Vaffa!

I’m going to ask you to imagine that we have just had a general election.  I’m going to do more than that: I want you to imagine that the Monster Raving Looney Party has emerged as the strongest force in Parliament.  Impossible, you say; such a thing is beyond imagination.  Oh, no, it is not; at least it’s not in Italy.  Following the recent election Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement attracted a quarter of the vote.  It now has 108 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, and 54 in the Senate.

Who’s Beppe Grillo, you ask?  He’s a comedian, that’s who he is, part of a long tradition of Italian funny men.  Where people once chanted ‘Du-ce!’ ‘Du-ce!’ then now chant ‘Bep-pe! Bep-pe!’ His story is remarkable, even more remarkable in some ways than that of Mussolini.  Turning from jokes to political activism, Il Beppe founded the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S) – the Five Star movement – in Milan in October, 2009, the very same city, incidentally, where life was first breathed into Fascism in 1919.  The capital V in the party title – well, not so much a party as a movement – stands for Vaffa!, the leader’s own signature, which roughly translates as Fuck off! 

And how Grillo wants so much in Italian life, particularly to Italian politics, to, well, Vaffa!  Ever since 2005, when he started his blog, now the most popular in Italy, he has gathered a large following among the disaffected, chiefly from the young.  Many of his new MPs and Senators only just scrape past the minimum 25 age limit for entering Parliament.  These are the people for whom, in their disgust, Vaffa! has become the watchword; these are the people who have been the devotees of Beppe’s Vaffa! Day, or V Day, set up in 2007.

All politicians are crooks, says Beppe, apart from his own, of course, a line that echoes all the way back to 1919.  He’s now had his very own, and rather remarkable, March on Rome.  The Economist, that maiden aunt of political journalism, is tut tutting its disapproval in the latest issue.  Send in the clowns, the old dear trumpets across her front cover, with an additional How Italy’s disastrous election threatens the future of the euro.  Inside the humourless dowager drones on about those naughty Italian children, determined as they are to avoid reality.  It’s not just the future of the euro that is threatened, she witters on, but the future of Italy itself.

Dear, oh dear, there is Beppe and Silvio Berlusconi, the other clown who made a reasonably good showing, moving ever forward while “...Mario Monti, the reform-minded technocrat who has led Italy for the past 15 months and restored much of its battered credibility, got a measly 10%”  Really, there is only one word for that and the word is...Vaffa! 

Democracy would be all right if it wasn’t for the voters.  That’s the reality of the European Union, a reality clearly endorsed by the Economist.  The people did not want Monti; Monti was imposed upon them.  Now the people, rather inconveniently, have spoken, exposing the fraudulent politics of Europe with a bold finger gesture.  Me ne freggo! – I don’t give a damn - , now there is another decent slogan worth reviving. 

The inconclusive result of the election is conclusive on one point at least: Italians do not want to be ruled by the technocrats, either of the Brussels or the local variety.  Monti was imposed on them in 2011 without elections by the Eurocrats.  Charles Moore puts the point very well in his Spectator Notes.  Just imagine (sorry, I hope I’m not overtaxing you here!) if David Cameron was kicked out of office by the European Central Bank, which decreed that Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority, was elevated in his place.  Yes, I too would support any British Beppe who came along, Ken Dodd or whoever, rather than the cat’s paw of the European banking-bureaucracy complex.

People can only be pushed so far before they start to get angry.  Our own anger was shown in a small way during the recent Eastleigh by-election, which saw the United Kingdom Independence Party pushing the Conservatives into a humiliating third place.  ‘It’s only a protest vote’, the Tory apparatchiks wailed, ‘The masses will return in 2015.’ Oh, really, will they?  Only, I think, if they are in a gay mood, as Cameron hopes.  But the anger over Europe, over the highhandedness of the dreadful European tyranny, grows by the day.  The Long March of UKIP is by no means over.

And then there is the onward march of Beppe.  His politics are not my politics; he is far too left-wing and statist for that, far too, ahem, fascist!  Still, he is a symptom of a growing disgust across the whole of Europe with Europe, with those who make a mockery of democracy because it does not suit their technocratic ends.  “We are all young”, the sixty-four-year old Beppe says on his blog. “We’re a movement of many people who are uniting from the bottom up.  We don’t have structures, hierarchies, bosses, secretaries...No one gives us orders.”  Yes, I am young. I turn to Brussels and I really only have one word – Vaffa!  

