Articles by: Judith Harris

  • Facts & Stories

    Troubled Stewardship of Italian Treasures


    ROME - Problem is, Rome's serious garbage emergency continues, and no one wants Roman streets to become covered, Neapolitan style, with rubbish mounds so something must be done. In theory, if one can believe the promoters of the Corcolle site, and they include the president of the Lazio Region Renata Polverini,it would be in use only temporarily, for no more than two years. This ignores, of course, that after two years a new site would have to be found.


    Tweets spurred on the protest among the township's citizens, galvanizing young and old into demonstrations. Tensions were such that last Thursday Italian culture minister Lorenzo Ornaghi went personally and unannounced to both Hadrian's Villa and the proposed dump site. After the visit he laid down the ultimatum that, were the dump to be assigned to Corcolle, he would resign. Instead the prime mover for the dump, Rome's Prefect-Commissioner Giuseppe Pecoraro, resigned. The question will be taken up at a meeting in late June on world heritage sites at St. Petersburg.


    The problem remains on the table, however, with Regional boss Polverini and Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno at loggerheads. Tivoli and Corcolle are not the sole outlying Regional towns less than keen on having a dump in its back yard, but finding a site near Rome is no easy task. One possible alternative to the abandoned quarry at Corcolle, for instance, overlies springs and undeground streams--as does much of Rome--meaning that pollution from the dump could seep into the water table.


    A huge part of the problem is that Rome has ineffective recycling; some 85% of its waste goes into dumps like that projected for Corcolle. (Because some towns are more efficient, the total Regional figure is higher, at 25%.) This puts Italy's capital well below the average of other Italian cities. According to a report in 2011 by the national statistics agency ISTAT, every Italian produces around 533.5 Kg of waste annually. In the North almost half of this is recycled (48%), with peaks of nearly 60% of rubbish recycled in the Veneto and the Trentino Alto Adige regions. Central Italy lags far behind at 25% overall while, in the South, only around 19% is recycled.


    The question then becomes why Rome lags so far behind the big cities in North Italy in waste management. It is unfair to blame all Italians, but the stewardship of Italy's unique heritage of cultural treasures - and Italians love to boast that they host half of all the cultural treasures of Europe - is simply inadequate and obsolete. Why should this be so is mysterious, particularly when its cultural treasures are precisely those which will help turn the post-industrial Italy of high unemployment into a service nation; consider the United Kingdom, home of the first industrial revolution, where 90% of the jobs are in the service industry rather than in manufacturing. The results of the Italian general census of 2012 are not yet in so comparative statistic is not yet available, but it is worth recalling that between 2007 and 2011 one million Italian workers lost their jobs.


    If this is the macro picture, the lack of correct stewardship trickles down. In Naples the Girolamo Museum houses an extraordinary collection of ancient manuscripts, in a splendid, centuries-old library where philosopher Giambattista Vico worked in the early l7th Century. Last week Carabinieri arrested the library's former director, Massimo Marino De Caro, on charges of having appropriated precious ancient manuscripts and books which, it is believed, have wound up in the hands of collectors in Western Europe but also in Japan and Russia. Arrested with him were three of his assistants, two from Argentina and one from the Ukraine. De Caro was caught red handed by two library employees, who managed to film him secretly.  


    The micro picture could hardly ignore Pompeii. At the Villa of the Mysteries the great hall with the famous painting of the sacred mysteries was left completely unguarded by custodians, clustered outdoors to chat. In the hall tourists snapped away at the fresco, using forbidden flashes. "Why don't you put up a sign saying no flash?" said the irate Italian who phoned this tale of woe into a morning radio talk show. "That's up to the Superintendent," shrugged the custodian.


    Rome's magnificent Villa Pamphilj, built in the mid-l7th century and donated in the 1960's to the city of Rome by the Doris Pamphilj family, has long been a victim of neglect, with heads lopped off statues, broken stone benches and smashed stone signs. A forlorn signs says that construction of new toilet facilities for visitors was complete in 2008 at a cost of E 125,000 (circa $200,000). None is yet open to the public.


    The attention drawn to Hadrian's Villa similarly brought complaints of negligent management there, down to people arriving to walk their dogs through the park.

     
  • Facts & Stories

    Remembering Sicily's Slain Anti-Mafia Judges

     In Washington, D.C., FBI director Robert S. Mueller spoke Friday in a commemoration at FBI headquarters. Also in Washington, the Italian ambassador will host an exhibition devoted to Falcone, in which - for the first time - ten photographs and a selection of documents which narrate the Falcone story will go on view Tuesday, May 22. The exhibition catalogue is published by Gangemi Editore; sponsor is, together with the Italian embassy, the Compagnia per la Musica in Roma.

    In Turin in North Italy, Gustavo Zagrebelsky has organized a series of programs dedicated toFalcone and his similarly slain colleague Paolo Borsellino, assassinated July 19 of the same year, 1992, called "For Legality." Among the participants are a number of mayors from towns which have suffered from the Mafia. This ambitious project includes  readings in theaters, film showings, concerts and several public debates. Justice Minister Paola Severino will conduct a dialogue on the Mafia together with Zagrebelsky, who is president of the Biennale Democrazia. Our goal, says Zagrebelsky, "is to save legality in Italy."

    In addition, a new book edited by Antonella Mascali, "Le ultime parole di Falcone e Borsellino" (Falcone's and Borsellino's Last Words, published by Chiarelettere), is making waves here in Italy. "The more the years go by, the more uncomfortable I become with participating in these public ceremonies commemorating the assassinations," writes Roberto Scarpinato in the introduction. "Falcone and Borsellino were assassinated because their work as extremely correct magistrates culminated in the convictions at the maxi-trial, making them the very symbol of a state which had struck a mortal blow against Cosa Nostra, and shattered the myth of its invincibility." The reason for his skepticism, as he goes on to explain, is that the Mafia has been all too often presented as the rotten apple in the barrel. Only occasionally is there mention of white-collar collusion.

