The European-ness of Italy: categories and norms.

Dainotto, Roberto M.

Between 1974 and 1976, Giorgio Agamben, Italo Calvino and Claudio Rugafiori were planning a journal dedicated to the study of so-called "structural categories" of Italian culture: "Si trattava di identificare, attraverso una serie di concetti polarmente coniugati, nulla di meno che le strutture categoriali della cultura italiana" (Agamben Categorie vii). The journal, alas, never saw the light of day. In 1978, however, Giorgio Agamben managed to put together a programmatic preface for the non-existent journal, in which "cio che la cultura italiana ha di particolare rispetto alle altre culture europee" was spelled out in categoric fashion:

La scelta della commedia e il rifiuto della tragedia, il dominio dell'elemento architettonico e una sensibilita cosi inerme di fronte alla bellezza che non riesce ad afferrarla se non come "vaghezza", la preminenza del Diritto insieme a una concezione creaturale dell'innocenza umana, la precoce attenzione alla fiaba como mondo stregato della colpa e il riscatto cristiano di questo mondo nella miniatura "storica" del presepe, l'interesse per la storiografia accanto a una concezione della vita umana come "favola", sono alcune delle categorie sulla cui tensione antinomica si sostiene il fenomeno italiano.

(Infanzia 145-46)

What was conspicuously absent, as if in a blind spot, from this lengthy series of antinomies (and will remain absent in Agamben's own Categorie italiane of 1996) was, however, the very categorical opposition from which the whole idea of the journal seemed to unfold: the antinomy between Italian and European, between the "fenomeno italiano" and the West as norm, the "particolare" in Italian culture and the general in the "altre culture europee."

The pages that follow, trying to re-assemble that original and un-seen categorical antinomy, are thus intended as a Calvino-like contribution to the rivista inesistente. In fact, if there is one dominant category of Italian culture, it is the opposition of Italian and European. Italians want to be Europeans in the exact measure in which they do not feel they are European enough. Even sociological studies of Italian support for European integration keep insisting that despite the absence of real economic or political advantages, and sometimes despite economic sacrifices made to the fiscal policies of Maastricht, "a substantially affective [i.e. non utilitarian] support" for integration still grows strong in Italy (Ammendola and Isernia 140; also Lindberg and Scheingold 38). What explains such an unbending desire to be part of an imagined European community?

Historically imagined as the standard of a putative norm to be reached, "Europe," understood as an "entita politica e morale" (Chabod 23), has consistently functioned as the locus amoenus, if not as the Utopia tout court, informing the entire rhetoric of the country. Such rhetoric has undoubtedly brought Italy many beautiful things; it has, however, also been used quite successfully to convince Italians of the European necessity to (for instance) privatize their beaches, downsize their welfare state, and embark on the adventures of the so-called work-mobility.

Paraphrasing a bit from a widely circulating computer animation on "Europe & Italy" by Bozzetto, I would then like to dedicate this essay, in the spirit of Agamben's commedia, to all those who think that the problems of Italy (many indeed) can all be magically solved by a "Europeanization" (Morlino 237; Desideri 96-116) of the country's economy, politics, social structure, and culture. I dedicate it, in other words, to Agamben himself, who is "convinto (come altri studiosi) che il carattere 'comico' della cultura italiana la destini a essere tagliata fuori della modernita" (Cassano Modernizzare 145).

I dedicate it also to the bards of Europe "sola salvezza per l'Italia" (Ferrera and Gualmini 1-10); to those who have blamed the un-European-ness of Italy on a misplaced national cult for "la natura pelasgica degli italiani, la mediterraneita, la paganita o altro topo piu gradito ai palati indigeni" (Bollati 34); to the theorists of the "paradosso italiano," "unico paese europeo [che non ha avuto] un'esperienza storica unificante dal punto di vista della coscienza nazionale in senso moderno" (Ferrarotti 83); and, last but not least, to those who have made it into Europe's new imagined community.

Extracomunitari

[...] dicono che in Italia e meglio nascere cane che essere extracomunitario

(Patino and Saravia 77)

It is a known fact that Italy has a long recorded history of emigration. In 1861, in the first census of unified Italy, more than one million Italians had already left the newly instituted motherland in search of a better life abroad. Things did not look better in 1876, when Luigi Bodio begun to record with statistical scruple the patterns of Italian emigration: an average of 123,000 Italians a year had left between 1869 and 1875; in 1875, the number had increased to an average of 135,000. Far from fulfilling the dream of self-determination, the new nation had brought in the reality of massive emigration. Neither the "industrial take-off" promoted by the government of Giovanni Giolitti, nor the dreams of an imperial nation pursued by Benito Mussolini, ever managed to offer many Italians an alternative to emigration. Then, in the late 50s, began "an invisible revolution": "What was this revolution? Emigration to foreign countries, especially towards the Americas, ended, but what started was an immigration from South to North, and these people, Northerners and Southerners, saw each other as foreigners" (Gianni Amelio in Crowdus 15).

In recent years, however, a major reversal of historical patterns has begun, with Italy "becoming the receiver of migrants [...] and of refugees from non-European countries" (Anthias and Lazaridis 3). The boats of Albanians and Liberians landing on the island of Lampedusa, and the euphemistically called Centri di Accoglienza (Welcome Centers) have become familiar icons in the landscape of present-day Italy. There is a plethora of reasons for this wave of immigration: the relative wealth of Italy compared to African and Eastern European countries; the increase of emigration from bordering Eastern European countries after the fall of the Communist regimes and their embargoes on emigration; the geographic position of Italy in the Mediterranean, with its long coastlines, which make the entry of migrants, with the assistance of well organized smugglers, possible; and, finally, the specific nature of the Italian economy (something similar to California), which yields "a high demand for a flexible work force in agriculture (harvesting of tomatoes, grapes, oranges, olives, etc.), tourism and catering, construction industries (confined to men), street hawking and domestic service (a female preserve)" (Anthias and Lazaridis 4).

