Italy in serious mood

Richard West Milan The British Airways cabin crew on the plane „Milan were openly contemptuous of the Zseogers. 'I wish they wouldn't stand in c.":„gangway', one steward remarked to her ,—"eague, who replied, 'What else would exPect from Italians?' Apparently BritAirways cabin crews are still in a bate teilversornechanges in schedules which caused wen.' to strike a few months ago, but I resen1,7 this rudeness from employees of the pubc°roPany which Was, that very week, srcl,uandering yet more money on the inauguat,flight of Concorde to the United States.

'• resentment against British Airways in

.eased to rage when I found at Milan's new rPort that they, or the airport staff, had last MY suitcase as well as luggage belonging ,oseveral other English passengers. This was e e luggage was meant to arrive there was a ()punter called 'Lost and Found' in English strilY, where apparently British Airways pas the regularly have to apply to get back Clerk Possessions. The 'Lost and Found' rlierk helped me to fill out a form describing Y sUitcase and very politely explained to hIlle that British Airways could not provide be,: clothes or temporary accorrimodation ,741.1se they had no representative at the 1)4, e clerk at Information said that the last ai" to Milan, which is thirty miles from the eiraP°rt, had left while I was filling in my

for the lost suitcase. A taxi, he said,

Fic■z:ttil ,(1 Cost about £20 and anyway all the e:s in Milan were very expensive. Why neer'isti°t stay instead at a cheap hotel in the ceili-Y town of Somma Lombardo, which I nionidereach by taxi for only £2 ?Just at that to s a taxi driver appeared. On getting cooLarlsula Lombardo I found that the reftoir: -jrretnicstiejl hotel appeared to cater largely People, for the notices were in rather than Italian. Although a dethaeet ilt3rconspiracy theories, I do not suggest horitish Airways, Milan Airport and the plot r1,8°olma Lombardo are leagued in a it see— Jose passengers' suitcases; however, bet an appropriate way of journeying ertleitigiincrilles the two bankrupt, comic-opera t 1, of Europe. A similar experience sent t-,'ave befallen a Honduran journalist lions.' report on the coming general elecin :111Nicaragua. stood waYlight next morning, I soon under!°Orist-"Y Sornma Lombardo relies for its [lad t-iTs k °I1 British Airways passengers who town neir , luggage lost. It. is a drab cement street Whose narrow, pavementless main lsls tr,"erves as a kind of race track for motor aucl et)ver from Milan. I could not even dis

where c -omma Lombardo was, since my only map of Italy lay in the suitcase of which there was still 'no news'.

The news in the newspapers was equally depressing; the British Airways Concorde was on its way to Washington (possibly with my suitcase) while here in Italy there were soon to be strikes by airline employees, teachers, tram drivers, bank clerks, hotel servants and, worst of all, barmen. When I started to buy replacements for some of the articles lost by British Airways and Milan Airport I soon saw just how desperate was the plight of the Italians, since goods here are cheap even when purchased in sterling. A razor, five blades, a toothbrush, toothpaste and shaving cream cost little over a pound, although it must be said that the razor, an English import, did not function properly. And then in receiving change I learned for that in Italy, which produced the first gold coin of modern times the florin, there is now almost no coinage because 100 lireand 501ire pieces have been exported illegally to Switzerland, where they are sold at more than

their normal value and made into the casings of watches. These days in Italy one is obliged to receive change and pay out money in telephone ietons, private bank notes, packets of sweets, cigarettes, postage stamps and Milan bus and tram tickets. The stamps are especially undesirable since the Italian Post Office surpasses even the GPO in ineptitude, so that letters may arrive months late or not at all. The Milan bus and tram tickets are no good more than ten miles from Milan and they of course become devalued when the tram workers go on strike.

This tram ticket currency seems all the more strange in Milan, which is Italy's industrial and financial centre, and whose citizens used to be very serious-minded. In fact when I last came to Milan in 1962, it was to write an article on the captains of industry who were in charge of what was then called Italy's 'economic miracle'. In Italy then as in Macmillan's England there was a craze for 'growth', 'growth rates', 'grabs for growth', the 'economics of scale', the creation of 'infrastructures' and 'the consumer society'. What this meant was the investment of great sums in industries related to oil, such as motor-cars, petrochemicals, the building of motorways and the deliberate running down of public transport. It meant great investment in land and property and consequent inflation of property prices, leading inevitably to inflation of all prices.

This, together with mass appeal to the greed of the 'consumer society' by purveyors of cars. TV sets, package holidays and all the other things pushing up the 'growth rate, encouraged all sections of Italian society to expect a continual ever-increasing rise in wages and salaries in return for doing less work. As in England it was the capitalists, the property speculators and the politicians who initiated the 'grab for growth', but the trade unions soon caught on to what was happening and helped to create that spirit of envy between different trades and professions that is widespread now in Italy.

In Italy, as in England and in the former democracies of Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, there was a 'mixed economy', in which the state, private enterprise and the unions shared power in corporations which could be subsidised by the taxpayer only by constant devaluation of the currency. In Italy, unlike England, political parties, especially the Christian Democrats, also had a vested interest in these corporations which are subsidiaries of IRI. One can see charts showing how much power the Christian Democrats. Republicans, even Socialists have in (RI's banks, oil and steel companies, even newspapers. This close involvement of industry with political parties, perhaps with individual politicians, explains the recent scandals in Rome over the bribes from Lockheed. Shell and BP.

