In Verona’s Piazza Brà, beside the great Roman amphitheatre, a small patch of ground contains four commemorative images of united Italy. Two of them are by now familiar and obligatory: a statue of Victor Emanuel II on a horse waving his sword, and a marble tablet on a house recording the window from which Garibaldi had sworn ‘Rome or Death!’ The third, a rarer species, is a bronze sculpture of a woman representing Italy, surrounded by a marble memorial listing the names of young Veronesi who were sent to kill or be killed in Africa: ‘To her sons who died heroically in Libya’. Close to the equestrian monarch is another unusual statue, that of a young fighter of the Resistance, handsome and fearless, a rifle slung over his shoulder and an inscription with the words, ‘To those who died for Liberty’. This fourth memorial is the significant one for modern Italy because it represents atonement for fascism, it symbolizes the rebirth of the nation in 1943, it tries to assure those who observe it that the country was in essence anti-fascist. Yet like the other three, it is representing something that is at least partly a myth.
After the armistice in 1943 Italians joined the Resistance for a variety of motives. Some were anti-fascists who wanted to defeat fascism, some were patriots who wanted to expel invaders, and more were communists who aimed for both of these things and a political revolution as well. Many, however, simply drifted into it because they were on the run from German and fascist forces. Although they were unskilled in open combat, the partisans proved to be effective in guerrilla warfare: they blew up bridges and killed fascist officials, they helped liberate the cities of the north from the German occupation, they punctured the credibility of Salò and they signalled the redemption of Italy. For some twenty months they fought courageously, and about 40,000 of them were killed. Yet there were never very many of them, perhaps 9,000 at the end of 1943, some 80,000 at the end of 1944, and about 100,000 by March 1945, when victory was certain.1 Comparable numbers had volunteered to fight for the Republic of Salò even though most of them must have known that defeat was inevitable. The Resistance was thus not the nation in arms: it was about one-third of 1 per cent of it in arms, roughly the same proportion that had volunteered to fight the Austrians in 1848. Nor were its achievements of the magnitude claimed on its memorials, which sometimes leave the impression that the partisans ‘vanquished the nazi-fascist tyranny’ by themselves. At the entrance of the town hall of Bologna photographs are still displayed of partisans liberating the city without giving a hint that Allied forces had helped them to do so.
Official Italy has liked to claim that, even if the Resistance was not numerically large, it was supported by the bulk of the population. This again is not true. For reasons of self-preservation many Italians preferred to remain neutral in the fratricidal war between the partisans and their fellow countrymen who fought for Salò. Many feared the partisans because they stole food and money, shot suspected collaborators and left villages vulnerable to reprisals from German and fascist forces.2 More than 10,000 civilians were executed in revenge for attacks on nazis and fascists. In March 1944 communist partisans detonated a bomb in Rome’s Via Rasella and killed thirty-two policemen who had been recruited by the nazis in the province of Bolzano (which Germany had seized after the armistice) and a couple of civilians as well. Hitler was so enraged by the event that he demanded an instant reprisal, and a decision was made to kill ten Italians for each dead policeman, which meant at first 320 executions, then 330 when one of the wounded died, and finally 335 after a counting error. They were murdered in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in retaliation for a terrorist attack that had no impact on the course of the war but caused 370 deaths as well as misery for the dead men’s families. Some Italians took the view that the communist perpetrators should have given themselves up for execution and thus spared the lives of at least a few innocent people.
It used to be joked in Italy and outside that on 25 July 1943 – the day Mussolini was arrested by the king – the Italian people had gone to bed as fascists and woken up as anti-fascists. While this was of course an over-simplification, there was some truth in the jibe. After the Second World War Italians consistently underestimated the numbers of them who had been fascists just as they exaggerated the strength and importance of those who had been anti-fascists. For them the Resistance became a sacred experience which could not be profaned because it represented reparation for fascism and credibility for the future. It was the true successor to the Risorgimento. In the words of Carla Capponi, a partisan and a future communist member of parliament, ‘In the Resistance each of us found our mother country. We felt [our] country was the country of the Risorgimento; of democracy and liberty.’3 The moral sense of the Resistance was succinctly expressed in a poem by Piero Calamandrei, which was later reproduced in an inscription on the town hall of Cuneo: ‘This pact of free men who joined voluntarily out of dignity, not out of hatred, determined to redeem the shame and terror of the world’.
In September 1943 the Italian government had been forced to accept an armistice that was in effect a surrender. Yet the king’s later declaration of war on Germany, and the ‘co-belligerency’ thus acquired, convinced many Italians that they were Hitler’s victims rather than his allies and that they were in fact ‘co-victors’ in 1945. This feeling was brazenly reflected in Italy’s attitude to Austria after the war. There were plenty of foreigners, including nearly 200 British MPs, who believed that the Alto Adige, the former South Tyrol, should be given to the newly independent state of Austria. Italy was adamant that it should not, retorting that the scheme was iniquitous because Austria had fought with the nazis from beginning to end and had not even produced a resistance movement. The Italian position thus implied that there was a wide moral gap between a nation that had been invaded and annexed – and thus forced to fight for the Reich – and one that had voluntarily joined Hitler even if, as a result of military defeat, it had only stayed the course for three and a quarter years.
Nearly two years of war on Italian soil had left the country a battered and unhappy place, much of it in ruins after the Allied bombing campaigns. Food shortages were everywhere, and so was the black market, flourishing in the trade of items such as salt and tobacco. The hunger and poverty in Naples shocked outsiders who went there. Little girls gathered cigarette butts and sold them on trays in the street; over 40,000 women worked as prostitutes; even ladies of elegance went to the San Carlo in coats made from stolen army blankets. Much of the population survived on bowls of maccheroni which were distributed both by nuns and by volunteers of the Salvation Army.
Retribution may not have been so extensive in Italy as it was in France because the fascist regime had not excited as much revulsion among Italians as the Vichy collaboration with Germany had among the French. All the same, some 12–15,000 fascists were pursued and killed at the time of liberation, and thousands more perished over the next couple of years. Bombs were thrown by extremists on the Left and the Right, and communists murdered the editor of the Milanese newspaper that had revealed the name of the partisan who shot Mussolini.* Some fascist leaders, such as Starace, Farinacci and Gentile, were captured and shot, but other senior figures of the regime, including Badoglio and Grandi, died peacefully as prosperous octogenarians. Graziani, who had been defence minister for Salò, was tried and imprisoned but released after a few months, after which he became honorary president of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the neo-fascist party sometimes known by its members as Mussolini sempre immortale.
There could be no real purge of the administration without destroying it altogether: the civil service would have had no civil servants because all of them had been obliged to join the Fascist Party, and the universities would have had no professors because all these had sworn an oath of allegiance to the regime. In 1946 the government thus issued a general amnesty for former fascists and at the same time permitted the MSI to operate, a move convenient for the other parties, which could now demonstrate their anti-fascism by scorning it. So lenient a policy left former fascist officials in control of local administration as well as the civil service: as late as 1960 all the police chiefs, all their deputies and all but two of the provincial prefects had been functionaries under Mussolini.5 The easiest form of epurazione (purging) was the time-honoured one of changing street-names, erasing those associated with the regime and replacing them with victims of fascism, so that almost all towns soon acquired a Via or a Piazza Matteotti and many had a Via Amendola as well. New boulevards often received more sonorous names. In Modena the Viale Martiri della Libertà comes from the Viale delle Rimembranze and passes into the Viale dei Caduti in Guerra.
