Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

– either in the communist or the liberal-socialist tradition of Giustizia e Liberta – most by the severe and independent intellectual milieu of Turin and they created what was almost certainly the finest publishing house in the world in the fifteen years after 1945.

The word ‘prince’ is chosen deliberately, for in spite of his communist sympathies, Giulio’s style, his magnificent bella figura in town or country, was royal, or at least feudal. Even as a guest in a Hampstead sitting-room, he radiated a seigneurial affability. Even in bathing trunks on a Havana beach, he was recognizable as a patron. The feudal spirit extended to his approach to business debts, including those to his authors, which eventually bankrupted him. (On the other hand, authors were likely to receive as a New Year’s gift cases of Barolo wine from the Einaudi vineyards, a wine so serious that the Einaudi cellars recommended letting it breathe for at least eight hours before drinking.) Like absolute monarchs, he thought of his kingdom as an extension of himself, and in the end it was his refusal to listen to financial advice, or even to consider the post-Giulio future of the house, that broke him. Such was the prestige of the firm that he was more than once saved from bankruptcy as a national treasure by a conjunction of the Italian anti-fascist establishment, co-ordinated by the great banker Raffaele Mattioli (the one who, in 1937, had hidden the dead Gramsci’s manuscripts in the bank safe until they could be passed, via Piero Sraffa, to the foreign HQ of the PCI). In the eighties he finally lost control, and in 1991 Giulio Einaudi Editore was sold to Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire. I cannot remember when I saw Giulio last. Probably at the eightieth birthday party which was organized for me in 1997 by the City of Genoa, old, sad and no longer quite upright, in an Italy very different from the one of his days of glory. Once he and Italo Calvino had formed part of the guard of honour at the coffin of Togliatti, who had recognized both his prestige and his political sympathies by granting to the house of Einaudi the rights to publish the works of Antonio Gramsci himself. Alas, by then what had once been Togliatti’s PCI was also in decline.

Italy between 1952 and 1997 combined dramatic social and cultural change with frozen politics. By the end of the Cold War the inhabitants of a traditionally poor country owned more cars per head of population than practically any other state in the world. The Pope’s country legalized birth control and divorce, taking to the first with enthusiasm, though notably abstaining from the second. It was a different country. But from the start of the East– West confrontation in 1947 it was clear that the USA would under no circumstances allow the communists to come to power in Italy, or even to elected government office. This remained Washington’s basic principle, one might say its ‘default position’, so long as there was a USSR and a PCI, and for a few years thereafter. But it also became equally clear that a mass Communist Party could not be eliminated either by police repression or by constitutional finagling, although the great rural revolt in the Italian south, whose by-products attracted my attention to ‘primitive rebellion’, faded away by the mid-1950s. As realists Christian Democrats accepted this, allowing the PCI political space in its regions, in culture and the media. After all, they had founded the Republic jointly with the communists. Inside Italy the Cold War was not a zero-sum game.

The Italy into which I came had therefore begun to settle down for the foreseeable future, rather like Japan, as a spectacularly corrupt political dependency of the USA, under a single party, the Christian Democrats, maintained in permanent government power by the US veto. When I first arrived in Italy I noted that the modest postwar Sicilian Mafia was still virtually undocumented and undescribed, while the Neapolitan Camorra, perhaps even more powerful today, then appeared to be extinct.⁹ Both are products of the Cold War political system. In the course of the decades after 1950 the Italian Republic became a strange, labyrinthine, often absurd and sometimes dangerous institution, increasingly distant from the actual reality of life of its inhabitants. The joke that Italy showed a country could do without a state, thus proving Bakunin right against Marx, is not strictly true, since Italians spent much of their time sidestepping what was on paper a strong, all-embracing and interventionist state. Italians were and had to be good at this game, since the massive transformation of public power, resources and employment into a nationwide patronage system and protection racket made it increasingly necessary to find ways of circulating the blood of the body politic by a million capillaries bypassing its increasingly clogged arteries. ‘Fixing it’ – by relations rather than simple bribery – became the Italian national motto.