Spaghetti Dialectics

Have you heard of a movie called 1900?  If not, it’s a 1976 Italian extravaganza, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.  I say it’s Italian but the leading parts are mostly taken by an international cast, chiefly American.  Apart from France's Gerald Depardieu – amazingly young and thin looking – there is Robert de Niro – also amazingly young looking -, Donald Sutherland and Burt Lancaster. 

Was this, I wonder, a time when their careers were in the doldrums?  Perhaps they still had to make a name for themselves?  No, no, that can’t be true.  Lancaster was a cinematic veteran at the time.  Well, maybe he just wasn’t getting the parts anymore.  Better to star in spaghetti dialectics rather than nothing at all!

Yes, that’s what we are dealing with, a lengthy Marxist soap opera, tedious if it wasn’t so risibly ridiculous.  I knew Marxists were dim but I had no idea just how dim.  Watch it if you have the time or the inclination.  I did by invitation and I had such a fun time.  

It’s a side-splitting pastiche of Italian history from 1900 – hence the title – to 1945 and beyond.  As I say, the lead parts are mostly taken by foreigners, but the director has managed to dig up some wonderful grotesques to masquerade as the poor suffering peasants.  Looking at them it’s almost as if, Pygmalion-style, he has managed to bring a lot of gargoyles to life!

This, dear readers, is a tale with a moral, an everyday story of proletarian folk.  It begins with the birth of two boys into entirely different strata of society.  Oh, but not at the same time, you understand; for when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?  First comes the peasant, one Olmo, born into a rather revolting clan known as the Dalcos.  Olmo – eventually to be filled out in adulthood by Depardieu – is destined to be a horny handed son of toil.  Actually, no, he’s destined to be a self-righteous and sanctimonious prig. 

After him into this world is thrown Alfredo Berlinghieri, the grandson of the padrone, the landowner, destined to be padrone himself one day and destined to be Robert de Niro.  1900 is their story, the story of Olmo and Alfredo, a story of an impossible friendship of social unequals, or an impossibly funny friendship.  These two will negotiate in their separate ways through the currents and eddies of twentieth century Italian politics. 

The real excitement comes after the First World War.  Olmo goes to the front, of course, and Alfredo stays behind, of course.  Well, he also serves who only stands and stares.  Into the mix comes a certain Attilia (note the name) Mellanchini, whom Alfredo’s father has employed as a foreman.  Now we have Donald Sutherland measuring up to what must surely be the most bizarre and grotesque part in his whole acting career. 

This Mellanichi, you see, is set to become the community Blackshirt.  Oh, but not just that; he also turns out to be a sadist and a sexual pervert.  Into Marx comes Freud, which I assume is the director’s own particular dialectic, the Bertolucci factor.  The important thing is that he is a bit of an epiphenomena, no more than the creature of the padrone, without a thought or a political instinct of his own.  He is hired, if you like, in 1922 and fired in 1943, hired by the father and discarded by the son, those wicked capitalists who take up fascism when it suits them and discard it when it does not.  Simple!  Oh, I should say that the friendship between Alfredo and Olmo does nothing to stop the former allowing Attila the fascist and his gang giving the latter a good kicking at one point.  You see, it’s the class struggle in action! 

Wait!  I completely forgot to mention Regina (Laura Betti), the poor relation to whom the Berlinghieris extend their condescending charity.  She turns out to be as weird sexually and in every other sense as Attila, with whom she takes up (naturally), proving to one and all that fascism was brought into the world as a vehicle for poor relations and perverts!  Ah, Regina, how I felt for her when Alfredo introduces his glamorous French wife Ada, a touch of exotic chic by Dominique Sanda.  How will she manage, the embittered Regina muses, among the pigs, the shit and the Dalcos?  Yes, well, give me the pigs over the Dalcos any day! 

