The Archipelago: Italy Since 1945

John Foot

Bloomsbury, £25

Review by Joseph Farrell

If Italy is scarcely a geographical archipelago, perhaps the term is useful to identify the varied social, cultural and political landscape of the country. Italy is a singularly difficult nation to define satisfactorily, and most attempts degenerate into either idealisation or denigration, both facile tendencies. No other people has produced so many geniuses who have embellished the world or scoundrels who have defiled it.

John Foot is well equipped for the task he has set himself, having already written on such varying aspects of Italian life as football, cycling, the career of a revolutionary psychiatrist who altered the way the mentally ill were treated, and above all on the construction of mental frameworks or images – his word is 'communal memory' – through which people view their present and past. This knowledge enhances his new work, which is history in the round, not merely a chronicle of the doings of ministers, industrialists and power brokers, but an attempt to reconstruct the developments and aspirations, the attainments and crimes which have shaped modern Italy. The period in question is one of unprecedented change. The gilded aristo on the Grand Tour in the eighteenth-century would have shuddered as he contemplated the bloodied and devastated country which emerged defeated from World War II, but would have recognised the underlying reality of a rural economy, a Catholic culture, and a basically poor society wedded to traditional ways.

All that changed rapidly. Unbridled, imaginative entrepreneurialism brought about the prosperity known as the 'economic miracle,' a complex phenomenon involving industrialisation, creativity, mass emigation from the South to the North, all of which made Italian style and cuisine the envy of the bourgeoisie everywhere, and allowed devices like the vespa and the Gaggia coffee machine to transform the image and the reality of Italy. Incongruously, the early chapters of this fine, ambitious book made me think of the triumphal march in Verdi's Aida as the victors were on parade, displaying their conquering achievements or, more banally, their reforms in education, land ownership, and prison conditions as well as their innovative architecture and trailblazing engineering to modernise society.

But, as with the Verdi opera, the onlooker knows there are subdued, darker forces which will emerge. Foot travels many miles on his journey, and it seems to me he employs two separate styles. For the early decades, he chooses an encyclopedic approach, providing a series of neatly categorised and concisely written tableaux and portraits. All human life is there. There is a lively section on the rivalry between two cyclists, Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi, the first a Catholic identified with the Christian Democrat right, and the latter more lazily taken as representing the Communist left, as well as accounts of assorted events like the 1963 disaster when the Vajont dam burst, the grip on the nation of the televised San Remo song festival and the impact on the Church of the election of John XXIII.

However, these summary pieces have the disadvantage of being somewhat static, especially in politics. The Communist party altered internally from a subordinate of Moscow to a more critical body after the Soviet suppression of Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, and then morphed into a reformist, eurocommunist organisation when it entered into contact with the Spanish Communist party after the death of Franco, but these aspects are presented simultaneously. Similarly, the complexity of the Christian Democrats (DC), with its multiple, warring factions, some ideological, like the right-wing Dorotei named after the abbey of St Dorothy where they first met, others adoringly clustered round one man, like the Andreottiani, the fawning followers of seven-times premier Giulio Andreotti, deserved subtler treatment than it receives.

For the triumphal march did not lead to a new civilisation. Incompetent, short-term governments, corruption, mafia violence, the rage of terrorism in the Sixties and Seventies and the rise of Berlusconi are the other side of a shiny coin. As he comes to the days he observed close up, Foot adopts a more conventional, discursive approach. Many observers have analysed the Italian malaise, most pointing the finger at the dominant DC. In post-war decades, Italy had its own internal Cold War, with the DC facing the Communist party. There was an agreement inside Italy's power establishment, enforced by its Nato allies, that the Communists could not be admitted to government, with the result that Italy was always dominated by the Christian Democrats, with coalition partners when needed.

They became embroiled in scandal and corruption, sometimes on a massive scale, as with the 1978 Lockheed affair which led to the resignation of the President. There were many others at local and national level, and the DC were not the only guilty force, but the result was public cynicism towards politics. The Italian state was a milch-cow for the parties. The Socialist Bettino Craxi became Prime Minister, one of the few non-DC politicians to do so, and spent fortunes on his own party, once, for example, in embellishing a pseudo-Egyptian set for a party conference. Eventually, the demands made on business were so exorbitant that no system could bear it, and the whole edifice was brought down by a group of magistrates in Milan who undertook the Clean Hands enquiry. Craxi found it expedient to flee to Tunisia where he is buried, and all the parties who had held power collapsed. No other western country had such a history of corruption. Foot writes of these events in sober and detached style, never raising his voice but setting out the facts of the various cases in measured tones.

There are three active organised-crime syndicates, all originating in the South but now found in every corner of the land, and each is an endemic plague. The problem is that these mafias are unlike ordinary criminal gangs that can be viewed as, literally, out-laws, for they are entangled with government. The central figure here, whom it is euphemistic to tag 'enigmatic,' is once again Andreotti. Foot asserts that he 'encapsulated the darkness at the heart of democratic Italy,' and after years of rumours of his association with the Sicilian mafia, he was eventually put on trial in Palermo but acquitted.

The Italian judicial system demonstrated its inadequacy during the so-called 'years of lead,' as the age of terrorism was known. Here too Italy has a primacy, for it faced not one but two assaults from the 'opposing extremisms,' another coinage of those years to designate the competing, contemporary terrorist campaigns of the Marxist Red Brigades and of shadowy right-wing groups. Foot suggests that 83% of the over 4,000 acts of violence could be attributed to the neo-fascists, but that figure seems to me highly dubious. The difference is that the right often received support from elements inside the ministries, and their criminality often went unpunished.

And then there is Silvio Berlusconi, who 'entered the field' when the old parties deserted it. He had been allied with Craxi, so did he become involved mainly to defend his business interests? Was he financed by the mafia from the outset? Was he as corrupt as was alleged in court cases, even if he was usually acquitted, often because the prosecution ran out of time? Will he ever leave the field? Is the future of politics Berlusconi and Trump?

In no country is the distrust of the state so deep or the gulf between political and civic society so wide. Galileo, after signing the document of the Holy Office declaring that the earth stood still, is said to have muttered under his breath – 'and yet it moves.' So does Italy, gracefully.