Troppo sapeva

I've just finished my usual round-up of the day's English language papers, sitting here at my desk in a small provincial Italian town, without even having left the house. I've read the Guardian, the New York Times, the Independent. I've glanced at the front pages of the Times in both London and Los Angeles, and even, god help me, the Daily Mail. I've checked out headlines in Australia and South Africa (OK; I'm exaggerating now - I do have work to do). All this would have been impossible only a few years ago, and I'd be tempted to write something rather dull, but positive, about the availability of information, the shrinking world, and so on, if it weren't for the fact that not a single paper thinks it worth reporting the latest developments in the Berlusconi-Mafia saga.

Of course, there are reasons for this. The indignation fatigue I mentioned in my previous post, which has spread beyond the national borders to sprinkle its sleepy dust over foreign news desks elsewhere. The 'what's new?' feel about so much of the information. The irreducible italianità of it all, with all those legal terms that have no equivalent in other 'normal' countries. The notion that Italy, despite the great 'organic' food and Andrea Bocelli and all those little men who can't wait to help us restore casali in Tuscany, shouldn't really be taken seriously, particularly right now with the tin-pot Casanova at its head. It's as though a whole country, one of the leading world economies and a member of all the most exclusive G clubs (7, 8, 20...), with forces in all the imperial outposts, had somehow been replaced by its comic equivalent, gurning and wiggling its hips in a corner of the room, only to be ignored despite its antics.

Which is more than a pity. Because Berlusconi's game is becoming wilder and more desperate by the day and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who cares one jot about Europe or, for that matter, the nature of populism and democracy, if only because it's the kind of game that could, as my mother used to say, end in tears. Two days ago he was in Sardinia, where he told his audience of young supporters that, if he had the chance, he would 'throttle' the people who made a popular television series about the Mafia (La Piovra) and all those authors who defamed Italy by writing about the Mafia. The last person to inveigh against La Piovra like this was Zeffirelli, a man whose career arc has plummeted from Visconti to the payroll of the Great Buffoon. The fact that Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, has written a public letter denouncing the latest plot to rewrite the legal code in Berlusconi's favour is obviously neither here nor there, though Saviano would be wise to hang onto his police protection yet awhile. Berlusconi used the verb 'strozzare', inelegant at the best of times and, in this context, deeply tainted by the lexical dye of Cosa Nostra. He also told a joke about Einstein, who died because 'he knew too much' (see title of post). Nobody expects the language of statesmanship from the man, but it would be nice if he could raise his game to the level of, say, someone selling silver-plated bracelets on a shopping channel.

Incoherence and the market

According to tonight's news, pirated copies of Gomorrah, the prize-winning film based on Saviano's exposure of the Camorra, the organised crime network in the area around Naples and beyond, are being sold, in cellophane wraps and with falsified government seals, by the Camorra in the area around Naples. Saviano, in the meantime, is in the deeply ironic position of hovering on the brink of an Oscar nomination while risking his life on a daily basis, threatened with death for having brought shame on - and attracted media attention to - the Camorra. In the area around Naples. And beyond.

Shadows

One of the most important, and useful, books to have come out recently in Italy isn't a novel, but an exposure of the role played by the Camorra, the international Mafia-style structure with its base in the organised crime of Campania, the region around Naples and, in many ways, a state within a state. The book's called, with a brutally neat play on words, Gomorrah. Written by Roberto Saviano (see right), it's sold 600,000 copies in Italy and earned its author the dubious privilege of needing police protection. He may be living abroad as I write this. Just last week, the newspapers published recorded conversations between a Camorra capo and his underlings, in which the capo expressed his hope that investigating magistrates hadn't read what the book had to say about him. It says something about the weird isolation in which these people live that he thought his secret might be safe.

Gomorrah has now been translated into English. There a review of it in the New York Times, where you can find the publishing details. Italy isn't just pizza and Piero della Francesca, as of course you know. The fact that a prime minister can control the entire television system to ensure that bad news doesn't happen ought to be proof enough. But the extent to which the country manages to live with its dark shadow, not only in Naples but throughout the nation, from Verona to Bari, from Milan to Palermo, remains a source of dreadful wonder. It's as though it were always noon and the shadow were a small tight circle hobbling the country's feet.