On we go thesis, antithesis and synthesis, a merry Marxist march.  At this point I’m desperately trying not to identify with the fascists (I’m no sex pervert), especially when Attila and his merry band start shooting peasants for whistling the Italian communist anthem badly out of tune.  Obviously these people are no more than rather sensitive music critics. What a pity Olmo wasn’t around, having previously made good his escape after pelting the unfortunate Attila with horse manure.  Sex pervert, yes; coprophile, no.

He turns up again, unfortunately, in 1945, a partisan and a communist; sorry, he was that all along, a socialist with holes in his pocket.  Now he is back, ready to do justice.  Attila has already been pronged and butchered – serves him right – but not before he shouts to Regina, his wife of some years, that their children will reap what has been sown on this day.  And now I call to mind the recent remark by the Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s comeback kid, that maybe Mussolini wasn’t such a bad chap after all.  A positive saint, I would say, compared with the Dalcos of this life.

Olmo does justice to his old friend the padrone, who is executed...no, not really, only symbolically, by a kangaroo court of peasant grotesques.  Where did the director dig up that munch munch woman – from the local cemetery, perhaps?  The padrone is dead; Alfredo Berlinghieri lives, proving that he is dead.  Confused?  Don’t be, for the padrone is not dead at all.  The struggle goes on, and there is Italy in the last century, after which history came to a full stop, or a Berlusconi, whichever your preference is.  Anything, anything, but a Dalco.   

Incidentally this is not movie review.  I’m just having a spot of fun, Ana’s delicious dialectical dance. :-)

IL Magnifico

If you come to Florence for the first time, a city you may have visited previously in art and imagination, there is one supreme moment of epiphany.  It is not a place that surrenders easily, unlike Rome and Venice.  But there you are, right in the centre, walking along narrow streets unknown to you.  

It's the evening of your first day.  You have not long arrived, driving up from Rome.  You are tired.  But life is short; you want to explore before going to bed, using every drop squeezed from the fruit of time.  You turn into a narrow and rising alley for pedestrians only.  On both sides are goldsmiths’ shops, so close together that you almost feel that you could reach out and touch both sides.  You reach the top of the incline.  There are no more shops.  The vista is free.  There is the River Arno.  You are at the top of the Ponte Vecchio - the Old Bridge.  This is your A Room With A View moment!  

This is the city of Dante, of the Medici, of Botticelli, of Donatello, of Machiavelli, of Savonarola, of Michelangelo and so many others.  It's a city of poets and painters, of soldiers and bankers, of prophets and outcasts.  It's where the Renaissance was born, in a place still suffused with its traces.  There is a romance to Florence, sensual, yes, but something else, something divine.  Here Dante saw Beatrice (say it in Italian: bet-reach-eeh.  It's so much more beautiful than the English pronunciation) He fell in love with perfection, and perfection was what she remained, near yet distant, adored yet unattainable.  It was by the banks of the Arno that they met for the last time, the briefest of brief encounters.  She died eight years later, aged only twenty-four.  She was his salvation, destined to live forever in one of the greatest poetic epics ever penned.

Florence is an impossible place, impossible to absorb in a few days.  I think perhaps it would take a lifetime to experience and understand all it has to offer!  I can only give you a small sampler.  Once again I visited the two Davids, Donatello's in bronze at the Bargello Museum, and Michelangelo’s marble giant in the Academia Gallery.  The later is an expression of power and virtue, a political statement, a symbol of the Florentine Republic after the Medici were temporarily cast aside.  I love it but it has an intimidating quality.  I far prefer Donatello's much more intimate creation.  Yes, I know the two are not comparable in terms of size, technique or purpose, but the bronze David, free of politics, is just so sensual, so beautiful, so superbly and simply erotic!  

To the Uffizi now, principally to see the work of Botticelli, my favourite Renaissance painter.  You've probably seen illustrations of Primavera and The Birth of Venus, but how marvellous it is to stand before them, captivating, sublime and mysterious.  I'm not presumptuous enough to hazard an interpretation of Primavera; I leave that to others.  It just thrills me.  I think the figure of Flora, off to the right, is another dimension of perfection and sensual beauty, this time in a female form.  

