Cowen's Sicily and Mine

Tyler rolls his eyes at an NYT account of prodigal misspending at the Italian Tourist Board, particularly in respect to the South and Sicily.     He's right of course, but here's a guilty secret: hang the Tourist Board, I'd list Sicily as one of my own favorite tourist destinations.  I first stumbled on it alone back in 1985, diverting myself with a long weekend away from a work assignment in Rome.    I told Mrs. Buce we had to get back there together and indeed we've traveled the island a couple of times since.  In all, I've pretty well scoured the place by car bus and train and I'll go again tonight if you are offering.  

There are tourists in Sicily and facilities sufficient to care for them--Taormina is the first place where I ever stayed in a hotel with a rack rate of 800 Euros, though happily I was not paying rack rate.   Things do seem to have gotten busier with time: in '85 I had the sere, spooky unfinished temple at Segesta all to myself; two years ago we found it equipped with full tourist array.    One thing Sicily mostly does without:  the walls of high-rises one finds blazoned along the Costa del Sol.  Too bad for Sicilians who want to make a few coins, but I say thank heavens for waste and sloth at the Tourist Board.

Bibliography:plenty of good stuff to read by Sicilians or about Sicily but I have a nostalgic soft spot for Goethe's Italian Journey, my companion on that solo first foray 29 years ago, and still the only bit of Goethe that I can say I unreservedly enjoyed.  Here's a brief appreciation of the Sicilian chapters.

I Can't Quite Figure Out David Gilmour

David Gilmour is the author of one of my favorite short biographies (of Giuseppe di Lampadusa, author of The  Leopard) and of several other books that I've read with pleasure and profit.   Right now I'm finishing up his In Search of Italy and I can't quite figure out what to make of it.

On the surface, it looks like it might be a yawn: a 10-peaks-in-10-weeks slog through a lot of long-forgotten dates and names.  It does start a bit slowly--about the Romans he doesn't have a lot to add but then the competition is pretty stiff. It is in the Renaissance that he really hits his stride.  Yes, there are a lot of names and dates, but this is definitely not just predigested Wiki: rather, he shows an extraordinary knack for for the crisp and lethal insight about people and correspondingly about entire social movements.  He is particularly good on the late 19th Century: his is one of the most helpful brief accounts I ever saw of the Cavour/Garibaldi revolution, giving full display to its essential fraudulence and self-delusion.  Which is not to say that his tone is particularly savage: indeed his very restraint is enough to make his account all the more telling.

And here's the puzzle.  A book like this usually begins with an account of how much the author loves his subject--at one point I had the impression that Gilmour actually lived in Italy though I now think I am mistaken.  Yet it's odd to see how someone who really loves the country could tell the story with which measured detachment--neither lost in his own enthusiasm, not choked in bitterness.  What we have instead is some marvelous story telling set against a background of almost glacial reserve.

By way of a taste, here is Gilmour's account of "the partisans," famed in song and story, who fought so valiantly (as we are told) against the retreating Germans in World War II.   You can find their memory kept green "in Verona’s Piazza Brà, beside the great Roman amphitheater," in the statue 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’."  Gilmour elaborates:

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.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 5833-5842). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

What I've Learned about Italian Nationalism from David Gilmour

Before this weekend, I knew enough about European history to know that Italy was/is "a geographical expression,"--a cut-and-paste smoke-and-mirrors nation-state, held together by the delusions and fantasies of its sponsors more than any durable threads in the fabric.  I more or less knew that  the fantasy was largely the fault responsibility of Giuseppe Mazzini and his ilk--19th Century dreamers/intriguers who imagined the Italian community:

[T]he goal that he and his democratic followers aimed for was simply an Italy that would be both independent and undivided. Only a unitary state, they believed, would liberate Italy from its age-old rivalries.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2698-2700). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

