and After
16 The Perennial Baroque
Conclusion
Maps
Index
PERMISSION to quote is gratefully acknowledged to the following: William Collins Sons & Co., for W. H. Auden's Introduction to Goethe's Italian Journey; Faber & Faber Ltd, for J. R. Hale's England and the Italian Renaissance; MacGibbon & Kee Ltd, for Danilo Dolci's Waste; Laurence Pollinger Ltd and the Estate of the late Mrs Frieda Lawrence for The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence; Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, for Siren Land and South Wind by Norman Douglas; and Thames & Hudson Ltd, for Paolo Monelli's Mussolini.
Past things shed light on future ones; the world was always of a kind; what is and will be was at some other time; the same things come back, but under different names and colours; not everybody recognizes them, but only he who is wise and considers them diligently.
FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI
Is there any other country in Europe where the character of the people seems to have been so little affected by political and technological change?
W. H. AUDEN
(in the introduction to Goethe's Italian Journey)
THIS book does not pretend to be a scientific treatise. It is no more ambitious nor accurate than the opening chapters of a leisurely nineteenth-century novel in which the author described at length the country in which his story would unfold, the historical moment, and the people themselves. The reader of this book, having read, can go to Italy and supply his own novel, with whatever live characters he meets on the spot. He will have learned more or less what to expect. Italy is still a country of limitless opportunities. It offers stage settings for all kinds of adventures, licit or illicit loves, the study of art, the experience of pathos, the weaving of intrigues. It can be gay, tragic, mad, pastoral, archaic, modern, or simply dolce.
I have tried to set down only the most distinguishing features, following the technique of the honest portrait painter, who puts on canvas those traits which make the sitter the person he is and not another. The sitter happens to be my country, and I have felt at times like the man who does that most exacting of all things, the ‘Portrait of the Artist's Mother’. The Mother, in this case, is notoriously distinguished. Her past is glorious, her achievements are dazzling, her traditions noble, her fame awe-inspiring, and her charm irresistible. I have known her and admired her for a long time. I love her dearly.
As I grew older, however (like many sons of famous mothers), I became disenchanted with some of her habits, shocked by some of her secret vices, repelled by her corruption, depravity and shamelessness and hurt when I discovered that she was not, after all, the shining paragon I believed her to be when I was young. Still, I could have no other mother. I could not stop loving her. When I was writing this book, I did not want to hurt her feelings, I did not want to be unnecessarily cruel, I did not want to forget her good points; but, at the same time, I tried hard not to flatter her, not to be seduced by her magical charms or misled by my own sentiments. I was determined to do the most honest job of portraiture I possibly could.
*
This book was difficult to compile. It is notoriously easier to write about things and people one does not really know very well. One has fewer doubts. But to write about one's own country was a tortured enterprise. I knew too much. I saw too many trees. I sometimes could prove one thing or its contrary, with equal ease. I was embarrassed by the exceptions. I questioned every idea and watched every word. In my younger days sentimental patriotism was the fashion. In my anxiety to correct such prejudices, was I too eager to demolish sound and durable notions? I was afraid to be too conservative and, at almost the same time, too ready to follow new intellectual fashions, the rage among contemporary intelligentsia, to embrace seductive new theories which might be obsolete before the book appeared in print.
One of the sources of confusion was the absurd discrepancy between the quantity and dazzling array of the inhabitants' achievements through many centuries and the mediocre quality of their national history. Italians have impressively filled Europe and most of the world with the fame of their larger-than-life-size famous men. Italian architects and masons built part of the Kremlin in Moscow and the Winter Palace in Leningrad; Italian artists have embellished the Capitol in Washington. They have strewn churches, princely palaces, and stately villas all over Catholic Europe, especially in Vienna, Madrid, Prague, and Warsaw; their influence on architecture was felt almost everywhere else, exterior architecture, to be sure, designed to impress and please the onlooker more than to serve strictly practical purposes. They have filled South America with ornate and rhetorical monuments to the local heroes.
Italy's smaller contributions to everyday life are so numerous as to go unnoticed. There would be no pistols but for the city of Pistoia; no savon in France but for the city of Savona; no faience anywhere but for the city of Faenza; no millinery but for the city of Milan; no blue jeans but for the city of Genoa, Gênes, where the blue cotton cloth was first produced, and no Genoa jibs; no Neapolitan ice-cream, no Roman candles, no Venetian blinds, no Bologna sausages, no Parmesan cheese, no Leghorn hens. Italians have discovered America for the Americans; taught poetry, statesmanship, and the ruses of trade to the English; military art to the Germans; cuisine to the French; acting and ballet dancing to the Russians; and music to everybody. If some day this world of ours should be turned into a cloud of radioactive dust in space, it will be by nuclear contrivances developed with the decisive aid of Italian scientists.*
There is no denying that all her geniuses made Italy great, one Italy, at least, the spiritual country, the land of culture, art, and ideas, of which only her best sons can be considered full citizens, as well as the distinguished foreigners who at all times felt themselves at home in it. Oddly enough, these great men did not make another Italy great, the concrete country to be found in almanacs and history books, the real Italy of past wars, invasions, treaties, political upheavals. In fact, it can be stated that many of these mental giants exercised little or no influence whatever.