One indisputable Italian loser in the world war was the monarchy. In June 1944, as the Allied armies liberated Rome, Victor Emanuel surrendered his powers to his son Umberto, appointing him lieutenant-general of the kingdom. Had he abdicated and moved abroad, he might have given the crown some time to recover the popularity which his own behaviour had lost. Yet he insisted on remaining king and living near Naples, refusing to abdicate until a month before a referendum on the monarchy’s future was held in June 1946. Umberto thus had little chance to show himself as the decent, responsible, if rather limited prince that he was. In the ballot he received 10,700,000 votes, mainly in Naples and the south, where people seemed to be voting more for the monarchical idea than for the northern dynasty that had evicted their own kings. Yet 12,700,000 other citizens chose to vote for the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. Although urged by some to stand firm and resist, Umberto decided his throne was not worth the bloodshed such a stance would have entailed; he therefore accepted the verdict and went into exile in Lisbon, a victim of the many mistakes made by his father. No male heirs of the Savoia were permitted to return to Italy until 2002, when they were allowed to do so on condition they renounced their claims to the throne. Soon after they came back, the family’s reputation hit a new low when Umberto’s violent and disreputable son, another Victor Emanuel, was arrested and charged with corruption and the recruitment of prostitutes for clients of a casino on Lake Lugano.
Until the summer of 1944 Marshal Badoglio had deluded himself into thinking he had a future as the prime minister of an anti-fascist Italy. But his past obviously made him objectionable to the new National Liberation Committee, the umbrella organization of the Resistance, which consisted of anti-fascist groups ranging in ideology from liberalism to communism. He was duly replaced by Ivanoe Bonomi, a mild and elderly figure of the moderate Left, an appointment that demonstrated a certain agreeable symmetry and an affirmation of democratic revival: the second last prime minister before Mussolini now became the second one after him. Bonomi lasted until the end of the war, when he was succeeded by Ferruccio Parri, a long-standing anti-fascist and a partisan leader from the Party of Action, the second largest group in the Resistance. Yet the new premier’s talents in guerrilla warfare were not matched by skills in politics, and after a few months he was supplanted by a christian democrat from the Trentino, Alcide De Gasperi, one of the great figures of Italian political history. From December 1945 De Gasperi led a coalition government that included the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti as minister of justice.
Elections for a constituent assembly were held on the day of the referendum on the monarchy for the explicit purpose of producing a new constitution. The principal victors were the Democrazia Cristiana (the christian democratic descendants of the pre-fascist Popular Party), which obtained 207 deputies of a total of 556, and the socialist and communist parties, which both gained more than 100 seats. In an augury for the future of republican Italy, the chief losers were the secular parties of the Centre and the Centre-Left. The Party of Action was decimated even though it had been prominent in the Resistance and some of its leaders had been opponents of Mussolini since the 1920s. So were the liberals, the heirs of the Risorgimento now being represented by just forty-one deputies. In 1949 liberalism received a consolation prize when the great economist, Luigi Einaudi, was elected first president of the republic, but it was already clear that it had no future as an independent force. As Luigi Barzini had warned Umberto shortly before the referendum, Italy was no longer in the hands of the people who had brought the Savoia to Rome. It was ‘in the hands of those who had nothing to do with the Risorgimento’, of the women who had not been allowed to vote, of the Catholics who had been told not to vote and of the poor who had been too poor to be enfranchised before 1913.6
The Constituent Assembly did its duty, its various parties being cooperative, deliberating with speed and producing a constitution that, if sometimes anodyne and uninspiring, was clearly democratic and anti-fascist. The rights and duties of citizens were defined, as were their civil and political liberties, and mention was made of the state’s obligation to address social and economic inequalities. As of old, the legislature would consist of two chambers, with the lower house again predominant, but the senate would now be almost entirely elected. Although both De Gasperi and Einaudi wanted a ‘first-past-the-post’ voting system, the assembly opted – as a precaution against any party gaining too much power – for proportional representation in multi-member constituencies. The head of state would be a president, who would enjoy less power than Victor Emanuel but more than a British monarch, and the head of government would be as usual the prime minister, the ‘president of the council of ministers’ (the cabinet). A glance at the roles of the various branches of government, including the judiciary, reveals why and how they have been able to restrain the activities of each other. The constitution may have been a charter for liberty but it also seemed a guarantor of weak government. The founding fathers of the Italian republic were apparently so anxious to prevent anyone from governing with too much power again that they created a constitution that made it difficult to govern at all. Endemic political instability was a result.
At the end of 1946 Pope Pius XII was urging De Gasperi to remove ‘godless’ communists and socialists from his government, but the prime minister resisted the pressure and waited until the following May before deciding to break up the coalition. At the spring elections of 1948 the christian democrats won an emphatic victory, gaining nearly half the vote and over half the seats, while the godless parties between them obtained less than a third of the votes cast. The cause of the Left was not helped by either a recent communist takeover in Prague or a split in the socialists, which prompted Giuseppe Saragat, a future president of the country, to lead the moderates into a new social democratic party. The christian democrats also possessed certain advantages of their own, even if few of their members could boast of having fought in the Resistance.† The party itself was a coalition ranging from the Right to the Centre-Left, but all factions were committed to representative government, and their belief in political liberty was symbolized by the word ‘LIBERTAS’ emblazoned on the party’s icon, a crusader shield. As the descendant of the Popular Party, which had won 100 seats in the 1919 elections, the christian democrats were assured of a mass following, and their conservative views on the family and the Church greatly appealed to newly enfranchised women voters.
One factor important to their success was the backing of the United States, which was eager to retain military bases in a democratic Italy as part of its strategy to contain the influence of the Soviet Union in Europe; as a result, large amounts of Marshall Aid were offered to Italy, and millions of dollars were paid annually to the anti-communist parties, principally to the christian democrats. Even more significant was the support of the pope and the Catholic Church. Although the Vatican had cooperated with the fascists, it had not much liked them, and it was delighted to have a christian democrat as prime minister for the first time. Papal encouragement was especially valuable in an era when most Italians were still practising Catholics. It gave the party not only the backing of hundreds of bishops and thousands of priests but the auxiliary assistance of the Catholic press and publishing houses, of the religious bodies that ran schools, hospitals and charities, and of a trade union, an association of small farmers and the nearly 3 million members of Catholic Action.
Alcide De Gasperi was an unusual politician, a Trentino whose political career had begun in 1911 when he had been elected a deputy for the parliament in Vienna. After his province had been transferred to Italy, he became a deputy for the Popular Party in the parliament in Rome, but his hostility to fascism led to his arrest and a period of imprisonment that lasted until the pope, Pius XI, secured his release; in 1929 the pontiff made him a librarian in the Vatican, where he remained until 1943. Towards the end of the Second World War De Gasperi re-entered politics, joining the Resistance and reorganizing the popolari, who had been banned by Mussolini, as the Democrazia Cristiana (DC). A man of wisdom, honesty and sound judgement, this austere northerner eschewed party matters to concentrate on broader concerns, chiefly the need to return Italy to a state of international respectability, to bring it into the western fold, and to give it a novel role, no longer as a colonial power or a destabilizer of Europe but as a responsible participant in international affairs. Foreign policy would now be relatively straightforward, based on attachment to western Europe and, at least for a time, guidance by the United States. In 1949 Italy joined NATO and three years later the European Defence Community.
Carlo Sforza, a former and future foreign minister, declared in a book published in New York during the war that ‘the integrity of our national life and the future of our country hang on the coming of that free and federated Europe of which Mazzini was the first prophet’.8 In his view nationalism was out of date and ready to be jettisoned in favour of international cooperation. Einaudi and De Gasperi agreed, and the three of them helped steer Italy along an unfamiliar road. As a borderer from territory that had changed hands many times in its history, De Gasperi hoped and believed that European integration would prevent future wars as well as help solve some of Italy’s stoniest economic problems. In 1952, together with France, Germany and the Benelux countries, he took his nation into the European Coal and Steel Community which five years later became the European Economic Community. After nearly a century of costly endeavour trying to match the power of France and Germany, Italy was now on peaceful and equal terms with them as a founder member of the future European Union. The Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, led to a huge surge in exports over the following decade and gave under-employed southerners the chance to earn a living in the factories of northern Europe.
