Overheard in Ferrara, for old times’ sake
Old Lady #1: He masters me just like my son. “Bring me the water!”, “do this and that!”, never a bit of gentleness.
Old Lady #2: What a man!
Old Lady #3: A force of nature!
Old Lady #1: Oh, He’s wonderful.
— from across the tables, at the Ristorante “da Guido”, Ferrara.
A strange interview with former US Ambassador to Italy and our conspiracy fashion. Sorry, here’s political talking, therefore quite boring, you’re warned.
On the eve of the Olympic games, a former U.S. ambassador to Italy, Richard N. Gardner, discussed with Newsweek Italian politics and Italy’s ties to the United States.
The interview is the usual blah-blah, except when the ambassador comes to the argument of the Red Brigades group and the ‘revolutionary’ left-wing terrorism that plagued Italy during the seventies.
What was the reaction when the group kidnapped and murdered former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978?
Moro was certianly going to be the next president of the republic. That was such a horrofic event that all the political parties closed ranks, including the Communist Party. It was the doctrine of communists that animated these people, but the Communist Party quickly saw that this kind of violence was leading nowhere and stood firmly with other parties in opposing it. And they stood firmly in support of the police. I give credit to a number of courageous members of government and courageous police work and the people who ran the antiterror efforts in those days. There are still some people who call themselves Red Brigades, and they killed a leading member of the government recently who was advocating for labor reform. But the Red Brigades as a threat to the state doesn’t exist today as it did at the time when I was there.
Right mr. Richard N. Gardner. The time when you were there. Too bad many political analysts and historians, who wanted to see the truth behind the masquerade, found many, too many hints that the Red Brigades were left unharmed by the italian police during those years. They let them grow stronger. They infiltrated them up to the highest level but never crushed the organization as they could. They arrested or killed the less aggressive hystorical leaders of the organization and let the rest of the Red Brigades develop into a way more bloodthirsty, more hierarchic militarized organization1.
After that and only after that came the Moro case. Moro, who wanted the communist party to enter into the government after thirty years of loyalty to italian democratic principles. And when Moro corpse was found, following 55 days of imprisionment in the city of Rome where thousands of policemen and investigators were supposed to go around searching for him, it was pretty clear to everybody that the Communist Party was out of the games and far from getting into the government as Moro had wanted.
Plus, because of the shock for the murder of Moro, the political experience of many Italian idealists, that believed in democracy and fought to make Italy a better place during the sixties & seventies, ended that day. Too bad for the country.
It’s not that I really care for the Italian Communist Party or its legacy, but… Why the whole thing happened, mr. former Ambassador? I think you give the best explanation yourself, in the same interview:
There were fears at the time you were ambassador to Italy that the Communist Party could take control of the Italian government. How would the course of history been changed had they taken power?
When I arrived in Italy, the expectation was that they would enter into the government in a historic compromise with the Christian Democrats. That would have changed Italy’s foreign policy. We would never have been able to deploy the cruise missiles in Italy [to maintain a counterweight against the Soviet missiles that had been targeted at Western Europe]. I have quotes from several members of the Communist Party who said, categorically, we are against this and would never have permitted it if we were in government. Deploying those cruise missiles in Italy was the precursor to having them in Germany. And according to [former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev, that was a factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union—though not the only one, of course … The cruise-missile decision in Italy turned out to be a turning point though.
As the journalist Pecorelli, misteriously murdered after the death of Moro, wrote: Yalta decided via Fani [via Fani is the street of Rome where the Red Brigades ambushed and kidnapped Moro]. Meaning that someone was firmly against a possible change of italian foreign policy, by the hands of the communists. And it was this someone, determined to keep the Yalta order, who decided to stop Moro. The Red Brigades, in this case, being just the right, obtuse, well-prepared tool at hand.
I have only one more curiosity about this interview. Why saying this things now? It doesn’t seem to be in tune with the eve of the Olympics 2006 in Turin. It’s definitely more in tune with the eve of the next general elections, to be held in spring 2006 in Italy, when some of the heirs of that communist tradition, united with some of the heirs of Moro tradition, will likely come into power in Italy after the friendly Berlusconi disaster.
I think this was all just a little, polite, warning to them. Nobody’s better than a former Ambassador to bring a friendly warning notice.
1. It is all too well documented, unfortunately. If you can read italian and are interested in this old stories, you want to read by Sergio Flamigni: La tela del ragno, Trame atlantiche and Convergenze Parallele; by Leonardo Sciascia: L’affaire Moro; by Girogio Galli, Il partito Armato
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About La Dolce Vita again, or: Is life abbreviated by feelings?