Italians always loved a good entertainer who could stir their emotions and divert them from themselves; they were always delighted by a talented painter, musician, sculptor, architect, actor, dancer, as long as he did not engage their higher faculties. They respected and admired great scientists, especially if their discoveries and theories were abstract and incomprehensible. They endured and feared a forceful leader, but they always thoroughly enjoyed his fall. As a rule, however, most of them ignored, neglected, opposed, or derided disarmed prophets, philosophers, political and religious reformers, preachers, revolutionary scientists who proposed new and upsetting theories, men of outstanding stature in all fields.
It is true that in other countries great men have also occasionally been persecuted and put to death. Nowhere else, however, has this happened with the same discrimination, regularity, and determination. The majority of heroes in other civilized countries were allowed to live and flourish, to contribute to the power, prestige, and greatness of their native lands. They were, as a rule, not considered crackpots, deviations from the norm, but shining examples, impersonations of the national ideal, average men magnified, who indicated the path to follow. Italy instinctively neutralized all the men who tried to foist moral greatness on their countrymen. Niccolò Machiavelli was kept away from important affairs; Giambattista Vico, the father of modern thought, lived in a garret in extreme poverty; Galileo Galilei was persecuted for his ideas; Dante Alighieri, Giuseppe Mazzini, and many others went into exile. Some, like Tommaso Campanella, spent most of their lives in dungeons. A few of the worthiest were killed amidst the rejoicing of the populace, burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno and Savonarola, hanged like the patriots of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799, stabbed and stoned by the crowd like Cola di Rienzo.
*
The coexistence of these two Italies presents some perplexing problems. Why did Italy, a land notoriously teeming with vigorous, wide-awake, and intelligent people, always behave so feebly? Why was she at all times so prone to catastrophes? She has been invaded, ravaged, sacked, humiliated in every century, and yet failed to do the simple things necessary to defend herself. This is not because the people shrank from fighting and dying. They have fought as many bloody wars as their more glorious neighbours, often under the foreigners' colours, and died in even greater numbers, the civilians massacred by foreign soldiery, the soldiers usually overwhelmed by superior enemies. A few wars they won, to be sure, but then mostly against other Italians and the Austrians. Perhaps the most difficult and deadly of all wars, a three and a half years' struggle in the snows of the Alps, they fought gallantly and, in spite of the Caporetto setback, finally won against not only the Austrians but the tougher Germans too. But most other wars they lost. It is absurd to think this is because the people are effete, cowardly, and too civilized. They are notoriously lively, brave, energetic. They can at times endure more and dare more than others.
Winning wars, after all, is the ultimate test not of the quality of single men but of their capacity to work together and accept common sacrifices. This is why the riddle which fascinated Machiavelli four hundred years ago is still endlessly debated among us: why did we not achieve national unity and a centralized government when other European nations did? Why did we not create a political régime of our own? It is possible to trace constant trends, too constant to be merely the result of coincidence, which have prevented Italians from coagulating into one nation: the rapid and enthusiastic acceptance of changing political fashions and of foreign conquerors which made all revolutions irresistible but superficial and all new régimes unstable; the art of living as if all laws were obnoxious obstacles to be overcome somehow, an art which made the best of laws ridiculously ineffective; the habit of treating whatever ruler was in command, local or foreign, as if he were corruptible, which soon transformed the most scrupulous and liberal ruler into a corrupt one; the certainty that the most inflexible government could, in the long run, be corroded from the inside. Most of the national governments we achieved at one time or another were therefore feeble, arbitrary, and inefficient, including our late totalitarian dictatorship, which was defined as a ‘tyranny tempered by the complete disobedience of all laws’. Why were we so late in developing modern industries and free institutions? Why did we set about conquering colonies when all other imperial powers were on the point of losing theirs?