At the end of the war the great division in Italy had been one between fascists and anti-fascists, yet within a couple of years it had become one between communists and anti-communists. De Gasperi’s break with the Left, inevitable though it was, polarized the country. For Italians the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc thus became an internal reality as well as a global rivalry. In Germany communism and christian democracy were governing in two separate states, but in Italy they were competing in the same arena. As the ideology of each contestant was essentially international and even universal, Italian nationalism soon became, as Sforza had hoped, outmoded and limited chiefly to supporters of the neo-fascist MSI. For a century Italian rulers had tried to bully their subjects into becoming nationalists, most recently by dragging them into a war in which they had ended up fighting on both sides. Now most of the people were fed up with nationalism and all its trimmings; for years after the war designers did not even dare put the national flag on postage stamps. Not much of the Risorgimento – and even less of its rhetoric – was left after 1946. Liberal anti-clericalism had gone the same way as nationalism, the Piedmontese monarchy had also disappeared, and the parties descended from Cavour (the liberals) and Mazzini (the republicans) were pitifully reduced. The country’s chief political rivals were now parties formed after the First World War.
After breaking with the Left, De Gasperi governed for another six years in a coalition of christian democrats and the small parties of the Centre. He knew it would be fatal to take his party to the Right or to allow it to be too closely identified with the Church; thus he rejected heavy-handed pressure from the Vatican to form an alliance with the neo-fascists in Rome’s local elections in 1952. The following year, at the age of seventy-two, he resigned after a parliamentary vote and, a year further on, he died from a heart attack. Italy is not full of statues of De Gasperi or of streets named after him, but there is a memorable sculpture in his native Trento of the statesman declaiming between two vast triangles of bronze that remind one of Lorenzetti’s frescoes of the well-governed and badly governed cities in the town hall of Siena. The evil panel portrays the recent past with a dive bomber and a vampire bat flying above a scene of devastation, of destroyed buildings and a collapsed church tower, a wasteland peopled only by a dead soldier and a dying woman with her baby. The good panel indicates the present and the future, a land of happiness and prosperity, of churches, factories, ships and aeroplanes; in the foreground a mother is shown suckling her baby and being embraced by her son, while a man sits on a tractor, surrounded by his cattle and a horse that nuzzles his shoulder. Italy’s post-war revival was not quite like this, but the economic side of it was indisputably impressive.
De Gasperi was succeeded by lesser men, who continued to rule in coalitions and to try to limit the Vatican’s interference in politics. Their governments were seldom very energetic. According to Piero Ottone, a distinguished journalist, ministers rolled up at their offices in the late morning, made a few telephone calls, signed a couple of documents and then ‘dedicated their time to party matters, which for them were the most important. Spanish hours prevailed for the rest of the day, including the siesta.’9 Yet increased energy levels would not by themselves have remedied the inherent instability of government. In the forty years after De Gasperi, twenty-seven prime ministers were sworn in, all but two of them christian democrats. There was an innate weakness in the system, as there was in the French Fourth Republic, but Italy had no figure like de Gaulle either willing or able to challenge it. One problem was the weakness of the executive. Another was the electoral system itself. Proportional representation and the party list meant that candidates did not need to be liked or even known to be successful in their multi-member constituencies. They needed to be popular only with party leaders in Rome and party secretaries in the regions for them to gain a place high enough on the list to secure election. Ostensible loyalty to his party was thus essential for a deputy’s chances of re-election, but it was not necessary to demonstrate it at critical moments in parliament because the secret ballot allowed him to vote against party policy without anyone finding out; the budget bill was defeated seventeen times in 1988 because dissidents in the government coalition furtively voted against it.
For nearly half a century after 1945, the christian democrats were always in power and never in any real danger of being overthrown by a disunited Left. Without a single spell in opposition, they resembled a regime in which all the important decisions on policy and government are made through deals inside the party. The DC was divided into factions, known as correnti, usually grouped around such canny operators as the dynamic Tuscan Amintore Fanfani, and the artful Roman Giulio Andreotti, who was prime minister seven times, a cabinet minister for twenty-one years and a deputy continuously from 1946 to 1991, when he was appointed a life senator. Governments used to fall about once a year but never as a result of a vote of no confidence moved by the opposition in parliament. They fell because either a faction within the DC or a small party in the coalition (such as the liberals) withdrew its support, an action that persuaded the prime minister to resign without a parliamentary vote. This was followed by frantic negotiations among the same people and the same factions until they agreed on the next prime minister, who often turned out to be the old one leading a largely unchanged team of ministers. Such a system ensured that the chief skill a politician needed was not the statesmanship of De Gasperi but the subtlety of manoeuvre as exemplified by Andreotti.
As the century progressed, the christian democrats lost many of their natural supporters: there were far fewer small farmers and practising Catholics in 1980 than there had been in 1948. There were also fewer women who divided their day between their church and their kitchen and were prepared to follow the instructions of their priests. Yet the christian democrats remained the largest party because people were frightened of the alternative, the Communist Party, which by the mid-1970s was gaining three and a half times as many votes as the socialists. Politics were thus effectively paralysed. Italians turned out at elections in impressive numbers but they knew they were not voting for a change of government; at best they hoped their party might increase its vote by a couple of percentage points. In the early years of the republic attempts had been made to end the paralysis by building a ‘Third Force’ of the secular Centre, a project supported by the weekly Il Mondo and by many of the country’s leading intellectuals. Yet loyalties to the Catholic and communist parties had been cemented so early that in the elections of 1953 the parties of a potential Third Force – the liberals, the republicans and the social democrats – between them received less than 10 per cent of the vote. Il Mondo closed down in 1966, its final issue leaving an unhappy last message: ‘What reigns in Italy above all else is the deep-rooted and penetrating presence of a soft and priestly secret government that conquers friends and foes alike and tends to enervate all initiative and all resistance.’10
Communism attracted more adherents in Italy than in any other country in the West. By the end of 1944, just a year after it had emerged into the open, the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) had half a million members, many of them living in the then German-occupied areas of the north. Thousands of young fascists mutated quickly into young communists, relishing their opposition to a defeated regime while appreciating the familiarities of discipline and authoritarianism offered by this alternative ‘system of truth’. In her novel La storia Elsa Morante captured this spirit in the character Nino, who becomes in turn a fascist, a partisan and a black marketeer although, whatever he is pretending to be, his behaviour is always an imitation of Mussolini.
Partisans and other party militants hoped the end of the war would leave them in a position to seize power and carry out a revolution – as their comrades in Yugoslavia were doing just across the border. They were thus dismayed by the cautiousness of their leadership. Palmiro Togliatti, a stalinist and former functionary of the Comintern, was a realist who guessed that the British and Americans would not allow a country to go communist just after they had taken the trouble to liberate it. Italy was not like eastern Europe; it was more like Greece, where communist guerrillas were in the process of being defeated by royalist forces that had British and later American help. Togliatti was convinced that, in order to survive, communist parties in western Europe had to adopt the Popular Front strategy of alliances with the democratic Left that the Comintern had promoted in the mid-1930s. What he called ‘the Italian road to socialism’ would be one that led first to national unity and only later, when the time was right, to socialism. In his new identity as conciliator he accepted the monarchy until its demise and also the place of the Church in national life. He got very little in return except for a short spell as a minister before De Gasperi expelled him and his party from the government in 1947.
