Journals of Italy

I: The Italians

In June 2022, I found myself in Rome, Italy. My second time in the city. On my first visit, I was entirely consumed by the local and national culture, immediately vowing to learn Italian and move there. The progress on these vows has been slow thus far, my Italian drains the moment I don’t use it for a week and I am still living in London. This trip only reinforced my devotion to the peninsula. The Italian life is a theatrical spectacle. An endless performance well over 2,000 years old. The Italian matter is of deep meaning to me, so expect this to be loqacious.

This Italian substance is an ancient remedy. Faithful pilgrims, from across Christendom, eager to buy their salvation from the church would annually come in the tens of thousands, many would be murdered, robbed or abducted by bandits enroute. Licentious Englishmen drunken with tales of beautiful women would leave their families and spend their remaining shillings on Italian prostitutes and booze. Merchants came from the far East flogging their tea and carpets; travellers feasting on rich history, art and food; the (wealthy) sick advised by their doctors to find peace amongst the Tuscan Antiapennini.

All of this has been ardently documented by many, but none better than Luigi Barzini (Dottore Barzini) in his 1964 'The Italians', an anthropological study of the Italian Character covering the late Roman period, the seven pre-unification states, Fascist/Nazi Italy and lastly the post-war modern Italy. Dottore Barzini perspicuously details the foreign experience of Italy, its "fatal charm" and "the other face of the coin", covering it from the Alpine villages of the North to the semi-arid terrains of Sicily.

I have experienced many parts of this country, yet still a fraction of what it offers and withal none have offered me the homage of Rome. In Milan, I found it too metropolitan and cramped, its architecture gaudy and uninspiring, and its people uninvolved with their own performance. Venice suffers from similar symptoms; decades of excessive tourism have commercialised the city. Furthermore, Venice, a post-Roman city, lacks the ancient flavour of its other Italian counterparts, its character mounted by influence from numerous French, German and Austrian occupations.

During my time in Rome, I journaled the vocabulary I collected, the friends and people I met and 'the performance' as Dottore Barzini titled it, all the things that fuel my amare for Italy. This piece is simply a short and stray replication of Dottore Barzini's work through my own experience of the 'performance'.

II: Città e amici

Trips to Rome have proved fruitful methods of meeting new people and making lasting friendships. In December 2019, I flew out to Italy for the first time to meet Lewis, an old school friend that was studying in Rome for his undergraduate. I settled with him for nine days, within the bounds of one small room with a balcony, perfect for morning coffee. One evening I went down to his faculty in Sapienza (University of Rome). In a small derelict room filled with cigarette smoke and walls occupied by socialist and anarchist propaganda, I was introduced to Francesca, a frantic polyglot that immediately started questioning my relations to her dear friend Lewis. Her boyfriend, Claudio, followed into the room shortly after, accompanied by a friend, Matteo. At once we were all entrenched in conversations of great importance, paradoxically none which I can remember, a fact just as true for the trivial arguments which ensued.

In summer 2022, I booked several flights around France, Italy and Bulgaria. Prior to my departure, it seemed that every room in Rome was full. Francesca and Claudio kindly offered to take me into their spare room. One flight later from Marseille to Roma Fiumicino, I took a bus to Termini arriving at midnight and found my way to their flat near Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore.

The following day, after a coffee with Claudio and Francesca, I was left to my own devices since they had urgent matters to attend to. Monica, a college friend of mine happened to be in the city at the same time, so a meeting was arranged. In the late afternoon, we met at Piazza del Popolo, she was joined by Leo, Monica’s university friend who was a Roman native and Lana, Leo’s Lagotto Romagnolo. Leo would spare no detail in annotating every fact of importance, history, and culture. We walked along the Via del Corso, reaching the Pantheon a short while later, enough time for him to have re-ignited my cacoethes for Italy

That evening Leo invited me to join for dinner with Monica and his family. On a terrace overlooking the city was a table surrounded by Leo’s family, their friends, Monica and myself. The dinner was an eccentric cocktail of fresh shrimp charred on a grill followed by marinated swordfish and an appetiser of never ending conversation. The seafood swam in a sea of white wine, Campari and Branca. Rome’s streets were singing to us from below, Romeo at the window calling for Juliet, no pun intended.

Evenings of food and drink were a common occurrence, the following night we were all invited to Claudio & Francesca’s. The night ran into the morning, only myself, Monica and Claudio had stayed up discussing all the matters of our thoughts, completely unfiltered by our mentation, vastly a result of the fatigue rather than drink. A few nights later, a friend of Claudio and Francesca, Stella, invited us to her flat for just the same cause.