We had a room with a view, a view of the Duomo, the central cathedral, topped by the magnificent dome designed and built in the fifteenth century by Filippo Brunelleschi.  It was a reflection of his talent and of the grandeur of Florence.  There is another view, right at the top, a God's eye view of the city, all laid out before you.   Be warned though: the ascent from the inside of the dome is not for the feint of heart!  From the gallery I looked down to the interior far below, the place where Savonarola once preached to a congregation of thousands at the height of his power.

Not far from here is the Baptistery, the oldest building in the city, dating back to the sixth century.  Enter through the wonderful east doors, by long tradition known as The Gates of Paradise, only to be confronted, looking up to the ceiling, by the Gates of Hell!  It's breathtaking mosaic in a medieval Byzantine style, dominated by the central figure of Christ.  This is the Last Judgement, with a fearsome demon consuming the damned.  The place is busy but try, if you can, to lie on your back looking up, even only for a moment or two.

Of course it wasn’t all art and culture.  We picnicked in the park.  We dined by starlight.  There is a wonderful restaurant not far from the Ponte Vecchio where I had wild boar served with polenta, soft and succulent, complemented by some local wine.  Alas, all dreams end.  We flew back this afternoon from Pisa, back to grey old London making ready for an Olympic party.  I feel, though, that I have just descended from Mount Olympus!  

A Prophet Unarmed

The stones of Florence are suffused in history. The traces of the past are everywhere, the traces of the Medici, from magnificent beginnings to a wretched and degenerate end. The traces are there, too, of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who became, for a brief season, the avatar and prophet of the Florentine republic. I had a sense of him in his cell in the Convent of San Marco, where his eagle-beaked portrait hangs on the wall. I had a sense of him standing in the Piazza della Signoria, the site of his famous Bonfire of the Vanities, where he himself was consumed by a great bonfire in May, 1498.

He was an extraordinary figure, one of the meteors of history. He came seemingly as a prophet armed only to end as a prophet outcast. In a sense he was the Catholic Martin Luther, condemning the many abuses of the Church, particularly bad during the pontificate of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, his nemesis. Florence was his celestial city, one that was destined to inherit the legacy of Classical Rome, reforming and renewing the purity of Catholic Christianity.

Born in Ferrara, Savonarola, full of messianic vision, came to Florence at just the right time. The sun of the Medici Renaissance was in eclipse. A new and terrifying disease had come to Italy with the invading French army of Charles VIII. Not yet known as syphilis, it was simply called the French pox. The half millennium was approaching, giving all the more force to Savonarola’s message of the Last Days. Florence was to be the New Jerusalem. Alas, in the end, by his own admission, he was a false prophet, no more than a ravening wolf. Or was he?

In Savonarola: the Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet Donald Weinstein, an expert on the period, has compiled a meticulous and commendably objective biography. He has a fine eye for the man, the place and the times. He also has a talent for pithy and memorable phrases. Savonarola appealed to what he calls the ‘myth of Florence’, a city he mesmerised by his ‘charisma of grace.’

The book does an excellent job in tracing the evolution of the Dominican’s message, moving by stages from one of Christian renewal to outright millenarianism. With the army of Charles VIII, Savonarola’s ‘New Cyrus’, threatening the city, people were more and more willing to hear what God had in store for them. The Medici were exiled. The myth of Florence and the myth of Savonarola came, for a time, into perfect harmony. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

The history of Florence, and the biography of Savonarola, in the years between 1494 and 1498 is worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. It’s a complex tale of faction, counter-faction, intrigues, feuds and wars, the stuff of high Renaissance politics, a labyrinth through which the author spins a fine thread.

In his consistent determination to avoid bias Weinstein lays every fact before us, building his structure brick by brick. He makes it clear that Savonarola, contrary to appearances, was always a prophet unarmed (he was never the city republic’s political master). His power was one of persuasion, a message supported up by the coincidences of the times, the key to his initial success and his ultimate failure. It was his tragedy that he found a power within himself only to denounce it in the end, not only a result of torture but also of an acute loss of self-belief.

Sober and scholarly, Weinstein also has a talent for weaving a gripping story, full of the most memorable characters, all set against the background of papal politics, foreign invasion and Renaissance humanism. Savonarola treats the subject sympathetically, even with a degree of admiration, without falling into the dangers of complete seduction. I’ve certainly come to understand the man much better from a reading of this book, though any personal sympathy I have for him is arrested by the fact he is alleged, personally, to have consigned paintings by Sandro Botticelli to the Bonfire of the Vanities!