The initial response to the new phenomenon of immigration was one of relative acceptance of the newcomers. After all, as the priest of Realmonte, a small town near Agrigento, once confidently declared, "we are used to strangers. We've had Arabs, we've had the Spanish, we've had the Greeks, we've even had the Americans. And now we have the Liberians" (cited in Moorehead 55). And, after all, Italy was itself a land of migrants: as Gianni Amelio dramatized in his movie Lamerica, the situation of the newcomers in Italy was "quite similar to that of Italian immigrants in America" (Matteo 15). How could Italians not be sympathetic to their plights!

In fact, the law 943 of 1987, "one of the most progressive in the world" (Pugliese 20; Melotti 90), went as far ahead as granting rights of residence and assistance to any legal or illegal immigrants who could prove they had a job or family in Italy. Even the Martelli sanatoria of 1990, while designed with the purpose of curbing immigration (and thus sanare or "heal the country," as observed by Parati 119), managed to enlarge in a positive way the provisions of the 1951 Refugee Convention by extending refugee status to non-Europeans as well. (1) "But then came a large number of landings--Albanians in 1990 and 1991, Yugoslavs in 1992, more Albanians in 1997, Kurds in 1998" (Moorehead 63). Mounting racism and xenophobia soon started dispelling not only the myth of italiani brava gente, but also the very idea that some historical memory of Italian emigration would or could protect the country from any anti-immigration hysteria. In the last few years, Italy has witnessed a discouraging increase of violence against immigrants; the growth of racist rhetoric from nationalist and even localist parties; a campaign of pure paranoia launched on all major TV channels and newspapers; and, on December 9, 2005, the curious decision of Italy's Supreme Court:

Dopo ponderata riflessione, la Corte di Cassazione, la nostra piu alta istanza giudiziaria, ha emesso l'alta sentenza: "Sporco negro" non e un insulto razzista. Spiega la Repubblica: "Per la Cassazione l'espressione 'sporco negro'--pronunciata da un italiano mentre aggredisce persone di colore alle quali provoca serie lesioni--non denota, di per se l'intento discriminatorio e razzista di chi la pronuncia perche potrebbe anche essere una meno grave manifestazione di 'generica antipatia, insofferenza o rifiuto' per chi appartiene a una razza diversa". Come se una generica antipatia, insofferenza o rifiuto non fosse, appunto gia sinonimo di un atteggiamento razzista--specie se accompagnata dall'aggressione e dalle botte. E infatti, se non e un insulto razzista questo, che attribuisce intrinseca sporcizia al colore della pelle ("sporco negro", cioe sporco perche "negro"), che cosa lo e?

(Portelli 1)

Much has been written about this new wave of frequently institutionalized Italian racism. Explanations for its rise are usually couched in economic terms--first and foremost, the usual fear of losing jobs to newcomers in Italy's notoriously weak economy of underemployment--or, lately, in culturalist ones: Italy's historically weak sense of national belonging (Bollati; Ferrarotti 34-123), threatened by the presence of an alien culture, responds with a xenophobia fueled by the nationalist parties of the right (Sniderman et al. 8; Ward 81-97). Italy's racism of the 1990s would then coincide with what Martin Barker has called "new racism" (Barker): a new kind proper to the forms of late capitalism in which aliens are economically necessary for low-paid temporary work, but ideologically demonized; one, moreover, which dispenses with biological theories of race and organizes itself, instead, around notions of cultural identity. In Prejudice and Politics in Italy, in fact, a group of sociologists has noticed how Italian racism is scarcely concerned with the biological facts of skin color; immigrants to Italy, whether black or white, "bear a burden of intolerance by virtue of being immigrants" (Sniderman et al. 8). In short, they threaten not only the economic security of the citizenry, but its cultural identity as well. Or, mutatis mutandis, immigrants, by virtue of being non-Italian, serve to define the nation's identity: we are not them: "noi siamo i belli, loro so' brutti, dai / loro so' brutti, ma brutti davvero" (99 Posse).

What I want to propose is now a supplement to the culturalist paradigm of Italy's nationalist xenophobia. I want to suggest, as a parallel explanation, that the rise of a new racism in Italy is intimately tied with Italy's tormented history of European integration. Immigration, in other words, threatens not only a sense of national identity, but a sense of Italy's belonging to Europe.

Links between new forms of racism and the reality of the new European union have already and abundantly been made clear. Etienne Balibar, among others, has noticed how anti-immigrant feelings in Europe are historically coeval to the downsizing of the welfare state and the shrinking of the national job-markets, planned in view of a European Union free-market economy and the final establishment of a common Euro-area ("Citizenship"). What he calls "class racism," would then be a misplaced animus that the victims of Europe's free-market grow against immigrants accused of stealing jobs, instead of against the managers of this new Europe. Balibar has, accordingly, talked of a "virtual European apartheid" (We, the People of Europe 9) and Michael Hardt has insisted on the exclusionary politics of Europe's discourse on citizenship (159-63). Gian Enrico Rusconi has also mentioned a pan-European effort to stop (and demonize) immigration (169). Armando Gnisci has shown how the Charter of Fundamental Rights of EU, by limiting "the right to move" only to "Every citizen of the Union" (Article 45.1), has represented a step back from the more permissive 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the General Assembly of the United Nations (Gnisci 21). Finally, Ashley Dawson and Patrizia Palumbo have linked Italian racism to the "European Union's increasing fortress mentality" (185). They have correctly noticed how Europe, which historically has contributed to the poverty of many African and East European nations through colonial plunder and territorial annexation, refuses now to pay the debts of its historical actions by refusing that poverty to enter its borders.

