Over at the New Yorker, Tim Parks has an eloquent — and quite sad — piece (“Booted: What really ails Italy?”) about the current state of Italy and the Italians. I just returned from having spent several days in Torino, a lovely city in the far North of Italy, and much of what Parks writes about confirms what I saw during my brief visit.
In particular, as he points out, a very good measure of the current ill-feeling in Italy is that the 150th anniversary of Italian unification passed in March with virtually no fanfare whatsoever. (As it happens, Torino was, possibly, the most significant exception to that generalization. As Parks discusses in some detail, Italian unification involved bringing seven different countries, ruled by seven different monarchs, under the authority of one: the King of Savoy, Victor Emmanuele. Torino was the royal seat for the ruling family of Savoy. It would ordinarily be expected to have become the capital of unified Italy – except that even the Savoyards realized that a united italy had to be ruled from Rome; but there’s still very much the sense that the Torinese feel themselves to be the first and the true modern “Italians.” They did have a full-fledged civic celebration of the anniversary, complete with decking out the whole city with banners declaring: “L’Italia Comincia Qui.” “Italy begins here.” I noted the use of the present instead of the past tense. There are prodigious stresses now on the very notion of a single, united Italy — again, Parks’ piece describes many of them quite well — and the political divide between North and South is deepening; if Italy begins in the Torino of 2011, that Italy probably would not look like the one that began there in 1861.
It’s all rather depressing. If you love Italy — and, really, if you love Western Civilization and believe that it has brought forth much that is glorious and beautiful, how can you not love Italy? — to watch it going through this is painful. Having a prime minister who is simultaneously a laughing-stock and a criminal and a true authoritarian (and who controls, by virtue of both his public office and his private holdings, virtually all Italian communications media, and he exercises that control in precisely the manner a true authoritarian would be expected to exercise it) certainly does not help matters – though as one of my Italian friends put it, Berlusconi is a symptom, not a cause; the real problem, as he put it, is that there’s not a lot of hope for anything any better than Berlusconi, even were he to leave the scene. “You Americans, even when you complain bitterly about the state of politics in the US, treat it like an illness from which you will, in time, recover. In Italy, we just foresee things getting worse and worse, sicker and sicker.”
[thanks to David Castronuovo for the pointer]