Palombella Rossa

(Cross-posted)

What does it mean to be a communist? It’s a feeling, a feeling of totality. But what is this totality? It's a field, a playing field… a pool. It is surrounded by angels, the supporters, and they look at you, they scream, they see you, but you keep silent… goal!

(Raoul Ruiz, Palombella Rossa)


I can't remember anything that happened before two weeks ago.

(Matt Damon, The Bourne Identity)

I was in time to vote for the Italian Communist Party, but only just. I turned eighteen in February of 1989. The European Elections were held in Italy on the 18th of June of that that year. So on that day, which was a Sunday, I walked down to my old primary school and did what over nine and a half million of my fellow citizens did: I voted communist. The PCI returned 27.56% of the vote, second only to the Christian Democrats on 32.91%. It would never compete in another nation-wide election.

Then, on the 9th of September, Nanni Moretti's Palombella Rossa was screened at the Venice Film Festival.

The usual explanation for why this film has garnered so little critical attention internationally compared to Moretti's later work is that it requires extensive knowledge of Italian politics, its sub-affiliations and its vernacular in order to be understood. I've never been entirely convinced by this. I think that too much has been made of Palombella Rossa's historically specific references to the identity crisis of the PCI, and that to the extent that this is in fact the overt subject of the film, its reflections are applicable to almost any decade in modern Italian history, and I suspect across borders as well, at least within Europe. But in fact the film is about personal/political identity in its wider sense, how it is constructed and maintained, how it is refracted within culture. It is also quite surreal and very, very funny.

Michele Apicella is a young member of Parliament for the PCI and a veteran water polo player. He has a car accident on his way to a game that leaves him physically unharmed but suffering from memory lapses. People make repeated mentions to something he said or did during a nationally televised political appearance earlier that week, but he has no recollection of it. He travels from Rome to Sicily along with the rest of his team and his daughter Valentina for a season-deciding game, and there he finds a young and clueless journalist, two politically motivated stalkers, a fascist he once victimised at university, a young Catholic and two old comrades, all eager to talk to him about his TV appearance.

Almost the entire action of the film takes place during the water polo game, while the television in the café of the pool complex shows David Lean's Dr Zhivago. But there are other timelines as well: the flashbacks from Michele's beginnings in water polo as a child, and those from his beginnings in politics as a young man (which take the form of an actual film that Moretti shot in super 8 in 1973 entitled La sconfitta – the defeat); the excerpts from Michele's recent televised political appearance; the excerpts from Dr Zhivago; and, woven amidst all of these, an intricately modulated filmic time, with extensive use of slow-motions, frequent intrusions of the musical score into the diegesis (for instance, when Michele wakes up on the massage table after the accident and tries to remember the melody of Nicola Piovani's piece for the opening credits) and the even more frequent overlapping of the timelines. Like in the sequence below, when Michele answers a possibly imaginary question by one of his interviewers in the middle of an offensive play.

The clips are not embedded. Click here to go on a new page with the YouTube video and subtitles of sorts.

The timelines come together in the film's protracted climactic scene, which lasts almost fifteen minutes. Michele's team, down by one goal with a few seconds to go, is awarded a penalty. Michele is going to take it. But first the players and the audience relocate en masse to the adjoining café to watch the ending of Dr Zhivago, cheering the preordained outcome as if it was a sports match and it could be influenced.

Click here to watch the clip.

Back in the pool and poised to take his shot, Michele has one last flashback and finally gets to remember (or possibly reimagine) what it was that he had done during that television programme: it turns out that in the middle of his answer on the way forward for the Communist Party he had broken into song, morphing his rote-learned speech into the lyrics of Franco Battiato's 1984 romantic pop hit E ti vengo a cercare (And I Come Looking For You). When the action returns to the pool, the audience joins him in the bellowed rendition, which segues in turn into the chant of support for the home team.

