will note that the minister’s brother-in-law’s wife is on the board of a company that makes, among other things, prosthetics. And if a newspaper mounts a campaign against, say, a firm for secretly selling eavesdropping equipment to an unsavory foreign dictatorship, the dietrologo will note that the paper’s shareholders include a company that operates in the same sector as the one whose wrongdoing has been uncovered. The essence of dietrologia is that it dismisses the notion that anyone could act purely for reasons of moral conviction.
But then in Italy what you get is seldom what you see—or hear. Long after I returned, I was having coffee with a fellow journalist and the conversation turned to an incident that had made news that week. It was election time, and Silvio Berlusconi was bringing his campaign to an end in Rome. The pollsters all agreed that the capital was critical to the outcome of the vote, but Rome had never been particularly easy terrain for Berlusconi, who comes from Milan. So it was not difficult to understand how his campaign aides had reacted when the AS Roma captain, Francesco Totti, said he would be voting against Berlusconi’s candidate in the mayoral election that was being held at the same time. The engaging Totti had the status of a demigod among AS Roma fans and in a city where, for many, soccer is more of a cult than a sport, his remark could have swung the vote. The night before at his closing rally Berlusconi had made things worse for himself by saying Totti was “out of his mind.”
But that morning, he had abruptly changed his tune. In a radio interview, he had praised the Roma captain as “a great lad and great footballer.” He went on: “I’ve always been fond of him. And anyway his wife works for a TV channel in my group.”
Returning from the bar, I must have said something like, “So, Berlusconi has buried the hatchet,” because my Italian colleague stopped dead in the street and looked at me with utter astonishment.
“You really haven’t understood, have you?” she asked.
“What?”
“That wasn’t a burying of the hatchet. For me, that was a warning. He was saying: ‘Watch it, Totti. Remember that your wife works for my company. One more remark like that before election day and she could be looking for work elsewhere.’ That’s the way any Italian would have understood it.”
The use of symbols and metaphors, the endless interplay between illusion and reality, the difficulty of getting at a commonly accepted truth: these are all things that make Italy both frustrating and endlessly intriguing—not least because they raise the tantalizing question of why a people who spend so much of their time peering behind masks and facades should nevertheless be so concerned with appearances, with what they see on the surface.
CHAPTER 6
Face Values
L’unico metodo infallibile per conoscere il prossimo è giudicarlo dalle apparenze.
The only infallible way to know another person is to judge him by his appearance.
Antonio Amurri
T he hero of Sandro Veronesi’s novel La forza del passato never got along with his father. 1 For one thing, his late father was—or at least seemed to be—a die-hard right-winger. At one point, Veronesi’s hero-narrator remembers an evening in the 1970s when they were watching a press conference given by Giorgio Almirante, the then leader of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). His mother was in the kitchen, baking a cake.
“He and I were alone, without mediators, an ideal situation for degeneration. Almirante was speaking, and I kept quiet in order to let my father make the first move, the better to decide on which attack to unleash; but strangely, rather than his usual opening provocation (something like ‘He’s certainly not wrong there’), this time he kept quiet too. By then Almirante had gotten to the fourth answer and neither of us had yet said a word, when, finally, my father spoke. ‘Never trust men who wear
But then in Italy what you get is seldom what you see—or hear. Long after I returned, I was having coffee with a fellow journalist and the conversation turned to an incident that had made news that week. It was election time, and Silvio Berlusconi was bringing his campaign to an end in Rome. The pollsters all agreed that the capital was critical to the outcome of the vote, but Rome had never been particularly easy terrain for Berlusconi, who comes from Milan. So it was not difficult to understand how his campaign aides had reacted when the AS Roma captain, Francesco Totti, said he would be voting against Berlusconi’s candidate in the mayoral election that was being held at the same time. The engaging Totti had the status of a demigod among AS Roma fans and in a city where, for many, soccer is more of a cult than a sport, his remark could have swung the vote. The night before at his closing rally Berlusconi had made things worse for himself by saying Totti was “out of his mind.”
But that morning, he had abruptly changed his tune. In a radio interview, he had praised the Roma captain as “a great lad and great footballer.” He went on: “I’ve always been fond of him. And anyway his wife works for a TV channel in my group.”
Returning from the bar, I must have said something like, “So, Berlusconi has buried the hatchet,” because my Italian colleague stopped dead in the street and looked at me with utter astonishment.
“You really haven’t understood, have you?” she asked.
“What?”
“That wasn’t a burying of the hatchet. For me, that was a warning. He was saying: ‘Watch it, Totti. Remember that your wife works for my company. One more remark like that before election day and she could be looking for work elsewhere.’ That’s the way any Italian would have understood it.”
The use of symbols and metaphors, the endless interplay between illusion and reality, the difficulty of getting at a commonly accepted truth: these are all things that make Italy both frustrating and endlessly intriguing—not least because they raise the tantalizing question of why a people who spend so much of their time peering behind masks and facades should nevertheless be so concerned with appearances, with what they see on the surface.
CHAPTER 6
Face Values
L’unico metodo infallibile per conoscere il prossimo è giudicarlo dalle apparenze.
The only infallible way to know another person is to judge him by his appearance.
Antonio Amurri
T he hero of Sandro Veronesi’s novel La forza del passato never got along with his father. 1 For one thing, his late father was—or at least seemed to be—a die-hard right-winger. At one point, Veronesi’s hero-narrator remembers an evening in the 1970s when they were watching a press conference given by Giorgio Almirante, the then leader of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). His mother was in the kitchen, baking a cake.
“He and I were alone, without mediators, an ideal situation for degeneration. Almirante was speaking, and I kept quiet in order to let my father make the first move, the better to decide on which attack to unleash; but strangely, rather than his usual opening provocation (something like ‘He’s certainly not wrong there’), this time he kept quiet too. By then Almirante had gotten to the fourth answer and neither of us had yet said a word, when, finally, my father spoke. ‘Never trust men who wear
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