The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones

Author:Tobias Jones [Jones, Tobias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Essays & Travelogues, History, Europe, Italy, Sports & Recreation, Football
ISBN: 9780571246052
Google: ikxT7dH3ngcC
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2008-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

As rhetoric, that announcement was of unrivalled brilliance. Even in translation, that combination of moderation, modernity, ‘cleanliness’, statal good sense instead of a left wing ‘cartel’, is effective. Berlusconi’s popularity rested, not least, on his Midas touch in business and on his whole-hearted endorsement of Antonio Di Pietro (who he would ask to be his Minister for Justice): ‘His [Di Pietro’s] moralising anxiety belongs to everyone. My newspapers, my television channels, my group, have always been in the front line in supporting the Clean Hands judges’. Another of the Clean Hands magistrates, Tiziana Parenti, would later take her place on the Forza Italia benches in Parliament.

The memory, though, is short. Only a few years after the Clean Hands earthquake, the whole episode is already being assiduously rewritten.

Every few weeks during the summer, my ‘betrothed’ and I make the spectacular journey across the mountains that takes us from the humid basin of Parma towards the warm, windy air of the Tuscan coast. At one point of the Cisa pass, as the road winds through the pine forests, the mountains loom into view. They appear snow-peaked because of the white quarries where huge blocks of marble are dynamited and lined up by the side of the roads. It’s this white marble which, interlaced with black or green, makes Tuscan cathedrals – in Pisa or Siena – look like something squeezed from a toothpaste tube. Once last summer, we decided to stop in a little mountain town, Aulla, and eat a sandwich in the main square. Opposite us were two rhetorical monuments. One was to the fallen from the war, and described in one, long-winded sentence, the ‘ardent hearth of vivid fire which at the beginning of Nazi-Fascist oppression released a spark which inflamed the children of the Resistance, who won fame with the legendary sacrifice of their women and their bloodied men who on an impassable path underwent atrocious slaughters, devastations and reprisals…’

Next to it was a small needle of white marble dedicated to the victims of the Clean Hands revolutionaries. ‘Intolerance, like bombs, kills precious liberty’, it says. ‘When the word is feeble’, read the words of one parliamentarian who committed suicide, ‘there’s nothing left but the gesture.’ ‘Let us remember in the dark of every injustice the victims and their executioners’, are the words of the Aulla mayor engraved into the marble. There are billboards announcing that the town is a ‘Di Pietro-free zone’ and there’s a cunning quotation in Latin: Summum ius, Summa iniuria (‘the greater the law, the greater the injustice’, which implies, I suppose, that the rule of law is not a particularly good thing). As ever, the roles of criminal and victim are so blurred and confused that no one can ever be sure whether Italy’s ‘Jacobin justice’ is worse than the ‘criminals’ it prosecutes.

Having been (in his own words) in the ‘front line’ of support for Clean Hands in 1994, Berlusconi has also completely changed tack. Although he won that election in 1994, his government was dogged by accusations of corruption against his entourage.

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