On my last last afternoon in Rome, I setoff with no phone, just a water bottle, a book and my journal, trying to retrace all the roads and lanes I had gone down over the last week, one last time. There is a deep comfort in being unknown in a land where you are not familiar with the language, the roads are strange and your otherwise shining ego is humbled in its lack of confidence. You are made to once again understand how little you know, how far you are from the mystical recognition. Walter Benjamin was a German jew from a wealthy family in Berlin. His autobiography , Berlin Childhood Around 1900, written in a contemporary fashion, gives insight of a young Walter finding his way around Berlin and recognising its historic landmarks in their meaning to him.

“But to lose oneself in a city-as one loses oneself in a forest-that calls for quite a different schooling” Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Childhood Around 1900

Much like Walter, I found myself lost in Rome, taking turn after turn to end in the same piazza, trekking down a stretch of road only to realised I had been going completely wrong direction. Frequent stops at pizzerias and coffee bars made the expedition seem like a jaunt. Eventually I found myself lost at the Vittariano, a unification monument which I will mention garrulously further on. Having climbed to the top, I was viewing the city of Rome at the height of 198 steps, the city that 2 millennia past had occupied London and Cairo under the same republic. I sat against a wall in the shade and began to scribble in my journal, the first and second lines took a while to get down, the heat made my hands clammy and the pen difficult to grip, the constant honking and sirens of the traffic in Piazza Venezia opposite me was not in favour of concentration. The next few lines were not as tiresome, the moment it took to write them was in fact about 45 minutes. It is often as necessary to get lost in wondering with thoughts, and let them lead you by the hand.

III: On Chinotto, Stoicism & Fear

On a late afternoon, myself and Claudio picked up bottles of chinotto, and headed up to Terrazza del Pincio, a gorgeous terrace at the edge of Villa Borghese gardens which overlooks the city. We sat at a bench adjacent to the terrace where a street artist was singing Elvis Presley's 'Can't Help Falling In Love', a scene duplicated from a Linklater film. We sat drinking and speaking for a period that was incalculable. It felt no longer than 30 minutes and no shorter than 3 hours. The discussion was fruitful, we had plenty to speak on, both young men whom had recently endured periods of turbulence with death, relationships (platonic and romantic) and uncertainty with the future.

In the month before I had arrived, Claudio, Francesca and Mattia had suffered a grave calamity with the departure of a friend, as he sat beside them on a train. Youthful tragedies such as this have cataclysmically high tolls on their loved ones. They leave them behind with anguish, memories, regrets, unsaid words, scents, photographs and written words, the arbitrary collection of belongings we gather through the course of life. Sitting on the terrace, I asked Claudio how he was feeling and how he was dealing with the grief? Looking away from me, he replied with stoic words, about processing the emotions and then moving forward, a linear transition from one to the next. However, my friend was betrayed by his voice and eyes which quietly whispered the unapparent difficulty of this process. Words of affirmation in difficult periods are a great course to understanding where we are trying to reach, Claudio is not knave to himself, only seeking to bring forth the coveted terminus. The stoics believe that death is out of the reach of our control, since we are captives to our own circumstances, and thus the grief which accompanies those still extant must be disciplined, only to his healthy and rational boundaries.

Stoicism is the apparent philosophy of content Italians, and has been for centuries, Claudio reflects his Roman forefather's philosophical lineage. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius' 'Meditations' is the nucleus of stoicism, his lessons reaching far beyond his era, to the ruinous and embroiled Italian city states, defeats in both World Wars and most recently during the Coronavirus pandemic, the Italians have always shown resilience against their bleak forecasts. In the over 1,500 years since the sacking of Rome, Italy, has not ever struggled to find a continuous stream of trouble with basically every aspect of its being; the social and political backwardness of the Southern regions, fascist and national socialists’ allegiances of the North, particularly Milan, the inefficient bureaucracy plaguing every region- North to South and everything in-between. The Italians in all these moments have preferred the casual and slow transition of their performance than the radical upheaval of the show, exposing them to their raw and bitter reality.

However, there are perhaps two tales of Italians rooting for the radical. The first is of Cola Di Rienzo, a common man from medieval Rome, a period so dark in the region’s history that even the church fled the city. Rome was ruled by a toxic compound of ‘arsonists, robbers, murders, rapists, conmen’ and tyrannic noble families hiding behind their fortified walls. In the late spring of 1347, Cola led a peasant army onto Rome where he peacefully took control of the city, with the promise of ending the ongoing famines, corruption, and to bring back security, liberty and justice to the Romans, whom now lived amongst the ruins of their predecessor’s empire. Cola was a showman more than anything else, the leader of great parades, powerfully invoking speeches and gripping promises, his reign in the city lasted seven months before he was excommunicated. He would return to his beloved Rome seven years later leading a papal army which was attempting to ‘pacify’ the city. This time his control only lasted three months before mass riots broke out, in which he was captured and killed, his body left on public display for numerous days afterwards. Cola had accomplished vain for his people, looting their scarce resources for wars and ceremonious parades. The Italians learnt content, reminiscing over their decrepit past in which they could hunger and cower in peace. Every region in Italy has a tale of this sort, without exception, with which they slowly built a national character of contempt.