I wrote that post about La Dolce Vita recently, following the already classical article about Italy on The Economist “Addio, Dolce Vita” that just came out.
My post derived from a series of ideas I have been toying with in my mind for years, as I tried to grasp what being italian was about, and what was happening to this country.
I didn’t get any anwser, I don’t even think anwsers are useful anymore, but I am beginning finally to get what Italy has lost in the last fourty years or so. Not that I am really able to explain it anyway.
“What a wondeful contry Italy is” the man thought with deep affection, and to better love it he directed his thought to Porta Capuana (Napoli) to the water of the faraglioni (Capri) in the spot where an under water cave crosses the first rock, to the trippe of the restaurant Troja (Florence) to the movie La Dolce Vita (Roma), to the slopes into fresh snow among the Tofane (Cortina) and he was moved by a feeling which he could not name.
It certanly was an italian feeling because he had never experienced it during his trips in other coutries. In Indochina peraphs, at sunset, when children astride buffalos dive into the ponds and lotus flowers start to open up; or the uproar of the cycadas at dawn, over the eucalypti, that lasts exactly ten minutes and than the silence and the first bells of the chineses’ bycicles are back. This was a very much beautiful feeling, but different and not so cheerful. No, that unnamed feeling was only italian.
“But feelings do stretch or abbreviate life?” the man asked himself and he “felt” that, for unjust that it might be, the second conjecture was more real if not more probable. (Goffredo Parise, Sillabari 1972-1982, Translation by Italy is Falling)
If feelings do abbreviate life, I will hint as by accident, does have this something to do with the fact that Italian people is the older in the whole world?
As this way of life vaguely defined la dolce vita, (that was not really sweet, but bitterly enjoyable, as portrayed by Goethe, Cellini, Casanova, Belli, Porta and later Fellini, Flaiano, Parise etc) was not because of richness (we already stated that in our previous post) neither it was to be enjoyed for too long in one’s life person, or meant to make that person’s life to last longer.
It was supposed to consume people just like any other form of this illness we call life.
Turin, foreign correspondence and wikipedia
Turin is preparing to host Winter Olympics in 2006.
Turin: city that I, as many milanese (part-milanese, for what is worth) fellows, do not know very well. We tend not to look in that direction, don’t ask me why. Old, rooted reciprocal suspicions and envies divide our cities. They had their kingdom for generations, and a king who also had the idea of the unification of Italy. Us, we had the French, the Spanish and the Austrian to rule our city for four hundreds years.
(Let me open a parenthesis here for a screen capture I want you to check in a second. The following is the page of Wikipedia about Turin and its history. Please note the part I put in evidence.
Another funny enough, manifest evidence of the structural weakness of the celebrated Wikipedia, as this article explains quite well. Back to the issue.)
Anyway, all I can hear about Turin today is good or at least sounds better than Milan. Not for business maybe, but for lifestyle and general attitude towards life. Always if you like the reserved, basically ironic, filled with understatement northern type.
For once, a foreign American journalist, Thomas Swick, wrote a dedicated, nice, reasonable piece about an italian location without the usual detached-from-reality “Tuscan sun” idealism. Since he writes about Turin and the Olympics winter games, it’s no surprise. Not very much Tuscan sun there, particularly in winter.
A lot of history though, architecture, literature. And the once magnificent, always nonchalant italian river Po that crosses the city.
Few excerpts follow, in order to make this post longer.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche settled for a time in Turin, writing his autobiography Ecce Homo. One day he walked into the Via Po — the street where, years later, Levi’s father would stop “to caress all the cats, sniff at all the truffles, and leaf through all the secondhand books” — and embraced a horse. It was the first indication of his descent into madness. (…)
We drove down Via Po, Elena pointing out that the porticos continued over the side streets only on the north side, the side where the Palazzo Reale sits. “So the king could ride his horse without getting wet.” … Crossing the Vittorio Emanuele I bridge, we took a right, and sped past shaded villas along the Po’s banks, well-situated social clubs with rowing sheds and red clay courts (…)
The city’s signature building, a spired, four-sided dome that defines the skyline, is called the Mole (mass). Like naming the Empire State Building the Stick. (In the cinema museum inside you can watch a scene from an old Italian film in which a man arriving in Turin gazes up at the great dome and declares to his family, “There it is — the Milan cathedral!”)
Technicalities: a layout poll for you, my readers. Sorry ’bout that.
