Italy out of contrast

the dark heart of italy: Travels through space and time across italy by tobias jones(faber, (pounds) 16.99)

IF you judge a country by its television, Italy must be in a desperate state. On average, Italians watch around 240 minutes per day, which is one of the more mindboggling statistics quoted by Tobias Jones. Anyone who thinks British television is on the skids need only spend a weekend channel hopping in Italy, where nutmeg- complexioned Lotharios and Barbarellas with Grand Canyon cleavages make one pine for the intellectual gravitas of Cilla Black. On one station during an election, says Jones, a woman hosting a political debate served coffee to male pundits and peeled off an item of clothing whenever tedium threatened. Like the rest of the viewers, he remained glued to the set until she was stripped to the waist. Truly, as Jones intimates, Italy is the land that feminism forgot.

Television, like many things in Italy, is largely in the hands of the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who owns three out of the country's seven channels. He also owns AC Milan, the Mondadori publishing house - which gives him control of the copyright of a quarter of all Italian books - dozens of magazines, production companies, video outlets and Il Giornale, one of the national newspapers. If Italians think that too much power and influence is invested in one man, they have few opportunities to say so. Consequently, when Jones tries to describe the art of spin-doctoring - as practised at Westminster - to friends in Parma, at whose university he teaches, the response is hilarity. Compared to Berlusconi, Tony Blair is squeaky clean and naive.

But from food to football, Italy seems very familiar on first acquaintance. In actuality, it is anything but. Scratch beneath the surface and you soon discover an attitude of mind that is alien to anyone not indigenous to this part of the planet. In Italy, for instance, things move at the pace of ScotRail, with the perverse exception of the trains. Rules are ignored and laws flaunted. The reason for this, says Jones, is that no-one in Italy is "ever, ever punished for anything". No penalties are ever issued, except on the football pitch, where referees are bought with Rolexes. "Crime is never followed by punishment because, at least for the powers-that- be, there's guaranteed impunity." Court cases can last decades. Justice is a pipe dream. Honesty is not regarded as a virtue. You either play the game or - as Jones learned to his cost - you get burned, whether by state monopolies such as Telecom Italia or the local bar tender. Corruption is commonplace and barely worthy of comment.

Jones arrived in Italy at the end of the 1990s and could only speak a few words of Italian. As his vocabulary grew, and the more he understood the origins of words, the more rigidly hierarchical and formal the country seemed. His first experience of this came when his girlfriend went overnight from being his "ragazza", his girl, to his "fidanzata", his betrothed. "Strange, I thought, I'm sure I would have remembered if I had proposed to her, or even discussed an engagement with her family or our friends."

The longer he stays in Italy the more perplexed he becomes by the way it functions. Having miraculously found a job - through all- important connections - he soon began to appreciate the necessity of reading the small print in a contract. Assuming his salary would be paid monthly, he simply noted how much he would receive, not when. So time drifted by without a pay cheque and the bills began to pile up. Since he was freelance, he was informed by the university's accounts office that payment would be honoured before the end of the academic year. No date was specified. He could leave it or lump it.

Such frustrations have been well documented in a plethora of recent books about Italy by Tim Parks, Paul Ginsborg, Joe McGinniss, Matt Frei and many others - authors keen to present a more sombre alternative to the bella Toscana picture painted by the likes of Frances Mayes and her imitators, who drool over the redness of tomatoes and the size of the zucchinis. It is an unenviable task because Italy, despite its unsavoury side, is ultimately seductive and irresistible. For a regular visitor, it offers an antidote to order, an alter-native to a global culture which prizes speed above all else. In Italy, says Jones, paying with plastic is still impossible in many places, not least because dealing in cash makes fraud that much harder to trace. Moreover, in Italy people still make things. In Britain, 7% of the workforce is employed in firms with fewer than 10 employees; in America it's only 3%. In Italy, the figure is 23%.

This gives texture to the fabric of a society in which appearance is everything and style masks countless ills. As esteemed Italian observer Luigi Barzini wrote: "Even a hernia truss, shown in the window of an ortho-paedist's shop, bedecked with little flags and colourful ribbons, becomes a gay and desirable object." In contrast, Italians, as Italo Calvino noted, are horrified by the "goofy and anti- aesthetical groups" of tourists who are "deaf to good taste". For their part, Italians show no embarrassment in discussing life's more intimate aspects. Jones offered students the chance to give 10- minute lectures on anything which took their fancy; three girls chose lingerie. "Never was the classroom so alive. There was a heated debate about where exactly a perizoma [a G-string] should be worn, about whether knicker straps outside your skirt is now out of fashion, about which push-up [Wonderbra] suits which form of breast. The male students, too, were suddenly awoken from their slumber " As, indeed, one might expect. All of which adds evidence to Jones's assertion that Italy is a visual - rather than a literary - country, where few people buy or borrow books and very few people read newspapers. I am not sure I agree with him, though official statistics would appear to be on his side. My impression is that bookshops, whether in major cities such as Milan, Bologna and Pisa, or smaller towns such as La Spezia or Cortona, are more modern and better-stocked than those, say in Edinburgh and Glasgow, never mind St Andrews and Ayr, and that newspaper readership is widespread and enthusiastic. It is also an impression borne out by Ginsborg in his latest book, Italy And Its Discontents: 1980-2001. Certainly, Jones is awry when he says that on public transport in Britain half the passengers might be reading. If they are, it is Metro, the free newspaper, and not Martin Amis.

But such quibbles aside, The Dark Heart Of Italy casts a long and questioning shadow. If it gets an Italian publisher, it will not be Mondadori.

Copyright 2003 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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