The second of these tales is of Benito Mussolini, the leader of fascist Italy for twenty-one years. Mussolini, nicknamed ‘Il Duce’, came into power during similar circumstances to that of Cola. Italy in the 1920s was riddled with malaria, crime, extreme political division and a failed economy as a result of their loss in the First World War. Although Mussolini accomplished far more than Cola, he held the same narcissistic tendencies, which would eventually lead to his demise. He too would be caught trying to escape the angry masses, before being shot and hung on display in Milan. The Italians would once again return to accepting their misery, learning to cope and rejoicing in its security of ill-fitting surprises.

Perhaps what these two events have in common is the chances of survival have now been gambled and are outweighed by those of annihilation. Rare, yet so powerful this event is, that the fear of action is now outranked by the certainty that would come from inaction. Within these moments, the apparent stoic thesis of the Italians falls apart, wildly exposing the fear within. The audience try to get away from reality using a performance, one they can believe in i.e., Cola Di Reinzo or Benito Mussolini.

Italians are a people that learn from, but also fear, their mistakes. Following Mussolini, showmen still came and occupied the Italian theatre of affairs, but these statesmen never lost sight of their performance or where they were heading. Take for example the late Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister for several intervals between 1994 and 2011, a true master of the show, it is impossible to not find his speeches, acts and charisma entertaining. Growing up, my father would often mention his name or tell me some wild tale of his doing. Berlusconi got away with looting Italy of billions, corruption and abuse of power because the people would rather watch his show than taste the salty nature of reality. The full of extent of Berlusconi’s damage may never be fully known; he has been charged with corruption, embezzlement, money laundering, abuse of office, drugs trafficking, collusion, tax fraud, mafia relations and extortion.

On many occasions, observers at a distance will falsely identify fear as stoicism, 'I shall not react out of apprehension' rather than 'I must not react in spite of my emotion'. The suffering of this dyspraxia is more evident in Italy than anywhere else, it is a country filled with fearful people whom appear to be content. They fear death, pain, need, and more than anything, the Italian fears change, no matter how unhappy he may be. Dottore Barzini wrote

“Even the revolutionaries are afraid of change”

Palmiro Togliatti, a communist leader in the 1920s, was exiled to Moscow by Mussolini where he befriended large heads of the Russian revolution such as Molotov and Trotsky, through the Comintern. Stalin, having killed off many of his allies, spared Togliatti, mocking his ability to start a revolution, since he was too timid and claimed he could only write of such events.

Have no delusions that this fear in Italians is a historical event, but an ongoing syndrome. The Italian peninsula is often described as the ‘Italian Island’ since they fear the outside ways of living. Those who do leave, usually despise the foreign lands they land on, and end up forming little Italys abroad or making some valuable foreign currencies and returning. The many Italians who made their way to the States in the 1900s, settled in the habitats most similar to theirs, across the Californian coast and its deserts. Mattia, of the people I had met, he was the most cynical of Italy and Italians, yet would always shrug when I asked why he remains. There is never any proper response to this question, it usually seems that Italians would rather make the process of leaving bureaucratic for their own ease of mind. I was eager to have Claudio visit me in London, but the arrangement of getting him to agree was almost diplomatic; there was statements of inflated prices (thirty-pound flights to Gatwick were said to be in the hundreds- until proven otherwise), passports, Brexit, accommodation, university, and so on. Most of these issues were genuine only a few decades ago, very few Italians had the privilege of travel until recently, this also barred Italians from witnessing how far behind their country was lagging. Italians take their holidays within Italy, most families will leave for the country or seaside in the hot months of July and August, few will stray out of ‘the island’ regardless of affordability.

IV: On The Use Of Beauty & Architecture In The Italian Performance

On my first visit to Rome December 2019, I was walking with Francessca, East along Via delle Botteghe Oscure, approaching Piazza Venezzia, a tourist hotspot. I remember telling her I wanted to climb the stairs of Vittoriano before I left, and she simply laughed and replied “You mean the wedding cake?”.

The historic monument, formally known as the Victor Emmanuel II Monument or Altare della Patria, was built in celebration of the reunification of Italy under Victor Emmanuel II (you wouldn’t have guessed). Construction began in 1885 and concluded 40 years later in 1935. Francessca explained that Romans hate the building for its gaudiness and excessiveness, ‘the platforms and white masonry make it look like a towered wedding cake’. I’ve also heard other Romans call it the ‘Typewriter’, regardless of the name choice, its almost always satirical.

