The Dark Heart of Italy
The Guardian’s review of Tobias Jones’s new book, The Dark Heart of Italy strikes more than a few familiar notes, particularly for anyone familiar with Poggibonsi!
The Dark Heart
of Italy
by Tobias Jones
Faber, £7.99On holiday in
Italy again this year, for the umpteenth time, I really began to notice
that there was something unpleasantly different about the place. It was
a hard feeling to pin down, but there seemed to be more visible
tawdriness, more collapse of public services, a general mood of
depression. Over dinner with Italian friends, I was given a blistering
denunciation of the Italian mind. “You have to understand that the
Italians are like anarchist sheep,” said one. “They don’t care about
anyone but themselves or their families, but at the same time they’ll
do whatever everyone else does, without question.” There then followed
an even more forceful barrage of insult against Silvio Berlusconi,
which lasted for most of the rest of the evening.You may find it
hard to believe how truly awful Berlusconi is. So try this: imagine if
Tony Blair, personally, owned ITV and Channels 4 and 5, had a heavy
hand on the BBC’s output, also owned every Blockbuster in the UK,
Manchester United FC, and most of the country’s newspapers, had been
under prolonged legal investigation for just about every financial
crime they have a name for, hired as his gardener a former mafioso
subsequently given two life sentences for murder and heroin
trafficking, stuffed his cabinet with what are amusingly called
“post-fascists”, and was an unblushing vulgarian who distributed 12
million free copies of his hagiographical life story - a book beginning
with a detailed horoscope of the man and containing 114 photographs of
its subject. While we’re at it, we may as well alter Blair’s appearance
by knocking several inches off his stature, removing most of his hair
and giving him piggy little eyes that radiate smugness and contempt.I suppose I
should calm down; but this is the effect Jones’s excellent book has on
one. Let’s make no mistake: everyone loves Italy, although this is more
of a matter of appreciating, at a distance, its culinary and artistic
heritage and, closer up, the kindness and generosity of individuals.
(You can still find a great deal of horrible pap in the increasingly
prevalent supermarkets, though; and when Jones writes of “the visual
finesse of the country”, that “everything is simply beautiful”, I can
tell him of at least one town in Tuscany which is ugly from top to
bottom and all the way around: Poggibonsi, which has, in my family,
become the kind of mild expletive you can use in front of the
children.) But it is in a dire situation.Culturally, it
is a mausoleum. Hardly anyone reads a non-sport-related newspaper,
fewer read books, and such information as you can get tends to come
from the most mindless television output on the planet. On the rare
occasion when something probing or vaguely satirical is aired,
audiences are often treated to the sound of Maurizio Gasparri, the
minister of communications (”behaves like a barking fascist”), phoning
up the station and both denouncing and threatening the perpetrators on
air, live. He is quoted on the back jacket of the book, incidentally:
“a mixture of bigotry and Marxism”, he says of The Dark Heart of Italy
; and it would appear that every commentator critical of Berlusconi and
his gang, or indeed anything vaguely intellectual, is called Marxist or
Bolshevik.These are only
the most comic aspects of the national degradation Jones touches on.
(Oh, along with the country’s almost pagan Catholicism; it would appear
that the Catholic church in Italy is an instrument for the prevention
of communism. “Excommunication of communist voters, for example, was
announced in 1948 . . . in Naples, when the communist party looked
likely to assume power, no fewer than 36 Madonnas began to shed
tears.”)Jones examines,
as closely as he can before the fog of detail becomes impenetrable, the
sinister machinations of P2, the endless maze of investigations into
the terrorist bombings of the 70s, the way Italy’s beautiful style of
football is marred by scandalous, financially motivated refereeing
decisions. He explains why driving is so dangerous in Italy (the slow
lane on motorways is called the corsia della vergogna - the lane of
shame). The country’s a mess - a beautiful mess. Un bel cassino, as
they put it themselves.