A couple of weeks ago I was in the EU, more specifically in Italy. Even in the era of the internet and virtual reality, it seems to me that it remains an undisputed truism that to fully understand a people or a polity one has to first learn the language of those people in order to read their great writers and poets, and secondly, and just as importantly, one has to visit their country and physically live with them for a while. That is to say a concomitant journey through time and space is necessary. Only then one begins to understand the mores, the culture, and indeed the very being and identity of a people. To merely read a translated grand historical narrative of their culture may prove informative and educational, even inspiring, but it remains inadequate.

For most of the students that I and a colleague in the Art Department from Broward College accompanied abroad, it was their first time in Europe. They were seeing Italy with fresh eyes and were surprised by it all: the art, the language, the architecture, the strange customs, the climate, the superb cuisine, the smells, the churches, the synagogues, the mosques (ancient or modern, empty or well attended), the wine, the shopping of beautiful artifacts; the aesthetic sense, the fashion, the soccer games, the bicycle races, the museums, the paintings, the sculptures, the Ferraris, the pastry shops, the gelato shops, the bread, the opera, the tiramisu, the artisan’s shops, the Sistine chapel, the Colosseum, the Forum Romanun, the David, the Moses, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Maria del Fiore, Santa Croce, St. Peter square, Piazza Navona, and the list could on and on. Naturally they fell in love with the country. How could they possibly not. You could see the enthusiasm and the cultural shock on their faces as they came to class in the morning at the University of Urbino where they were pursuing courses in Italian art, civilization and language. They asked all kinds of strange questions such as why Italian showers had a cord hanging in them.  I’d reply that such a cord was to be used only in case of emergency, in case one slipped in the shower and hurt oneself. They found that strange.

I’d bump into them later in the main square of Urbino (Piazza della Repubblica) eating a gelato, or in the famed Ducal palace of Federico of Montefeltro (dubbed by Kenneth Clark the prototype of Renaissance palaces and the most beautiful in the world) viewing an extraordinary display of Raphael painting, a special this year, Raphael being a native of Urbino; or at night in the same palace’s beautifully lit courtyard where a series of international Renaissance concerts were performed. It was like being in a sort of magical place back in time surrounded by sheer beauty. Indeed, how could they not be impressed by it all?

Of course I was glad of their enthusiasm and did nothing to dampen it in any way but I retained an internal smile throughout. For you see, I have lived in Italy for a quarter of my life; I could not possibly see it the same way they saw it; I saw it with different eyes. I kept remembering and comparing things as they were decades ago and things as they are now. And the compost picture that came out of that comparison was not a pretty one. I’d like to share with the reader some of the reflections on those comparisons. It occurred to me that Italy in 1951 was one of the six founding member states of the European Union at the signing of the Treaty of Rome. She had just come out of some twenty five years of fascism and a disastrous war which has left her in shambles. In 1945, having disposed of Mussolini, fascism, the king and the monarchy the Italian people established a republic. 

The preeminent architect of that republic, who became its first prime minister, was Alcide De Gasperi. He, together with Robert Shumman and Jean Monet in France, and Konrad Aidenouer in Germany advocated the founding of a European Union to prevent, once a for all, another world war on the European continent. These men were real statesmen because they possessed a vision of what a united Europe could symbolize and accomplish in the world. Had they written a constitution it would certainly not have been the uninspiring treaty (the so called Treaty of Lisbon) which wants to pass as a constitution and justifiably rejected at the polls by the people of three member nations.

Compare that to what we have today in Italy. A prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who far from being a visionary considers Italy his private corporation of which he is the presiding CEO. At the Aquila G8 meeting he had the effrontery to go around advocating more ethical behavior in economic matters and quoting the social encyclical of the Pope which had just come out. No wonder he is largely seen as the clown of Europe, a fornicator who thinks nothing about sleeping with prostitutes in Palazzo Ghigi, the residence of the prime minister, and then lies about it, so that we were treated to the sorry spectacle of a prostitute telling the truth and a prime minister lying.

To add some humor to it all, as it befits a clown, he promised to go on pilgrimage to Monte Rotondo, the place where the Capuchin friar Saint Padre Pio lived some forty years ago where he would seek forgiveness and redemption. It sounds like a Boccaccio tale from the Decameron and yet incredibly the majority of Italians continue to support him; they don’t believe that fornicating and lying is such a big deal; which says much about the ethical values of present day Italy that tolerates what would have been unheard of at the times of a De Gasperi. The repeated requested of the President of Italy Napolitano that Berlusconi answer some of the legitimate questions of Parliament about his private conduct went unheeded.

As Vico points out in The New Science, at the end of a civilization shame disappears and the whole civilization goes crazy. Not even an economic crisis has distracted most Italians from the pursuit of mere material possessions and pleasures and la dolce vita in general. Compared to 1950 we have today a much more materially prosperous country that is however destitute in spiritual values. In that sense Italy who gave us the Renaissance and the beginning of the modern world can function as a mirror to the rest of Europe and indeed Western civilization.