Vittoriano has connotations further than the flavourless wedding cake, it represents the early Fascist triumph over Italy’s past. Countless ancient churches, buildings and Roman excavations were moved to make way for the monument at cor de Roma. The Seventeenth Century Church of St. Rita was dismantled and rebuilt near the Theatre of Marcellus. The three medieval towers of Aracoeli Covent were completely demolished, which were twinned with the imminent domain and expropriation of the surrounding ghettos. Carving out a new reality of what was, to what should have been. Through centuries of weak Italian influence and cultural insignificance, the city’s urban planning had become unorganised and recognised not its own European centrale, its hegemony of the continent’s culture and sociology. The excavations also discovered the Second Century Roman dwellings of Insula Romana, part of the Capitoline Hill, which only two decades later became the victim of Benito Mussolini’s brutal campaign of ‘re-Romanising Rome’. The birth of Fascist architecture, parented by Italian neo-classical works such as the Vittoriano; the monument itself was often the setting of Mussolini’s performances, dressed in Fascist emblems, showcasing his military forte.

The site’s controversies do not seize at the hearing of fascism. If you have a keen eye, you may have spotted the Vittoriano stands out from the works it imitates; the building has a glaring white sheen rather than a yellowish one seen on the Colosseum and Pantheon. Despite the age gap, the true reasoning for the discolouring is architectural. The latter two sites are Roman, built with Travertine marble, sourced from just outside the city. The Vittoriano was initially to be built with Travertine, however Giuseppe Socconi, its architect later changed his mind and decided to use Botticino marble. The marble had to be sourced from Brescia, a city in the far North of the country, near Milan, and required huge logistical and financial planning to commence. It was convenient that the Prime Minister at the time was Giuseppe Zanardelli, a native to Brescia.

“Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.” Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

The late Sir Roger Scruton, during his long and creatively rich life, was a stanch advocate for European traditionalism and naturalism through the vehicles of architecture, music, and literature. Scruton frequently travelled to Italy, where he found the ancient Roman spirit barely breathing, only just passing through the shadow the renaissance and enlightenment had put over the Western World.

Like Scruton, the many travellers whom have come to Italy over the last 1000 years, whether they trekked the alps or sailed across the Mediterranean, have embarked on their journey for one reason, in part or in whole; abundant beauty. Italians create a life that is entertaining and animated, costumed as a character in their tale. Unlike their Northern European counterparts, Italians insist that beauty is necessary, Barzini remarks on this:

“The first purpose of the show is to make life acceptable. Life in the raw can be notoriously meaningless and frightening.”

The components of Italian life must be made to be beautiful, if they are ugly, they should be replaced and if the fact of life is tragic, as it has been in Italy for centuries, it must be swept and ignored.

Amidst Italy’s struggles in 1938, a year before the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler made an official visit to Rome. Upon the visit Mussolini, abided by the traditions of the performance. Rome was cleaned, government offices and palaces were refurbished, new buildings were erected, dozens of which were out of cardboard, all for the purpose of boasting Italy’s prosperity to its guest.

“Roma de travertino, refatta de cartone, saluta l’imbianchino, suo prossimo padrone.” [Rome of travertine, re-made with cardboard, greets the house painter who will be her next master.] Trilussa

The Italian performance was swallowed by Hitler, returning to Berlin, he was impressed by the revolution Italy had undergone, now confident in its abilities to forge a Europe. Of course this was an illusion, Italy’s military was weak and ill equipped. Mussolini’s political grip faltered and Italy struggled to maintain its new territories, their conquests in Greece and North Africa were swiftly rebuked in the Battle of Alamein in 1942, Egypt. The German Reich was forced to send reinforcements from the Eastern front with the Soviet Union, severely weakening its position in Europe and initiating the Axis’ retreat. Mussolini performed an Italy that did not exist, in the end, it would be the Italian performance which ultimately be the demise of the Third Reich.

V: Epilogue, The Road Out

In the Forewords of Barzini’s The Italians, he describes his work as a craft of art, he is a painter that sits to paint his beloved, an easy task to put in the beauty but strenuous to brush in the strain and weakness of her old age. If I were to sit in front of a canvas to paint Italy, it would merely be a portrait of a mistress, one I have not taken the time to see the pain she carries, only her physical form. However, like many of the ancient lands that promise to stand up once again, I have met her many times through others.

“They console themselves with the thought that, when the smoke clears, Italy will rise again like a Phoenix from its ashes. Has it not always done so?”