There is little doubt that coordinated European policy has radicalized, rather than appeased, xenophobic tensions in its member states. As a matter of fact, a reversal of Italian policies regarding immigration happened, around 1994, under the direct action of the Council of Ministers of the European Union, which imposed on its member states a severe control on immigrant visas, and singled out Italy's "porous borders" as a threat to the security of Europe. Around that year, the "fortress Europe" of Schengen was born. The point I am trying to make here, however, is not simply that Italian racism grows as a direct consequence of Europe's policy decisions. What I am suggesting, rather, is that such racism grows on some deeper, peculiarly Italian cultural anxieties about Italy's belonging to an entity called "Europe." A way to enter into such cultural anxiety could be through a curious linguistic shift registered in the jargon of Italian xenophobia: between 1989 and 1991 (Sciortino and Colombo 103), the usual terms deployed to label derogatorily all immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe--vo cumpra, marocchini--give way to a new, and increasingly popular term: extracomunitari. Borrowed from juridical language, the term technically indicates whoever is not a citizen of a state of the European Union. In common usage, however, extracomunitario is not a citizen of a non-EU Western nation, say, a Swiss or a North American. If xenophobia is a response to a sense of threatened identity, the emergence of the word extracomunitario raises the question of what kind of identity is implied by the term.

We have learnt from Saussure that language is a system of arbitrary signs functioning on the mechanism of difference or binary oppositions: the meaning of "raw" is "not cooked," and "cooked" has no other meaning than "not raw" (67-69; 79-86). "Good" is "not evil" and "evil" is "not good." According to the same logic, extracomunitario is then certainly "non-European." The term serves to imagine, as its opposite does, a sense of "European" identity. This "Europe" is not so much a precise geography, but an imagined community comprehending Swiss and Americans as well. It is the horizon of Europe as a conceptual "entita politica e morale" which extends, like Tocqueville's "gradual and continuous progress of the European race," to "the Rocky Mountains [with] the solemnity of a providential event" (Tocqueville 398). (2)

The real question, however, is why Italians have picked this strange, bureaucratic-sounding word extracomunitario in the first place. What is the need to reaffirm, time and again, a European identity to which we Italians, different from "them," do belong? Does compulsive repetition betray, perhaps, a sense of insecurity? An anecdote narrated by Caroline Moorehead may help us cast some lights on this very issue. It is the story of the arrival, on the coasts of Sicily, of a group of shipwrecked refugees from Liberia. The first pages of Moorehead's narrative are an edifying story of the Sicilian villagers' acceptance of the outsiders: they help them, feed them, and cover them with warm blankets. Although the village "is very poor," and "unemployment is as high here as in all parts of Sicily" (55), human solidarity triumphs, and everybody "feels mostly sympathy for those so desperate that they will risk their lives" to come to Italy (60-61). There is no sense, in other words, of the outsiders threatening to steal a few more jobs away from the locals. This perfect picture of conviviality, however, does not last long. It is not that the immigrants suddenly turn into criminals or prostitutes. No. They simply leave:

[...] as autumn turned into winter, and freezing winds blew through the high mountains, the Africans clearly began to suspect that the life of a remote Sicilian town, safe as it was, might not be so desirable after all. Security was all very well, but what of the new life that Europe had seemed to promise? What of the affluence, the comfort, the good things they had seen on their televisions back at home? At least, that is what Dr. Palumbo [a notable from the village] assumes they thought [...]. The day came when San Biagio woke to find three of the Liberians gone, departed on the early bus for Palermo. A few days later, another five had vanished. By January, there were none left. Even the girl with her new baby had disappeared. Not one said good-bye to anyone. "It wasn't that we wanted thanks," said Dr. Palumbo again. "We didn't help them for gratitude. But to leave saying nothing? It made us feel foolish, used." It also made them feel sad, thinking about these wandering young Africans, slipping quietly into the night, to scatter and vanish into Europe [...].

(Moorehead 68-69)

Certainly, we should not take anecdotes at face value, nor should we trust poor and betrayed Dr. Palumbo as any kind of objective witness to the events of the arrival and disappearance of the extracomunitari. Perhaps he did want some gratitude. Yet, the fact remains that those extracomunitari had little to be grateful for; they had come "to Europe: they were in search of better lives, and they were resentful that Italy seemed to offer so little" (Moorehead 69). In other words, they had come to Europe, but they had only landed in Italy. "It wasn't that we wanted thanks"; perhaps, truly, the Sicilian villagers wanted only to share the wondrous riches of Europe with them. Ungratefully, they were reminded of their biggest fear: that Europe was not there. "Neanche gli extracomunitari rimangono qui [...] siamo noi i veri extracomunitari"; "Gli extracomunitari siamo noi, incapaci di essere parte della [...] Europa".

We Have Made Italy. Let's Now Make the Europeans

"Non siamo l'ammirazione dell'Europa, bisogna dirselo," wrote Massimo D'Azeglio in his posthumously published memoirs (272). With D'Azeglio, we are in the heyday of the Italian Risorgimento. Against all odds, Italy has defied the logic of the Congress of Vienna. In spite of Metternich's assumption that "Italian affairs do not exist," and despite Count Angeberg's assurance that Italy was but "a combination of independent states linked together by the same geographical expression" (quoted in Straus 92-93), Italy has become a modern European nation. With a flag inspired by 1789, and a people's parliament comparable to the British one, Italy has been made. What still remained to be done, however, was to make this Italy into a true, modern European nation. What was still lacking, in other words, was that "fondamento morale" that "alcun'altra nazione europea e civile" already had (Leopardi 63). Or, as Benedetto Croce would write still half a century after the facts of unification, what was missing was "una coscienza Italiana moderna che fosse Europea e nazionale" (Croce 39).

A good number of recent publications suggests how the sort of Europe-envy that developed around the Risorgimento created, in turn, the topos of the South: a place, half real and half imaginary, in which Italy ceased to be Europe and threatened to turn into something worse (Dickie 53-82; Moe 13-36). The fear of not being European enough, in other words, became "The Southern Question." The South then appeared to the founders of the patria as an identity at odds with those principles--freedom, equality, and national association--that were largely defined, as Mazzini noticed, according to "il senso dato a queste parole in Francia" (2.550). No doubt, plenty of pre-Risorgimento literature had already prepared the palimpsest for such non-European-ness of the South. The programmatic depiction of the Bourbon South as a place of utter decadence and moral corruption had failed to foresee that such historical and contextual depictions could easily be de-historicized and generalized to comprehend and haunt the whole of Italy:

The anti-Bourbon campaigns of Italian nationalists added to the European perception of Southerners as barbaric savages, unworthy of modern Europe. [Luigi] Settembrini, who had denounced Bourbon government already in an 1847 essay, decried this negative effect: "[...] we have cried all across the world that the Bourbons had turned us into barbarians and beasts; and everybody believed that we were barbarians and beasts."