    Having reported on the Maxi-trial for both Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and on the Mafia drug wars in that period for the BBC, I can only agree. In that period I asked a courageous magistrate, whose brother had been assassinated in his place, why the Italian state failed to tackle and defeat the Mafia in the same way that it had defeated terrorism. His reply: "The terrorists were against the Italian system. The Mafia is the system."

    If this former magistrate is to be believed, then, it was the system which murdered Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo (also  a magistrate) and his three bodyguards. Two months later the system also eliminated Borsellino and his five bodyguards when his car was, like Falcone's, was blown up.

    As a foreign correspondent, I could hardly be expected to know much of the inside story of all this. But at the same time very few local Palermo reporters knew much more. I was sent, for instance, to interview the then head of the secret services in Palermo, a pleasant enough man, originally from Rome, named Bruno Contrada. A former police chief of Palermo, he headed the famous "flying squad" of detectives before becoming deputy director of the civil intelligence service SISDE. On Dec. 14, 1992, he was arrested for "external concourse in association with the Mafia" on the basis of admissions made by a number of Mafia bosses under arrest, including Tommaso Buscetta (the so-called pentito who was particularly helpful to Falcone), Gaspare Mutolo and others.

    Reading of Contrada's first conviction and subsequent appeals, I found it difficult to believe that someone in such a crucial position could be guilty. But in 2007 Italy's supreme court of Cassations upheld Contrada's conviction to ten years in prison. The following year Contrada's lawyers asked for him to be released to house arrest at his sister's home in Naples on grounds of poor health; he had lost nearly 50 pounds. The request was granted. When Paolo Borsellino's brother, Salvatore, complained about the release, Contrada's lawyers threatened to sue Salvatore Borsellino for defamation.

    On the day the maxi-trial opened in Palermo back in TK there was great excitement. A gigantic courthouse had been specially built with a secure tunnel that meant that the alleged Mafiosi could be introduced into the courtroom. It was difficult to ignore what looked like a a giant WWII cement pillbox, and so I went knocking on the doors of the apartment buildings that overlooked the courtroom. "I don't know what goes on in there," said one starchy woman. "None of my business."

    The US and France too thought it was their business, at least, and Borsellino, Falcone and the others in the anti-Mafia pool (as it was called) shared evidence with other investigators for the successful prosecution in both those countries of the "pizza connection," which was in fact a drug connection linking New York to the world center of heroin manufacture at that time (the Eighties). What should not be forgotten, in this year's commemoration, is how many obstacles which "the system" placed in the way of these outstanding judges, prosecutors, magistrates and simple policemen, like my detective friend Michele, who took the place of his own slain boss, Boris Giuliano.

    By the way, only a few hours ago the Francesca Morvillo High School in the Southern town of Brindisi - named for Falcone's murdered wife - was bombed, killing one and wounding seven.

  • Op-Eds

    Elections in Italy: Harbinger or Swan Song?

    ROME – When most of the votes for new local administrations were counted on Tuesday,  the question became whether the results foretell the future for Italy or are singing the swan song of its ailing second republic. If they are a reliable prediction of the national general elections scheduled for mid-2013 (although a few right-wing politicos still hope to anticipate these to October), what could follow is a Greek-style melt-down, according to Corriere della Sera columnist Massimo Franco.

    But at the same time, if they are a swan song to the politics of the past two decades, they give the Italian political leadership time to reorganize and rethink. Even on the right, some commentators today acknowledge that those for the past few decades have utterly failed to create a political class for the big towns and small villages throughout Italy with just that – class. "I hope the parties will reflect on this," was the lapidary comment of Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

    Whatever the interpretations, with one-fifth of the electorate called to vote, the elections Sunday and Monday amounted to a serious sampler. Although its success on the local level is not yet comparable to that of the Socialist sweep in France, the Center-Left, led by the Partito Democratico (PD), but with outside support, fared better than any other coalition.  Silvio Berlusconi's Liberty party (PdL), dropping some 10% of its support across the board, appears in serious melt-down. The scandal-ridden Northern League, where the leaders are at war, seems to be sinking like a stone in its heartland of Lombardy, though not in the Veneto. There Flavio Tosi, 42, was re-elected mayor of Verona, positioning himself as a possible future leader of the entire League - a reward for his successfully distancing himself from the "Magic Circle" who fiddled the League finances under the distracted eye of League founder Umberto Bossi.

    As predicted, the political preacher and former comedian Beppe Grillo and his protest party, the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement), which campaigned with countless small-town personal blitzes by Grillo and everywhere by electronic tweet, did a star turn. In some small Northern towns Grillo copped up to 15%. In Monza, where the Center-left took first place with over 38% of the vote, Grillo won 9.7%, placing him in an almost neck-to-neck race against the Northern League, which bested him if barely with  11.2%.

    Although some of its supporters were elected, the Catholic center headed by Pier Ferdinando Casini and flanked by Gianfranco Fini failed dismally, suggesting that this is more a part of the past than the future. "I am extremely worried," Casini acknowledged Tuesday. Most fortunately, there were no signs of a revived neo-Fascist organization, like the neo-Nazi party that emerged in Greece.