The Italian road to socialism might be leading to an unhappy destination – that of permanent opposition – but at the time it proved attractive to millions of voters who flocked to communist festivals and enjoyed the amenities of the case del popolo, the ‘people’s clubs’. The Communist Party was especially strong in areas of the former Papal States, in which misgovernment had fostered a strong tradition of anti-clericalism. By 1976 it had nearly half a million members in a single region, Emilia-Romagna, and in two of the most prosperous provinces in the country, Bologna and Modena, nearly half the votes in local elections regularly went to the communists. Although excluded from national power in Rome, the party dominated the ‘Red Belt’ (Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia-Romagna), controlling both municipalities and regional governments. The towers of San Gimignano overlooked one of the few towns in the world that voluntarily gave nearly two-thirds of its votes to a communist party. Visitors to Bologna were impressed by the communists’ administration of the city, by the hospitals and public transport, and by the absence of that drabness and bureaucracy associated with Eastern Europe. In Emilia and Tuscany it was easy to get the impression that Italian communists were different from other communists, that they were harmless social democrats who enjoyed their pasta and salami and ran their cities with admirable efficiency.
Yet they were not social democrats: if they had been, they could have joined the socialist or social democratic parties. The PCI revered Stalin and remained unctuously attached to the Soviet Union for many years. On the death of the Russian dictator in 1953, its newspaper hailed ‘the man who [had] done most for the liberation of the human race’. Party intellectuals, who must have known the truth, were especially servile in their praise for the achievements of the Soviet Union: one of them, Mario Alicata, a former fascist, went to Russia and described it in 1952 as ‘the first country in the history of the world in which all men are finally free’.11 In 1956 the Italian communists supported the Russian invasion of Hungary and refused to break publicly with the Soviet Union even when later they criticized its policies in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Afghanistan. The leaders felt the need to balance criticism with ‘fraternal’ messages of support for the principles of the Bolshevik Revolution; they also seem to have feared that a real break would have led to a schism within their own party and the creation of a rump of hardliners financially backed by the Kremlin.
The communist leader from 1972 until his death in 1984 was Enrico Berlinguer, a Sardinian of clear integrity and intelligence. Like Togliatti, he put national unity before other priorities and believed that it could be achieved in Italy only through a partnership, or at least a compromise, between Catholics and communists. He himself embodied this approach not only in his ideas but also in his life, for his family was of noble origin, his wife was religious, and his children were brought up as Catholics. Under his leadership the party’s electoral popularity increased, and many people believed it might displace the christian democrats as the largest force in parliament after the elections of 1976. Like Santiago Carrillo in Spain, Berlinguer epitomized the idea of ‘Eurocommunism’, a somewhat nebulous term suggesting a more modern and moderate form of the ideology, one that was more democratic, more independent of the Soviet Union and more inclined to cooperate with non-marxist parties. Yet he was nervous of coming to power in a left-wing coalition because he feared it would provoke a civil war or a right-wing coup or even some kind of intervention from the United States. Perhaps he was too cautious. In any case, as soon as Chile’s left-wing government was overthrown in 1973 in a coup that ended the life as well as the regime of Salvador Allende, he offered the christian democrats what he called ‘an historic compromise’. At the beginning he envisaged that the communists would cooperate with the government and help deal with the post-1973 economic crisis but later, he hoped, they would receive tangible benefits in the shape of social reforms and ministerial posts. In his quest for conservative approval, Berlinguer even declared that Italy should remain in NATO and announced that his party opposed any extension of public ownership, a statement that put Italian communists to the right of French socialists and the British Labour Party.
The communists’ attempt to join the government failed chiefly because few christian democrats were interested in the idea of an historic compromise. Aldo Moro, prime minister from 1974 to 1976, was one of the few but he was a procrastinator who kept begging the communists to be patient while he ‘educated’ his own party’s right wing. His successor, Giulio Andreotti, was another delayer, keen to have Berlinguer and his colleagues support the unpopular measures of his unpopular government while giving them nothing in return. Moro, however, remained their best hope, and he was close to making them formal partners in the parliamentary majority when, in the spring of 1978, he was kidnapped and later murdered by the revolutionary Red Brigades, whose aim was to sabotage the chances of the historic compromise, an ambition they duly achieved.
Terrorism was a tactic used by groups on the extreme Right as well as the extreme Left, and some 500 people were killed by it in the two decades after 1969. Fascists committed the more spectacular atrocities, such as the bomb in Bologna’s train station in 1980 that killed eighty-five people, while left-wing terrorists carried out a selective campaign of assassination and kidnappings of industrialists, politicians, lawyers and journalists. Curiously, both sets of terrorists had a similar objective: they hoped that, by creating tension and destabilizing the state, they could provoke a military takeover and the installation of a regime that the Right would love and protect and the Left would loathe and overthrow. Both were trying to take the country back to the conditions of 1920–22, yet neither of them enjoyed popular support. ‘Front Line’, ‘Workers’ Power’, the Red Brigades and similar groups claimed to be taking ‘proletarian action’, but their members were middle-class students and intellectuals playing fatally at being Che Guevara. Over the years they were defeated by a patient and intelligent police campaign led by a general of the carabinieri, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.
Left-wing terrorists were contemptuous of the Communist Party, which had long renounced its revolutionary pretensions. Even in 1968 party leaders had criticized the student revolt, and by 1974 they seemed to have abandoned socialism altogether: Berlinguer was offering his supporters nothing more than the prospect of ‘implementing measures and guidelines that are in some respects of a socialist type’.12 After the elections of 1979, when the communists lost an eighth of their 1976 vote, even Berlinguer realized that his pursuit of the historic compromise, however laudable as a sentiment, had been a mistake and a failure. In elections to the European parliament in 1984 the communists received, for the first and only time, slightly more votes than the christian democrats. Yet commentators recognized that this was not a sign of resurgence. It was more in the nature of a sympathy vote, a consequence of the death six days before the poll of the most respected man in Italian politics, Enrico Berlinguer.
The 1980s were the decade of the pentapartito, government by a coalition of five parties – the christian democrats, the social democrats, the socialists, the republicans and the liberals. For the four middle years of the decade, the DC relinquished the premiership and allowed it to go to the leader of the Socialist Party, Bettino Craxi, a man who had little in common with earlier Italian socialists. He was a leader, he understood power, he preferred government to opposition and he liked and admired wealth; he made friends with both Ronald Reagan and Silvio Berlusconi, the Milanese businessman, who asked him to become the godfather of his son. Many of Craxi’s subordinates also discarded their socialism and became notorious for their taste for fast cars, smart nightclubs and luxurious holidays. Their party soon became regarded as the most corrupt in Italy.
In the meantime the communists grew increasingly irrelevant. They supported Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies in the Soviet Union and hoped that some kind of reformed and democratic communism would survive. Yet their support was being eroded at home both by the decline of the traditional working class and by the visible fragility of their ideological raison d’être. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 signalled the end of the Communist Party in Italy, but its half-century of influence had not been wholly negative and unproductive. Although it had been excluded from power in Rome, the party had run local governments and, from Togliatti to Berlinguer, it had played a stabilizing role in the life of the nation. Its influence was especially clear in Italian culture, which it dominated for decades after 1944. Italy naturally had a conservative culture as well, a largely anti-communist press and many non-marxist publishers; Feltrinelli, itself a left-wing publishing house, achieved success through the publication of two very unrevolutionary novels, Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago and Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Yet cultural glamour belonged to the communists: they had the support of the celebrities, of most of the artists and writers and directors who were famous and revered both in Italy and abroad.
In 1947 Pier Paolo Pasolini declared that only communism could provide ‘a new culture’ for Italy, a view with which thousands of people in the arts, especially those in literature and the cinema, agreed. It became axiomatic that a serious director had to be ‘engaged’ in political issues, that he had to have impegno (commitment), that his films had to take political sides and make ideological statements. Marxism and the Resistance had fused to create a left-wing Zeitgeist, and many artists found life simpler if they joined the Communist Party or at least became fellow travellers.