Somewhere between a thriving and ever more confident civil society and the esoteric activities of the state, and covered by layers of silence and obfuscation, lay the field of power. It had no constitution and no formal structure. It was an acephalous complex of power centres which had to come to terms with each other locally or nationally: private, public, legal, clandestine, formal, informal. Everyone knew, for instance, that the ‘avvocato’ – Gianni Agnelli, head of the family that owned FIAT and a lot else – was a national power centre, just as he knew that, while no Italian government could fail to come to terms with him, he in turn had to deal with whoever pushed the buttons in Rome. Part of this field of power was subterranean and secret, half-emerging only in periods of crisis such as the 1970s and 1980s. In those periods Italian politics returned to the operatic or Borgia mode, amid endless arguments not so much about who the assassins of the ‘cadaveri eccellenti’¹⁴ or illustrious corpses were, but who was behind them, how they were linked to discreet but influential masonic lodges and the obscure projects to prevent the PCI from entering the ring of political power, if need be by military coups.

In the 1990s this system collapsed. The end of the Cold War deprived the Italian regime of its only justification and a genuine revolt of public opinion against the really spectacular greed of the socialist prime minister and his party broke its back. All the parties of postwar Italy were wiped out at the 1994 elections except the PCI, whose relatively deserved reputation for honesty saved them, and the Neofascists, who had also been in permanent opposition. Alas, there as elsewhere the 1990s proved that destroying a bad old regime was possible, but did not necessarily produce the conditions for creating a better one.

III

What is the autobiographer to say about a country that has been part of his and his wife’s life for half a century? Some of the people closest to us are or were Italians. We spoke Italian at home when we did not want the children to understand. Italy has been good to us, giving us friendship in beautiful places, the endless discovery of its capacity for creation, past and present, and more of those rare moments of pure satisfaction at being alive than human beings can reasonably expect past their youth. It has given me my themes as a historian. Its readers have been generous to me as a writer.

Yet as I believe that being a historian helps to understand a country, I must ask myself why the Italy of Signor Berlusconi in 2002 is not one I expected fifty years ago. How far did I fail to see where Italy was going because my observation was deficient, or biased, how far because twists in the road were not yet visible? Was it the democratization of consumer society that widened the gap between the minority of the educated and intellectual whose company elderly historians keep, and the rest of a people who read few newspapers and spent less money on books per head than all but the two poorest members of the European Union? Did the sheer speed of economic and hence social and cultural transformation defeat foresight, in Italy as elsewhere?

Certainly few read the signs right in that coup-threatened period of fear and tension, the 1970s, the peak of the PCI’s electoral support nationally and in the big cities. We did not see that dramatic industrial transformation was fatally weakening the PCI’s political influence in the economic core of Italy, the north: the FIAT assembly-line building in Turin now houses the annual Book Fair. The Party did not recognize that after 1968 it had lost its major political asset, namely the accepted hegemony over the Italian left, and indeed over all forces of opposition other than the remainders of fascism. The small instant book I did at the time with Giorgio Napolitano, then on the Secretariat of the PCI, shows no sign of having been written in the decade that culminated in the kidnapping and murder of the Italian Premier Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, the most formidable European terrorist movement of the left.¹⁰ Perhaps, worst of all, the Party, like working-class movements elsewhere, was beginning to lose touch with its popolo comunista, for whom it had been the party of resistance, liberation and social hope, the defender of the poor. As early as the seventies friends from Turin told me: ‘We are no longer a movement; we are becoming a ‘‘party of opinion’’ like the others.’ How could one talk politics in the same way to the sharp, media-wise youngish journalists who telephoned from the (now struggling) Party daily L’Unita as to the journalist generation of partisans and liberation? Rejuvenating its cadres, the Party found it had