(Astarita 281)

The solution was now to separate the baby from the bath water. It is not that Italy was Southern and un-European. The Italian South, alone, was the problem. "It does not take much intelligence or insight to understand that a people that is so profoundly degraded [as the Southern one] cannot think seriously about freedom, cannot understand it, want it, die for it" (Francesco Trinchera in Moe 145). The Milanese Gian Rinaldo Carli, collaborator of Il Caffe, had written in Della disuguaglianza fisica, morale e civile fra gli uomini: "Come Montesquieu ha giudiziosamente rimarcato, gli uomini del nord sono piu coraggiosi degli uomini del sud" (cited in Berselli Ambri 175). The solution, in other words, was to deal with the Southern problem through a military occupation called "fight against brigandage." Historian Luigi Farini, just nominated lieutenant general of the mezzogiorno, wrote to Cavour in 1860 from the "front": "Ma, amico caro, che paese e questo! [...] Che barbarie! Ma che Italia e questa? Questa e Affrica: i beduini, a paragone di questi villani, sono esempi di civiche virtu!" (Petraccone 18). Already there, the South was the threat of a pathology degenerating the moral body not only of an Italian identity, but of Italy's own belonging to the Europe of nations: "This is Africa! "

Before unification, literary historian Cesare Balbo, in Delle speranze d'Italia (1855), had mentioned fundamental differences setting apart Southern from Northern identity, and Costantino Nigra, in Storia letteraria d'Italia (1861), had been perhaps the first to codify such differences in terms of racial identities: Northern Italy belonged to the Celtic and European race, Southern Italy to an Italic one. It was the positivistic anthropology of Giuseppe Sergi, however, that gave scientific systematization to the theory of such differences (Petraccone 18; Pick 109-54). As Orientalism had canonized the Oriental as "lethargic" and led by a "need for vengeance that overrides everything" (Said 39, 49), so did Cesare Lombroso observe Southern Calabria in 1862 as a "barbaric" place where "l'ozio vi era eretto a merito, e l'odio a sistema, l'accattonaggio a mestiere" (89). Just as Orientalism had canonized the Orient as a place of backwardness representing "a distant European past," and the Oriental as an epiphany of "primitiveness [...] [that] had not been subject to the ordinary processes of history" (Said 85, 230), so was Lombroso's Southerner the example of a "primitivismo atavistico [...] l'effetto di un arresto di sviluppo nel senso morale collettivo, di una permanenza nello stato barbarico" (514). In short, Italy was split into two races: while a perfectly sociable homo europaeus inhabited a happy North, the homo meridionalis, under the yoke of climate and natural factors, threatened to de-Europeanize the country (Teti 154).

Alfredo Niceforo, Sicilian member of the Roman Anthropological Society and of the Italian Society of Geography, could not but internalize the theory and confirm that the Southern country "si e atrofizzata nel cammino della civilta ed e rimasta con le idee morali delle primitive societa; gli uomini presentano cosi un atavismo psichico individuale, e l'intera regione, nella sua coscienza collettiva, un atavismo sociale" (41). Niceforo's reviewer for the daily Il Secolo asked then rhetorically: "Non par di sognare, leggendo che questi costumi da tribu arabe anteriori a Maometto rivivano nei nostri giorni, in una provincia nostra; che queste imprese abbiano per protagonisti, non touaregg o dei beduini, ma cittadini italiani, e per teatro, non il deserto del Sahara, ma le montagne sarde? " (cited in Petraccone 164).

So, in those days when Italy was striving to become a modern European nation, the Southern Question already threatened to disturb the happy picture: "Ma e Italia? E Europa questa?" (Giulio Bechi cited in Petraccone 166). Worse: could the Southern disease possibly contaminate the whole nation?

Italian Idiocy

Let's fast-forward. World War II was hardly over when Alberto Savinio began imagining Europe as a means to redeem Italy from the "Asiatic despotism" that Mussolini had just borrowed from the Germans ("ces asiatiques d'Europe" Opere 618). Written between 1943 and 1944, Sorte dell'Europa opens with a scathing assessment of Italian intelligence: "Gli italiani mancano di pensiero e di giudizio" (15). Years of fascism had certainly contributed to such lack of judgment:

A onor del vero pero, l'inerzia del pensiero e del giudizio non e da imputare "interamente" ai vent'anni di regime autoritario che l'Italia ha conchiuso sei giorni sono [Mussolini's arrest on July 25], perche il regime autoritario ha rafforzato l'inerzia del pensiero e del giudizio, l'ha sistematizzata, l'ha codificata, ma non l'ha generata: l'inerzia del pensiero e del giudizio in parte preesisteva.

(Sorte 16)

One such inertia (but by no means the only one) was the myth of nationalism, which, since the Risorgimento, had remained a dominant concept of Italian thought. Even when such concept had exhausted its progressive value and acquired a reactionary one, Savinio alleged, Italian inertia had kept moving with it. Nationalism had brought Italy into World War I, for the "liberation" of Fiume. Nationalism had led Italy to the disastrous colonial enterprises of Massaua and Dogali. And nationalism had brought Italy into Mussolini's hands. It was high time, finally, to get rid of such a concept "e creare dei concetti che secondano [un] miglioramento, e lo stimolano, fin dove il miglioramento dell'Italia si confonde con il miglioramento stesso dell'Europa (Sorte 22-23).