Following recent suggestions this blog received, I may consider giving a new face to the layout. This would mean no ‘courier new’ anymore, but some fascist ‘Arial’ thing (almost ‘Arian’, if you think about it) instead.
I could also consider to screw my 800X600 users (I still get a few of them) and widen the main column, if that makes it more readable.
But I don’t feel like taking this decision alone. Please consider give me some advice here.
Italian good reputation abroad: who wants it?
This post evolves from a couple of comments I recently gave at Carletto Darwin‘s.
Carletto, who if I understand it well is italian but lives abroad, offered a reasonable complaint on how little Italy is considered abroad, how little attention it gets on international mainstream media – as opposed to the boasting news on our foreign policy as we can watch it or read it in Italy (and, I may add, as opposed to the idealized postcard most people have of Italy. See in picture, a better Venice with cars, gambling machines, pollution and baptist churches).
He suggested we all should travel abroad (which is always a good advice) so to understand how little we count as a nation in Europe. He stated that, compared to our great past, the arts and everything we gave to the world, it is really pathetic how Italy is downsized to near zero right now.
I instinctively resisted to this apparently faultless argument, which after all rings with a lot of things I happen to say on this blog. I mean, I would never object to the fact that the italian role in the world is near zero.
What happened though, is that few points came out from this resistance of mine, points of which I had no knowledge before.
First, a lot of countries get no or few mainstream media attention, and you wouldn’t think they are countries of losers or uninteresting countries.
Last time I heard from Canada? Can’t recall. Could be something about the whales… So that makes of Canada another worthless country, but it is not, right? Must be a nice place. Like Switzerland, or Lithuania.
Second, Italy has a great History alright, but what cultural heritage has to do with media attention? All countries do have a past, but when it comes to foreign policy and media attention what counts is a powerful economy, or better, a powerful army. What does that means? It means that media attention doesn’t worth shit, because it’s driven to where’s the money, and the bloodsheds.
Third, this undeniable international insignificance of Italy is definitively a good thing. Yep.
It is true, as Haramlik says, that Italy is hard to take seriously, for its complete, enthusiastic unawareness on what goes on in the world.
Instead, without taking away nothing to the obvious misery of the indigenous situation, the global irrelevance of Italy abroad is very instructive and desirable.
It’s instructive, because it gives an insight on what really lies under the cover of the media, the real proportions of the forces in the battle. Since the economic, political planet out there is no kids’ game, to be left at the margins would help us to glimpse the real monstrous shape of things.
It’s desirable, because no matter how much the Media can blather about our leading role, or what beautiful friends we have, or complain here and there our petty forgotten role expecting and preparing for some magic reform that will makes us bigger, richer and stronger, a lot of people here instinctively feel that whenever we would have any leading role in Europe or at the UN council, it won’t be a nice thing going. Instead, it will mean just more and more things to lie about for us.
You know, the last time Italy counted something in global decisions, we ended up bombing Belgrade from Aviano and denying it afterwards.
I am not here craving to have any authority to join any more bombing anywhere in the world, right?
What I learned, thinking about it, is that to me even if those brown-nosing articles full of lies were true, that would mean nothing.
Because I have no expectations for Italy. No Hope.
There will be goals to reach alright, to make this country a better place indeed, but I know that none of those goals will have anything to do with what warms me up. Our past, our culture, the way it was. Those goals all speak about modernization, industry, competition, China, high speed, economic bills, new soccer rules, innovation, southern, northern… all the vices of this sleepy onanistic emarginated deluded sort of people.
They are filling me with boredom already, in advance, with their lousy progress to come.
On the contrary, whenever Italy would go back to that past tender lifestyle, made of love, creativeness, fights, townish life, rural life, poetizing in the midst of the most black poverty (such is the Italian History in one line) that might be beautiful or at least not boring: but that day, definitively nobody would ever give a shit about us anymore. Not even the illegal migrants.
There’s no way back, I know. Who really wants to go back?
But there’s no worthwhile way forward either, so as I said I have no real expectations. I’ll just stay here, like a pigeon, and watch Italy crumble as a soaked biscuit.
Another Caravaggio show. I can’t take it anymore.
How many Caravaggio shows can a man take in his life? In my lifetime, at least in the years I spent in Milan, I never bumped into a Giacometti or a Morandi one, a Previati or Utrillo or Rothko or Severini or Segantini or Mengs or Bruegel one (well, it’s not a definitive list, it’s just to give the impression of my very large artistic needs). But tens of Caravaggio’s and school shows passed in the city. This could be wonderful if it wasn’t that the art shows in Milan are the poorest thing.