The qualities and defects which made us what we are fascinated foreigners, even though some of our characteristic habits were far from admirable. Travellers did not hide their contempt for us, since the end of the Quattrocento, to be exact. Yet they never stopped coming to Italy. Many begin to admire us today, listen to us, imitate us, and even envy us. Why? We are, of course, still great in the things which always came easy to us. We have improved, to be sure, in many fields, but not perceptibly in those which made us the object of foreigners' scorn in the past. We are not more honest, reliable, and law-abiding than we were, we are badly organized and badly governed. Our love life is still highly uncontrolled. Could it be that foreigners are no longer certain that their virtues are best? Or could it be that our vices have turned out to be desirable advantages in the modern world, qualities essential for survival? Did we or did the rest of the world change? And what exactly are the Italians' virtues and defects?
*
I know of no sure way to ascertain the Italian national character. There are no questionnaires for the dead. There are no authors to rely on. Descriptions of Italian habits and customs by Italian writers are very rare and seldom explicit. Few of them are trustworthy. Each writer had his own axe to grind, thesis to prove, course of action to propose, or spite to vent. Each wrote from his particular vantage point, the bias imposed by his century, class, province, education, political views, and luck in life.
There are, however, three or four small exceptions. There is an essay by Giacomo Leopardi, the nineteenth-century poet, a remarkable man who managed to be objective in spite of the fact that he was an aristocrat, a man of genius, and a hunchback, and lived in a dreary provincial town; there are also revealing passages in Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini; a few essays on Italian literature as a key to national character by Francesco de Sanctis, a professor at the Zürich Polytechnic one hundred years ago, and little more. Leopardi himself had to admit: ‘Italians do not write or think about their customs, as if they thought such studies were not useful to them.’ There are, of course, thousands of books by foreigners, but, among them, there is only one real authority, Stendhal. John Addington Symonds is, in my opinion, the next best, although blinded at times by his stern moral views and his hatred for Popery. All others, for some reason, either love us or hate us too much. Their best books on Italy often contain brilliant flashes of intuition and some revealing truths, in a clutter of clichés, superficial appraisals, supine acceptance of preconceived notions, wrong information, and misspelled Italian words.
I have been helped, however, by the fact that, though Italians do not write about their national virtues and vices, they talk about them incessantly. The debate goes on in railway compartments, sidewalk cafés and newspaper offices, on the most fascinating subject of all – why are we the way we are? I have participated in such endless discussions all my life. I heard infinite theories and no conclusive answers. I discovered, however, that we all instinctively agree that some habits, traits, tendencies, and practices are unmistakably our own. We call them cose all'italiana. The words are sometimes pronounced proudly, sometimes with affection, irony, compassion, amusement, or resignation, very often with rage and contempt, but always with underlying sadness.
What exactly are these cose all'italiana? They are things in which we reflect ourselves as if in mirrors: a gratuitous beau geste, a shabby subterfuge, an ingenious deception, a brilliant improvisation, an intricate stratagem, a particular act of bravery or villainy, a spectacular performance…. Such cose may not be statistically prominent, but they can happen only in Italy. They should not be taken lightly. They are clues. By looking for them, following them, adding them together carefully, the good and the bad, I slowly began to see a pattern. They prove that there are things that come easy to us and others that are impossible. They clearly determined the course of past events. They will surely determine the future. Perhaps there is no escape for us. And it is this feeling of being trapped within the inflexible limits of national inclinations which gives Italian life, under the brilliant and vivacious surface, its fundamentally bitter, disenchanted, melancholic quality.
* The list of the famous Italians is awe-inspiring. It is well to record them here, as they will scarcely be mentioned in the rest of the book, written with the presumption that the reader is well acquainted with them. Here are some of the main ones: the saints: Saint Francis, Santa Catarina da Siena, San Bernardino da Siena, San Luigi Gonzaga, Saint Thomas of Aquino. The sinners: the Borgia family (Spanish but acclimatized), Cellini, Caravaggio, Cagliostro, Casanova. The political thinkers: Dante Alighieri, King Frederick of Hohenstaufen of the two Sicilies (born in Italy, the inventor of the modern state, the ‘state as a work of art’), Lorenzo de Medici (inventor of the ‘balance of power’), Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Mazzini, Cavour. The military leaders: Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, Raimondo Montecuccoli (who led Austrian armies), Napoleon, Garibaldi. The admirals: Andrea Doria, Mocenigo, Morosini, Bragadin, Caracciolo. The scientists: Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, Volta, Marconi, Fermi. The navigators: Columbus, Vespucci, the Cabots. The thinkers: Saint Thomas of Aquino, Campanella, Croce, Vico. The poets: Dante Alighieri, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Leopardi, Manzoni. The sculptors: Verrocchio, Donatello, Ghiberti, della Robbia, Cellini, Michelangelo, Bernini. The painters: Giotto, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Piero della Francesca, Perugino, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo, Modigliani. The musicians: Palestrina, Pergolesi, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Rossini, Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti, Puccini, Toscanini. These are, of course, the names of first magnitude. The second and third could easily fill a small city's telephone book.