[...] il passaggio dall'attuale Europa divisa in nazioni, in una Europa [...]. A questo solo fine devono tendere tutte le menti e tutte le volonta, tutte le forze e tutte le intelligenze; davanti a questo fine deve cedere qualunque interesse particolaristico, ossia qualunque ragione "nazionale".

(Sorte 22-23, 34)

In those same years, Federico Chabod was also trying to propose the idea of Europe--"coscienza politica e morale," "senso di solidarieta morale e di connessione spirituale, non di divisione razzistica"--as the only salvation from the lurking fires of nationalism (171). Yet, with Savinio, the disasters of fascist nationalism were hyper-compensated, so to speak, by a theory that wanted Italy to disappear completely into a European totality, its reason and its "particular interests" confused, quite etymologically and with more than an echo of Mazzini's "Giovane Europa," with those of the European country defined as "una sola nazione unita da comuni pensieri, da comuni interessi, da un comune destino (Sorte 22-23, 86).

The slippage, here, might be rather meaningful, because in the moment Europe is represented as the overcoming of the nation not into a different entity, but into another bigger nation--una sola nazione--we are left to ponder what, exactly, is at stake here for Savinio. Is Europe the conceptual negation of nationalism? Or is it, rather, a mere escape from the shame of being Italians after fascism?

Like the literature of early Italian anthropology, Savinio's writings opened an entirely new perspective by establishing feelings and prejudices about Europe and Italy that shaped Italian consciousness for years to come. They not only diagnosed a primordial lack of judgment of the Italians to be cured (or saved) by a miraculously therapeutic Europe; they also prescribed the way Italians had to relinquish "qualunque interesse particolaristico" to merge and disappear into the new "nation." The distance between Savinio and Italy's recent European integration, from this perspective, is not that great. Italians, as a pathology in the otherwise healthy body of a Europe "saggia, virtuosa e austera," simply have to stop being Italians: "Essere finalmente come gli altri, e non cosi mediterranei, pizza e mandolino, un po' inferiori [...]" (Turani 36).

Turani is here quite exemplary of a general Italian attitude to European integration that Savinio had inaugurated in 1944. In the words of Franco Cassano:

La Gran Bretagna rivendica con orgoglio la sua insularita e un ruolo di mediazione tra Europa e America, la Germania si sente il cuore Profondo e il nucleo autentico d'Europa, la Francia crede nell'equazione perfetta tra il proprio nazionalismo e l'universalismo dei diritti [Europei], la Spagna e il Portogallo si dividono tra una transoceanica fraternita latina e l'ebbrezza di una modernita recente.

(Peninsula 7)

Per l'Italia [invece] l'ingresso in Europa vuol dire [un ripudiare la propria identita] come una disgrazia.

(Modernizzare 123-24).

For Savinio, such disgrazia was the shame of fascism. Other disgrazie, however, soon accumulated on the commonplace of pathologic Italy.

Cape of Europe

Mi vergognavo di essere italiano [...].

(D'Azeglio 270)

In the novella "Capo d'Europa," written for Nuovi Argomenti in 1972, Angela Bianchini offers a dramatic example of the Italian necessity of forgetting national identities and escaping to Europe. Set in 1940, this is the story of an unnamed ragazza--a Jew, and yet allegorical Everyman (or Everywoman) of fascist Italy--compensating exactly for her "mancanza di intelligenza e di giudizio" in her first encounter with Europe. Living in Italy, she has been the clear victim of Mussolini's rhetoric: driven "dalla piu cieca fede nei destini della patria," she has been one of those Jews, reminiscent of the Finzi-Continis, who remained totally surprised by the implementation of the Racial Laws in 1938. Since then, she has been in "un'angosciosa e disperata agitazione" (Bianchini 1125). Her parents have finally managed to get a visa for her, and she is now on her way to New York.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that this is the story of an escape to the New World, or a breakout from a Europe devastated by war and preyed on by Nazism. If the ragazza's destination is the United States, Bianchini's narrative, organized from the point of view of 1972, "stops abruptly," as Angela Jeannet notices, "at the instant the young woman boards a ship to America" (Jeannet 95). Bianchini's final destination, in other words, is Cape of Europe, out of Lisbon, and more precisely the Pensione Europa where the ragazza spends five days waiting to board the ship for the New World. This is not a story about the American myth; it is about an Italian in a mythical Europa.

The beginning of the story is a barely disguised echo of Europa's westward flight on the bull's back. On the arguably more modern airplane of the Littorio, "sopra il Mediterraneo increspato in piccole onde spumeggianti, con le isole che fluttuavano, come in una carta geografica, in rilievo oleografico" (Bianchini 1126), the ragazza is literally kidnapped, "come presa in un turbinio di eliche," from her familiar world. Nostalgia for home is scarcely lessened by the new perspective on life that flying, "vedendo le cose dall'alto" (1129), seems to offer her: "ora, dall'alto del piccolo apparecchio, provava rimorso, per aver capito poco o niente della guerra che l'Italia aveva esaltata come guerra fascista, per aver inneggiato alla presa di Barcellona [...] (1128). Such remorse, however, soon dissipates upon landing. Nostalgia for Italy comes back. At Pensione Europa, the ragazza meets the Rubens, a family of anti-fascist intellectuals whose original nationality--not to mention their native tongue--seems impossible to assess. From their names, they must be Jews like her. But they have lived in Kiev, Germany, Spain, France, and now in Lisbon. "Aristocratici delle partenze," the Rubens, Jews or not-Jews, are true Europeans, conceptual and narrative antitheses of the ragazza whose life, instead, has been "un trantran stabile e sedentario, dedicato alla solidita della vita, alla sicurezza del domani, e, soprattutto, all'unicita del culto e della patria" (1153). The encounter is not an easy one: the Rubens threaten the very sense of the world the ragazza has been accustomed to, starting with her culto della patria which she has to defend, against all evidence, with provincial and quite Savinian imbecility:

"No" disse, "non e poi cosi tragico, non e vero che manchi tutto in Italia; il caffe non c'e, e il te nemmeno, il sapone non si trova e si fa in casa; si, ci sono le tessere annonarie, ma le stoffe e le scarpe e possibile procurarsele e, in fondo, si va ancora avanti e molti hanno provviste".

