ANOTHER VOICE
To return to the subject of Italians, they don't really like opera — or even women (the men, that is)
PETRONELLA WYATT
ome of the hate letters one receives in this job are as long as the Catalogue aria, but the most vituperative followed an arti- cle I wrote last year after the Fenice opera house in Venice had burned to a crisp. I had expressed scepticism about it being restored by the year 2000, as the Italian government was then claiming it would, on the grounds that most modern Italians are as little concerned with culture as were the ragbag of barbarian invaders from whom they are descended.
This caused something of a diplomatic incident — or rather an undiplomatic one. The Italian minister in London wrote to the editor of The Spectator expressing his dis- tress. My assertions were not only unhelpful but a shameful attack upon a country with which Britain enjoyed peacetime relations. As for my allegation that the Italians had no sense of humour, this was quite clearly an outrageous untruth. It is with a certain recklessness, then, that I return to the sub- ject of Italy, but I feel entitled to reply.
Last week I was in Venice, visiting Alis- tair McAlpine. While he surveyed, via the English newspapers, the ruins of the Tory party, I went to inspect the ruins of the Fenice opera house. The façade remains, the breeze drifting through the grey stones as the silvery rustle of gondola bells shivers the veiled canals. Strangely, though, restoration has not yet begun, and it is only three years until the millennium.
Cultural heritage receives a mere 0.18 per cent of the Italian state budget, but after local weeping and wailing over the fire, Pavarotti sang for the Fenice and approxi- mately six official funds were set up for the rebuilding. Recently £40 million was sent for this purpose from Rome to Venice. On the way, however, it would seem the money was mysteriously 'diverted'. The Venetian authorities are evasive as to what has hap- pened to these funds. Actually, they are evasive as to what happened to the Fenice.
It appears that the fabled Italian love of music does not prevent them from burning down their own opera houses. In recent years, quite a number have been destroyed by arson. The official line now is that the Fenice fire 'was not an accident'. There was a rumour that the mafia were responsible, but it is more probable that the culprits were ordinary Venetian builders with an eye on the enormous commissions they would receive for rebuilding it. At this rate, however, they might not be rebuilding it, which would have the salutary effect of causing them to think twice in future before destroying historic landmarks.
The point is, the Venetians do not really care. There are other opera houses in Venice. 'Everyone here cried so loud when it happened', a local official explained to me, 'because they hoped the world would feel more sorry and give us more money.' Among the few people in Venice genuinely concerned with the Fenice's ultimate des- tiny are the American and Japanese tourists who, from being summer visitors, now fly to the city all year round. Any restoration work in Italy is determined by the market forces of tourism, not by an innate, visceral love of culture. If a palazzo is repainted here and there it is because the Venetians are trying to attract foreign money. Thus three outlets of McDonald's have recently been opened for the enjoy- ment of American visitors, but it is mainly the Venetians who go to them.
Sometimes one thinks that it would really be best if Italy were taken away from the Italians and given to some other people to look after. Since the fall of the Roman empire, nothing has become Italy quite so much as occupation. Before unification, it was the Habsburg monarchy that brought some semblance of order to northern Italy. Lombardy and Venetia, which were under Austrian rule, made up the most prosper- ous part of that country. By contrast, in Piedmont, which was governed by the indigenous House of Savoy, half the popu- lation was illiterate.
If some nations are full of misfits, Italy has myth-fits. It is a country that only really exists in the minds of foreigners. The Italy with which we are all familiar is a creation of generations of over-romantic English and Americans, beginning in the 19th cen- tury. The trouble is that we saw Leonardos and Dantes in every Milanese mediocrity, Giglis in every gondolier and Verdis in every organ-grinder. Moreover, writers and Mention Major, and the word "curatins" springs to mind.' film-makers identified Casanova in every epicene Count Tutti-Impotenti.
When I wrote that the Italians were in danger of losing even their reputation as great heterosexual lovers, I received letters of protest from as far south as Sicily and as far north as Milan. According to surveys, however, homosexuality is on the rise all over Italy. This may well be part of a gener- al world trend towards openness, but the increase in Italy is disproportionately sharp. How can this be? Gay Paree, per- haps, but not gay Italee! But it could be proof that the idea of the Italian as the con- summate womaniser is as mythical as every- thing else. It is, moreover, a relatively mod- ern fable, dating from the past 150 years, As recently as the first half of the 18th cen- tury foreigners could and often did regard Italy as a nation of powder-pink poofs, When John Wilkes, the English politician and sensualist, visited Italy in the 1760s he wrote disgustedly, 'In Rome Venus could walk down the street naked and no Italian gentleman would pay her attention. It would be different, however, were it an unclothed serving lad.' Casanova, indeed, was considered an exception and a rarity by his contempo- raries in the rest of Europe. Even so, his reputation was far less impressive then than it is today. This great womaniser was acknowledged to be adept for an Italian but not much of a match for a Frenchman or even an Englishman. Indeed Wilkes, who was notoriously ugly, stole one of Casano- va's girlfriends with relative ease. It was only the famous memoirs, which are distin- guished chiefly by their colossal mendacity, that established their author as one of the outstanding lovers of his age. It was the Italians, after all, who invented the 'walker', usually a homosexual man who escorts married women without har- bouring any sexual intentions towards them. These men were called cavaliere ser- vente and were acquired by new brides. as part of an established convention, relieving their husbands of the tedium of taking them to parties and at the same time reliev- ing their fears of being cuckolded. That Italian women were dissatisfied with their countrymen is confirmed by a letter written by a young Venetian countess in 1763: 'MY countrymen are unsatisfactory companions in romance. Oh, that I had been born else- where!' I await with interest the Italian minister's response to that one.
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