Click here to watch the clip

A little digression: After the release of Palombella Rossa, Moretti toured several branches of the PCI country-wide for a 40-minute film entitled La cosa, the thing, in which he documented, cinéma verite-style, the discussion amongst members following the proposal by then secretary Achille Occhetto that the party should transition into a new entity, whose working name, believe it or not, was actually 'the thing'. It was a lacerating process that I remember very well – I was in my first year at university when it took place. Eventually the party split in two: a minority component founded the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista, aspiring to refound the party of Gramsci on the old revolutionary principles, whilst the majority – which held on to most of the property as well as the membership – moved on to create the Partito Democratico della Sinistra, the Democratic Party of the Left. In the process the party's symbol went from this.

To this.

The hammer and sickle, significantly shrunk in size, now lay at the foot of a majestic oak tree, symbolising wisdom and renewal. Then in 1998 the PDS dropped the P and became Democratici di Sinistra – Democrats of the Left, as it if had somehow stopped being a party. In the process, and for no apparent reason, the hammer and sickle disappeared from the symbol altogether, to be replaced by the red carnation of the European Socialists.

Then in 2007, in another genius move, the party dropped the S and regained the P! So now it's the Democratic Party, but no longer of the Left (demonstrating once again that when a term is omitted on the grounds that it's implicit, it actually never is). On the botanical side of things, the carnation and the oak tree were replaced by a single olive branch, symbolising the definitive end of any residual attachment to class warfare or indeed to struggles of any kind.

At this rate the next symbol will be a dozen red roses and a blowjob. But the reason why I mention all this is to illustrate to what extent the process of transition from the old Communist Party to a modern and broad-based centre-left party was predicated on deliberate acts of amnesia, and the gradual deletion of old symbols and ideas, as if in order to reclaim modernity the Left had to get rid of its past wholesale first. That is the sense of the shrill, desperate-sounding slogan of the Partito Democratico at the national election of 2008: Un'Italia moderna si può fare, A modern Italy can be achieved. Standing for the united centre-left, as a broad coalition and no longer the mass party of old that was always marginalised when it came time to form a government, the Democratic Party at the European elections of last year garnered 26.13% of the vote – less than the PCI in 1989.

What Palombella Rossa does is dramatise this process of unbecoming, in a modality that I would suggest is applicable to many other places and times in history. Ultimately, asking who we are is the same thing as asking who we were, and this has always been true, or at least it certainly has been in my lifetime for the militant Italian Left, whose foremost preoccupation has always been the very problematic affirmation of its own identity. In 1989 the party counted almost one and a half million active members, and seemingly every one of them was a theorist, as La cosa ably illustrates. Those endless and fiercely historicized discussions, that sometimes appeared to exist in an entirely self-referential plane, never prevented Left-wing activists inside and outside the party to operate in very concrete ways to change Italian society; inhuman utopia rather than humane pragmatism was in fact arguably the lifeblood of all those mass movements and organizations.

And so Palombella Rossa's main preoccupation is not only with loss of memory but also with loss of language. The nonsensical title (palombella is the lob shot in water polo, hence 'red lob') is the distorted mirror put in front of Michele's insistence that 'words are important', and all of the film's competing and patterned voices, each with its highly specialised armoury of tropes, gradually lose their capacity to mean things, including the protagonist's, until political speech turns into pop song lyric, albeit a highly literate one, and ideology is reduced to the choice of which corner to aim for.

To the right... to the right… I must look to the right and shoot to the right… the goalkeeper leaves me room on the left but I'm going to shoot to the right… NO! Maybe it's better if I shoot to the left!…

The penalty, naturally, results in a save. But Michele's trembling incoherence, which two decades later must strike us as acutely prescient, has far more catastrophic consequences: and so, on the way back to Rome after the game, he ends up driving off the road and down a steep bank whilst obsessively repeating the words 'We're like everyone else, but we're different! We're like everyone else, but we're different!' As he and Valentina climb out of the car, preternaturally unharmed, the cut-out of a sun is raised at the crest of the hill, and the assembled crowd – which turns out to comprise many characters from Michele's past, including his childhood self – spontaneously form a tableau, their right hands outstretched towards the old socialist symbol: il sol dell'avvenire, the red rising sun. Fittingly, in a sequence that is pure symbolism, the last line of the film is non verbal, and belongs to Michele as a young boy:

