Italian illusions
Colin Welch
nowst thou the land where the lemon 1.X.trees bloom?' My honest answer still, no. For various reasons, fear perhaps up- permost, I have usually given Italy a wide berth. There are so many northern novels which describe how northern people go to Italy and — well never get back. Heyse's L'Arrabiata, Mann's Death in Venice, Douglas's South Wind, Constantine Fitz- Gibbon's Holiday, a book that talented writer never thought much of, the unvalued fruit as it was of an aborted film script, yet presenting a chilling picture of an American who, stranded without money in a remote Italian village, got everything wrong and ended up in disgrace and death. The Italians know how to live in Italy; we most- ly don't. She presents temptations which they can deal with and we often can't. No one can live a northern life in Italy. Well, why not live a southern one? But we can't do that either. The checks and restraints and balances built into the southern temperament are denied to us. When we try to go native we go berserk. Inglese Italianato, it diavolo incarnate . . . A dangerous land then for those of us ill- guarded by the last grey shreds of puritanism.
Before last month, I'd been there once — a fortnight on Lake Garda years ago in a flowery hotel run by a retired ma- jor (yes, well actually he was a colonel) of the Warwicks. His Italian, though effective, was largely confined to pronto, subito and p.d.q.issimo. He had the amiable custom of laying out all the drinks on a sideboard, as in a country house, and trusting his guests to help themselves and chalk it up — which all nationalities unfailingly and cheerfully did. An encouraging if not very typical ex- perience. Nor did I hesitate when the kindest of Knoxes invited us for a fortnight near Urbino. Somehow they live their own life wherever they are. I trusted them to deliver me from the consequences of my own imprudence and infatuations, which they lovingly did.
Yet still I must confess that whatever I write about Italy is the modest harvest of ig- norance, of perceptions thus unusually pro- ne to take illusion for reality. I would not write at all if I did not have the impression that Italy confounds and baffles even those who know her well and have loved her long.
Is it illusion, for instance, which clothes the Italian so well, which piles his plate with delicious food (and not just pasta now: he eats more meat than we do)? Awestruck we watched, shocked in a way, gastrosophical- ly or gastrologically if not more profound- ly, as three epicene youths in a restaurant engulfed dish after dish, all unidentifiable, elaborate, rich, brown, oily, bereft of vegetables, to be joined by an older, fatter, more disagreeable looking man, a real Trimalchio, and his boy friend, upon which they all started all over again, the double repast culminating with a gigantic lobster, its soaring claws adorned with silver paper. Did they then tickle their throats, Roman- style, to make room for more? We didn't wait to see; but they didn't eat like citizens of a state near bankruptcy or plagued by Communists.
Is it illusion which fills the Italian's glass with excellent cheap wine (and makes him drunk too, contrary to legend, judging from some wild post-prandial driving), which makes his wife so elegant and mounts every chic ragazza on her motorino, hair streaming with helmetless bravado in the soft breeze?
I impiously suspect, as I suspect does our editor, that it is illusion which creates or magnifies the mountainous problems and crises by which Italy is constantly beset, her alleged 'ungovernability', the perpetual im- minence of disaster, poverty and ruin, which gloomily recounts the contrasting ills which afflict all her provinces, some underdeveloped, some over, none just right, not a sound limb to be seen, like the luckless horse depicted for the instruction of veterinary students; which reveals the `ever-widening gap' between north and south. That gap, now: huge as it may be, how can it be widening? The children of the south have flowed northward; investment, private as well as public, flows to the cheaper and less congested south. Can the wider gap rest on statistics mistaken or misused? A mystery ...
Perhaps none of these misfortunes is wholly illusory. Yet does their overwhelm- ing bulk owe nothing to that maladie pro- fessionelle of my craft, which sees in crises copy and in problems by-lines, and which offers quack remedies and solutions pro- bably no more appropriate there than here? The leaning towers of Bologna look not on- ly sinister but, with heavy traffic shaking their very foundations, hideously unsafe. Something has preserved them. Something must preserve Italy, something invisible to the journalistic or northern eye, some hid- den braces or reinforcement.
Is it illusion again which clamps onto a gracious opulent city like Bologna a Com- munist local government? Of 'nominal' Communism in action there is no trace, unless in the suburban Via Stalingrado and a strange absence of bath plugs in our hotel. You even have to pay on the buses, once modishly free. Stylish crowds throng the piazza. A thunderous pop group emits left- wing twaddle on the cathedral steps; the no- ble organ within thunders back in dignified reproof. Is it all a dream? Italy's Com- munists are, we know, like no one else s. They are 'good administrators', a party of 'law and order', model citizens in (almost) every way. Indeed, indeed; but why then call themselves Communists? Is it because they really are Communists, soon to throw off disguise and appear shamelessly as they really are? Or do they just think the word attractive, likely to win friends and In; fluence people, as it seems to have done Why on earth should this be so? Is it that they or their supporters know nothing.of Communism? Or, knowing something, hke it? It is all as baffling to me as if a self- styled Murder party, or feminists or Ser- vitudinists, were to prosper in places other- wise totally sane, to take power and govern to general satisfaction. Is it further an illusion that Italians, and particulary Italian males, adore children and babies? Not yet, to judge from scenes on the outward planes. A handsome middle-aged Italian, whose British equivalent would be buried in the Financial Times, put on a show for the phlegmatic English baby in front which would have won applause from a stone. He beamed., cooed, clucked, wiggled his fingers in his ears, popped up now this side of the seat, now that, now like a jack-in-the-box over the top. Sad that this prodigious display should be rewarded only by meditative dribbles, a cold stare and finally roars of graceless disapproval. Yet in the advance of the Italian pet some see a threat to the babY cult. Yorkshire terriers, dachshunds ap- pear, and must attract to themselves some of the torrential affection hitherto monopolised by the baby. Is it now an din' sion that the Italians are cruel not onlyto animals but to the insane? I suspect it S. I was also rather gruntled to find a rare DallY Telegraph in Assisi. Could St Francis have commended this estimable organ in his ser- mon to the birds? Is it an illusion that in Arezzo there sin' vives a large memorial, paid for by the citizens, recording the beneficence and many virtues of the Austrian Emperor Fer- dinand III? Not at all. Many Peoples' becoming independent, would have torn down such traces of a less glorious Past' The polite Italians were content to add a modificatory footnote. That Italy is hard to leave is no illusion. The heart, the sunshine combine to slow the parting steps. So do Italians, often said i . tn, lack sense of time. `No soup, please: re one dish. Train to catch."Si, Si, signor!. prestissimo': and ten minutes later soup in," exorably arrives. 'Can you cut my hair soon? I've got a plane in an hour.„Sr,'d signore, just five minutes, two minutes, a. n I'll be with you.' The minutes pass, five, ten, fifteen. A new, complex and ri chlY scented process is about to commence 0.e n_ my predecessor's pate. Soon I and he barber are locked in affectionate em 't in the doorway. 'Oh, signore, please don go now. I start subito.' Alas, he never did
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