‘Neo-realism’ was an obligatory first phase for post-war directors who wished to be taken seriously, and some fine films resulted from it, such as Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) by Vittorio De Sica or La terra trema by Luchino Visconti, who was the champion of neo-realism until decadence became a more appealing theme. The products of this genre are usually gritty, worthy and well made, shot on the street often with non-professional actors. Yet they are also humourless, comfortless and unglamorous, and they were not very popular with Italians. Working-class people understandably found it more diverting to watch John Wayne fighting ‘Red Indians’ or Charlie Chaplin outwitting huge bullies than to see themselves represented as exploited fishermen in Sicily or Romans so poor that they could not afford a bicycle. Yet neo-realism continued, alongside brighter genres, for decades. In 1978 Ermanno Olmi directed one of the longest and bleakest of all films about the misery of peasant life, L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs). It begins with scenes of warm-hearted rustic life in Lombardy in the nineteenth century: the peasants are trying to make the best of a hard existence, singing as they tear the husks off the corn-cobs and sitting together in the evenings, the men telling stories and the women knitting and saying prayers. But the central story recounts the tribulations of a hard-working peasant, who is persuaded by the local priest to send his clever son to school; as the little boy’s shoes are broken – and he has a long way to walk – the father cuts down a small tree to make him some clogs, the landowner notices the stump, and as a result the entire family is evicted. Olmi’s political message could not be clearer: rural Italy was divided between pure and good-hearted peasants and brutal and rapacious landlords.‡
One era of Italian cinema is often said to have ended with Mussolini, and another, largely unrelated, to have succeeded it in 1944. Naturally it did not happen in quite this way: like other Italians, film directors changed their spots, and the creators of fascist films mutated into makers of committed, left-wing, neo-realist cinema. One of them, Carmine Gallone, was briefly ostracized for his work under the dictatorship but redeemed himself with a film about the opera Tosca set in nazi-occupied Rome.13 Others escaped ostracism. Roberto Rossellini had been a friend of Mussolini’s children and the director of three war films known as his ‘fascist trilogy’. Yet in 1945 he reinvented himself as an anti-fascist by making the famous Resistance film, Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City). This is a work that realistically and evocatively conveys the atmosphere at the end of the German occupation, but it is also a work of distortion and propaganda. The only bad people in Rossellini’s film are oafish German soldiers under the command of an effetely sadistic officer. The Italians are nearly all good, high-minded folk who make sacrifices in expiation for the fascist aberration. The new Italy rising from the ashes is represented by a stoic priest, an indomitable partisan and a compassionate working-class woman, who are respectively executed, tortured to death and shot by the nazis. Neither of the two men blink or shake or show the slightest sign of nervousness, even when they know they are about to be tortured or shot. Their deaths symbolize the rebirth of the nation, their Christian resignation heralding a resurrection of its people.
Another, much later, work that combined neo-realism with political propaganda was Novecento (1900), a film made for international audiences in 1976 by Bernardo Bertolucci, a young but already famous director whose previous film had been Last Tango in Paris. The beauty of both the photography and the music – a typically haunting score by Ennio Morricone – is undoubted, but the work is dominated by the politics of the director, one of the Communist Party’s celebrities, a man who made no secret of his belief in ‘the victory of the masses’.14 In his film the entire history of the inter-war years is reduced to a Manichaean struggle between a small number of ugly fascist bullies and a multitude of handsome, down-trodden and noble-hearted peasants.
It opens with a scene in the Emilian countryside on Liberation Day 1945. The peasants are up in arms – the men grabbing rifles, the women wielding pitchforks – and are hunting down the local fascist leader, a brute played by Donald Sutherland, suitably sinister in a bald wig and suitably named Attila. Eventually they capture him, together with his sadistic wife, and are on the point of killing him when the scene stops and the film goes back to the beginning of the century. We have to wait five hours, until the end of Part Two, before we observe his end.
We are now in 1901, on the day of Verdi’s death, and the film is appropriately shot near the banks of the River Po, close to the composer’s home, with many of the extras gathered from Roncole and Busseto. The early scenes are almost uplifting. Peasants with austerely noble faces toil in the fields and sometimes take time off to dance under the poplar trees; the sense of camaraderie is ubiquitous and even shared by the old landowner, an eccentric aristocrat played by Burt Lancaster, who feels a sense of obligation to his employees. Yet soon the action advances a few years, and it becomes clear that matters have deteriorated. Burt is dead, his inheritance grabbed fraudulently by an appalling younger son, and the peasants, now enrolled in the Socialist Party, are on strike with red flags flying, while an ancient accordionist, dressed symbolically in a Russian smock, strolls along a railway platform playing the ‘Internationale’.
Things get even worse after the next skip, which takes us to the end of the First World War. A peasant woman’s bastard son, who was born in an early scene, has now grown up to become Gérard Depardieu, acting very poorly as a demobbed soldier transformed into an heroic socialist with the assistance of his girlfriend, a young marxist teacher. An agricultural crisis is upon us, and the evictions of peasants have begun, cartloads of families with their pitiful possessions traversing the countryside along paths beside the river. When some peasants refuse to be evicted, Depardieu and the schoolteacher organize defiance by persuading the women to lie down in front of a cavalry charge aborted only at the last moment by a relatively humane officer. All this is happening, somewhat surreally, in full view of the ghastly landowner and his equally repellent friends who, clad in fur coats, are shooting duck from boats on adjacent canals. Disgusted by the withdrawal of the mounted troops, one of the duck-shooters fires both barrels of his shotgun at the peasants. He and his fellow sportsmen then retire to a church in which, having realized that the liberal government is not going to suppress the socialists, they give money to Attila to establish a branch of Mussolini’s fasci di combattimento. There are only two dissenters, one of them played by Robert De Niro (the landowner’s son), who has spent part of the duck shoot masturbating his insatiable cousin Regina (Attila’s future wife) with the butt of his shotgun. His role is to spend the rest of the film as the weak, cowardly, non-fascist aristocrat who allows himself to be manipulated by the fascists.
Soon a drunken band of Mussolini’s thugs appear, brandishing clubs and lurching about in a lorry. After they have burned down a casa del popolo, killing some pensioners, Depardieu drags the charred corpses around in a cart; a vast crowd of mourners in red scarves unexpectedly gathers – perhaps they are not real – and a band plays the ‘Internationale’. The camera shifts back to the fascists, some of them lounging in a bar while others are at a tailor’s, watching Donald Sutherland trying on a black shirt and urging his followers to buy one too. Snarling demonically, he is suddenly inspired to demonstrate his virility by head-butting a cat, screaming as he kills it that this is the way to treat communists.§ In Part Two of the film his Attila becomes even more revolting. The director evidently thinks that a fascist cannot be simply a fascist: he must also be a sadist, a paedophile, a pervert and a murderer. In a moment of pederastic delirium, Attila kills a young boy and blames the murder first on Depardieu, who is duly beaten up by his fascists, and then on a wandering simpleton, who is carted off to prison as a result. Next, Attila murders a widow and impales her on her railings and soon, after angry workers have pelted him with horse manure, he carries out a general massacre of peasants in the estate farmyard. Eventually (and far too late), blue skies arrive along with liberation, and Sutherland is captured and shot in a graveyard.
