Life, Italian Style

WHEN TOBIAS JONES moved from England to Italy in 1999, he expected to find the pastoral bliss described by centuries of poets. On the evidence of this book, it appears that Jones passed his time in Parma sipping Chianti, chatting about Renaissance art, visiting ruins, eating four-course pranzi, and admiring Italian women. Which is exactly how one expects a man of culture from a bleak, uncivilized Protestant country to behave.

Had Jones written his book solely on the basis of these diversions, he likely would have produced a sentimental portrait of Italian life. But, in the best reforming spirit (Jones’s Italian friends called him il calvinista, “the Calvinist”), he resolved not to be seduced by the dazzling exterior of Italy, but to probe its soul, its “dark heart.” There he found, among other things, a society of criminality, injustice, civil war, and terrorism–with, at the very top, prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

First released in Britain in 2003, Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy caused an uproar in Italy, where several members of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party denounced Jones, improbably, as a “foreign Trotskyist” and member of a worldwide left-wing conspiracy to defame the prime minister. When an Italian translation of the book was finally printed this year (not before the book had become the bestselling English-language book in Italian retail history), men close to Berlusconi once again publicly rebuked Jones. Meantime, the Italian public, always unpatriotic, enthusiastically greeted Jones’s criticisms of its country. Now that the American edition has appeared, readers here will be able to judge for themselves whether this book is really an unfair attack on Italy or, as Jones intends it, a deeper look at the country than has been taken by previous observers.

In truth, much of The Dark Heart of Italy is conventional travel writing. Jones spends ample time in the book celebrating the numerous happy virtues of Italian life and lamenting the absence of these in England. He cherishes the generous, lively, “exquisitely refined,” and intelligent character of the average Italian. He dilates upon the excellent food and asserts that life in Italy, with its leisurely pace, with its time devoted to intellectual conversation, is much more civilized than life in England. And he takes care to notice little things that, in his home country, would seem unusual: “The care put into buying shoes, tablecloths, handbags, and clothes is extraordinary. . . . Even at two in the morning, groups of women gather outside shop-windows and discuss the width of sandal straps in the same amicably heated way that old men discuss Verdi.”

But the most interesting parts of the book are those that provocatively examine other aspects of Italian life. Typically, Jones introduces a certain facet of Italian life, recollects his positive first impressions about it, and then explains how, in time, he discovered the grim realities underneath. So, for instance, in the chapter on learning how to speak Italian: Jones says at first he enjoyed the euphonious sound of Italian, and the zestful, expressive use of hand gestures he witnessed in Italian conversations. (He even admired the flair Italians showed for insult.) But then it turns out that Italian was not so happy a language. He found that getting others to believe him was not a matter of plain speaking, but one of being studiedly pompous and orotund (parlantina, this is called). He discovered that the most humdrum people demanded to be addressed by ridiculous titles (“every graduate is called ‘doctor,’ . . . a weather forecaster has to be at least lieutenant colonel”). And too often, he saw that only an obsequious style of speaking helped him get his way with officials and petty bureaucrats. The delight of learning the language gave way to frustration.

In the chapter on Italian soccer, Jones records a similar experience: At first he gushed at the precise, technical, elegant style of the Italian game. But later he discovered that soccer in Italy, as a business, is frequently racked by scandals involving ineligible players, drugs, racism, shady accounting, and financial crises. Likewise in the chapter on Italian capitalism (“Fewer Taxes for Everyone”), Jones begins with praise for Italy’s highly skilled artisan class, only to say that Italy’s extensive black economy and favor-based labor system make the country hostile to foreign investment. Another chapter exposes Italy’s slow, ineffective justice system; still another attacks Italian television. Jones also records his painful confusion at the political terrorism that rends the country. Ills in Italy are never met with reform, and crimes never lead to punishment. As the Italians say, non paga nessuno–no one pays.

But the thread that runs through the book, connecting the different chapters, is Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister since May 2001. Permanently tanned, rich, and a ladies’ man with the nickname “the Great Seducer,” Berlusconi has a sunny charm that is not lost on Jones.

But, though conceding him high personal qualities, Jones offers criticisms of Berlusconi that might have come straight from the most corrosive issues of the Economist (which has devoted several issues to attacking Berlusconi). The prime minister is accused of perjury, money-laundering, pressuring journalists, bribing judges, sacrificing the common good of the country to his own interests, and ignoring civil rights. The British edition of the book ran, on its cover, a photograph of Berlusconi “standing on a balcony in Milan, smiling at his adulatory supporters, looking uncannily like Benito Mussolini.”

In the end, though, The Dark Heart of Italy remains the work of a foreigner, for its avowed intention of discovering the soul of Italy is never achieved. Jones’s criticisms recognize that something is not right but cannot reach down to the underlying causes. This is especially clear in the chapter on Italy’s “Slaughter Commission,” in which Jones seems mainly to quote the writing of others. Only in the chapter on Catholicism in Italy, which recalls a moving visit Jones paid to Piedmont (where a Protestant minority lives), is any truly illuminating work done.

Still, The Dark Heart of Italy partakes of the tradition of bold cultural writing. It is reminiscent of such works as Edmund Wilson’s Europe Without Baedeker and V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers. Interestingly, multiculturalism, which seeks to open one’s eyes to other cultures and to induce modesty about one’s heritage, has not led to much rich travel writing.

In avoiding the decadence of most travel writing, which treats countries from the point of view of their beaches and ice cream shops, Jones has achieved one of his central goals, which was to go beneath the surface. But whether he found the heart of Italy, or only new illusions, is a different question.

Stephen Barbara is a writer in Hoboken, New Jersey.