    Abstentions were almost as high as predicted. Of the 7.5 million potential voters, the turnout was of 5 million, or 67%, versus the almost 74% who voted in 2007. In the 27 townships counted at this writing, the turnout was of 58%, eight percent below the turnout of 2007. The sharpest decline in voting was in the North; even in the Ligurian coastal cities of Genoa and La Spezia, which vaunt a strong democratic tradition, only 56% bothered to vote.

    The anti-austerity vote in Greece, in particular, does not augur well. There is little doubt that the austerity measures being taken are unpopular in Italy as well as in Greece. But so far Italy's was, all in all, a vote for moderation rather than an extreme rejection of government action. And this suggests that, under the economic circumstances, the Italian politicians showed considerable wisdom last November by turning over the reins of government to an a-political cabinet of professional economists. On the other hand, should the center-right decide to turn Premier Mario Monti into a scapegoat for what is undeniably an election debacle for Berlusconi, the question is whether the PdL will withdraw from it their crucial support in Parliament, so as to reposition themselves as an aggressive outsider in hopes of out-Grilling outsider Beppe Grillo. So far there seem to be no signs of this, but it is early to know what the future will bring.

    In Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, 64, who had been the city's mayor back in 1993, was re-elected on a ticket backed by Italia dei Valori, the independent leftist party of Antonio Di Pietro, and pro-environmentalist groups. Topping the list with over 43% of the vote, he was head and shoulders in front of all the other groups, including the candidates from both Center-left (18%) and the Center-right (12.5%).

    The Center-left, however, forged ahead in Genoa (48.3%), L'Aquila (40.7%), Parma (40%), Taranto (49.5%), Como (35%). In all these cities the runners-up were significantly below. The electorate in Cuneo was more divided, however, with 36% voting for the "Centro" (center) versus 30% for the center-left, and Grillo claiming 8.4% of that vote.

  • Diary of an Economic Tragedy: “Look Us in the face”

    ROME – In Naples on April 24 real estate agent Diego Peduto, 52, threw himself from his balcony and died after receiving a tax bill from the state agency Equitalia which he had no money pay. On April 29 at Nuoro in Sardinia a failing businessman killed himself after having been obliged to fire his own two sons. On April 30 Giovanni Caccavale, 57, hanged himself in his home because, after losing his job as doorman, his own home had been put up for sale. On May 5 – again in Naples, near Mergellina – the same tax agency went after Pietro Paganelli, 72, seizing his beloved 40-year-old Fiat 600 and threatening to seize the house in which his youngest son lived because Paganelli was unable to pay the mortgage. Paganelli shot himself in the head and is now in an irreversible coma. Before leaving his home he said he was going fishing; in a suicide note he wrote that “dignity is more important than one's life.” His debt: E 15,000, or about $22,000.

    In the North, on May 2 in Treviso a businessman deeply in debt ended it all by hanging himself. And at about the same time in Mestre, the industrial town south of Venice, skilled craftsman Federico Pierobon, 40, found himself jobless and he too hanged himself, using an electricity cord. According to the craft union in Mestre, Pierobon is the eleventh among the businessmen and craft workers of the Veneto Region to commit suicide so far this year. Finally, in case all this should pass unobserved, a mournful group of the widows of suicide victims staged a march in Bologna last Saturday. Standing in front of the tax office there, they shouted, “Open your shutters and look us in the face!”

    The sad list goes on: last week a man hounded by the tax cops barricaded himself in a building and waved a gun until he was taken away unharmed; the last straw, he later recounted, was receiving a bill with a series of fines for having failed to pay his obligatory annual TV tax for the state-owned RAI. “I just went crazy when I saw this big pile of papers,” he said. Can he be blamed? In order to avoid just this pile of nasty papers I personally pay the RAI TV tax twice simply because the risk of trouble is greater than the annual tax of around $140.

    So what is this all about, and, most importantly, where and when will it end? In an interview with the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, the Minister for International Cooperation and Integration Andrea Riccardi, the most prominent Catholic leader in the government as founder of the Sant'Egidio community, which has worked as a peace broker in international disputes especially in Africa, was asked if Equitalia could be a bit less aggressive and permit time payments of debts. “The Government is working on this – people feel abandoned,” he replied. “Emotionally I'm near these people....” In other words, he failed to give a satisfactory answer.

    And it isn't over yet. In the past four years in Italy (2008 to 2011) one out of five professional managers has been declared redundant and sent home (20.8% or 104,000 out of 500,000), according to the national statistics agency ISTAT. Curiously, for once it is not the women to be sacked first; of the managerial class both women and men have been sent home in the same measure. “What we have are thousands of people of 45 or 50 who find themselves suddenly unemployed just when it is ever tougher to find a job in a market that's frozen,” said Giorgio Ambrogioni, president of the management association Federmanager, adding that those who do find a new job must often do without health insurance or retirement funding.

    Like Mario Draghi, Premier Mario Monti is now talking of job creation while also trying its best to curb wasteful government spending, no easy task. He has brought in Enrico Bondi, the commercial bankruptcy wizard who turned round and refloated Parmalat, the Italian dairy multinational which went into liquidation in 2003 – it was Europe's Enron - to help him perform this magic trick.“We have to deal with a bloated burocracy where people have been given jobs thanks to their family, buddies and the parish priest,” one no-nonsense government crusader explained. “It's tough.” Monti hopes to reduce public spending by E4.26 billion (circa $5.2 billion) within the year. If he fails, he has warned, the value added tax (VAT or, in Italy, IVA) will have to be raised from the present 21% to 23%, with obvious consequences on consumption; a 2% hike in the price of consumer goods risks translation into shutting down one shop out of every fifty that have survived so far.

