Kennst Du Das Land?
ByD. W. BROGAN IT was thirty years, almost exactly, since I had been in Italy in the spring. I had since visited it more than once in high summer, in the depth of winter, but spring in Italy had missed me. I had escaped, too, by being in America, the worst horrors of the English winter, but Cambridge towards the end of March had been quite " snell " enough, and the sun that I saw in the, clear air of Geneva airport was something of a novelty. But we were still in the north; it was crisp; the " first fresh flame " of spring vegetation was visible but not burning very warmly. Then, in less than an hour, we were in another world, the southern world that northerners have coveted for so long and in which for centuries they have come to warm their bones and minds.
True, Milan is not the ideal city in which to get a first or even a fresh impression of Italy. It was Sunday, and in the late afternoon, with most shops shut and rather aimless crowds walking along the streets between the heavy buildings, it had a German air. It does sometimes look as if it were Mailand, not Milano. There were moments when it even recalled my native city on a Sunday (though of course Glasgow cathedral is a much superior building to the Duomo, if not as large).
But it was Italy all the same. For there were the Italians with that air of intense vivacity and energy that they manage to put into life. Doke far niente may have been the motto a century ago, and much further south, but it isn't today in the north. Cars, trams, the little motor scooters, so well named " wasps," shot off or clanged along. The not very attractive Milanese version of the Tuscan tongue could be heard flowing in spate. There were the newspapers with those admirable, coloured and highly improbable covers, covers illustrating crime, covers illustrating great world events. There were photographic illustrations, too. A weekly devoted to political synthesis had a handsome coloured cover of a conversation between Mrs. Luce and an Italian interrogator. How unlike the cover and the contents of our Political Quarterly or Political Studies !
There were the posters issued by the Communist Party announcing the grief of all the workers of the world at the death of Stalin. All Communist mortuary prose on this subject has been pretty lush, but the Italian tributes excelled those I had seen elsewhere in the. Party Preis and publicity. The language no doubt helped a lot. Modern Italian lends itself to hyperbole. But the lavishness of the displays reminded me of the important fact of Communist strength in the largest Italian city and of the political crisis that was approaching so fast. It was, however, some comfort to note that a Communist deputy who was to address some great meeting was styled " On." No Harrys or Bens, not even Jacques and Maurice. " The Honourable." Cavour had not lived in vain.
But Milan is not the Italy we come for. It is too big, too new in most parts, too cosmopolitan. We were due at a con- ference in Bergamo, and we went out on a bus on the auto- strada, once one of the prides of the Fascist State. There was the plain of Lombardy as flat as the plain of Holland. There were great buildings, rising like mountains out of the plain as they do in Holland. One, I was told, was a new basilica, though I should have thought Lombardy adequately stocked with basilicas. But the red roofs, the white facades, the thatch on the barns of the peasant cottages, the campanile—all insisted that this wasn't Holland, and the sun insisted that it wasn't England. This was the south, " wo die Zitronen bluhn." No actual lemon-trees were in sight, 'but that didn't matter. This was Goethe's Italy, Shelley's Italy.
Or was it ? Advertising is one of the greatest of modern arts, and it is certainly practised with vigour in northern Italy. Not since a nightmare journey in southern California last December have I seen such misplaced energy and ingenuity. There, in a hundred horrid forms the genius of the countrymen of Leonardo and Luini was expressing itself. Here again we got the contrast between the Italy we seek and the Italy the Italians live in. Above us was the old city, clustered on its hill round the cathedral and the castello, a true Acropolis. Below was the new city, mainly nineteenth-century I should guess, with two agreeable classical customs houses and a simple pillar to " Buonaparte, l'Italia, 1797." On the pillar was the profile of the young hero, with his hair down over his collar as it had been at Lodi. And all round us were the drive and energy of Italian life.
And yet, some things have not changed. I had brought with me to Italy, the best novel of Lombardy. (No, not I Promessi Sposi, La Chartreuse de Parme.) As I saw the multitudinous uniforms, from our old friends the carabinieri in their cocked hats to some soldiers who wore a kind of Russian variant on khaki, as I saw the priests and nuns, I doubted if Stendhaj would have found his beloved Italy much changed. Of course, the old city with its quiet, with its memorials of the family of the great condottiere, Colleone, with its Lion of St. Mark and its superb view over the plain and the foothills of the Alps, reinforced this impression. So did the inscriptions, so the bas- "1elief lying at the foot of the castello tower with a profile on it that had once been very familiar in Italy. There were the hills so laboriously tended; there were the plains so laboriously tilled.
I know the gloomy demographic figures for Italy, its short- ages of raw materials, its extravagantly over-manned govern- mental services, the social problems that account for the size of the Communist Party, the tensions that have just led to the dissolution of the Senate. Yet one does not get the impression of pessimism and resignation that one gets at times and places in France. There is a great deal of building going on. There is (I am told) a living tradition of good craftsmanship in some trades. There is, I know, a lot of under-employment. But there is a lot of work, cheerfulness, and, to the hasty visiting eye, hope. Haec est Italia dis sacra.
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