Italian literature after the war evolved in similar fashion to cinema. Neo-realism and impegno were the first essentials, and radical commitment remained almost compulsory, but writers in due course drifted away from realism towards innovation and avant-garde ‘experimentalism’. By the late 1950s intellectuals were agonizing over the future of the novel, trying to work out new roles for writers and new ‘paths’ for their writing. Literary journals sent questionnaires to authors and printed their answers to questions about the place of ‘social realism’ in contemporary fiction. Pasolini even invented rules for writing poems which could make poetry ‘radically innovative but regulated by an awareness of political and social realities’.15
In Spain a number of intellectuals who in the 1930s had supported the Falange, a blue-shirted fascist party, recanted and became democratic critics of Franco even during the most repressive years of the dictatorship. One young poet, Dionisio Ridruejo, rose to be chief of nationalist propaganda before repudiating fascism completely; in atonement for his youthful years in the Falange, he founded an illegal social democratic party and spent the rest of his life criticizing Franco and frequently going to jail. Few of Italy’s fascist writers became social democrats. Indeed, many of them travelled from the far Right to the far Left without feeling the need to stop anywhere, even temporarily, on the way. The novelist Curzio Malaparte was in turn a nationalist, a fascist, a communist and an enthusiast for maoist China. Other fascist writers who anchored themselves on the Left included the Sicilian Vitaliano Brancati, a one-time eulogist of Mussolini, and the Tuscan Vasco Pratolini, who distanced himself from his black-shirted youth by adopting realismo socialista to write about the Florentine working class.
In his novel of the Resistance, Uomini e no (Men and not Men), Elio Vittorini even extended the idea of good versus bad to the corpses of the combatants – dignified partisan against fascist ‘dog’ or ‘carrion’. Yet this communist intellectual had been a fascist who had toadied to the leadership, approved of its censorship and praised the invasion of Ethiopia. He only turned against Mussolini after the dictator had backed Franco and his supporters, whom Vittorini regarded as too Catholic and reactionary – and insufficiently fascist – to deserve support. Later he bolstered his anti-fascist credentials (which hardly existed until the regime’s fall) by joining the communists and putting himself in charge of what he called the ‘modern renovation of literature’.16 Vittorini epitomized that near uniformity of intellectual standpoint that made it so hard for anti-communist writers to achieve success. Committed left-wingers were regularly preferred and promoted above more deserving liberals and conservatives. The writer Salvatore Quasimodo, who was a communist, acquired a status so exalted in Italy that in 1959 the Nobel Prize Committee was persuaded to choose him ahead of Eugenio Montale, a much finer poet, who had to wait until 1975 for the Committee to recognize his merits.
One writer who suffered discrimination was Giorgio Bassani, who had been persecuted at the end of fascism because he was a Jew and was now belittled by the Left because he was not a marxist. His nostalgic semi-autobiographical novels set in Ferrara had no place in Vittorini’s ‘renovation’. Nor did Lampedusa’s The Leopard, a novel that Bassani discovered and arranged for publication after its author’s death. Vittorini had already done his best to bury the work by rejecting it for publication, once as an adviser for Mondadori and again as a director of Einaudi. But he could not stop Feltrinelli from publishing it on Bassani’s advice in 1958. Nor could he or his left-wing allies prevent large numbers of Italians from enjoying this beautiful novel, one that Luigi Barzini suggested ‘made all us Italians understand our life and history to the depths’17 – a work, moreover, that made no concessions to socialist realism or avant-garde experimentalism. Yet Vittorini made an effort, and his fatuous complaint that The Leopard was ‘right-wing’ was repeated by other writers and by the heavy guns of the communist press, which blasted the book’s ‘ideological deficiency’. The campaign of denigration was blunted, however, by the French writer Louis Aragon, one of the leading marxist intellectuals in Europe, who mocked Alberto Moravia’s grumble that Lampedusa’s work was ‘right-wing’ and a success for the Right. Even more disconcerting was Aragon’s assertion that The Leopard was ‘one of the great novels of this century, one of the great novels of all time’, and most crushingly, ‘perhaps … the only Italian novel’.18 Italian readers sided with Aragon. In an opinion poll carried out by a literary weekly in 1985, The Leopard was chosen as ‘the most loved’ novel of the twentieth century; it was also voted, together with Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, as one of the two ‘most important’.19
Italians had been the richest people in Europe from the early Middle Ages to the end of the sixteenth century. They had subsequently dropped behind the French, the Dutch and the English, and in the years after unification, Italy was the poorest nation in western Europe outside the Iberian peninsula. Italians after the Second World War were still impoverished, as the neo-realist films remind us, and their country was much the least prosperous of the six founder members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952.
Yet the 1950s and 1960s turned out to be the most successful decades in the economic history of united Italy. Between 1951 and 1969 the economy increased by an average of nearly 6 per cent a year, and the rate of export expansion was even higher. Considering that Italy had been a predominantly agricultural country at the beginning of the 1950s, the industrial statistics are astonishing. By 1967 Olivetti was producing nearly a million typewriters a year, FIAT had become the largest car manufacturer in Europe, and the nation was annually making over 3 million refrigerators, more than any country in the world except for the United States and Japan. Within the space of a single generation, Italy had become a consumer society. Its people could afford not only fridges but also cars, televisions, washing-machines and good clothes. They spoke with some justice of an ‘economic miracle’.
In 1948 the young Piero Ottone was sent to London as the correspondent of an Italian newspaper. At Calais he parked his car in the wrong queue for Dover, whereupon a gendarme came up, lectured him on his mistake and, on observing the number plate, sighed contemptuously, ‘Ah, les Italiens …’ An outraged Ottone was tempted to make an official complaint. Born in 1924, he had been educated to believe that Italy was a great country, that Mussolini was a great ruler, and that Britain, France and the United States were ‘old, grey and decadent’ powers, worthy of an Italian’s disdain. Admittedly Italy had just lost a war, but that could happen to anyone, and to be patronized by a French policeman was intolerable.20 Ottone, who later became editor of the Corriere della Sera, soon understood why his country’s reputation was so low, and he was naturally delighted when, by its own efforts, it began to rise. The prestige of Italy eventually grew not as Crispi and Victor Emanuel and Mussolini had intended – by becoming a mighty power – but because the country was an innovator in such peaceful and productive fields as film, fashion and industrial design. The Ferrari factory outside Modena was one of many enterprises that made Italy seem chic and stylish, just as the manufacture of Vespa scooters in the Arno Valley made it feel ‘cool’ – especially when Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn rode one in the film Roman Holiday. The fashion business, based first in Florence and later in Milan, was another success for Italian style. The country may have been infected by London and the ‘Swinging Sixties’, by the Beatles and by Carnaby Street, but the infection was temporary. Carnaby Street is now folklore, but Gucci and Armani are great international brands.
Italy’s rise owed much to Marshall Aid and much also to the dynamism and skills of its people. The government too played its part. Although Italy was a full member of NATO, it allotted barely 1 per cent of its GDP to defence and, without wars to fight or colonies to conquer, it could now invest money in infrastructure, especially motorways, which were built quickly and well. Only eight years were needed to complete the whole Autostrada del Sole, running 755 kilometres from Milan to Naples, a project that included the construction of thirty-eight tunnels, 113 bridges and five chapels. Motorways in the north are today often congested, partly because Italians have more cars than other Europeans, and partly because governments invested a lot of money in roads and very little in railways. The first thing you notice about travelling by train in Italy is that everything is very old: network, tracks, coaches, locomotives, goods wagons and, except in certain large cities, stations. Those of us who like to meander about the country by rail soon become aware that the so-called accelerato is the slowest train in Italy. Even the rest are slow compared to their equivalents in other parts of western Europe, and in some cases they are getting slower. The Inter-City service from Milan to Turin now takes ten minutes longer than it did in 1987. If you get up early to go from one end of Sicily to the other, from Ragusa in the south-east to Trapani in the north-west, you will spend nine and a half hours in trains, waiting-rooms and a connecting bus to travel 440 kilometres.21
Italy suffered along with other western countries from the economic crisis of the 1970s, but it recovered more quickly than most. It owed this success to the rise of the ‘Third Italy’, thus termed to differentiate it from the industrialized north-west and the agricultural south. Located in the central regions and the Veneto, ‘Third Italy’s’ chief characteristic was the small family business, which often stayed small as well as successful but sometimes became huge and international, as in the case of the Benetton family near Treviso, which, sensing a market for colourful knitted clothes, started off with one second-hand knitting machine and came to acquire over 6,000 stores in 120 countries. In the provinces of Third Italy Italians rediscovered those talents and that entrepreneurial flair with which they had led the European economy in the Middle Ages. Concentrating on quality and style, they came to be ranked among the world’s finest manufacturers of ceramics, glass, shoes, clothes and furniture. At a time when such skills were vanishing in Britain, it was not surprising that by 1986 the Italian economy was larger than the British. Italians were jubilant about this sorpasso (overtaking), which made their economy the fifth largest in the world, and some predicted they would soon overtake France and become the fourth biggest. Italy at the end of the 1980s was a success story.