    For the first time in a decade, therefore, Italy has appointed a committee to analyze government spending. The effort is called a “spending review,” with the words in English “so as not to terrify people,” our economist friend explained sardonically. In the past Italy has already had several spending reviews, but they were long since abolished by conservative governments (read: Berlusconi). According to sociologist Franco Ferrarotti, another problem is that, “The politicians simply don't know how to read a budget.”

    An early analysis suggests that the big waste is the health care sector, which accounted for over 32% of all government spending in 1990 but today, 37%. Already many financially troubled hospitals are cutting services; at the Policlinico Gemelli, Rome's noteworthy Catholic hospital, an area formerly dedicated to post-operative physical therapy has been shut down for lack of funds.

    Italy's second greatest area of government spending is education, which accounted for 23.1% of the total in 1990. By 2009 this had already dropped down to 17.7%, however, so in that sector the government hopes to cut expenditures by 10% by the end of 2013, to become 50% in 2014, through reorganizing and centralizing rented offices especially in the provinces, which will be required to use more computers. Good grief: rented school administration offices? Teaching is not supposed to be affected because teachers' salaries are stable thanks to contracts only recently negotiated by the unions.
  • Op-Eds

    A Night at the Opera


    ROME – On Monday night in Rome's magnificent opera house the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed  Shostakovich's dark Fifth Symphony, composed on the eve of war in 1937,  and steeped in foreboding. When the last notes faded, conductor Riccardo Muti turned to the sell-out audience to remark that to find a suitable musical encore would be a challenge, but that he intended to do so because Italian President Giorgio Napolitano was in the audience.


    Until that moment the President's presence had gone unnoticed, but the moment Muti spoke, the audience rose to its feet as one, whirling around in Napolitano's direction, and bursting into applause and shouts of “Bravo, bravo!” When the encore came, it had been carefully selected: the overture from Giuseppe Verdi's "La Forza del Destino," the force of destiny.


    The reason for this truly unusual outburst was that Italians—at least the sort of Italians who attend concerts of classical music—are deeply concerned, not to say appalled, at the all too apparent double whammy of political and economic decline. In these tough times President Napolitano is seen as the guardian angel of a country on the edge of a political and economic abyss.


    In the background is the daily dose of political scandal. The latest Milan wiretaps show the under-age party girl, Ruby Rubacuore, boasting that former Premier Silvio Berlusconi offered her cash in exchange for her silence. In the mythical northern Padania the Northern League's administrative manager admits hiding gold ingots behind a chest of drawers in his house (the police had already looked there so there may be a curious epilogue here). He was also hoarding diamonds bought with party funds--that is, with taxpayers' money-- as a currency hedge when there were fears of a Euro meltdown.


    Not even Pier Luigi Bersani's Partito Democratico (PD) is immune. And

    right-wing banner headlines trumpet (perhaps unfairly) that the professorial pro tempore government of Premier Mario Monti, which preaches financial chastity, just splashed out to buy 400 new cars to shuttle government VIPs and their aides about town.


    This month also marks the third anniversary of the Abruzzi earthquake, in which 309 died, 2,000 were injured, and 56 town centers were destroyed or semi-destroyed. At present, according to the local press, 33,000 people are still lodged in temporary dwellings of one kind and another, and, although over $300 million has been spent to support weak walls at L'Aquila, real reconstruction of the historical town center is yet to begin. Rumors of misuse of funds are rife.

     

    The political dissolution is complicated by economic woes. A rash of suicides of troubled businessmen--one every four days--cannot yet be compared with the far worse record in Greece, but is of obvious concern. When the small manufacturer fails to be paid by his customers, he cannot pay his creditors, his employees or his rent, and finds himself facing bankruptcy. Another straw in the wind: during the past six months rents in ten large Italian cities have fallen by 5%--that is, a projected 10% or more annually--while in Naples and Venice, by 10% (20% annually).


    “We are in a recession on a par with that of 1929,” sentenced Giovanni Sartori, one of the grand old men of Italian political commentators. Writing  in the Corriere della Sera of April 22, Sartori said that the mainstream political parties are all mired in “the same political sludge." In his analysis, Italian politics have passed through  three distinct political phases. The first, from the early postwar years until about 1990, was characterized by a trio of “mass political party organizations": Communist, Catholic and Socialist.


    But after 1990 this type of political party organization disintegrated into formations generated and dominated by TV.  This second phase of “the light-weight party” (partito leggero), in which the mass political organizations were gradually dissolved, has lasted twenty years and was  characterized by televized political propaganda.


    This has now been supplanted by what Sartori calls the “liquid party,” a term coined by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman referring to societies which change too quickly for solidity. On the Italian political scene this liquidity, which is canceling the very term political party, is a result in part of Facebook, blogs and Twitter, and has produced the Beppe Grillo movement, which pollsters say may now have up to 8% of the potential vote in administrative local elections to take place within the next few weeks.


    The problem, says Sartori, is that Grillo has no plan for governing the complexity of a nation state. As for candidates, the comic turned political crusader seems to be proposing spontaneous lists of candidates for which he will more or less guarantee, though upon what basis is something of a mystery.


    Behind Grillo, however, more than tweets or sms's, is anger and the obvious fact that the political rot has brought disgrace upon all the larger establishment parties, to greater or lesser degree. Not even Catholic leader Roberto Formigone is escaping unblemished as photographs of him in a bikini on a rich buddy's yacht grace the dailies.


    But what people continue to disagree about, during this week which commemorated the liberation of Rome from Nazi-Fascism on April 25 of 1944, is what is to be done and the underlying causes. For some it is all the fault of accepting the Euro and joining Europe. Others blame poor mass education, family and buddy clientelism, the lack of reward  

    for professional merit, the failure to teach languages in a serious way and the failure to invest in research.