This laughter is a sardonic summation of the kind of spectacle that was the end of history in Italy: played out more as farce than as tragedy, animated more by confusion than by despair. Having lost its memory and its voice, the Left whimpered off the stage. And it had all been carefully mapped right here, in this curiously neglected film, oft-cited but seldom watched, whose highest praise is that it speaks so much more clearly now than it did back then.

The Phoenicians

Phoenician funerary mask, 4th-5th century BC

Here’s a interesting statistic about my education. Between primary school, intermediate school and high school I studied the Phoenicians three times and the Second World War zero times. That’s because in Italy we believe in studying history in a strict chronological order, and furthermore we restart the clock of civilisation at each level. Thus in order to get to the great conflicts of the last century you need to have covered Mesopotamia and Phoenicia and the rest of the ancient world, then the Roman Empire and Visigoths and Charlemagne and the age of discoveries and Napoleon and the Risorgimento, so that by the time you get to the final year of each course of study you’re lucky to even make it to the twentieth century, let alone cover Fascism or the Holocaust. What little I happened to be told at school concerning these not insignificant topics was not part of the study of history proper, but of literature, and only at intermediate school, when we looked at authors like Primo Levi or books such as Anne Frank’s Diary or L’Agnese va a morire. I’m pretty sure we also saw a film about Mussolini starring Rod Steiger.

To this day, even though I read independently into these large chunks of neglected history, and saw other films not starring Rod Steiger, I find that when my oldest asks me about the causes of World War I mumble quite a bit, whereas I am far clearer on what caused Sparta and Athens to have regular goes at each other, or indeed the Carthaginians and the Romans.

Not that the Carthaginians, strictly speaking, are the same thing as the Phoenicians. There’s a vexed historiographical question if you’ve ever seen one instead of concentrating on your country’s recent racist past. Phoenicia, also known as Canaan, is a region where the ancient civilisation known to us as the Phoenicians established itself since the Iron Age, that is to say around 1200 BC, whereas the Carthaginians are a related but in important ways distinct civilisation that flourished much later around the city of Carthage after the Persians conquered Phoenicia proper. The confusion arises from the fact that the first city known as Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians, but it’s actually situated in modern Tunisia, and that’s where the Phoenician elites repaired after the Persian conquest (Cyrus, was it?). Then they started to wage wars on the Romans, who referred to them as Punic people, by which they meant no offence: Punic means purple and purple dyes were one of the Pheonicians’ trades. This enmity led to at least three Punic wars, one of which - was it the second? - featured the routing of the Romans at Cannae. Come to think of it, it has to have been the second war because the first one was fought in Sicily, and Cannae is in Apulia. Then I’m pretty sure the third war is the one where Cato the Elder was all 'you’ll never guess where I got these figs from' and 'delenda Carthago est' and the Romans took the war to the enemy shores and that spelt the end for the Carthaginians.

Another thing I remember without having to reach for Wikipedia is that the most notable ancient source for the claim that the Phoenicians gave the alphabet to the Greeks was Herodotus.

Fragmentary inscription on a cup found in Kition, 9th century BC

And there is nothing wrong with that. I don't begrudge my memory the space furnished with these ancient relics, nor am I completely insensitive to the argument that in order to understand modernity it is useful to know something about the pre-modern world. Certainly I like to think for instance that a selective allegiance to classical Greece can be helpful to counter the enforced Christian monoculturalism of the thing we call Europe. But so long as this is true, let us make those connections visible and concrete: let us look at the history of democracy, of revolutions, of migrations, of the city. Plodding along history as if on a train that stops at every station seems designed to do just the opposite, and to quite deliberately ensure that the ultimate destination - the present that, according to cliché, history should help us make sense of - won't be reached, or will be reached too late to be included in the final exams, which amounts to the same thing.