One of the casualties of the ‘economic miracle’ was the natural environment. The post-war constitution had specified the protection of Italy’s landscape as a government duty, but the stipulation has been very largely ignored. The city centres of the north and the centre have generally been well preserved, but their suburbs are invariably ugly, sprawly and chaotic. To the outsider it often seems as if there had been a tacit agreement between citizens and the state whereby, in return for keeping their medieval centres intact, Italians were allowed to build whatever they liked in whatever style they chose outside them: fruitful plains, scenic woods, Alpine valleys – few of them have been safe from the industrialist or the building speculator. Even where there were regulations about spaces and population density, these were widely disregarded, especially in the south. Some regions looked after their landscapes better than others. Tuscany was the best, while Sicily was among the worst; anyone who had known Palermo’s plain, the Conca d’Oro, in 1950 would not have recognized it in 1970 because its citrus groves had been concreted over to enrich both the Mafia and the city council, whose personnel overlapped. During the boom years Italy’s coastline suffered as tragically and irreversibly as Spain’s Mediterranean shores and the Balearic Islands. In an effort to appear modern and industrial, Italy built far more oil refineries than it needed and sited them, along with petrochemical works and other factories, in unsuitable places such as the eastern seaboard of Sicily or the Venetian lagoon. Almost any sandy patch on the peninsula was regarded as suitable for development, and those few areas of shoreline beauty that survive – such as the Amalfi coast and the Ligurian Cinque Terre – have done so because they are rocky, difficult to reach and unembellished by convenient beaches.
Another consequence of the miracle – one shared by all industrializing states – was a massive exodus from the land. Although its productivity increased, agricultural acreage shrank, and new machinery meant that farmers no longer needed to employ so much labour. In 1950 nearly half the population worked the land: a half-century later, only one Italian in fifteen earned a living from agriculture. Millions of young men, mainly from the south, began leaving in the 1950s, boarding the trains from Palermo and Apulia or catching the ferries from Sardinia, country boys saying farewell to their families and carrying their possessions in parcels or in cardboard boxes tied with string, eventually arriving outside a factory in Turin or somewhere else in the unwelcoming north and having to adjust to an unfamiliar life in a shanty town or a concrete block on the outskirts of a frightening city. Their departure left countless villages populated mainly by women and the old; most farmers and labourers you saw in the early 1970s were born before the First World War.
The southerners who remained became richer, though, as in the village where Carlo Levi had lived, less as a result of their own efforts than because they received government handouts and remittances from those who had emigrated. Italy’s economic miracle did not reduce the gap between the north and the south, and in 1997 income per capita was still more than twice as high in Emilia-Romagna as it was in Campania, Calabria, Basilicata and Sicily. Yet without government intervention the gap would presumably have been even wider. In their early days the christian democrats implemented some measure of land reform, which enabled about 120,000 peasant families to settle on land expropriated from the latifondi. More importantly, De Gasperi created the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Development Fund for the South), which in its first years accomplished valuable work on the infrastructure, building roads, aqueducts and irrigation systems. In the 1960s, however, it began to invest in industry – with less happy results. Vast sums were spent on building huge factories in places where skilled labour and suitable communications were absent. Before long it became obvious that the christian democrats were using the Cassa for purposes that previous democratic governments from Depretis onwards would have appreciated: they were bribing the south, providing jobs and projects for their clients and receiving votes and political power in return.
At Gioia Tauro in Calabria a beautiful and fertile landscape of olive trees and orange groves was flattened to make way for a huge industrial complex to be dominated by a steel works that had to be abandoned before an ounce of steel was produced. The chief effect of this choice, apart from the environmental desecration, was vicious warfare among local gangs vying for building contracts which resulted in the murder of hundreds of people. Other schemes in the south – in Sicily, Apulia and Sardinia – also collapsed because they were selected for political rather than economic reasons: some failed to produce anything at all, and others were closed down soon after construction. Such projects were known as ‘cathedrals in the desert’, but at least real cathedrals functioned and were visited. The Cassa ceased to operate in 1984, a victim of its investment policies but also of its failure to prevent local criminals from stealing so much of its money. One of the worst examples of southern corruption took place after the 1980 earthquake near Naples, in which 2,400 people were killed: funds allocated by the government to rebuild the area were simply diverted to enrich a new breed of businessman linked to the criminal gangs of the Camorra.
Unhealthy though it was to gain votes through bribery, it was still more poisonous to acquire them by protecting criminals. In the years after the war the christian democrats had increasingly come to rely on Sicily and the Veneto as their strongholds of electoral support. Yet while the people of the north-east voted democratically, in accordance with their interests and traditions, many Sicilians voted according to the wishes of the Mafia bosses. The christian democrats needed the mafiosi to obtain these votes, and the mafiosi needed the politicians to protect them from prosecution. Although this relationship was resented and denounced by party members in other areas of Italy, it endured and became ever more shameful and in the end dangerous. Leading Sicilian christian democrats had to play a dual role, national politician and sometimes government minister in Rome, and protector of the Mafia in Sicily. They may not themselves have been ‘men of honour’ (mafiosi), but they were ‘friends’ who, as E. M. Forster put it in another context, preferred to betray their country than to betray their friends.
The most controversial figure at the heart of the DC–Mafia connection was Giulio Andreotti, a man who was scrupulous about religion but not about politics and who was regularly described as wily, ‘machiavellian’ and even ‘Jesuitical’. Andreotti came from Lazio, where his power base was small, and he needed and acquired Sicily to have himself installed with such frequency in the cabinet, seven times as prime minister of coalition governments in the twenty years after 1972. Although he evidently had connections with the Mafia – and could be perceived as its ultimate protector – he operated on the island through two infamous lieutenants, Salvo Lima and Vito Ciancimino. However particular in his personal habits, Andreotti was not fastidious in his choice of subordinates. Both men served as mayors of Palermo and city councillors for public works, jobs that enabled them to carry out the ‘sack’ of the Sicilian capital by issuing thousands of building permits to Mafia frontmen and enriching themselves in the process. Ciancimino was a notorious figure whose power was so far-reaching that he personally decided which singers should be employed by the Palermo opera house; yet eventually he overplayed his hand, was arrested in 1984 and later convicted of corruption and collusion with the Mafia. Lima was luckier for a time, and he even became a minister under Andreotti in Rome. He personified the dual role of the Sicilian christian democrat, a man regarded simultaneously as the Mafia’s ambassador to Rome and Andreotti’s viceroy in Palermo.