    A few--and they are still in the minority--insist that Italy, with its absolutely unique heritage of art, architecture, archaeology, museums and lovely historical cities, has not invested enough in protecting and promoting these marvelous resources. Anyone reading this blog knows that this is my personal opinion.


    This op-ed bloglet began with conductor Muti and will end with him. Two nights after their appearance in Rome the Chicago Symphony performed at the historic San Carlo Theater in Naples. Once again turning to the audience after the symphony's last notes rang out, Muti confided, "I first came to this theater at age fifteen in a rented tux--it was obligatory to wear one. The trousers were too long, and I tripped on the steps. But I made it. So can you. Do not to wait for the government to act for you--act for yourselves."


    Thank you, Maestro.



  • Op-Eds

    Scrambling the Political Eggs

    ROME – Speaking of revolution, it was Lenin who said that if you want to make an omelette, you must be willing to break a few eggs. In its own way Italy is making a revolution, if only by scrambling the eggs.

    The second Republic—brought about by the scandals of Operation Clean Hands back in the early Nineties—is fading fast into an unknown third, and Premier Mario Monti's government is facing obstacles that not even his considerable skills may be able to overcome. Weaker by the day, his cabinet of professorial experts has soldiered on bravely, and was widely expected to remain in office until the natural end of the five-year legislature in mid-2013. But suddenly the political winds have changed, and today's conventional wisdom is that national general political elections may take place this coming October. Here's why.

    First, alienation. “It's a divorce between the government and the country,” sentenced Pier Luigi Bersani the other day. Most pollsters agree that the number of those alienated from the mainstream political class has risen to the point that those who say they will not go to the polls or turn in blank ballots, has risen to around 45% of the electorate; some say up to 60%. Because no one knows which establishment party will suffer most from the predicted tsunami of defections, all are running equally scared, fearing that worse may be in store. 

    Secondly, a photo-finish looming between the big two parties. Silvio Berlusconi's Partito della Liberta(PDL) can claim just 24.9% of the electorate, but Bersani's left-leaning Partito Democratico (PD), which represents the progressive trade union CGIL, has slipped ahead, with % in the most recent poll, according to the respected Swg. However, another pollster, IPSOS, puts the PDL further down, at just over 22%.

    Third, Beppe Grillo. The comedian cum political guru Grillo has surged in popularity, to the point his Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Stars Movement) party is, for the first time in history, the third largest in Italy. In the polls (again, Swg) Grillo has bounced ahead of the Northern League, surging to 7.2% by comparison with Umberto Bossi's Northern League, with 7.1%.
     

     Certainly Grill's anti-party party is growing by the day, as he campaigns vigorously in the big and smaller towns of Italy, from Sicily to Como in the North this past weekend.

    Fourth, the Northern League. The scandals have taken their toll. This weekend the party founder and grand old ailing man Umberto Bossi, referring to his inner “magic circle” as it is being called, acknowledged that he is “ashamed,” but that “the people understand.” The latest shock, after the revelations of publicly donated party funds whisked into private pockets, was that a senior aide to Bossi had paid a private investigator to snoop into the doings of the party's second-in-command, “Bobo” Maroni, who just happened to be Interior Minister in the Berlusconi government at that time. In an attempt at damage control, Bossi showed up at a party rally Saturday where Maroni was speaking. They exchanged theatrical hugs.

    Fifth, scandals. No party is free of accusations of corruption, the daily fare of the media from right to left. In addition there is sex: the week's testimony by ex-Premier Berlusconi is literally hair-raising. Explaining why he provided huge sums of cash to women revealed as prostitutes (unbeknownst to him if to no one else), he said things like he wanted to help Ruby the heart-stealer (Ruby Rubacuore), the fake adult and fake Egyptian, because she was a Catholic convert and needed money to avoid becoming a prostitute. The girls at his party were not really dressed like nuns but wearing a wardrobe of sexy outfits that Gaddafi had given him as a present (!)

    Sixth, anger at Monti. The reality of Premier Monti's measures is beginning to sink in. Huge tax hikes will be applied by October on home ownership, gasoline, highway tolls, household utilities and other essentials, for circa 45% of income. Moreover, tens of thousands of the middle-aged who accepted early retirement in exchange for a pension have found themselves unemployed but with no income whatsoever because the Monti government raised the pensionable age.

     Given this truly worrisome situation, the establishment parties are doing their best to try to give themselves a new look. They need to: local administrative elections loom May 6 and 7 and will provide an even more precise picture of the voters' mood. Altogether, 1,014 townships throughout Italy will go to the polls. They include, in the South, Palermo and Taranto and, in the North, Genoa, Verona, Monza and Piacenza. Twenty-eight are provincial capitals with over 100,000 inhabitants. Sicily has 149 townships summoned to vote while the Valle d'Aosta (which votes later, on May 27) has only one. The tiniest is the hamlet of Montelapiana in the Abruzzo, home to just 77.

    In a belated attempt at damage control, the general secretary of the PDL Angelino Alfano appealed to the League to run a joint platform for the May elections, but Bossi would have none of it: “We're better off alone than with bad company,” he said without bothering to appear gracious to his former bedfellow in government. 

    Behind the scenes there is movement, not surprisingly. Silvio Berlusconi seems to be planning to dissolve his PDL for a startup new party with a brand new name and, to this end, is courting the wealthy industrialist Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, 64. Former chairman of Fiat and today president of Ferrari, Montezemolo is rumored to aspire to the premiership of Italy. A name for Berlusconi's proposed new party? Until a few months ago it was Il Partito dell'amore (the party of love) but today the gossip has it that this is not patriotic enough so it will be along the lines of the party that loves Italy.