I love irony and I love anecdote, and the author also has a taste for both. For example, I was fascinated to discover that Charles VIII, upon whom Savonarola placed so much faith, died after banging his head on a doorframe the same day that the friar was arrested, a strange turn of fate, particularly fateful as the king was short so the door must have been even shorter!

This is a good story, lucid, meticulous and exhaustive. If you have any interest at all in biography, in history, in a fascinating life and in the even more fascinating canvas of Renaissance Italy I can assure you that there is no vanity in reading Savonarola.

Il Duce and the Naked Princess

There is a scene in Nixon, the biopic directed by Oliver Stone, recording the former president’s historic trip to China, accompanied by Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State. During an interview with Mao Zedong, Kissinger, whose reputation clearly travelled ahead of him, was pointedly asked how a fat man like him got so many women, rather ironic considering what we now know about the appalling red hypocrite. “Power, Mr Chairman”, he responded, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

I was reminded of this on reading recently about the sexual conquests of a fat, short and bald man – Benito Mussolini. These included Claretta Petacci, almost thirty years younger than Il Duce, loyal enough to join him in death. But now comes a surprise: evidence has been uncovered claiming that his mistresses also included Marie Jose of Piedmont, wife of Umberto II and the last queen of Italy.

There were certainly rumours of a relationship in the 1930s, when the Belgian-born Marie was still the crown princess. Evidence of a kind, I suppose, was provided by Petacci herself, who recorded in her diary that the princess made an attempt to seduce Mussolini, even swimming naked in his presence, which, so he assured his mistress, he found “repulsive.” Yes, sure.

The new evidence, if it can be considered as evidence, is really not that much more substantial. It comes in a letter from Romano, one of Mussolini’s sons, to Antonio Terzi, the former deputy editor of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Although written forty years ago it was only recently published in an Italian magazine. For some reason it was never used by Terzi, now dead, and only discovered when his own son was searching through his archives. In this Romano writes;

I can in good faith confirm that often in our house the relationship between my father and Maria Jose, both political and romantic, was spoken of, I can tell you with sincerity that my mother was considerably more explicit – between my father and the then princess of Piedmont there was a brief period of intimate relations, which I believe was then called off by my father.

All I can say is that the relationship may indeed have been ‘spoken of’ but this is just another rumour rather than conclusive proof. Besides the suggestion that there was a ‘political relationship,’ along with the romantic, tends to undermine the document’s credibility. Almost alone among the royal family, Marie was always sceptical of both Mussolini and Fascism. During the Second World War she was an important conduit between the Allies and the Axis power, a British diplomat going so far as to describe her as the only member of the royal family with sound political judgement.

Although this letter may enhance still further Mussolini’s reputation as a sexual predator, just it traduces the good name of the late Marie Jose, it adds nothing to our understanding of the man or the times. It may, though, just add a little to our understanding of the political psychology of a country which rather admires leaders with a certain macho reputation. How else does one explain the ability of Silvio Berlusconi to survive sexual scandal after sexual scandal, even so far as a certain Ruby the Heart Stealer? But that’s another story altogether! (Oh, if you must know Google this – Bunga Bunga and the Heart Stealer.)

Italy and the Dirty Don

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s sleazy and priapic prime minister, is a puzzle. This shady, corrupt, dirty old sexual predator, ever preying on young girls, should have been ejected from office long since. He would have been…in any other country but Italy. But the Dirty Don is a product, a product of history, a product of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth century ‘resurgence’, which saw the creation of the modern state, the imperfect end of an imperfect process.

There is a very interesting piece by Alexander Lee in the History Matters section of the March issue of History Today, in which he argues that Berlusconi type – yes, he is a type – is a direct consequence of Italy’s democratic deficit. It’s a timely article, coming on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the country’s unification, which falls on 17 March.

The thing is, you see, Italy emerged as a state before it became a nation. I would go further: Italy is the nation that never was. Unification was only a partial process, a political process unaccompanied by any deep-rooted sense of common identity. Even today one of the strongest forces in Italian politics, the Northern League, is committed to separation from the south, the old Kingdom of Naples, frogmarched into Italy by Garibaldi and his Red Shirts in 1860.