(1135)

And later:

Rispose che, si, le leggi razziali esistevano, ma funzionavano anche, com'era il caso della sua famiglia, i meriti patriottici; che agli ebrei avevano portato via la radio e la servitu, ma che non vivevano, almeno quelli che conosceva lei, affatto isolati....

(1136)

Undoubtedly, such denials are "il suo modo di difendere il passato, l'unico da lei appreso." Yet this past, in the narrator's more detached words, is also longing for a way of living "meschino e pauroso che non conosceva [...] i grandi spazi percorsi attraverso l'Europa" (1141-42). In other words, between the ragazza's provincial attachments to Italy and the Rubens' European cosmopolitanism, a profound dichotomy opens that Bianchini's narrative explores. The confrontation between the Italian and the European is, then, a progressive revelation of the Italian's "inferiorita oggettiva" (Bollati 41), to the point that towards the end of the story, "[l]a ragazza vide se stessa, in confronto ai Ruben, pavida e goffa" (1154).

Here we should be careful not to take this goffaggine in a merely political sense. At this moment, the ragazza is ashamed not only for her stubborn and stupid defense of fascism, but mostly for her provincialism. Whereas the Rubens "avevano [...] una disponibilita e pluralita di patrie che la turbava" (1153), her existence seems rooted in discreet forms of provincial identities. She is Italian. She is Roman. And, at best, she is a Jew:

E, d'altronde, quella definizione: [ebrea,] la riportava a una tradizione, a una categoria a cui non era sicura di volere appartenere, e ancora una volta sorgeva il problema dell'unicita di nazionalita, di culto, di patria, che i Ruben superavano con eleganza [...] e lei si trovava, invece, di continuo davanti a se, in forma di ostacolo e di inciampo.

(1155)

So, if the interest of a Jew in 1940 was, presumably, to leave Cape of Europe as soon as possible before the Nazis could get there, the interest of Bianchini in 1972 is to dwell at Pensione Europa a little longer, until such dichotomy between identity and plurality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, Italian and European becomes Bildung, that is, the realization of this fundamental Italian goffaggine and its redemption by Europe. So, close to the day of departure, "[l]a ragazza pensava ancora come Ruben le avesse mostrato un'Europa a lei sconosciuta, frontiere traversate con grazia e leggerezza, con la sola eleganza degli affetti e delle idee" (1175). With the realization of this idea of border crossings, the Italian ragazza goffa is metamorphosed, in perfect Ovidian fashion, into a gracious, light, and elegant European. She can now leave for America, and, we are told with an echo of Tocqueville, "fu un distacco lento e solenne" (1185).

It is this intervening sense of goffaggine that interests me in Bianchini's narrative when compared to Savinio. Savinio's Europe, in 1943, is the old, Kantian myth of Perpetual Peace. Escaping to Europe means running towards the end of all wars. In 1972, however, Bianchini's Europe is remembered in a state of war, and yet it is still the commonplace of something desirable to escape to in order to acquire "grazia e leggerezza." Savinio's Italians, in 1943, are imbeciles without knowing it. Their imbecility, moreover, is a political question. In 1972, however, Bianchini's Every(wo)man does feel "pavida e goffa" vis-a-vis Europe--and not only in a political sense.

I suggest that this goffaggine acquires its meaning not in the context of fascist Italy, but in that of Italy's aspirations to modernity throughout the 1960s. The poet Giuseppe Goffredo, in Cadmos cerca Europa, talks explicitly about this epochal sense of shame that invested the whole of Italian culture since the years of the economic miracle: "Il sentimento di vergogna [...] alla mia generazione, credo sia stato inculcato da quello che man mano veniva avanti, chiamato dal senso comune: progresso, sviluppo, modernita" (56). The economic boom, which started in 1958, had broadcast "il mercato scintillante dei consumi, arrivati in casa attraverso la televisione" (58). Images of, and aspirations to progress, development and modernity, however, hardly reflected the real country Italians had before their eyes. The latter, in fact, described on the pages of the weekly L'Espresso, hardly looked like Europe at all:

"In quasi nessuna abitazione esiste gabinetto. In alcune, al posto del gabinetto, c'e un foro sull'uscio di casa chiamato "buttatoio" che comunica direttamente con un canale di scolo scavato ai margini della strada. Molto spesso il canale viene scoperto per evitare che si ostruisca: la fogna corre cosi liberamente al livello della strada. [La famiglia che abita qui ha] avuto dieci figli di cui quattro morti prestissimo. Oggi vivono tutti insieme, marito moglie e sei figli (quattro femmine e due maschi), nell'unica stanza di cui e costituita l'abitazione. Dormono in cinque nel letto matrimoniale, gli altri per terra sulla paglia. Nella stanza c'e anche il mulo che viene legato al piede del letto. Lo sterco del mulo, che viene ammucchiato vicino alla porta di casa, viene poi venduto come letame." Non e l'Africa [...]: e Palma di Montechiaro, provincia di Agrigento, un pezzo di Sicilia, Italia, nel 1958.

(cited in Mafai 4)

Cristo si e fermato a Eboli was written by Carlo Levi in 1945. Now, it was Europe, identified with modernity, which had stopped at the Southern doors of Italy, at the place where Europe suddenly became "Africa."

The problem was certainly not a new one: meridionalismo, and the anthropology of Lombroso and Niceforo had sanctioned the existence of the due Italie already in the years of the unification. There was one modern and Northern--European--Italy; and there was another Southern one, arrested in the teleology of history, what Niceforo called "Mediterranean Italy." In the years of the economic miracle, the old Southern question resurfaced: the problem of Italy's modernity was the Southern problem, a problem that the commedia all'italiana, from Sedotta e abbandonata to Divorzio all'italiana, could scarcely exorcize as a distant aberration. The South, in short, was the obstacle to Italy's desired modernization. An Italian goffaggine, in other words, was the shame, registered by Raffaele La Capria in Armonia perduta, of living in a Southern country, one where "la Storia si e arenata, si e arrestata, e rimasta irrealizzata, e non si e evoluta gradualmente dispiegando nelle varie epoche tutte le proprie potenzialita, ed esaurendole: com'e accaduto a Londra [o] a Parigi [...]" (17).