    Meantime, Pierferdinando Casini is struggling to launch a new “Third Pole” party—this because neither to the right like Berlusconi nor to the left like Bersani—that will bring together centrists under a name on the lines of Pole of Nations or Pole for Italy. With him would be Gianfranco Fini and Francesco Rutelli.

    And so the search is on for a new name, a new party, and a few new faces, but so far it is mostly a scrambling of the same old eggs.
  • Facts & Stories

    “Foreigner, Go Home”—But Don’t Count on It

    ROME – Born in India, Nazir Rafiq Ahmad, 50, teaches English in three schools in Rome, where he has lived since 2001. On April 14 he was returning home via the subway when, between the Terminal Station and Piazza Cavour, he was assaulted by a young man screaming racist insults, the kindest of which was “Go home, foreigner.” To stop the beating Ahmad was defended by others in the subway car and, when he collapsed bleeding onto the floor, a young woman doctor, Italian, rushed forward to help him. This attack was hardly on the level of the xenophobic Norwegian slaughter of seventy-seven people accused of opening the gates to Muslims. It is, even so, a reflection on Italian attitudes and a harbinger of things to come, even without the neo-Nazi slogans.

    But the situation is complex. Just off the isle of Lampedusa, five bodies of Libyan illegal immigrants were recovered just one month ago.
     

    They have good reason to be concerned: last year at this time some 2,000 immigrants landed in a single day on the island that is home to only 5,500 Italians. Lampedusan authorities fear a repetition of last year’s flood of illegal immigrants as soon as the seas are calm and the weather is warm. Last year the money-earning tourism that had been traditional to the island fell by 70% over the previous year. 

    The sad truth is that the island is even less equipped than last year to deal with the predicted influx because one of their two reception centers was burnt to the ground by Tunisian immigrants last Sept. 20, and has not yet been rebuilt, even as just last week fifty illegal immigrants arrived. “We can’t just leave people in the middle of the road,” said Bernardino De Rubeis, mayor of Lampedusa. “We have asked for the center to be rebuilt and reopened as soon as possible. We also count on assurances [from the Government] that within 48 hours the illegal immigrants will be sent elsewhere in Italy.”

    The Northern League of Umberto Bossi has been the Italian political party most identified withexploitation of anti-immigrant politics. However, scandals have literally hacked off much of the party leadership, from Bossi himself and his sons to Rosi Mauro and other party administrators accused of dipping into publicly provided party funds for their personal gain (only the latest: the accusation in the Italian press that a certain raven-haired woman known as “la Badante”—i.e., Rosi the Caretaker, who is also Vice President of the Italian Senate and as such third in line to succeed President Giorgio Napolitano in an emergency—acquired $130,000 worth of diamonds and gold ingots with party funds. The result is a wave of reformism within the Northern League, with a document circulated asking for an end to the party’s xenophobic rhetoric. Whether or not a new party majority may accept this is yet to be seen, however.

    Again in the North, the Milan registry office ignited a firestorm of news reports and phone-in chat shows when it revealed that, according to its latest statistical analysis, three out of every ten babies born in Milan—the very cornerstone of League support—has a Chinese name. In other words, Lombardy, the cradle of Italian manufacturing, finance, fashion and advertising, will be 30% Italo-Chinese by birth within the next decade, as Italy’s birth rate continues to decline. Officially Milan has some 80,000 Chinese, but in fact more since not all are legally registered. Already, and this is the most important statistic, 12% of all of Italy’s gross domestic product (GDP) is the product of regularly registered, legal immigrant labor.

    It is all a ticklish business, as was seen in the Northern border town where police legally withdrew passports from immigrants for checking, and—so as to make sure they gave the right passport back later in the night—wrote ID numbers of immigrants’ hands. The reaction from other Italians was swift: memories of World War II Nazi tactics are still too fresh, even though the border police explained that, when they had previously given the immigrants’ paper slips with numbers, the slips were lost.

    Muslim immigration is a separate chapter. The Northern League two years ago presented a bill before Parliament calling for the arrest of women wearing the veil. But if accepting the newcomers is difficult, so is their being forced to accept the Italian way of life, at least for some. At least two young women were murdered in recent years by Muslim family members who felt that their daughters and sisters had strayed too far into Italian mores, dressing like Italian women and being courted by Italian boyfriends.

    At the same time, according to Magdi Allam writing in Corriere della Sera some time back, anti-Semitic hate videogames are on the web, and are aimed at Muslim immigrant children. The website www.awladnaa.net, which is still on line and still managed by the Fratelli Musulmani (Muslim Brotherhood) in Arabic, teaches children—including in Italy, according to Allam—that “the Jews assassinated 25 prophets of God, and their history if full of criminal homicides and corruption.” Another phrase would have it that, “The Jews instigate the whole world against Islam and Muslims with the pretext of combating terrorism….”

    To see clips in Italy of the positive side of the story, see the three-part series produced by Il Sole-24 Ore on immigrant entrepreneurs Margarita Sanchez, Xu Qui Lin, and Nelu Mega at: http://karimamoual.blog.ilsole24ore.com/
     

    That Italy needs the regularly registered immigrant workers and business entrepreneurs like them is plain, just as it is plain that more clandestine immigrants will arrive. They must be legal, registered and their identities clear, though this is difficult when passports are intentionally thrown away. Nevertheless, Italy will have to bite the bullet sooner or later, and the sooner the better.
  • Facts & Stories

    Family Values, Bossi Style

    ROME – Umberto Bossi, 71, founding father of the 30-year-old Northern League, liked to hurl invectives at the Italian nation, as opposed to his beloved, honest and above all northern Padania. A favorite insult was “Roma ladrona!” (Rome the Robber), referring to the national government. But now the chickens have come home to roost—and I use the word “chickens” advisedly—for it turns out that some in Bossi’s entourage, known to League insiders as the “Magic Circle,” were themselves stealing from the till, and on the grand scale.