ITALIANS are pleased and perplexed. Every year since the end of the war they have seen the number of foreign visitors to their country increase at an incredibly rapid rate. The phenomenon has now reached unprecedented, practically inexplicable, and almost alarming proportions. In the 1950s the tourists numbered eight, ten, twelve million yearly. A little later, only yesterday, they were fifteen, seventeen, nineteen million. They have now passed the twenty million mark, a proportion of more than one tourist to every two and a half Italians, and the total is still growing. It appears that, if circumstances remain favourable, the travellers will reach thirty million within a decade, and will eventually match and even surpass the number of native inhabitants in the peninsula. Nothing daunts foreigners. Nothing frightens them. Nothing stops them. They arrive in a steady stream, by all forms of transport and even on foot, by day and night, from the sea or via the Alps. What is but a small trickle in the winter months grows in the spring to the size of a stream, and, in April, May, and June, turns into a monsoon flood, breaking all dikes, covering everything in sight. It begins to recede in September. It never completely dries up.
People come from all parts of the five known continents, from the old established nations of Europe and America and from the newly founded ones in Africa and Asia. The largest number come from the north, the vast, democratic, bourgeois, industrial north of Europe and America. Some now also come from Russia, in some ways the most northerly of all countries, organized parties of sightseers, behaving like military units traversing a dangerous territory inhabited by treacherous natives, as diffident and self-contained as Xenophon's Greeks marching across Asia Minor. Russian tourists all wear the same box-like clothes, as new as those of provincial newly-weds, and ankle-length raincoats. They look well-fed, self-satisfied, and well-behaved. They appear eager to acquire as much culture, in all its forms as rapidly and cheaply as possible. They have a disturbing resemblance to the diligent German tourists at the beginning of the century, the solid subjects of William II.
There are many travellers who, in order to obey the urge that drives them south, abandon their own countries, whose delights and tourist attractions are being advertised and celebrated all over the world. What do they seek that is better than what they left behind? Not many Italians willingly travel abroad in any direction, north, south, east or west. They always feel more or less exiled and unhappy in alien lands, and honestly believe the attractions of their homeland to be most satisfying. They are the first victims of the famous charm of Italy, never satiated with her sights, climate, food, music and life. Familiarity never breeds contempt in them. Neapolitans, for instance, after many thousand years, still gaze with the same rapture on their native landscape, eat spaghetti alle vongole as if they had never tasted them before, and compose endless songs dedicated to the immortal beauty of their women and their bay. Those Italians who travel abroad are, as a rule, the privileged – Milanese industrialists and Roman princes who have adopted foreign ways, cabinet ministers, diplomats, newly-weds – and the disinherited who go looking for work. They are usually all equally homesick abroad; the rich and the poor look for caffè espresso, a good Italian restaurant, wherever they go, and sigh for the day of their return.
At the high tide of the tourist season, from early June till late September, visitors fill every empty space available in Italy. Trains, buses, boats, restaurants, churches, museums, Greek and Roman ruins, chapels, concert halls, historic landmarks and famous belvederes, whence romantic landscapes (two stars in the guide books) can be admired, are packed to capacity with foreigners. One literally finds them everywhere, often at one's table, unknown friends of friends, sometimes even in one's bathroom and bed. They also fill a couple of universities, Perugia and Urbino, set aside for them, where they study the language, imbibe the Latin sun-drenched culture, make love, go swimming, and feed themselves cheaply on pasta, olive oil, tomatoes and garlic. American universities sometimes hold summer sessions, in art appreciation, history of civilization, and related subjects in some ancient villa on a hilltop near Florence with a view over the whole city, or a palazzo on the Grand Canal. Swedish and Norwegian workers' clubs have purchased wooded strips of deserted Italian coastline, where they have built their own club-houses and recreation centres.
There are sultry days in July and August when the cities, emptied by the natives, are almost completely taken over by the swarms of dusty and perspiring foreigners. During the siesta hour, when even the carriage horses sleep under their straw hats, the relentless tourists finally slow down. They bivouac everywhere. They recline on park benches, kerbstones, the stone brims of fountains or ancient ruins. They place their heads over their crossed arms on café tables for a siesta among the empty bottles, the dirty napkins and the recently purchased souvenirs. They then really look like a tired and bedraggled army after a fatiguing battle, who have occupied a city abandoned by their fleeing enemy. They have conquered. The place is theirs.