The irony is especially galling since every one of the schools I attended displayed a shield like the one above (from my primary), bearing the name of the school and the symbol of the Republic. That was one of the chief promises of the institutions of 1948: that education would (finally) be a right and a public good, the key to equality of opportunity regardless of socio-economic status. A free education provided by the state to all children under the age of fourteen on the basis of a national curriculum was the paramount instrument for achieving the objective under article 3 of our newly minted constitution, namely

to remove all economic and social obstacles that, by limiting the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent full individual development and the participation of all workers in the political, economic, and social organization of the country.

And yet so few of us ever even got to be told at school about that constitution or the circumstances in which it was forged. That same Republic that was the guarantor of our right to an education was wholly absent from our teachings, as was in most cases the Fascism that it repudiated. And so was the post-war world in which our parents grew up, the economic boom, terrorism, our lasting involvement in the former African colonies. The contemporary world outside our schools seldom made an appearance in our daily schedule, and outside of the study of geography - the primary products of the Sicilian economy are as follows… - it didn’t feature anywhere in our curriculum, except as a sort of afterthought: time allowing, students enrolled in the final year should study Fascism, an important national political movement starring Rod Steiger. But time seldom allowed.

So, as in matters of religion, you grew up with an idea of the country shaped by your family’s beliefs, which were also beliefs about history. This was especially true for my parents’ generation, that lived through Fascism and the transition to the Republic. In the overall context of the nation’s unbecoming, some families and social groups were far keener to forget than others, or had more pressing reasons to cling to their own mythologies: what was our involvement, how did our present (mis)fortunes come about? It is on the basis of those histories that we construct our sense of citizenship.

If it were up to me to reform the Italian education system, my founding principle would be this: that it is the foremost right of each child to be told about the present and to be given the instruments to understand it. Our national pastime of short term memory loss must finally be abandoned, the mirrors uncovered: this is what we look like, this is where we come from. For it is precisely the emptiness of these spaces that allows false histories to grow and fester: the grotesquely distorted picture of the Roman empire evoked by Mussolini, which he revived by annexing with brutal ferocity the bits of Africa that had fallen off the table at which the other colonial powers insisted to dine; or more recently, the heroic warlike lineage that the Northern secessionists trace back to Alberto da Giussano and his Lombard League, garnished by pagan rituals staged along the Po river - as if that plain had ever been one place, one country, one people. It is in that fractured history of symbols emptied of meaning that the Italian far Right constructs its myths of origin. Yet it works also because it plays on something familiar, on stories and names learned more or less by rote in the distant past of childhood and left conveniently unconnected, like my sparse knowledge of all things Phoenician; while the more concrete histories and lineages - of industrialisation, of struggle, of work - that would serve the progressive causes are never or too seldom encountered.

The education of children under Mussolini sought to inculcate absolute faith in the Party and teach its knowledge, which was the only knowledge available. The directive had been written by the Duce himself:

Italian school, in all its levels and in all its teachings, must be inspired by the ideology of Fascism, educate the Italian youth to understanding Fascism, to take pride in it and to live in the historical climate created by the Fascist revolution.

Image via the ANPI Lissone blog, from a post I heartily commend to speakers of the lingo

Primary school-aged children were taught that 'book and musket make the perfect Fascist' (libro e moschetto, fascista perfetto), and the book in question was the one and only primer allowed in the classroom. In it you would read for instance the story of two boys who came back from their holidays, and one of them told the other that he had seen the house where Mussolini was born; or you’d learn about the efforts that the regime made to help the families of Italians abroad so that they could send their children to visit the motherland and draw from its strength and beauty the determination to remain good Italians. They were lies, but told in the present tense. In the new Republic, where the promise of education was that it would set you free, you learnt convenient, harmless truths about the distant past instead.