    Despite his debilitating stroke, until now Umberto Bossi, a former cabinet minister, had continued to play the jokester, shouting filthy words at journalists and giving them the finger, repeatedly, while ignoring questions from the press. The fun ended this week when Umberto broke down and wept on a national TV political talk show, saying that his family’s misdeeds were his fault, and that he was resigning as head of his party, which immediately, however, kicked him upstairs as its honorary president. 

    Several magistrates, including the courageous, competent and determined Neapolitan Henry John Woodcock, have put Bossi’s political party under investigation for drinking illegally from the public trough, and the stench is considerable. (These barnyard images come to mind because the man until now the party’s number two, former Interior Minister Roberto “Bobo” Maroni, has just vowed that the League will “clean up the chicken yard.”)

    Accusations of misappropriation of party funding regard the costly renovation of Bossi’s own sprawling home and the eleven apartments in the name of his wife, said to be a passionate reader of tarot cards and other esoteric magic. At only age 21 Bossi’s son Renzo had been elected to the 80-member regional assembly of Lombardy, a post that gave him almost $200,000 a year. Renzo owns an expensive BMW even though, assigned a chauffeur by dint of his political job, he  hardly needed his own car for whizzing around Padania. Renzo is universally known as “Il Trota”, the Trout, because his father was once asked if Renzo were his delfino (dolphin, which makes a pun for dauphin). To this Umberto Bossi replied, “No, he’s just a trout.” 

    According to leaked testimony from witnesses for the prosecution who include League party officials, Bossi’s son actually purchased a university degree from London, paid by publicly provided party funds. A second son received money for vaguely defined consultancies. Other party funding was allegedly diverted to investments in Tanzania and Argentina, apparently out of fear that the Euro would collapse. 

    The vice president of the Italian Senate, Rosy Mauro, is one of the closest inside the Magic Circle. When Bossi had his stroke in 2004, the stocky, black-haired Rosy moved in as his self-appointed caretaker, prompting another Bossi-crowd nickname, “la Badante.” Married, la Badante is also best friends with a male singer who likes to imitate Elvis Presley in night clubs, and who during her tenure there obtained a well-paying job in the Senate. Rosy’s management of Senate meetings, when she has been handed the gavel, is casual. Take a look at the Rosy show on YouTube called “La Presidentessa Impazzita” (The Crazy President), in which she ignores the voting senators entirely, deciding on her own that the assembly had approved a bill she favored). 

    However picturesque and folklorish, these incidents along the road to Italian democracy demonstrate the existence of two genuine and enduring problems. The first is that, where families are concerned, anything goes. Umberto Bossi, screaming that the Italian South was full of thieves, tolerated  that his own son, who had flunked out of school at least three times, receive a whopping salary as a public “servant.” As one commentator here remarked, “Could any family have been more like the maligned stereotype of the Italian South? Public money paid for Bossi’s home to be fixed up, his wife spent her time cooking or else up in the attic reading tarot cards, and his kid ran around in an expensive car while given a job paid for by the state.”  

    The most important issue at stake is public funding of the Italian political parties. Bossi’s party treasurer, who is accused of investing party money outside of Italy, resigned last week, and allegedly had links with the Mafia in Calabria (!) And Bossi’s party is not the only one at risk of judicial action for misuse of funds. The former treasurer of the Margherita party, Luigi Lusi, is under investigation for party funds he sent to a personal account in Canada. And some already defunct parties were receiving funds as well.

    Back in April 1993, a referendum on public financing of political parties was held. Nine out of ten voters voted against it, and public financing officially came to an end. Nevertheless, within months a law was slipped in through the back door permitting “reimbursement” of party expenses. According to Italian press calculations, in 2002 the government headed by Silvio Berlusconi then doubled the reimbursement for all elections (local, national, and to the European Parliament). Reimbursements have risen further since then, with accounting justifying only about one-third of the public funding provided. The result: Italian public financing of political parties is double that of France and Germany. According to the Court of Accounts, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, even after it ceased to exist, received € 128 million as reimbursement while its officially justified expenditures amounted to only € 50. Where did the rest go? 

    Some parties have already opted for independent accounting firms to go over their books so as to insure propriety. These include the Partito Democratico of Luigi Bersani.

    Since November this has been an interregnum between the full-fledged governments which, unlike the present technocrat government headed by Mario Monti, represent specific political  interests. But this May brings local administrative elections, and so the political fall-out from the unrelenting spate of scandals unveiled since Monti took office is likely to be reflected in the vote, most likely by a low turn-out from a disaffected electorate.
  • Art & Culture

    It's About Togetherness

    MILAN - It's about togetherness.

    Italian poet Paola Pennecchi and Canadian photographer Alison Harris have joined forces to create an evocative, coffee table-sized book entitled Traslochi, which translates roughly to Moving On, with a gallery presentation in Milan on Friday, March 30. The theme lends itself to endings--to the physical and emotional business of packing up and going away-- but also to occasionally bizarre silences and vacant spaces of both the exterior physical and inner worlds. Appropriate to the theme, the exhibit then moves on to Berlin, Paris, Venice and New York.

    Photographer Alison Harris (full disclosure: not a relative), who has lived in Rome and near Genoa, is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in the U.S. and and currently lives in Paris. Her photographs have been published by Rizzoli and HarperCollins, among others, and have been on view in one-woman and collective exhibitions in Genoa, New York, Houston, and in the Galerie Italienne in Paris. Her works have also been acquired by the Musee Carnavalet and the Bibliotheque Historique in Paris and by the National Austrian Library. 