I am not talking here of the minority, the experienced foreigners who know why they come to Italy and what Italy is. Many have come here before and know their way about, others have never been here but somehow know what to do and what they want. They all avoid the heat and the dust, seldom visit the obvious places but, when they have to (the obvious places are often the most desirable), they go at convenient hours, when the crowd is away and the air is cool. They wear ordinary clothes, the same as everybody else. Some are in love with nature, others with art, culture, archaeology or music. Some like meeting people and making friends, others discover little-known beaches or unexplored islands. There are those who make lengthy detours, to see some little-known masterpiece, and those who like food and wine and know the trattorie which only a few natives and no foreigners have yet discovered. There are many who speak the language well. These easily disappear in the background. They do not interest me here. There is nothing peculiar about them. I am talking of the vast majority of tourists, the millions driven by some unknown urge.
They are so punctual and numerous that their mass arrival, in the eyes of ordinary Italians, appears as irresistible as a natural event, as ineluctable as the seasonal return of migratory birds, swallows, quail or partridges, driven by instinct; or as an anthropological phenomenon like the migration of nomadic tribes seeking green pastures for their herds. The impression is heightened by the fact that many of these travellers look somewhat alike to Italian eyes. They dress in garishly-coloured clothes, much as the members of the ancient barbaric hordes once did and as the Gipsies and Berbers still do. A great number of Germans, Scandinavians, Britons and Dutch have pink skins, which the sun seldom succeeds in tanning a decent brown but reddens to the tender colour of prosciutto or covers with freckles. They perspire freely in the heat, under their nylon shirts. They wear barbaric sandals. They have dark glasses over their eyes and their heads are bare or covered with cheap straw hats on whose brims are printed or embroidered the names of cities, sanctuaries, beaches, islands or other famous landmarks.
There is something mysteriously significant about the behaviour of many of them. A mild frenzy takes most of them and transforms them once across the Italian border. It resembles the irresistible excitement which captures some living organisms and makes them forget themselves and everything else, when, like salmon going upstream, they obey some deep and secret impulse of Nature; or the intoxication, the gentle and sweet delirium, which makes all honeymooners quietly mad everywhere in the world and honeymooners in Italy doubly so, both because they are on their honeymoon and they are in Italy. Like all newly-weds, in fact, many ordinary travellers seem deliciously drunk with new illusions and hopes. The sedate professional man, the sober shopkeeper, the loyal employee, the rigorous scientist, the stern educator, the tidy housewife, the bespectacled spinster, the innocent maiden, the virtuous wife, the resigned husband, all behave as they probably never dared to behave before and as they probably would not behave publicly in their native habitat. More exactly, they behave as if they had shed the rôles assigned to them and the personalities bestowed on them by Nature, because such roles and personalities had suddenly become repugnant and alien to them; or as if all the rules of the game of life had been changed or suspended. Some seem strangely deprived of all, or part of, their customary discernment, of their powers of control and discrimination, and of the scepticism, diffidence, prudence, suspicion and fear necessary for survival in most countries. They get into all sorts of scrapes. They make friends with all sorts of people. They look at things with indulgent and dewy eyes, apparently ready to love, admire, understand, or, at least, excuse and forgive almost everything, the good, the bad, the indifferent, the repugnant. They are often easily swindled, but many do not always mind if they are.
Most of these visitors from Northern Europe drink vast and indiscriminate quantities of wine. They drink, with equal good-natured enthusiasm, anything at all: costly vintages from famous vineyards, raw wines still smelling of sulphur and wooden staves, sweet and syrupy wines made for people who know little about such things. It is, for some curious reason, the first things Germans and Austrians do, as they cross the Brenner pass on their southward trip. They stop the car at one of the many wineshops which line both sides of the valley road, just beyond the border, as frequent as the petrol stations. Each osteria has a wrought-iron hanging sign, a terrace in the quivering shadow of a leafy pergola, checked table-cloths, waitresses in dirndl, everything designed in a tasteful fairy-story style, a style which is a mixture suited to the geographical and psychological spot, half German and half Italian, half Walt-Disney-Tyrolean and half Il Trovatore or Palio-di-Siena-Medieval. On the Brenner road, German and Austrian tourists behave as the Americans did under prohibition, when they rushed for the first bar across the Canadian border. There is no obvious explanation for this phenomenon. There is no scarcity of cheap wines, local or imported, in Germany and Austria. Perhaps these people are trying to quench not a physiological but a psychological thirst. This may be an unconscious magic rite; they drink wine as if it were a potion necessary to acquire a new personality, or they drink it as one drinks champagne on New Year's eve, on the stroke of midnight, to celebrate the crossing of a spiritual border and to inaugurate new hopes and a new life.