So here’s one last thing that I remember about the Phoenicians: that they may not even have existed. We give that name to the people who lived in that region, but whether they thought of themselves as a unified people living in a unified nation, or it was in fact the Greeks who succeeded in painting them that way, we just don’t know. And there’s perhaps one last bit of irony, and a lesson: that if you don’t write and understand your own history, somebody else will do it for you.

Milan, City of Fashion

Francesco Scognamiglio, Fall 2009 Collection

One of the "ronde", vigilante squads authorised by the local council. In the words of vice-mayor and Youth Front stalwart Riccardo De Corato: "If people see uniforms, they feel safer".

Milano Moda Uomo 2009-2010

'This seat is reserved to dicks'. Massimo Salvini, deputy secretary of the Northern League, local councillor and member of the European Parliament, who earlier this year suggested instituting special train carriages for immigrants only.

Diet Coke's Homage to Gianni Versace, Corso Vittorio Emanuele, October 2009. No, really.

Another trio of vigilantes, in the garb inspired by the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano. Don't ask me about the demented salute.

An image from the prestigious 2009 Pirelli Calendar.

An image from the 2009 Forza Nuova calendar.

Gae Aulenti's monument to needle and thread, Piazzale Cadorna.

'Counterfeit fashion hurts the Italian industry', Piazzale Cadorna, September 2009.

"This shop sells only Italian products", Milan, 1937. Image by Adolfo Porry Camporel.

Models, 2009.

Partisans, 1945.

Giorgio Armani, Fall 2009 collection.

Milan, 1937. Original caption: "The beautiful Italian families". Image by Tino Petrelli.

'Prison bus' used to round up people who may or may not be guilty of the new crime of illegal immigration. Full set of images here.

Dolce e Gabbana, 2009 Fall Collection.

Fascists on Mars

On the morning of the 25th of April 1994, Justine and I made our way to Piazzale Loreto under pouring rain to take part in the traditional Liberation Day march. Except this time it felt a little more significant than it ever had in my lifetime: less than a month earlier Silvio Berlusconi and his Coalition of the Unsavoury had won the national elections, and the new government - whilst not installed yet - was guaranteed to be the first in quite some time to include ministers for whom the word ‘fascist’ would be more than a generic insult, but rather a factual statement of self-avowed political affiliation.

Three hundred thousand people marched in Milan that day, and most of us didn’t make it to Cathedral square in time to hear any of the speeches. You can see some of the pictures and hear some of the sounds here, but it’s worth considering that number for a moment: three hundred thousand. Imagine yourself in a group of people that size. Now imagine yourself as part of the police contingent that is supposed to guarantee the order. You and what army, right? Later that year, one million people marched in Rome to protest the government’s plans for social and labour reform, and shortly thereafter Berlusconi lost the support of one of the parties in the coalition and had to forfeit his mandate.

But he came back, twice, and is in power to this day. As a result, there is now a far greater degree of normalcy in the idea that people who grew up politically in the Fronte della Gioventù, the main youth fascist organisation, may end up as national ministers. So here comes the part where I very humbly accept Mr Litterick’s invitation of some weeks ago to discuss what that means, politically, for my country, and if we can refer to Italy as being fascist, or run by fascists. If you’ll just allow me a little trip to space first.


Corrado Guzzanti is not well known outside of Italy. His sister Sabrina, who directed the political documentary Viva Zapatero! and whose TV work was famously censored by the public broadcaster at Berlusconi’s behest, enjoys a little more international notoriety. Both of them, at any rate, are important public voices who are occasionally allowed to speak in these difficult times. On one such occasion, in 2002, Corrado co-authored and starred in Il Caso Scafroglia, a satirical programme that contained some brutal indictments of the government’s policies, but is remembered mostly for a comparatively light offering: Fascisti su Marte, a six-part film purporting to document the voyage to Mars in 1939 of a handful of fascist militiamen. Much sepia-toned hilarity ensues as the bumbling explorers proceed to claim the ‘Bolshevik, traitorous planet’ for the glory of the regime (you can watch the whole series here). My favourite moments are those that caricature the rhetorical bombast of the triumph of the will, Italian-style: like when the men first descend on the planet and find it to be lacking in oxygen, a problem that the gerarca Barbagli solves by issuing a peremptory order: ‘Breathe!’ Or when Barbagli explains to his fellow cosmonauts floating around the rocket cabin that ‘gravity needs to be found within oneself, in the values of Fascism and in the mission.’