    Born and still based in Milan, poet Paola Pennecchi works as an editor, coordinator and technical consultant for Eurotrendy, Mondadori, Rizzoli, Conde Nast, Aagetp, Technice Nuove and other specialized Milanese companies in the field of marketing and publicity. Her poems appeared for the first time in the quarterly Cultura Oggi in 1995.  Part of that moving on is language, for all Pennecchi's poems are presented in both Italian and in English. And here's an excerpt from her lyric of stillness Sii grata (Be grateful).

    Thank you, #1, Grazie 1.

    Your slow Quel tuo lento

    rocking progress has been avanzare e' stato come

    a comforting cradle un balsamo di culla

    in the hours of darkness nelle ore del buio.

     

    At every stop Ad ogni fermata

    a story, a traveler una storia, un viandante

    to tie da allacciare

    to my destiny. al mio destino.

     

    And salvation. E alla salvezza.

    Galleria Spaziotemporaneo, Via Solferino 56, 20121 Milan, through April 14, 2012, Tues through Sat 4 pm to 7:30 pm. 
  • Op-Eds

    Eavesdropping on Mr. Monti’s Asian Road Show

     ROME – Last week’s joke circulating here was that two stodgy matrons in a café were chatting over cups of steaming cappuccino, presumably about their children or menus. A man eavesdrops as one lady leans toward the other to ask earnestly, “How goes the spread today?” The joke is that until now no Italian matron had ever heard of the spread. This week rings a change. Now that the spread is at least partly in check, the two busybodies are supposedly asking: “So what’s happening to Article 18 this week?”

    For those who have managed to remain out of the loop, Article 18 is a paragraph is a labor law code that restricts the right of companies having more than fifteen employees from firing workers. (For more details on the visible and invisible effects of Article 18, see  >>. If a labor court determines unjust firing, the worker must be re-instated with full past pay. This protective legislation, adopted in the 1970s, on the one hand has guaranteed some workers from losing jobs by guaranteeing them the equivalent of tenure, but on the other hand has obliged manufacturers in trouble to keep workers on when the company risks going under. In addition, Article 18 has kept other workers from having jobs because, to dodge the law, some small factory owners carefully restrict their labor force to no more than fourteen. Another dodge, which the government is also fighting, is to hire workers on temporary contracts which leaves them completely unprotected.

    Premier Mario Monti has made reform of this highly protective labor law a cornerstone of his government’s program, and this has brought him into conflict with a goodly chunk of the labor force, which is threatening massive retaliatory strikes, and bringing him into conflict with some of the politicians who support the crisis government. On Monday Monti, whose government is still firmly in the saddle since it came to power in November, leaves for what the Italian press has dubbed the “Monti road show,” a swing through Asia to hustle investments in Italy.

    After weeks of meetings that brought the trade unions, the government and the manufacturers association Confindustria around a bargaining table, an eavesdropping journalist from the financial daily Il Sole-24 Ore swears that, after the latest meeting in a confusion of bodyguards and chauffeurs on Friday, the head of the leftist trade union CGIL (General Confederation of Italian Labor), he heard the head of the huge leftist trade union, Susanna Camusso, whisper to Monti, “Have a great trip to Asia, but you’re not going to tell them that they can just fire everybody, are you?” To which Monti reportedly replied in his usual courteous (and carefully ambiguous) manner, “That is not my intention.”

    Labor market reform—that is, easing the employer’s right to dismiss workers for economic and disciplinary reasons—is the knottiest of Italian problems after corruption. The government on the one hand is pressing for labor reform, but on the other hand must keep itself in power with the votes of a broad coalition extending from right to left. In the case of Article l8, the road show at home can resemble a collision course. Monti’s support in Parliament comes from a heterogeneous coalition: Silvio Berlusconi’s rightist Freedom party (PdL); the Catholic-dominated centrist group headed by Pier Ferdinando Casini; and the Partito Democratico (PD), a catch-all leftist formation with a tradition of supporting the leftist trade unions, beginning with the once Communist-dominated CGIL, largest of the big three trade unions. Not surprisingly, the head of the PD, Pier Luigi Bersani, adamantly opposes the government’s reform project, even though Monti points out that only a tiny percentage (0.5%) of dismissal cases that come before a court involve Article l8. Ironically, when Bersani was then Premier Romano Prodi’s minister of economic development, he himself worked in favor of liberalization.

    What is to be done? On Friday the government said firmly that its reform package remains on the table and will be presented as a draft bill later the Spring. This brought applause from the manufacturers because it was an important signal to the unions that the government is no longer willing to negotiate the reform bill, but will take it directly to Parliament. Passage is unlikely before summer, if at all; as has been pointed out repeatedly, there is conflict between the very concept of Italy and the new Europe, for the Italian constitution begins with the declaration that Italy is a republic founded upon labor, whereas Europe is a political fusion founded upon the free market.

    Already on the credit side of the government ledger are a cautious pension reform, some liberalization of the economy and austerity measures. But although Monti and his labor minister, Elsa Fornero, speak earnestly of fostering job creation, the fact is that nothing has yet moved in that area. The result: the CGIL hunkers down all the more into a protective stance. Monti had hoped that this would be resolved before departing for his Asian tour, which will take in Tokyo, Boao to attend the Forum for Asia—the equivalent of the Davos World Economic Forum—and Astana.

    Meantime, as Monti said Saturday, “Those politicians who like to go on about the GNP should show some patience. These are long-term operations, and the emergency is not yet over.”

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