So there it was: the new nation thrown up on the European shores. But while there may have been some enthusiasm for the ideal of Italy, at least among the educated classes (peasants in Sicily thought it was the name of the king of Piedmont's wife!), there was little or none for democratic accountability. Garibaldi himself saw the individual as less important than the state. The old bone-head and his Red Shirts; Mussolini and his Black Shirts - there is really no difference, just so long as there is a shirt!

Cynicism over democratic accountability was compounded by the style of parliamentary politics that emerged after unification: one of cronyism, localism, corruption and naked self-interest. As Lee says, even for leading figures of the Risorgimento parliament was no more than a market place for sinecures, jobs and contracts. The kickback culture was king; it remains king.

Parliament, then, was simply a theatre of organised abuse, which explains why Italian ‘democracy’ died so readily in 1922, typically in a backstage deal, not in Mussolini’s ludicrously theatrical March on Rome. After the end of the fascist dictatorship it was back to business as usual, with the post-war Christian Democrats retaining a prolonged hold on power by a mixture of cronyism and patronage. Prime ministers Giulio Andreotti and Amintore Fanfani even made government contracts dependant on support of the party, a situation that would not have been tolerated elsewhere.

Politics was just about manipulation and management, not transparency and accountability, and management was about largess and bribes. This culture was aided by the failures of unification, which left people with a local rather than a national consciousness. Italy, Prince Metternich once said, is no more than a geographical expression. Really, once the dust of Garibaldi had settled, once he had taken off his shirt, that’s exactly what it remained, even so far as today. Fragmentation effectively means that politicians can get way with all sorts of chicanery and malfeasance.

Berlusconi is not the antithesis of the Risorgimento, a bogus ‘rebirth’ which never valued liberty and accountability. In so many ways he is its modern representative, the inheritor of a long tradition of corruption and democratic abuses. He continues to hold power not by the will of the people, assuming it’s possible to identify such a thing in Italy, but by the will of a cabal; by deals done behind doors, by offers made that could not be refused. Hey, chase those girls and cue the music. :-)

Ana in Rome

I was in Rome for the long weekend, travelling on pure impulse. It’s not the first time I’ve been. I visited with mother and father when I was in my mid-teens and again in the summer of 2006. It was nice to return after such a gap. It’s not my favourite city in Europe, an honour that belongs to Paris, but it’s more comfortable, more relaxed in many ways, if I can put it like that. My partner had not been before, and as it delights me to be cast in the role of Beatrice, guiding Dante through the celestial spheres, off we went!

It’s all so familiar, the Roman and the Renaissance, from Trajan’s Column to Saint Peter’s Basilica. There is a spot in the Forum where Caesar is alleged to have been assassinated. There were flowers when I first went; there are still flowers today, though what makes the old brute worthy of this honour I’m not at all sure!

Now, Marcus Aurelius, he is the one to admire, a better writer and a better man. His equestrian statue is a real delight, now protected from the elements in glass case in the Palazzo Novo on the Capitoline Hill, with a replica in place where it used to stand. We may not have had it at all but for the fact that he survived the early Christian purge of Imperial monuments after he was mistaken for Constantine the Great.


From the Capitoline Hill it was on to the Coliseum and then the Baths of Caracalla, named after the ‘hoodie’ emperor of the early third century. The Baths, though not nearly as popular as the Coliseum, are, at least so far as I am concerned, the best Roman remains in Rome. But who can resist doing the thumbs down sign in the great Flavian amphitheatre? Not me, that’s for sure. What an empress I would have been, a cross between Livia and Messalina!

Now we jumped forward through the centuries. It’s impossible for me to describe that moment when one enters the Sistine Chapel for the first time to stand before God, or to stand before Michelangelo and Leonardo, which in that places amounts to much the same thing. I simply can’t look at the ceiling or at The Last Judgement without being overwhelmed, without being reduced to complete silence in a moment of sublime awe. It brings tears to my eyes even writing about it like this.