Being Italian, having that identity, meant therefore to be marked as a pathology of history, a defect of modernity, a failure of progress, a Giovannino-come-lately in the spectacle of consumer society. On the other hand, escaping to Europe meant nothing less than entering history, progress, and modernity. But to do that, Italy had to lose its Southern identity, and become Northern, that is, European. Italo Calvino, for instance, had written with an echo of Savinio that "dobbiamo puntare su una [...] Italia in cui il Nord conti di piu, in cui la forma mentis [Europea] domini in tutte le nostre azioni e pensieri" (II.2186-87). In other words, shame of an Italian identity pavida e goffa was shame for an identity that differentiated Italy from the rest of Europe. Shame, in Goffredo's words, "ci invitava senza mezzi termini ad abiurare [alla nostra identita]" (58), and to embark into the adventure of Pasolini's omologazione culturale (Scritti corsari 237).

As Franco Piperno notes in Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridionale, the prejudice of a century-long meridionalismo weighted mightily on the kind of modernity Italians imagined in the years of the economic miracle. It still burdens discussions of Italy's Europeanization today. It is not only the Northern League--"Per non sprofondare nel mediterraneo" was Bossi's electoral slogan in 1994--but the entire national culture that, from the unification onward, has seen Southern and Mediterranean Italy as the problem, la questione, of Italy's European-ness:

[...] le abitudini comuni, i saperi informali, le forme conoscitive proprie alla civilta meridionale sono imbarazzanti denuncie del ritardo, senza alcuna valenza di autonomia concettuale e sentimentale che non sia quella, spettrale, del folklore. A partire dalla nascita della nazione, il Sud diviene il luogo della resistenza alla ragione, il mondo come era all' origine prima che l'astratta mentalita moderna [ed Europea] ne dissolvesse il senso. Massoni, liberali, mazziniani, socialisti, fascisti, cattolici popolari e comunisti, tutti costoro per oltre un secolo hanno coniugato i loro sforzi per costruire la nazione [come un tentativo di de-meridionalizzazione]. Da questo punto di vista, si puo ben dire che il meridionalismo interseca tutta la cultura politica nazionale e fornisce una idea del Mezzogiorno che e divenuta, appunto, un luogo comune.

(Piperno 13-14)

Escaping to Europe means, then, escaping the commonplace of Italy's meridionalita; a "'settentrionalizzazione' dei comportamenti e delle regole" becomes a way to dispense with the South as the problem and question of Italy's modernity (Cassano, Modernizzare 123).

From this perspective, however, Bianchini's prescriptive invitation to start seeing identity "in forma di ostacolo e di inciampo," her challenge to any sense of nostalgia for the Italy we have left behind us, appears less concerned to face up to fascism than to serve Pasolini's omologazione. And Bianchini's westward flight from the "Mediterraneo increspato in piccole onde spumeggianti" (1126) towards the Atlantic reminds one not of a Jewish girl escaping from the Racial Laws, but of that myth of modernization that Serge Latouche called "the westernization of the world."

Italy and the Time Machine

In 1997, the journalist Giuseppe Turani decided to answer the growing population of Italy's Euro-skeptics with the publication of a book with the programmatic title, Scappiamo in Europa. L'ultima occasione per salvarci dallo sfascio. Echoing a famous dystopia by John Carpenter, set incidentally in a then-futuristic 1997, Turani's escape from Italy was the flight from a civilization that had reached its final collapse. What this sfascio, this collapse was, hardly needed much elaboration: the political corruption unveiled with Tangentopoli; inefficient services; a disorganized university; an antediluvian banking system; rampant inflation; rising unemployment; and an immense budget deficit had revealed Italy as "una sorta di Disneyland-nazione, senza ne capo ne coda. Una sorta di paese latino-americano d'altri tempi, un po' da operetta, trapiantato nel cuore dell'Europa saggia, virtuosa e austere" (Turani 32).

Un-European as always, Italy was now Latin America! In truth, Italians, and no doubt many of the international observers, had lost by 1997 any hope in the palingenesis promised by the birth of a Second Republic. In 1994, Silvio Berlusconi had won the political elections in March, the European elections in June, and, more important, the European Soccer Cup in early July. His alliance, which included Lega Nord and Alleanza Nazionale, had taken a generally favorable view of the Maastricht Treaty and the European Union in general, and was willing to carry out Italy's obligations towards Europe under the banner of liberalism and federalism. Under the pressure of Berlusconi's allies, the Europe he imagined was a Europe of Nations: a Europe in which the fiscal autonomy of the "nations" of Veneto, Lombardy, and Piedmont was safeguarded (a Europe of ethnocultural particularisms not altogether different from the one imagined in Catalunia, the Basque country, or Flemish Belgium). By the last weeks of July, however, the dream of a new European Italy that the new caesar, after Modugno, had painted in blue, had collapsed under new investigations of corruption moved against Berlusconi, and with the decision of the Northern League to abandon the coalition and implement a program of more radical secessionism. Berlusconi's Italy had not overcome the sfascio, and his tax cuts, without solving any problem, had taken Italy further away from any Europe, of nations or otherwise. After a provisional technical government that ruled Italy for two years, it was the center-left coalition headed by Romano Prodi that, in 1996, won the elections. Prodi's Europe was definitely not a Europe of Nations, which he called a Europe of national egoisms. It was, nonetheless, as the title of his book had it, Un'idea dell'Europa. Il valore Europa per modernizzare l'Italia. Italy needed to be modernized in order to become, as Massimo D'Alema used to say in those days, "un paese normale." And Europe provided the only possibility to normalize and modernize this otherwise unhealthy nation. Prodi's recipe was to replace the country's famous Mediterranean diet with a good dose of parameters of Maastricht, escape Italy's shallow waters, and finally steady the course towards Europe: "Il paese ha bisogno di un governo che lo guidi fuori delle secche e lo riporti in Europa [...]. Vi sono quindi alcune cose essenziali da fare: (Vannicelli) il risanamento della nostra finanza pubblica" (Prodi 25-27).