What I didn't know is that there were others on the left--not just the old fogeys of authoritarianism and empire--who did not see it that way.  These "others" believed

that only regard for [Italy's endemic internecine]  rivalries would allow Italians to respect each other’s differences and live together in harmony: a unitary state could never conceivably work in so diverse a country. The foremost federalist was the brilliant Milanese intellectual Carlo Cattaneo, who considered ‘the ancient love of liberty in Italy’ to be more important than ‘the cult of unity’. Like Guicciardini 300 years earlier, he believed that Italy had prospered from competition between the cities and argued that a political system that failed to take the communal spirit into account would not succeed. In his eyes this spirit was far from being a medieval irrelevance: it was alive – as it still is, 

remaining a vital component of the national identity even today. Cattaneo did not greatly exaggerate when he claimed, ‘The communes are the nation: they are the nation in the most innermost sanctuary of its liberty.’  Cattaneo was no romantic nationalist. Indeed he believed that nationalism was essentially illiberal – an unusual credence in those days – and he suspected with some reason that this would be the case with Piedmont. As a Milanese historian, he was aware of the old Piedmontese custom of grabbing and annexing bits of Lombardy, and he was rightly apprehensive about the ambitions of the Savoia monarchs in his own time. As a Lombard, he was also aware of his region’s ancient trading relationships beyond the Alps and recognized that there could be advantages, administrative and economic, in becoming a self-governing part of the Habsburg Empire. Such advantages would obviously disappear if Lombardy were to be annexed by Piedmont. 

 Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2699-2705). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.


I've spent a bit of time in and around Italy and I have to admit I don't remember ever hearing  of Carlo Cattanio before.


 

Come Here and you will Find Nothing, Nothing!

Everyone agrees that Venice is different from anywhere else. Visitors immediately see that it has no hills and that its streets are full of water; soon they also notice that it has neither ramparts nor a castle; the Doge’s Palace, the headquarters of the Venetian Empire, is unfortified. As they wander about, they will observe that there are no fountains, no ruins and not many statues in public places; since it was founded after the fall of Rome, it has no amphitheatres, no triumphal arches and no classical archaeologists.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 1712-1716). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Remembering and "I Remember"

Mr. and Mrs. Buce enjoyed a Netflix screening last night of Fellini's Amarcord -- "I Remember" in the dialect of Rimini, Fellini's childhood home (so they say: I never heard the word anyplace else).   I must say I enjoyed it a lot more than I did on my first exposure perhaps 30 years ago--enjoyed it more, largely because I got it better.  At least in those days, I was not one of those who enjoyed carefree summers in Italy (cf. Dave Thomson, infra.): I had never set foot in the place.  Since then I've had the good fortune to spend a fair amount of time in Italy, not always carefree and not always summer, but absorbing and instructive for all that.  I've read  fair amount about the place and even picked up a smattering of a smattering of the language.  But whatever--the point is I think I have a somewhat better sense now of what he was up to.

I suppose there is no dispute with the notion that Amarcord holds a  place in the movie canon--and canonical or  not, it has a 91-91 at Rotten Tomatoes.  But I think it is harder to say just why it is so well loved.  The negative reviews are intense.  My first thought is that is that they just don't get it.  Then again, I'm not sure the positive reviews always get it, either: the movie just  be more subtle and complex than either its friends or its enemies understand.

So: the standard pitch is that Amarcord is a nostalgia trip, a gauzy and self-gratifying recollection of the director's adolescence just before World War II (the auteur would have turned 18 in 1938).  Most people find this a virtue and they are not entirely wrong: it is a nostalgia trip, and a good nostalgia trip is hard not to like.

A few dissenters   agree that it's a nostalgia trip but count that as more of a defect than a virtue. A few see it as just a bunch of fascist ruffians (or worse, cadet ruffians, ruffian wannabees), and what's so pretty about that? Some--Thomson--fault it for ducking all the hard questions, i.e., how did we (Italians) get into this mess and more  important, how do we get out?

I suppose Thomson is right on the big-picture aspect: there is essentially nothing here by way of larger context.  But as to the picture itself: I wonder if the picture is perhaps both a gauzy nostalgia trip and an unpleasant fascist cartoon?    Wouldn't it be fair to say that most of our nostalgia trips are, in some sense, cartoons--buffed down and buttered up for easier digestion?  One step to maturity is the recognition of how distorted and, okay, comical those visions may have been--while recognizing that they were, after all, our visions, and that we can no more disown them than we can disown a big toe.  My guess is that Fellini understands perfectly well the absurdity of the four kids, ahem, consoling themselves in unison in the parked car, like some sort of hands-on (heh!) barbershop quartet.  He understands the absurdity, but he knows that it is he who was there, he part of it all.  On the same theme, I think he understands just how pathetically overblown his little corner of society behaved--and yet knew that it was his little corner of society which he could not disown.   Put it in harsher terms: you can see why Hitler had such contempt for his Italian allies, and you can believe that with a lot like this, it's really no wonder that there was a Mussolini.    Fellini may not show us a way in or a way out, but he knows that it his past and that he cannot--and doesn't even want to--leave it behind.