All very benign, all in good fun, so much so that at times you could be excused to think it was an affectionate homage, punctuated by some of the most unwittingly comical anthems of way back then.

These aren't fascists to be scared of. Except if one places Fascist on Mars in the context of the political and cultural work promoted by the Right in the same years and on the very same television channels: a methodical effort of revision underlying the claim that our values derive from pre-modern Christian roots, on the one hand, and the defeat of communism and socialism, on the other. Read against these texts, Fascists on Mars is only marginally less ridiculous than other acts of creative historiography instrumental to that particular cause.

Fascism is integral to this New History, consistent with its teleology, whereas the equal and contrary principles that informed our Republican constitution - to wit, the dangerous notion the work is a right of the citizen and the State is responsible for delivering social justice - are a deviation. To put it another way: the first Italian Republic (1948-1994) was founded on anti-fascist principles, which is why a not insignificant sector of the right wing inside and outside of Parliament could not clip its ticket to power without having performed appropriate acts of abjuration and unbecoming. In the second Republic - which began precisely in 1994 with the new electoral system - this is patently no longer the case, but there is still the small matter of rewriting the history books and the school curricula to reflect this change of heart. Nothing less will satisfy people who used in their youth to take such pride in their belonging.

Because the transition is not yet complete, and the former fascist youngsters who now fill the offices of, say, Minister of Defence, or Mayor of our capital, cannot indulge quite yet in public displays of affection for the old regime and still hope to occupy those institutions, especially in the wider context of international relations with out major allies. This was the scene when Gianni Alemanno, the current mayor of Rome, took office:

More of these lovely pictures here

You could almost physically hear the sound of eyebrows being raised across Europe, including those of Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë, who publicly doubted his ability to work with a politician who would tolerate such displays from his supporters. Alemanno initially bristled, but later went on to express 'pain and revulsion for the inhumanity of Fascism'. A bitter pill, no doubt, and it won't be the last one he has to swallow in order to be allowed to play with the big boys of European politics.

And he's not alone. Even leaders of Forza Nuova, the organisation for fascists who never have to say I'm sorry, have started walking that embarrassing tight rope in the hope of getting closer to the levers of power. Following the recent congress of the movement in Milan, secretary Roberto Fiore said 'I didn't see any Roman salutes'. He is in fact pictured here, first from the left, experiencing a freak occurrence of sudden and temporary retinal detachment in both eyes:


It's like they're daring him to show his hand and return the salute, don't you think? And here's another one of Fiore's mates, Padre Tam, Roman-saluting at a Forza Nuova march in Bergamo.


This fine figure of clergyman, recently in the news for claiming that the Nazi gas chambers were used for disinfection purposes, belongs to the Society of St. Pius X, well known for its anti-semitism and recently re-admitted by the current Pope into the fold of the Church.

All this, however, is theatre, and I get a little impatient with it. We should be more afraid of self-disciplined fascists who know not to do the Roman salute in public, than we are of those whose right arms start twitching uncontrollably when they find themselves in a crowd of like-minded fellows. The Roman salute is our friend, it's a GPS for fascists: look, there they are. But what of the politics? Does monsieur Delanoë have a problem with Alemanno's actual policies, or is it just a matter of decorum, of respectability? Because they're working really hard on the respectability thing, Delanoë needs not worry about that. And when the last one of them has learnt how to use the last of the dessert forks, we'll get to comparing immigration policies, or public policing, or surveillance practices. Does France, does the UK, does Germany think that this exercise will make them look good?