Until the 1970s many people in Sicily continued to deny the existence of the Mafia. One cardinal-archbishop claimed it was an invention of the Communist Party, while his successor shrugged it off with the astonishing observation that it killed fewer people than abortions. Yet soon the revelations of pentiti, penitent mafiosi who gave evidence against former colleagues, proved that it was – or at any rate had now become – a highly structured and organized entity. Gone were the old-style provincial bosses who, inviolate in their strongholds, had dispensed favours, arranged killings and managed protection rackets from a café in their home piazza. Their replacements were less visible and more violent, men who moved into the cities and made millions in the building industry and even more millions in the narcotics trade; in the 1970s Palermo became the global capital of the heroin market. The most ruthless of these new men belonged to the Corleone clan, which gained a spurious glamour in foreign imaginations because it shared the surname of the characters in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, which in the films based upon the story were played by Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. Yet it is hard to think of many people less resembling Robert De Niro than Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina, the squat psychopath and principal boss of the 1980s, or his henchman Giovanni Brusca, who admitted to murdering ‘many more than one hundred but less than two hundred people’.22
At the beginning of the 1980s the corleonesi exterminated their rivals and in the same period declared war on the nation. Until then, the Mafia had been careful not to target members of the Italian ‘establishment’. Now, under Riina, it reversed direction and chose to challenge the state by assassinating policemen, politicians, journalists and magistrates. Their victims – known collectively as ‘the eminent corpses’ – included the president of the Sicilian regional government, the chief prosecutor in Palermo, the communist leader in Sicily and the christian democratic leader in Palermo, a man whose father had protected the Mafia as a minister in Rome but who himself was bravely trying to detach the DC from the criminals. Despite the outrage of many islanders, there was woefully little response from the christian democrats who, while doubtless disapproving of the murders, did not dare to break with the Mafia. It was not until 1982 and the most audacious killing of all – that of the police general Dalla Chiesa, vanquisher of the Red Brigades and newly appointed prefect of Palermo – that the ruling coalition made any serious response. One consequence of the murder was a law criminalizing ‘associazione mafiosa’, a phrase difficult to define and an offence even more difficult to prove, but it enabled the courts to convict Ciancimino and several other politicians later on. In 2003 a court in Palermo accepted that even Andreotti was guilty of Mafia associations but judged that these had taken place too long ago for that octogenarian politician to be imprisoned now.
Another consequence of Dalla Chiesa’s killing was the establishment of a pool of deft and dedicated magistrates in Palermo who, armed with the evidence of numerous pentiti, were able to round up hundreds of suspected mafiosi. At the end of 1987, after a ‘maxi-trial’ in Palermo that had lasted nearly two years, some 350 suspects were convicted and sent to prison. The guilty men were not too concerned about this because they knew that under Italian law they still had two chances of getting off, both in the appeal court and in the Supreme Court, the Court of Cassation. At the appeal stage they had the good fortune to come up against a judge notorious for acquitting mafiosi on technicalities and who himself was later charged with associazione mafiosa. Many of them were duly released and remained confident of equally benign treatment when their cases came up for review in the Supreme Court. They thought that Salvo Lima would fix the trial, that the presiding judge would be on their side, that ultimately Andreotti would protect them from having to serve their sentences. They were wrong and, when many of the original verdicts were upheld, they responded predictably with vengeance. One of their first victims was Lima, their ‘friend’ for over thirty years, who was murdered both as a reprisal for his failure to protect them and as a warning to Andreotti and the christian democrats that they too were in danger. Next, they targeted the magistrates who had caught them, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, men who had grown up with mafiosi in the Kalsa district of Palermo and who knew how greatly they were risking their lives when they took up the challenge. Italians were convulsed by the murders in 1992 of these heroic figures – and their wives and their police escorts – and some declared themselves ashamed of being Italian. Reactions were so strong that the state was goaded into taking sustained action; even the Polish pope, John Paul II, who had been reticent for too long, condemned the Mafia while on a pastoral visit to Sicily in 1993. Over the next three years thousands of mafiosi were arrested, including the ineffable Riina, and the murder rate dropped dramatically. For the only time in the history of the Italian republic, it seemed that the Mafia might be defeated.
The Mafia in Sicily had gained the reputation of being a uniquely brutal, secret and effective organization of criminals. In fact there were others in southern Italy with rival qualifications. Calabria had the ’Ndrangheta, which was equally ruthless, and Apulia had the Sacra Corona Unita (United Sacred Crown), against which magistrates in Bari fought with some degree of success. The most powerful of all was the Neapolitan Camorra which, like the Mafia, had close connections with the christian democrats. One of its ‘friends’ was Antonio Gava, who was known as the ‘viceroy of Naples’ and who in the 1980s was appointed to several ministerial posts in Rome, including minister of the interior, the man supposed to be in charge of fighting organized crime; he subsequently spent thirteen years trying – ultimately with success – to clear himself of the charge of associazione mafiosa. At the time the Camorra rivalled the Mafia in the scale of its violence, the two between them murdering on average over 500 people a year, but it later overtook its Sicilian equivalent in size, wealth, killings and corruption. In the thirteen years after 1991 seventy-one municipalities in Campania were dissolved because they were being run by gangs of the Camorra. In the twenty-six years up to 2005, ‘the system’ – as its members liked to call it – murdered 3,600 people.23
The Italian state had helped make its citizens prosperous but it had failed to provide them with security or to protect the lives of its officials. Politics, prosperity and corruption seemed to mix very easily – and not only near the tentacles of the Mafia and the Camorra. In the late 1970s corruption brought about the resignation of a president of the republic (Giovanni Leone) and the imprisonment of a former minister for defence (Mario Tanassi), and in the following decade the disease became endemic in the parties of the governing coalition. As magistrates soon discovered, building and other business contracts were being awarded only to those companies prepared to pay bribes to the politicians who were awarding them.
In February 1992 a prominent Milanese socialist was caught red-handed receiving a bribe from a company that did the cleaning at a geriatric hospital administered by himself. Taken into custody, he stayed silent for a while until, finding himself reviled by his party leaders, he was persuaded to answer questions put by local magistrates. It soon became clear that this was not an isolated case but a piece of a vast, rambling and seemingly infinite jigsaw puzzle of corruption. The chief prosecutor of Milan decided to investigate the alleged crimes and put together an effective team of magistrates,** men whose detective work and interrogation skills persuaded many of the guilty to confess. Their investigations, known as the ‘mani pulite’ (‘Clean Hands’) campaign, found hundreds of people from the government coalition guilty of receiving bribes and putting the money into their parties’ coffers and, in many cases, their own pockets.
The scandal engulfed and destroyed the political system of the previous half-century. Over the sixteen years of Craxi’s reign as their leader, the socialists had already acquired a reputation as Italy’s most dishonest party, and the magistrates’ investigations now confirmed it. Craxi himself brazenly denied the many charges of corruption against himself but, on realizing a conviction was inevitable, he fled to his villa in Tunisia, never to return. He was declared a fugitive of justice and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison; meanwhile his deputy went to jail, and his party disappeared. Other parties, also guilty of corruption, disbanded or simply disintegrated. The christian democrats dissolved their party in 1994, although many of them refused to accept that their political lives were over. Whatever future they might still have made together was sabotaged, however, by internal divisions, and their members were soon dispersing in different directions, some to the neo-fascists, some to new formations and others to a Centre-Left coalition known as ‘the Olive Tree’; one independent group tried for years to make itself a pivotal force at the centre of politics but never quite succeeded in doing so.
As well as rejecting their discredited politicians, Italians also condemned the process that had produced them. Fed up with proportional representation, a system that had immobilized politics and kept the same party in power, they voted in a referendum in 1993 for something more like Westminster. As the appropriate legislation proceeded through parliament, the Governor of the Bank of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was appointed prime minister to take care of the economy. By the time he resigned, a few months later, Italy had a new system: the Chamber of Deputies would have just one-quarter of its members elected by proportional representation and the rest by a ‘first-past-the-post’ system in single-member constituencies.