Il Divo

I'll bet we see them both in Arts and Letters Daily: two densely detailed obituaries of Giulio Andreotti, who apparently did not mind being recognized as Il Divo, the mastermind of Italian politics for most of the time since World War II, even if it  brought him perilously close to disgrace. The obit in The Telegraph is thicker with anecdote, but I'll cast my vote for Jon Tagliabue's rendering in the New York Times because he more sharply poses the central puzzle of Andreotti's long  career: how did so (seemingly) evil a man preside over the rise of Italy from near-third-world poverty to its current position is one of the  richest nations in the world?

The question is not rhetorical by which I mean I do not have a foreordained answer for it.  Could be that Andreotti was not as bad as he was cracked up to be? Or that Italy is not doing as well as I like to think?  Or--yes, I am tempted here--that the Italians have mastered the art of not letting bad government get in the way of the good life?

This is, after all, the most perfunctory of nations--the "geographic expression" in Bismark's famously dismissive one liner; the one where they didn't even pretend they spoke a common language until after World War II; the one where the Pope himself told the folks they didn't need to pay taxes (I know the Pope changed his mind on that one; it is equally conventional to remark that the change of mind seems to have got lost in the famously slow Italian mails).

Eppure si muove; and yet it moves, Galileo's folkloric recantation of his recantation. It was the title of a pretty, although perhaps a bit too cheery, account of Italian politics I read back in the 80s, round about the first time I ever went there.  On the whole, my guess that things are a tad worse  now than they were then: the postwar miracle is over, real earnings seem to have declined and that damn song-and-dance man just keeps going and going and going (we keep him because with him, we know we'll never have to pay taxes).  Which might, in the end, by Berlusconi's best defense: hey, Italians have survived and thrived under dreadful government before.

Afterthought:  I had totally forgotten that somebody actually made a movie about Andreotti (L'uomo Magro?) a few years back. I know I watched it,stuck around all the way to the end. But in retrospect, it is apparently just about as colorless and forgettable as Il Divo so often attempted to be.  For my Italy-sleaze fix, I'd rather go back and take another look at Habemus Papam, about a Pope who seemed about as gentle as the new incumbent, but didn't seem to enjoy it as much.

Meditation on the Italian Countryside

Between 1950 and 2005 the Italian countryside lost to asphalt and concrete a total of 3.66 million hectares, a figure larger than the combined size  of Tuscany and Umbria.

So David Gilmour in The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples (2011).  I can't contradict him; I never saw Italy before 1950.  But driving across southern Tuscany last fall, I was impressed at how empty it seemed.  I suppose partly the point is hill country: you certainly can't farm anything much out here and maybe the highest and best use is the production of the admirable wild boar sausage.

The other side of Rome, you find the Capuan Plane which one may think of as empty though it's not: the problem is rather that it seems to belong to the Camorra and thus becomes a place where respectable folks, Italian and otherwise, just don't want to go.  Once malaria country; evidently the mobsters are immune to the mosquito.   

È un Piccolo Mondo Dopo Tutti

The New York Times is all in a twist over whether it is really “Italian” food in Italy if the chef is from North Africa (link). Isn’t it a little late for that kind of discussion? Seems to me it has been years now that the “Italian” lace has been made by Chinese in Prato (link) and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of those Chinese lace makers never get any closer to Prato than Shanghai (I guess some of them do;, though I remember seeing Chinese on the chalkboards over the vegetable stands in the Mercato Centrale in Firenze back in 1998).

And come to think of it, wasn’t St. Augustine from Carthage (link)? And Emperor Septimus Severus from Libya (link)?

And the Soccer players? Where do the soccer players come from? And aren’t all the hookers from Romania? Okay, bad example, but you get the idea.

Bella Italia

In Gerrmany, they say, the law is a command to be obeyed. In Italy, it's a problem to be solved (link):

Italian court lets women lie about adultery

By Malcolm Moore in Rome

Last Updated: 10:28am GMT 08/03/2008

In a victory for Italian adulterers, the country's Supreme Court has ruled that it is acceptable for wives to lie in order to cover up an affair. The court said that a 48-year-old woman from Orbetello in Tuscany, named only as Carla, was within her rights to lie to police over having a lover.

The case arose when her boyfriend, Giovanni, was arrested by police for making abusive phone calls to her husband, Vincenzo.

When the police asked Carla whether she had lent her mobile phone to her lover, she said she did not have a lover and that she had not lent him her phone.