Just as an example, in recent years: in 1999, the show “From Caravaggio to Salvator Rosa“; in 2002, “The Caravaggio from Vatican“; in 2004, “Caravaggio: The Medusa“; in 2001, “The Lombardian cinquecento: from Leonardo to Caravaggio“. Consider that in the same years other big Caravaggio shows were held around in Italy, in Rome and Bergamo, Naples, Turin.
Now this show is opening in Milan.
I know, Caravaggio is great1 and he was from Milan, too. He was born on september 29th 1573 (the day of Saint Michael Archangel, hence his name), on the same day our beloved PM Berlusconi was born.
But still. If someone speaks to me one more time about the “maudit painter” I may throw up.
It’s all thanks to the great imagination and largeness of means of our show organizators and local assessors that the same bunch of artists keeps visiting this city every two years.
Other big hits are: Kandinsky and Picasso. Gee.
1. I have in my mind the scene at the bookshop from the movie “Hannah and her sisters”, where one of the sisters asks to Michael Caine whether he likes Caravaggio. “who doesn’t?” he answers.
reading the story of Fabrizio Gatti (#2)
More sources are covering the story of the journalist Fabrizio Gatti, who posed as an illegal immigrant and got detained in a camp, getting back with the most squalid stories.
The Guardian has more on the issue.
Episodes of abuses, and some astonishing detail turn up, like the “fascist-style straight-arm salutes being exchanged between carabinieri” (for incredible that it may seem, I heard already, as many Italians did, about such stories of exposed fascist behavior (which is forbidden by the Italian constitution) among Italian security forces, often in linkage with the mistreatment of immigrants, or in the dealing of hooligans or extra-parliament leftist political groups).
In my opinion, the account of Gatti shows a picture which comparable in bleakness and squalor to the episodes of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Yet after all there is a war in Iraq. The only war in Europe instead is the one between the slave laborers coming from the “third” world and the privileged citizens of Europe who vote for hypocrite political forces “tough” against immigration, turning their heads in front of the abuses.
About the political reactions, the government right now is acting like if Fabrizio Gatti’s account was false. A very reliable, encouraging pose indeed.
Since the story comes from a left-wing newspaper, they say, it’s just a bullet aimed at the government.
But they should know better, because in the story of Fabrizio Gatti, who remained seven days in the camp (not few hours like their inspectors), there are not only squalid details of mistreatments, and episodes of brutal violence, but also the incredible ending: after enduring seven days of dire conditions in a detention center, Gatti was simply let go. Despite the conservative government’s tough policy on immigration, the reporter’s alter ego, Bilal Ibrahim el Habib, was set free, “to go and work in any city in Europe as an illegal alien”.
So what the detention was for then? Learning more about Italy?
woman as an object: a clock precisely.
Along the beltway avenue near my place. A moving ad temporary parked on the sidewalk attract everyone’s attention. A woman is offering her ass while acting like a big clock. The dorky unreadable letters all around recite:
“It’s time to spend less and to get more”
“…only when you want”
“…just € 0.80 a hour!”
“Yes, it’s time for STATUS sportland”
I think is a gym they’re talking about. It’s not at all about a woman tied up to a large board and ready for anything you want.
just out of boredom
So it happened again. Out of boredom, those stoned kids must have drop the stone again. On the freeway. From the overpass. Just out of boredom.
What happened is that a car hit a large fallen rock laying on the asphalt of he freeway, got knocked over a couple of times, got the engine block detached and lost in the middle of the middle lane, where another car hit it, rolling over a couple of time, killing the man at the wheel.
I’ve said already there’s nothing into news.
No real hints about what reality is, at least in its basic, perceivable forms.
That is not what you want to know about it.
That all the overpasses upon italian freeways are already fenced by high metal barrier, so high they even bend inward upon part of the overpass breadth. That this is because, for few summers few years ago, some youngsters were used to throw stones from the overpasses on the passing cars. Eventually they made victims. A band of them got arrested. The overpasses fenced, visibly numbered.
That they remind you of the hostile idiocy of your fellow humans while you travel.
That now they’re up to it again, and strangely enough, with a very large rock.
How possibly they could throw it from the bridge is inexplicable.
That the tag word today, is boredom. Because that is what keep plaguing the vast, unknown, unlearned, hazed italian province.
And that we usually don’t go around speaking about it, but we know nothing gets well there.