With equal indulgent enthusiasm, these summer visitors indiscriminately enjoy all kinds of doubtful attractions, things they probably shunned at home. They listen with the same breathless rapture and delighted smiles to the best opera singing in the world at Rome, Milan or Spoleto, and to wheezy village bands, to impeccable Vivaldi quartets and to tinny dance orchestras. They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fishermen's octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach. They buy vast quantities of souvenirs to take home, smart things they cannot find elsewhere, cheap trinkets made in Japan, costly masterpieces, tawdry imitations.
Many try to speak Italian. A few creditably manage this in a short time. Others think they do. Things seem, of course, more significant and enjoyable when expressed in the native language. A spade is only a spade, A Shaufel but a Shaufel, but a badile cannot help being a pagan, Mediterranean, intoxicating badile. Some study lists of words phonetically spelled in handbooks. Some pick them up in random conversations. They also try hard to gesticulate wildly as they speak. They usually manage it in the style of amateur comedians playing an Italian character. They laugh loudly and converse with everybody, the people at the next table, travelling companions in the trains, the waiters, the beggars, the street singers, the cicerones, anybody in sight, with the same good-natured lack of discrimination with which dog lovers pet any dog.
The men, many men at least, those of all ages who have a natural bent for that sort of thing, admire and pursue Italian girls. It must be said that the Italian girls and young women, for reasons nobody knows for sure, are now more disturbingly beautiful than they have ever been in men's memory and perhaps in history, certainly more attractive and desirable than the models of the most famous statues and paintings in the past; Botticelli's ‘Venus’, Titian's ‘Sacred Love’ and Raphael's ‘Fornarina’ would not make anybody turn around in the streets. Italian girls are more attractive and approachable, not only than in the past but also than in many other countries today. Feminine beauty, before the war, like prosperity, seemed to be a privilege reserved to rare local cases, but widespread among many foreigners, especially Americans. Smart Italian young men of the time anxiously awaited the disembarking of the American girls in the spring, well-shaped, well-washed, well-dressed and incredibly long-legged, who always looked as if they really arrived from another and younger world. They were healthy, witty, free and unafraid. Now our women, too, have somehow surprisingly acquired long and shapely legs; they have lovely and pert faces, overbearing breasts, thin waists and harmonious behinds like double mandolins. But, more than this, they have simple, unembarrassed, friendly manners: they can say tender words with heart-breaking candour or, at times, prettily pronounce unprintable ones.
Foreign men, it is true, have always pursued women in Italy. The courtesans of Venice and Rome during the Renaissance were much appreciated. The Carnival season in Rome and Venice was for centuries merely an excuse to chase masked girls through the streets. Now the hunt has acquired a more determined, almost desperate, character. Many visitors are fascinated by the girls to the point that they often lose all powers of coherent speech and judgement: they are bewitched by the girls' sinuous and provocative walk, their inviting and hospitable ways, their smart clothes which often look as if they are sewn on them, or, more especially, their tiny two-piece bathing suits. Foreign men sometimes follow some specially provocative specimens in the streets like hungry dogs following butcher boys delivering meat. Striking up an acquaintance is not always difficult, in a caffè or on a beach. Many men easily, too easily perhaps, find their way to some girl's bedroom. Some of these always fall deeply in love. They earnestly want to get married. They want to bring back a living souvenir of the land of sunshine and amiable ways to their gloomy countries. At the end of every summer, there are men who threaten suicide (a few kill themselves), for the love of a beautiful woman, with whom they can scarcely talk, and who would possibly discredit them and make them unhappy if she became their wife.
Many foreign women think Italians are irresistible. The men too have a long-established reputation. Some are indeed irresistible. Their charm, skill, lack of scruples and boldness are proverbial. Most of them always feel free as birds, even the married ones, or those who are deeply in love or engaged. Many are disposed to make love at the drop of a hat, anywhere, in a car, on a beach, behind a bush, on mountain summits, under water or even in a bed, during the day or at night. They are not too difficult to please, young or mature men, fat or lean, peasants or city playboys with Maserati cars. They seldom waste time. All that a woman has to do in many cases is throw a meaningful glance across a café table, smile cryptically to herself, wave a hand, or put an unlighted cigarette in her mouth and look vainly for matches in her handbag. The better men take just a little more effort to attract. Naturally, some women, the ugly ducklings with flat chests, the middle-aged who still feel young at heart, the lonely and well-preserved grandmothers, all come to Italy with the hope of enriching their lives with the souvenir of an Italian love affair, a pagan romance under the stars, by the sea, accompanied by guitar music. There are even inexpensive camps, collections of straw huts on lonely beaches in Southern Italy and on the islands, founded by foreign institutions, dedicated to the meeting of neglected and impecunious foreign women and eager Italian men, whatever men the primitive surroundings provide, fishermen, sailors, soldiers, and unemployed farm-hands, with brilliantine in their curly hair and flashing smiles.