Let me give you a spot of advice if you are thinking of visiting, advice pertinent to the issue of silence. If you go to the Sistine, which forms part of the Vatican Museums, go early. Be there waiting for it to open. Once you have your ticket make straight for the chapel, ignoring all the treasures in your path; you can see them later. That way you should get there before the crowds arrive. Silence is supposed to be maintained but it is not, at least not strictly, and when the place is full of tour parties, the modern version of the Vandals and the Goths, the hubble-bubble is truly intolerable.

I checked on Sunday evening to see if my coins were still in the Trevi Fountain. Of course they were: that’s why I was back in Rome. :-)

Life after Death

Ah, the politics of the dead, a subject which reveals so much about the living, whether it be over the fate of Evita in Argentina or Lenin in Russia. But it’s perambulations of the dead Mussolini that gives wonderful insight into the political health of post-war Italy.

After his death, and the display of his corpse in Milan, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave in Musocco, the municipal cemetery to the north of the city. On Easter Sunday 22 April 1946 his body was located and dug up by Domenico Leccisi and two other neo-Fascists. Making off with their hero, they left a bizarre message on the open grave "Finally, O Duce, you are with us. We will cover you with roses, but the smell of your virtue will overpower the smell of those roses."

On the loose for months-and a cause of great anxiety to the new Italian democracy-the Duce was finally 'recaptured' in August, hiding in a small trunk at the Certosa di Pavia, just outside Milan. Two Franciscan brothers were subsequently charged with concealing the corpse, though it was discovered on further investigation that he had been constantly on the move!

However, the Duce found was just as much of an embarrassment as the Duce lost to the fragile Italian government. This was a subject that divided the nation into mutually hostile camps; and unsure what to do, the authorities held the remains in a kind of political limbo for ten years, before agreeing to allow them to be re-interred at Predappio in Emila, his birth place, after a campaign headed by Leccisi and the Movimento Sociale Italiano. Leccisi, now a fascist deputy, went on to write his autobiography, With Mussolini Before and After Piazzale Loreto.

In the end it was, once again, all down to politics. Adone Zoli, the Prime Minister of the day, contacted Donna Rachelle, the former dictator's widow, to tell her he was returning the remains. He did so for one simple reason: he needed the support of the far-right in parliament, including Leccisi himself.

In Predappio Mussolini's tomb has become something of a fascist Mecca, constantly guarded by grim-faced, black-caped attendants. The whole thing is really quite vulgar, with Fascist kitsch on sale to the hordes of people who come to pay their respects, a source of both embarrassment and income to the left-wing local authorities!

Good Walkers

The Benandanti, which literally means ‘good walkers’, was a Northern Italian shamanistic society accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition. But these people, who first caught the attention of the Church in the sixteenth century, were not easy to pin down. They freely admitted that they practiced what were clearly vestiges of older pagan rites but strongly denied being witches, or at least witches in the sense understood by the Inquisition, hateful, diabolical and evil. Indeed, they said that they practiced magic to serve God by battling other, more malign influences in their community. These nightly battles were alleged to have taken place in the district of Friuli right up to 1610.

It was during the Ember days that the Benandanti were under compulsion to serve their communities. Summoned either by drum call, or by angels, refusal to answer was met with a beating. It wasn’t their bodies that travelled, no; it was their souls. A trance was induced allowing the soul to leave the body and thus engage in combat with those described as the Malandanti, the evil walkers. Their souls travelled to these nightly rendezvous in the form of an animal the came forth from their mouths, most typically in the shape of cats, rabbits, butterflies or mice. In this form they travelled to the centre of the earth to encounter the opposing army.

The Inquisition records contain some lovely details of the nocturnal duels. The Benandanti fought with fennel stalks, their opponents with sorghum. The good walkers were also armed with rue, the most powerful magical plant in the Italian arsenal. Saint Lucy was invoked for assistance. She and the rue both offered protection against the effects of the Evil Eye. If they were victorious then the crops and herds would be abundant over the coming year; if not local abundance would wither away.

These people were clearly just part of an ancient pagan fertility cult; small wonder that they frustrated the Inquisition.

Futurism and Fascism

I wonder if anyone has every dipped into Filippo Marinetti's wonderful Futurist cookbook? It contains such meal plans as salami immersed in a bath; coffee flavoured with eau-de-Cologne; and for desert, pineapple and sardines! He once suggested to Mussolini that pasta be banned because it made the Italians lazy.