After one year, however, by 1997, the risanamento had gone nowhere. Paul Ginsborg summarizes:

Italy was still far from meeting the Maastricht criteria: the deficit/GDP ratio that year stood at 6.7 per cent, compared to an E[uropean] M[onetary] U[nion] requirement of not more than 3 per cent per annum; the level of the public debt/GDP ratio at 123.8 per cent, compared to the 60 per cent required; the level of inflation at 3.9 per cent, when it should have been [an average of 2.6 per cent].

(304)

That is how the talk of risanamento metamorphosed, just a few months before the publication of Scappiamo in Europa, into the rhetoric of sacrificio. The sacrifices called for by Prodi had to be made: salary increases sacrificed to inflation; jobs to restructuring; pensions to productivity; pieces of the welfare state to efficiency; even one extra so-called "European" tax had to be paid now. It was named la tassa per l'Europa. The problem was, how reasonable were these sacrifices when Europe still looked so far away? Here was Turani's answer, announced already by the title of his book. With a logic he must have learnt in Las Vegas, Turani argued that the moment in which you have lost almost everything is not when you leave the game, but when you double your bets, and gamble even your tax for Europe. All or nothing. After all, it is the last chance, l'ultima occasione, after which rien ne va plus. What was curious about Turani's otherwise legitimate, if hazardous, game strategy was the peculiar prize Italians were to win after gambling all these sacrifices: a triumphal entry into Europe! But what had Italians really to achieve from becoming Europeans? How could Europeanization make Italy, in Turani's Dalemian words, "davvero un paese normale" (131)? How was Europe to solve the problems of Italy? Here Giuseppe Turani reverted from economic data and political science to the more proper genre of science fiction to explain to Italians what they would gain from Europe. In the vein of H. G. Wells, he wrote:

[Immaginiamoci] nel 2005 [...]. Seduti [su un] terrazzo con vista panoramica sul passato, sappiamo [...] che nel 2005 [siamo] in tutto poco piu di 57 milioni [...]. [Siamo] sempre gli stessi (come numero) [che nel 1997], ma [abbiamo] un milione di miliardi in piu da spartirci. E quindi [siamo] ricchi, molto piu ricchi. Questo e poco, ma e sicuro.

(13)

In sum:

Se davvero potessimo con una macchina del tempo portarci nel 2005, prendere un aperitivo sulla nostra famosa terrazza e poi voltarci indietro, probabilmente smetteremmo subito di accapigliarci su pensioni, eurotasse, ticket e altro.

(15)

Today, when the prophesied year 2005 has already come and gone, Europe certainly seems less the paese della cuccagna that Turani was promising the Italian Pinocchios. As we know, Italians today are not "piu ricchi degli inglesi," nor are their salaries "vicini a quelli americani." How was Europe to save Italy? Turani, as I have already suggested, does not give any positive or reasonable answer to such question. Rather, he creates a narrative--and I quote from the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms' definition of "science fiction" here--"concerned with utopia and utopist visions."

Europe is the ou-topos, the no-where, the imaginary commonplace where all problems and contradictions will be magically resolved. As a commonplace, the redeeming quality of Europe need not be explained by Turani: such a quality "seems to be true," as Aristotle would say, "since all, as it were, acknowledge it as such" (Rhetoric II. xxi. 11).

Conclusions

From the years of the Risorgimento to the era of the European community, a compulsion to imagine identities and negotiate among them has been at the very core of all structural categories of Italian culture. The antinomy of Italian and European, parallel to those of local and global, regional and national, strapaese and stracitta, has left Italy a peculiar cultural inheritance of a politics of identity, based on the dream of a complete loss of identity,--"essere finalmente come tutti gli altri," in Turani's words (36). An Italian exceptionalism, in fact, may well be the product of such dream, rather than its immediate cause. Shame for a perceived Italian pathological difference (Agamben's "fenomeno italiano") has in fact created, as effect rather than cause, a truly pathological culture. It is not entirely correct to say, with Agamben, that this is a culture hinging on comedy; comedy, rather, is only one side of the antinomy that founds our national culture. Such antinomy predicates Italy's comic reality on the one hand, and the tragic grandeur of an elsewhere, a "Europe," on the other. This has left Italians to choose between the rock of the commedia, "che Dante ha lasciato in eredita alla cultura italiana" (Agamben Categorie 26), and the hard place of the travel narrative (arguably another inheritance from Dante). Comedy has absolved the historical role, from Dante to Sordi, of teaching Italians to accept and redeem their sin of difference not by correcting it, but simply through confession. Travel narrative, instead, has promised the transformation of the Italian Everyman, his escape from an "Italia di dolore ostello" to the eschatology of the European paradise.

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(1) The 1951 Refugee Convention granted refugee status only to European asylum seekers.

(2) As an "entita politica e morale" pitted against the "despotic East" and the "backward South," Europe, as Oriana Fallaci infamously put it, does not end with a continent: "[...] noi siamo New York. Siamo l'America. Noi italiani, noi francesi, noi inglesi, noi tedeschi, noi austriaci, noi ungheresi, noi slovacchi, noi polacchi, noi scandinavi, noi belgi, noi spagnoli, noi greci, e noi portoghesi siamo America. Se l'America crolla, crolla l'Europa" (Fallaci).

(3) Blogs from http://forum.lunigiana.it/messages/26/321.html? 1098471116 and http://blog.repubblica.it/rblog/ comment.do? method=edit&entryid=40289e9703fcb3ad 0103feb3748e0068.

Roberto M. Dainotto

Duke University