In court, her lawyers argued that she was trying "to save herself from a grave and inevitable stain on her honour". ...

HT: Howard J. Bashman

On Public TV Patient No. 1 (And a Noninfectious Wet Kiss To the Italians)

Revere at Effect Measure undertakes to defend Public TB Case No. 1 (link):

According to him -- and he says he has it on tape -- he was told he wasn't a risk to anyone before he left. By all accounts this was, and probably still is, true (I will review the evidence in another post). He had no cough or fever or other symptoms (i.e., he has latent, not active TB at this time) and his sputum had no visible tubercle bacilli under the microscope. In other words, he is like 95% of people infected with this bug, not sick. Most are also not infectious. The diagnosis that he was potentially infectious must have come from culturing the sputum for the TB organism, which grows very slowly. It can take months, sometimes. Again, when it grew they probably tested it against the usual drugs and found it was resistant to the first line ones. At that point they likely started the culture growing again against the second line drugs. That takes more time, and he was in Europe before it was discovered it was resistant to those as well, i.e., that he had XDR-TB.

Okay so far. But:

It's at this point things start to unravel. Like most people infected with TB he isn't sick, but the TB can start up and cause active illness at any time. And active TB with XDR strains has a fairly high mortality, not because it is more virulent (it isn't), or more infectious (it isn't) but because TB is not a good disease and it can kill you. We don't fear it now in the US because we have drugs for it. Except, of course, if it is XDR.

So as I imagine the circumstance, here's a guy whose life suddenly turns in an instant. He gets a message from CDC he now has a life changing disease and his only shot at cure is in a hospital in Denver. But he is told he has to report to Italian authorities and stay in an Italian hospital for an undetermined, possibly indefinite, length of time, during which they may irreparably damage the chance of successful treatment by using an improper drug regimen. So he panics and heads for home. It is important to note this guy was not a fugitive. He wasn't running from anything. He was running to something (home, family and his chance to be cured). As soon as he reached US soil he turned himself in.

It’s an honorable effort, but it has some problems, which Revere himself seems tacitly to acknowledge. The first words are “according to him”—i.e., we’re asked to exonerate the defendant on defense testimony only. I wouldn’t take that one to the bank.

The second part seems to me more challenging. My first thought, watching the story on Jim Lehrer last night, was that the patient's conduct from Italy on was inexcusable. Revere makes a beguiling argument—but it’s not so much as a defense as an excuse, a plea for forgiveness.

As a judge, I’d give it a thought at sentencing phase, even if not on guilt. But let me offer a response. That is: if I had to pick a country whose hospital I might be stuck in, Italy might very well be my first choice. They may not be the most high-tech, but they are super diagnosticians, and they are fine at patient care. You may have to bribe the nurses for patient care, but you might eat well. I guess my only concern is that when the Italians decide you’re done, you’re done—none of this nonsense about “extraordinary means.”

Remembering Salvatore

Yesterday I linked (via Michael Froomkin) to this wonderful story about the long-forgotten time when France thought it a cool idea to merge with the United Kingdom. It prrompted my memory of another such episode, almost equally bizarre. Does anyone remember Salvatore Giuliano, the the bandit king of Sicily (as I suspect some newspaper called him) who spread a bit of hope and a fair amount of misery around Sicily just after World War II? He’s a case study of what Eric Hobsbarm anatomized in his superb contextualized study, Bandits (although Giuliano does not appear in the index).

Giuliano seems to fit the classic bandit model pretty well—decentralized peasant population, exploitative and inefficient government, superstition, bitterness, apocalyptic dreams. I first learned about him from Eleanor Clark’s Rome and a Villa, one of the more successful entries in the crowded field of Italian travel books. There is also apparently a movie (here is an enthusiastic review), although I never saw it.

Anyway, among Giuliano’s many wild ideas was the notion that Sicily should merge with the United States. He wrote a friendly letter to Harry Truman (sovereign to sovereign?) exploring the possibility. I don't remember that he got an answer ("President Truman has read your letter with great interest...") It takes a bit of imagination to remember back to the time when people in other countries wanted to join up wholesale with the Anglo-American world—instead, I guess, of just doing it retail, as has become the pattern.

Soon enough, Giuliano came to be a nuisance to what passed for a government in rural Sicily—the Mafia—and they squashed him like a bug. And no, he is not the grandfather of the Mayor of New York—“o” (singular) instead of “i” plural.