But I don't want to be drawn into the relative fascism quotient of other European powers and besides it still doesn't answer Paul's question. So here goes.

I do not think the regime in Italy at the moment could accurately be described as fascist, in terms of its historical specificity. But I also believe that things are bad, and could precipitate rather quickly. While the Right is busy weakening our institutions and generally making things worse for everyone but friends, family and concubines, the Left offers no credible alternative, no meaningful solution for a significant set of social and economic problems. And if the crisis deepens, as I believe it will, a descent into actual, honest to God authoritarianism could be achieved in very little time. The conditions are there, the action stations well and truly manned.

If it ever comes to that, however, we should not talk of a restoration, of a traumatic return to the past, but rather look back on a long parenthesis of non-actual-fascism that is coming to a close. For we never truly ceased to be fascists: we never dealt honestly with that time in our past; we never demanded true change from our institutions; we never asked that our politicians cease to be corrupt, or treat their offices as anything other than fiefdoms; we never expected our judges to find the culprits when scores were being massacred - using fascist muscle, like the old actions squads but with bombs - in the name of authority and the preservation of the State; we never demanded that the promise of our constitution be kept, and social justice be made to inform a programme of reforms and the country's belated transition into modernity. We acted rather like the man in this photo I shall never tire of recycling: we erased the hated symbol, but left the rest of the edifice intact.

Milan, 26th July 1943. Photo by Vincenzo Carrese.

In 2004 I happened to be visiting home in April and went on the Liberation Day demonstration with my mother, the first time we marched together since I was a little boy. It was a much smaller affair than the one of 1994, although still in the order of the tens of thousands, and there was less of a sense of urgency, a smaller supply of palpable shock and anger. A whole lot less rain, too. But it reminded me - after having been out of the country for almost seven years - of that uncanny kinship, the sense of shared history and common purpose one feels amongst so many like-minded people. Marching on such a day and in such numbers performs an important and far more than symbolic function, too: it stakes a principled claim regarding who we are, about the realities of our past, and who we ought to be and how. It's like a slow-moving, living, breathing blueprint of the Italy that could be.

The squandering of that human capital, of a capacity for mass mobilisation that has no equal in the rest of Europe, begins in earnest the very next day. But so long as the people keep turning up, I'll keep a modest reserve of hope.

Unbecoming

Achille Campanile was an Italian humourist who did his best work in the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties, in novels such as Ma che cos’è questo amore and Se la luna mi porta fortuna. However my favourite writings of his are the very short plays he wrote during that period, and that were collected decades later by Rizzoli in Tragedie in due battute ('Two-Line Tragedies'), a book that my sister found at a remainder bookshop’s and gave me for my birthday in 1993. See, thanks to that inscription of hers I’m able to pinpoint the exact day when I became a fan.

Here’s a typical two-line tragedy:

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF MODERN CONVENIENCES

Characters:
THE HUSBAND
THE WIFE

THE HUSBAND Coming home with a large parcel
I brought the gas masks.

THE WIFE
Great. Tonight we can go to sleep with the gas on.

(curtain)

Critic Guido Almansi coined for Campanile the term ‘umorismo scemo’, dumb humour, although he didn’t mean it derogatorily. It had to do with levels of surreality and confounded expectations - the Marx Brothers brand of silliness would be another example. Yet very occasionally there was a little edge in Campanile as well. The above excerpt for instance might seem entirely innocuous to a contemporary reader but at the time would have had a slightly different resonance. Here are two kids modelling the spring/summer fashions in Rome in 1935:

Photo by Adolfo Porry Camporel

Those are uniforms, by the way: the boy is a balilla, the girl a piccola italiana. At different ages you’d graduate to another stage of fascist life. For boys it went like this: at age four you’d become a figlio della lupa (son of the she-wolf - that’d be the kind beast at whose teats suckled the mythical foundling founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus) and wear your first black shirt; then at eight you were made a balilla, at fourteen an avanguardista. For the girls it went figlia della lupa, piccola italiana and then giovane italiana. My mother was seven (hence a daughter of the she-wolf) when she was made to line up alongside the railway tracks outside her village to be part of the cheering crowd that saluted Hitler’s train as it sped past towards Rome during his visit to Italy in 1938. And she would have been wearing a piccola italiana uniform much like the one pictured above some years later, when she was made to greet with a poem and a bunch of flowers her former neighbour, a father of fourteen returning on a train from Russia, minus his legs.

Meanwhile throughout Italy the process of 'defascistizzazione' (literally de-fascistisation, but I prefer Graziella Parati's phrase 'unbecoming fascist') was about to begin in earnest. Mussolini had been deposed a mere twenty-four hours earlier, on July 25th, 1943, when the fellow in this picture started chiseling off the fasces from the headquarters of the national postal service in Milan.

Photo by Vincenzo Carrese

Already the Ventennio, the twenty years of Mussolini’s rule, was well on its way to never having happened at all. A marginally more figurative bracket was about to be closed, in the form of the amnesty of 1946 that bears the name of Palmiro Togliatti.

Except nowadays the spectres and the apologists of the old regime are everywhere, of course, including the seats of government. It will happen when history and memory are not so much repressed as removed, when symbols are banned in place of ideas, when you allow yourself to be convinced (neorealism has a lot to answer for) that we weren’t so bad, that the monsters of history lived elsewhere and spoke a harsher tongue. The circle of reconciliation hasn’t quite been closed yet: we still insist to celebrate and demonstrate on April 25th, on the day of the liberation, only in the name of those who died to defeat fascism; but perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the slogan of the far right Movimento Sociale, ‘Italiani - Dimenticate la guerra civile’, forget the civil war, will reach the highest institutions. Somebody then will have to get up that ladder again and restore the fasces to their original glory, for the citizens pay their taxes and have had to put up with broken buildings for far too long as it is.

And what say you, dear reader, isn’t this a picturesque view:


We’re at Antrodoco, in the province of Rieti, in central Italy. The pine forest above the village was artfully planted between 1938 and 1939 to spell out DVX, that is to say ‘il duce’, that is to say Mussolini. After years of tireless campaigning, local tourism councillor Clarice Serani finally managed to obtain funding from the regional administration to restore and protect the monument. ‘The project had been stuck for years,’ he explained at the time, ‘because people who weren’t from around here insisted to give to this piece of writing an ideological meaning.’

Stupid out of towners…

Now can you imagine a portion of the Black Forest spelling out the word Führer, and the local population being allowed to take pride in it and call it a 'monument'? No? Well, the genius of Campanile had foreseen exactly what the Italian reaction to this news would be. Take it away, Achille:

INSUBSTANTIAL TRAGEDY

Characters:
NOBODY

The scene takes place nowhere.

NOBODY
Keeps silent.

(curtain)

The historical images are from the catalogue of the exhibition Fotografia della libertà e delle dittature - da Sander a Cartier-Bresson 1922-1946, Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Milan 1995.
On a not entirely unrelated note, Wellington readers ought to make their way to the National Library over the next couple of weeks to view the excellent Welcome Sweet Peace exhibition about the return of New Zealand soldiers from World War I, with materials from the Alexander Turnbull Library collections. I'll put up info on the Web side of the exhibition soon, but it's worth seeing it in person - closes March 14. A guided tour with curator and all-round nice guy Andrew Francis is scheduled for 12.10 pm on Thursday 12th.


Update: You Cannot Press a Flower Between Two Web Pages*

This is little more than a placeholder, but I quivered in my boots (unseasonable, I know) when I chanced upon the hand crafted books of Pania Press, and had to wave frantically to you all about it and at least point you to their Web front, for you to visit forthwith. Here's an image from their most recent creation, Minotaur, reproduced with kind permission.