But on a more political level there is something even more ominous and troubling than the mere clowning of Berlusconi and the deteriorating moral standards of the country’s elites. It is the phenomenon of the so called “ronde,’ (a military term suggesting the patrolling of the military police) i.e., self-appointed vigilante groups who go around big Italian cities patrolling the streets and stopping people according to a profile of those they consider immigrants and/or terrorists. Somehow the two are grouped together. At piazza della Reppublica in Urbino I met an American who told me that he was one of the ronde’s victims. He was stopped, asked to produce a passport and questioned. What was his crime? He sported a beard, and that in itself  made him a suspect. If that reminds the reader of the Nazi vigilante groups in brown shirts of the 1930s, he would not be too far from the mark. This going on, mind you, in a modern democratic nation, proud of being one of the founding members of the EU.

The “ronde” of course are very much in sinc with the xenophobic philosophy of Umberto Bossi, one of the ministers allied with Berlusconi, leader of the Lega party which advocates the secession of the so called “popolo Padano,” a term Bossi invented, for there is no such people historically; that is to say, the secession of the whole of northern Italy, the most affluent part of Italy, from the rest of the country. Ironically this is happening 150 years after Italian unification and in the era of a allegedly dwindling nationalism within the EU. So when one of the major architect of Italian unification, Cavour, said that “now that we have made Italy we need to make the Italian” and when the Prince of Salina in The Leopard says that we have to change everything so that nothing changes, they were in a way acknowledging that such a union was an artificial political union created from the top down aiming at the aping of European nationalism with no sense of an organic cultural identity of the whole Italian people.

Here too, I would suggest that Italy functions as a mirror to the rest of the EU; for indeed vigilantism and xenophobia is on the ascendancy even outside of Italy, in allegedly liberal countries like the Netherlands and Denmark. Vigilantism suggests that the cultural identity of this brand new European (the “Newropean,” so called) is quite fragile. Churhes are abandoned since everybody is in soccer stadiums on Sunday and religion is equivalent for many Europeans to medieval obscurantism, but then it is resented when Moslem immigrants buy them and transform them into mosques. One begins to suspect that the same slogan can be applied to the EU: now that we have made Europe politically, we need to make the Europeans. One is bound to ask: has the cart once again has been put before the horse?

The result in the unified Italy of 1861 was the creation of two countries which pretended to be one: a Northern Italy and a Southern Italy, not to speak of Rome which was still in the hands of the Church at the time. If the reader thinks this an anachronism of sort, that modern Italy has transcended such divisions, he would be greatly mistaken. An event which happened while I was there a few weeks ago is illustrative. An Italian parliamentarian from the Lega Party by the name of Salvini (who will soon grace the halls of the European parliament in Strasburg) was recently recorded shouting a song at a soccer game which went like this: “arrivano i Napoletani, anche is cani se ne scappano dalla puzza” (here come the Neapolitans, even dogs run away from the stench). Need one say more? What is ironic even here is that all this is happening while the europarlamentarians in the EU parliament bravely speaks of a European identity beyond nationalism. I wonder what the europarlamentarian Salvini will be speaking about when he gets there.

It was at that absurd point that I took three of the students with me for a short trip to Southern Italy while the others went to Venice. They had no idea that there was another Italy from Rome down. When they arrived in Bitonto, they saw a Italy just as cultured and even more affable than the other. A Italy where it is possible in a city of 60,000 inhabitants (Bitonto) to open a state museum free to the public from a donation of an art collection gathered over half a century (the Devanna museum of which I have spoken in another article a few months ago (see Ovi of 22 April 2009) and containing masterpieces by Artemisia Gentilieschi, el Greco, De Nittis, Veronese, Titian, Delacroix, Stella, just to mention a few. Those three students were very glad to have visited Southern Italy. It encouraged three others in fact to visit Naples and Pompei later on. I hope that such visits to the land of Magna Grecia which precedes the Romans, become a regular feature of summer study trips to Italy.

The other two social phenomena which I observed but which I reserve for future articles for they would take us too far afield, is that of the presence in Italy of the extra-communitarians, that is to say, people from outside the EU who arrive by the thousands, legally and often illegally, mostly Africans and Moslems. The other is the narcissism and egomania observable in the youth of Italy. Here too there is an obvious conscious imitation of one of the worst features of American popular culture. The same youth at times will also be consciously anti-American. It’s like having the cake and eating it too.

There is plenty of food for thought in those impressions of Italy and I am still ruminating on them. Suffice here to end with this though, not everything that is progressive and the latest fashion is necessarily progress. Some of it is regression. Indeed progress is not deterministic and inevitable. But there is more to come. Stay tuned.