Futurism and Fascism are usually thought of as the terrible twins. But are they? Though he broke with Mussolini politically in 1920 Marinetti went on to support his regime, claiming that it had fulfilled Futurism's minimum programme. In 1929 he even became the secretary of the Fascist Writer's Union, and remained loyal to Mussolini up to his death in 1944. But the link between Futurism as an art form and Fascism as a political style only really holds true at a superficial level. Look at the manifesto of the Futurist party which Marinetti published in early 1918, calling for the eight hour day; equal pay for women; expulsion of the Pope and the King from Italy; nationalisation of land, to be distributed among war veterans; high taxation on wealth; easy divorce and free love. Not much in the way of Fascist ideology there!

Marinetti, a great self-publicist, but not much of a politician, joined Mussolini in the formation of the Fasci italiani di combattimento in March 1919, though, as the movement grew, the Futurists remained a small and isolated element. More than that, some of his clownish antics, like the so-called 'Battle of Via Mercanti', did more harm than good to the emerging movement, which was almost destroyed in the elections of November 1919.

The kind of direct action, the energizing myth favoured by Marinetti was bringing Mussolini no political benefits whatsoever. What did was the emergence in 1920 of rural Squadrismo, a reactionary force that represented everything that Futurism did not. It was this turn towards rural conservatism that caused Marinetti to resign from the party in a mood of disgust. Of this Mussolini said that Marinetti was "an eccentric buffoon who wants to play politics and whom no one in Italy, least of all me, takes seriously." Fascism was carried to power on a wave of brutish reaction, not in a Futurist carnival.

Seedy Silvio, Italy’s Second Rate Tiberius

My mind turned this morning for entirely unexplained reasons to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s worst son since, well, Il Duce! Sorry:that’s unfair; Mussolini at least had a sense of style!

Yes, I know now why Berlusconi, that seedy old Lothario, has intruded on my consciousness: it’s because I caught the tail-end of a story about girls-meaning prostitutes-who had been paid to attend one of his gruesome parties. I really do have to make some concessions to the perspicacity of Karl Marx; everything in history does indeed occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. On reflection I think I will amend that to suggest that many things in history occur twice, the first time as farce and the second time as even more farce. Seedy Silvio calls to mind the long-dead Emperor Tiberius. If you want to know the exact parallel I’m drawing read Seutonius, particularly his account of those lovely parties at the Imperial retreat on Capri.

Seedy Silvio has such a stranglehold on the Italian press that it’s doubtful if Italy has a free press at all, one of the essential props, arguably the essential prop, of a proper working democracy. But Italy came late to democracy and, I suspect, has never been entirely comfortable with the idea or the practice. After all, this is a country that no sooner had it cast off Fascism than it almost embraced Communism. Now it has another ‘benevolent dictator’, who, like his predecessor, would probably much rather send people ‘on holiday’ than murder them. I wonder if there are still places on Capri. :-))

Fascist Style

The chief advantage of the Fasci italiani di combattimento in 1919 was that it was tied to no philosophy and no ideology whatsoever; that it was, in other words, organised opportunism.

This, above all, was the Fascist style. It took the shape of a chameleon, able to change colours in accordance with the political climate. Unlike the socialists, the communists, the liberals and the conservatives the movement carried nothing, no system of beliefs or organisational structure, which would prevent its rapid mutations. Fascism, above all, was a mood, one of discontent, that could combine the arditi, who simple longed for action for the sake of action, and comic-opera revolutionaries like the Futurist Marinetti, who saw politics as an escape from cultural boredom.

This was transformismo politics, one that could, in theory have taken the movement to the left, if that is where the advantage lay. But in the end the advantage, the prospects for growth, advancement and power, were on the right, in the defense of Italy against Bolshevism. The appeal to the working-class, the direction of leftwards Fascism, had failed miserably in the elections of 1919. In the end Mussolini, in alliance with conservative rural Fascists like Roberto Farinacci, took advantage of the fear among the middle-class and the peasantry of a socialist revolution. It was Fascist anti-socialism that created a mass movement, and ensured thereafter that it would always be a philosophy of the right.