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Many foreigners come back the next year. Some come back more and more often. Some stay a little longer, every time, and decide to live in Italy for a spell. A few eventually discover to their dismay they can no longer leave. They cannot help feeling there is something cowardly in the decision to live here for ever. Their sensations have been well described long ago by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a tourist in Rome, who watched himself gradually turning into an expatriate: ‘The years, after all, have a kind of emptiness,’ he wrote, ‘when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by and by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all, or only that little space of either in which we finally lay down our discontented bones.’
How many of these transplanted foreigners are there in Italy today? A few hundred thousand? One million? Nobody knows. Some are inconspicuous. They are the Italianizanten, in love with the place, those who have always been here and who know why they are here. A special mental disposition, an elective affinity makes them honorary Italians. A few of them are more Italian than the Italians themselves: they know more about the country, its literature, its manners, its past history, its hidden treasures and its possibilities than many natives. Those who interest me are the others. The most conspicuous are naturally the rich, the millionaires from turbulent South American countries afraid of revolutions, the successful artists, the Hollywood actors, the dilettanti rentiers, the world-weary aesthetes with Swiss bank accounts.
They spend a season, a few years, or a lifetime in a house in Florence or in some stately Medicean villa overlooking the town, among priceless paintings and frescoed walls (like Queen Victoria, the Brownings, Mark Twain, Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley). They rent a palazzo on the Canal Grande, complete with gilded gondolas and liveried gondoliers (like Lord Byron, de Musset, Ruskin, Wagner, Barbara Hutton and Cole Porter). Or, like a character out of a Henry James novel, they settle in the piano nobile, the noble first floor with the high-ceilinged rooms, in some Roman palazzo. Some prefer to inhabit quaint and dramatic houses, perched on hilltops, overlooking the sea or a lake (like Shelley at Lerici; Axel Munthe, Norman Douglas and Krupp von Bohlen in Capri; Gorky in Sorrento).
The rich come because, understandably, they want to avoid paying heavy income tax at home, or have their fortunes riddled by death duties. Others want to go on living opulently, surrounded by servants, as the rich have always done, and as it will be possible to do in Italy for a few years more. The nouveaux riches crave the reassurance of noble surroundings. All of them want a maximum of visible splendour with the minimum possible outlay of money. But there is something more. Many clearly want to withdraw from the rude turmoil of active life, to preserve and cherish a romantic illusion about themselves, their excellent taste, genius, beauty, and rank, which could be shattered by unkind confrontations in their own country. They pathetically want not to be contradicted by facts.
Then there are the poor expatriates. They greatly outnumber the rich, and they increase yearly. Many of them, as they were in past centuries, are artists, some are good artists, others are the struggling young, the old failures and the young hopefuls, the successful and those who will never amount to anything; they know it, and do not care. Italy suits them, a country in which one may work, decant one's own and other people's ideas, experiment, meet stimulating people and generally develop latent possibilities. There are all kinds: writers, painters, dancers, musicians, actors, sculptors, poets or followers of new and as yet unnamed arts. Some are mere dabblers, dilettanti, people whose love for art is much greater than their modest capacities and talents, who somehow eke out a living in artistic surroundings, on the margin of the art world. For all these, Italy is the world's timeless refuge, the river bank on which to withdraw from the rapidly rushing stream.
The inartistic impecunious are perhaps more numerous than the artists. They are of all sorts. There are German war widows, decrepit French courtesans who live on the prizes of love games of a forgotten era, Indian Army colonels, pensioned Scandinavian school teachers, American grandparents who dislike Southern California, misfits, déclassés, divorcees of all nations, and all kinds of beachcombers. Many live in the big cities, where they often rent tiny furnished flats in decrepit houses or artists' studios. They avoid the busy industrial centres and the brazenly new and anonymous blocks of flats. They prefer Italy picturesque, poor and decrepit. There is comfort in decay. Many also prefer the historic hill-towns, the villages perched on mountain tops, the tiny fishing ports along the coast, the rocky islands. Some of the delightful spots impecunious foreigners discovered in past generations, like Capri, Ischia, Ravello, Taormina or Bordighera (where Edward Lear lived his last years and wrote his last limericks), have now become very famous, expensive, noisy and overcrowded. But there are always others, new unspoiled ones.