In Milan in 1962 I spent a day with Enrico Mattei, who headed the petrol corporation and was the most famous character in Italy's 'grab for growth'—the man who was getting oil fgom Libya and the Soviet Union and was promising to bring wealth to Sicily and the South with capital developments. I found him in some ways rather sinister, an impression greatly increased when I watched him receive another visitor to his oil refinery— Leonid Brezhnev, then Soviet Minister of Industry. Both these important men had personal armed bodyguards whom they strongly resembled. A few months later Mattei was killed in an aircrash which has since been widely blamed on the CIA.

Inflation and the scandals in Rome are among the main causes of discontent and of growing support for the left. The Communists are considered capable of stopping strikes in spite of the example of Chile, where the Allende left-wing government was wrecked by prolonged strikes by copper miners, transport workers and middle-class unions. The Communists have set up vigilante teams in certain cities to combat hooligans of the extreme left and right. They have never enjoyed a share in IRI's enterprises. but they are hesitant to exploit their record

against the Christian Democrats, whom they want to join in a government.

Indeed the Communists, in their eagerness not to frighten the bourgeoisie, show signs of becoming what the Times would call 'moderate'—that is, refusing to recognise what is wrong with the country and fearing to take unpleasant measures like sacking much of the civil service, closing dud companies and introducing industrial discipline. It matters less that they have also alienated the far left of young middle-class Maoists and Trotskyists, who flourish here as they did in France and England during the 'sixties. One magazine cover shows three young revolutionaries with red headscarves and clenched fists who give a very revolutionary impression until one notices that the girl has nails sticking out half an inch from her fingertips. Like most young Italian men, the revolutionaries carry handbags so as not to spoil the fit of their jeans and I cannot believe that any barricades could be stormed by men with handbags.

The Italians are slow to pick up intellectual fads. Having done so they take them up with vigour. The women's movement, as it also calls itself here, is something much more important than the posturing of a few clever journalists. Italian women have real injustides to endure, as anyone knows who has had the experience of seeing an Italian man producing first a photograph of his wife and children walking to church and then a photograph of his girlfriend in the nude. The women of Italy, who used to be thought outstandingly pious, have backed the recent demands for legalised contraception and abortion, and a recent poll shows that fifty per cent of them will vote for the Communists or the Socialists.

A group of women have seized a deserted building in the centre of Milan and have turned it into a commune; women tend to look rather fierce these days. An old acquaintance of mine who is standing for parliament as a Christian Democrat got worked up with rage against two women across the café whom he accused of being intellectuals. 'Have you seen their posters caricaturing men ?' he asked me, 'Come. I will take you to see them in the car.' They were a bit frightening, but not so frightening as the article about Italy's militant lesbian party who claim that Italian women are a// essentially lesbian and should forswear men.

I had not realised that pornography had become such big business in Italy. True there were always advanced films, but now pornography is all over the bookstalls as well. noticed next to the Corriere della Serra and L'Os.wrvatore Romano a magazine called Vampire, showing a naked girl biting another girl's naked bottom. What effect does all this have on Italians, who we were led to suppose were so hot-blooded and amorous that pornography would drive them insane? Perhaps English girl tourists in Italy this summer should be warned that they will have their bottoms not only pinched even harder by men but bitten by women.

Whatever happens with the election on 20 June, Italy may be in a serious mood for the rest of the year as the new coalition sorts out the country's problems. Unlike the English, the Italians know what has happened in South America where many of them have relatives (indeed most Argentinians have Italian names). Unlike the English many Italians seem to realise that insolvency will surely lead to revolution and almost surely one of the right. The Italian newspapers carry daily stories of them in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, once pleasant democracies where the police now use wholesale torture and murder to crush the remnants of opposition.

Perhaps the Italians would now welcome a puritanical government that offered reduced living standards and large-scale unemployment if at the same time it introduced discipline and honesty in government, but I suspect that the Communists will funk this chance and attempt to muddle along as before. One feels that some Italians would like a leader like Savonarola, the scourge of the Medici and the papacy, who was brought to power by the Florentines at the end of the fifteenth century. The communist leader Enrico Berlinguer, far from blasting the papacy and the modern equivalent of the Medici, seems anxious to join with them in a coalition, providing still more featherbedding of industry, inflation, strikes and bitterness—which will then be turned against the left.

Things could get worse, but they seem already very bad even to someone accustomed to modern England. In the last days of the old regime in Saigon I wrote an article saying that the public services such as the post office and electricity worked better than in London, and a reader wrote in to compare my remarks with the claim by Mussolini to have made the trains run on time. The reader's argument seemed to be that because Mussolini made the trains run on time therefore efficient government was something that only fascists wanted. It might be truer to say that unless the trains run on time, the public services work, the government is honest, the currency is stable and industry free from strife, one is almost certain to get Mussolini or some even nastier brute like Pinochet in Chile.

This occurred to me on the morning I left Milan for Venice aboard a train that admittedly ran only half an hour late. It was the day after the bank strike and the clerks remained in a surly mood, for only one of them deigned to serve the customers while the rest hung about chatting and reading the newspapers. After waiting a quarter of an hour in the queue I left to change my traveller's cheques at the hotel, which was not due to go on strike until a few days later. At the station I found an ever) longer queue for tickets than at the bank, and again there were several idle clerks behind the man at the counter. After a long wait I felt I might miss my train and I hit on a way round the difficulty by going to the foreign ticket counter and buying a ticket for Ljubljana just over the border in Yugoslavia. It cost a little more than the ticket to Venice, but I was able to pay most of the difference in Milan tram tickets.