The impecunious wear shabby but picturesque clothes, sometimes cook their own meals, sometimes board with peasants or fishermen, or eat in a cheap pizzeria or wineshop for a few lire. Ordinary food is as good as in provincial France or as it once was in China. Most of these poor foreigners say they came to Italy mainly because the climate is milder and the money goes further than anywhere else. What they like, of course, is not only low prices and sunshine but a place where indigence looks like modest affluence by contrast with the surrounding poverty, where poverty can be worn with dignity, as it is not noticeable or embarrassing. Lack of wealth, in fact, is seldom the object of pity or contempt among ordinary Italians. It is considered the natural condition of man. Poverty is a private matter, like religion, politics or other qualities, habits and vices, not to be questioned. What these people look for, in other words, is the Italians' traditional indifference to other people's personal appearance and idiosyncrasies, poverty among them, an indifference which verges on indulgence and sometimes on encouragement.
The Italy of these foreigners, both rich and poor, is mainly an imaginary country, not entirely corresponding to the Italy of the Italians. The expatriates often do not really pay attention to, see clearly, or like the Italy of the Italians. Many know too few natives, to begin with, and see them too fuzzily to understand them and their problems. The poor foreigners mostly meet servants, hotel concierges, waiters, shopkeepers, an artisan or two, the postman and sundry hangers-on. The rich also meet bright members of the local café society, the Italians who speak foreign languages, have travelled abroad, sometimes have foreign relatives and drink whisky. Few ever know the great mass of the people. These foreigners treat natives kindly enough: many mistake the amused and indulgent manners with which the Italians treat them, which sometimes approach the condescension with which one treats children, for courtesy and sympathy.
The problems of contemporary Italy are too disturbing and too difficult to understand; local political events have always seemed mysterious and negligible. Before the war, many who disliked the Fascist régime nevertheless thought it was a harmless and picturesque buffoonery, ‘good enough for the natives’. After the war, there were some who believed that a little Communism ‘would do the Italians good’. Ezra Pound's ideas about Mussolini and his government, before and during the war, are perhaps the most illustrious example of this kind of utter but honest confusion. There is also a minority who heartily dislike the Italians. These think that the beautiful scenery, which is the stage setting of their own dream life, is incongruously cluttered up by millions of extras, men, women, boisterous children, and ruined by vespas, fluorescent lighting, noise, modern constructions, pretensions and complications of all kinds. The country most of these foreigners really inhabit is the tiny Italy of the expatriates, made up of a few celebrated quarters of the ancient cities, some towns, villages, famous landscapes, three or four islands, where they consort mostly with people like themselves.
Many find, at one point, like Hawthorne, that they can no longer leave this practically non-existent country. They can no longer face the harsher world where they came from, where they see things perhaps too clearly, and where every word in their familiar language has a precise meaning. They have become hopelessly addicted to the amiable and mild ways of Italy. Many also have nobody left to go back to. They cling to their little lair, the view of the sea from the hill, the view of the Coliseum from the window if you turn your neck far enough to the right, the view of the Grand Canal, the roofs of Florence, the decayed villas of Rapallo, a clutter of antiques they picked up during the years, and their set habits. Italy is filled with people growing old, who can no longer think of leaving, living alone, comforted by a cat or a dog, waited on by a servant, an honest person at times but often enough an unscrupulous maid who feeds her family with what she steals. A day comes when these old people grow ill and helpless, far from the familiar sights and sounds of their youth, self-exiled for reasons which have become dim in their memories, in an alien place which they never really saw as it is and quite understood. At the end, they wait for death, some of them still dressed in gaudy and youthful resort clothes, surrounded by foreign sights and people who have somehow become the necessary props and conventional supporting characters of the imaginary drama of their lives. Many die every year and are buried hurriedly in the corner of an Italian cemetery reserved for heathens or heretics; some bodies are shipped home to practically unknown and indifferent relatives. Many die without having really discovered why they chose to live the last years of their lives in Italy, of all places.
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Many idle expatriates are not old but young. They do not seek a princely life of splendour at reduced rates, modest and easy comfort, or the slightly cowardly peace without competition and adverse criticism which Italy can afford. They do not want to nourish illusions about themselves, pursue unusual inclinations, or prepare themselves for a future of glory. Many of them are not weak and desperate but vigorous, hopeful, lively, and healthy. On late summer afternoons in Rome, when the sea breeze, or ponentino, cools the leaden air, these young foreigners of both sexes, uncombed, sun-burned, wearing crumpled cotton clothes and dusty sandals, the men sometimes looking strangely feminine and the girls strangely masculine, crowd the stairway of Trinità dei Monti on the Piazza di Spagna.
contadine