It could be argued that, in this respect, Italian journalists have been years ahead of the revolution in media practice brought about by the Internet. Italian newspaper journalists have not assumed the role of information arbiters—“gatekeepers” in the jargon—to the same extent as their counterparts in much of the rest of the world. But the problem with this approach is that it allows politicians and others—particularly vested interest groups—to get away with the unchallenged propagation of falsehoods, both blatant and subtle.
A good example of the latter arose in the 1990s with the “expulsion” of clandestine immigrants. As Africans, Asians and Latin Americans began streaming into Southern Europe, successive Italian governments reacted to public unease with statistics to show that in the last month, or year, or whatever, so many thousand irregular immigrants had been caught and expelled. As the years went past, and the number of black and brown faces on the buses and in the metro increased almost by the day, people began to suspect they were not being told the whole story. Yet it was only toward the end of the decade that it was explained to the public through the media what precisely had been meant by “expelled.” Once identified, unauthorized immigrants were served with an expulsion order. Then they were let go. It meant that, if they were caught again, they could face jail. But otherwise they could either wait for an immigration amnesty of the sort that has been granted several times in Italy, or move on to another EU country where their status would be more ambiguous.
The underlying reality was that Italian politicians, like their peers in the rest of Europe, realized their country needed immigrants. Privately, they would admit it. Because of Italy’s ultralow birth rate,
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it had to take in people from outside if its economy was to grow and its welfare state—in particular its pension system—was to remain sustainable. But Italian politicians also knew that immigration, and particularly clandestine immigration, was a sensitive issue with the electorate. Paper “expulsions” offered a delightful way out. As Romano Prodi once said, with only a touch of exaggeration, “In the Italian political debate, it is hard to distinguish the real problem, which is never talked about, from the fictitious problem, which is fought over ferociously.”
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In 2011, as Italy drifted toward near catastrophe in the eurozone debt crisis of that year, former
Economist
editor Bill Emmott wrote an article for
La Stampa
marveling at the number of myths circulating in discussions about the economy—an area where, as he said, you might have thought it was easy to check how things really were. It was not just politicians who were propagating these myths—most of them comforting—but prominent financiers, business representatives and government officials. It was said with confidence, for example, that Italy was the EU’s second-biggest exporter (when, in fact, it had dropped to fifth place), that the Italians were still Europe’s biggest savers (when, in fact, they had fallen behind the Germans and French) and—most perniciously—that negative growth in the south was canceling out positive growth in the rest of the country. The reality was that the Mezzogiorno’s overall performance in the previous ten years had been better than that of the center and north.
An even more dangerous fairy tale that went unchallenged at this time was that Italy’s huge debts, which were already heading for 120 percent of its GDP, were of no one’s concern but the Italians. This was supposedly because nationals held all but a very small proportion of its sovereign bonds, its government’s IOUs. This was just not true. In fact, about half of Italy’s public debt at that time was owed to foreigners. The potential for its shaky public finances to cause a Europe-wide, if not worldwide, economic crisis was considerable. Yet Italians were rarely told that.
Anyone who has sat through a trial in Italy will know that this same principle, of polite noncontradiction, can hold good in court too. One of the most sensational cases in Italy’s legal history was the one in which an American student, Amanda Knox, and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were accused of murdering Knox’s British flatmate, Meredith Kercher. Both were given hefty prison sentences at a trial in which the prosecution claimed that the victim had been killed in a bizarre sex game that turned brutally and tragically violent. But between the trial and the appeal, court-appointed experts poured scorn on the forensic evidence submitted by the prosecution, so by the time the case returned to court, not only were the two young appellants on trial, but also Italy’s methods of investigating and prosecuting serious crime.
Such was the publicity given to the case that, by the time counsel were ready to sum up, it was no exaggeration to say that the eyes of the world were on the frescoed underground courtroom in Perugia where the appeal was being heard. So it was all the more surprising that, as he listened to their final pleas, the judge made no move to interrupt counsel, who repeated as fact claims that had been utterly discredited in earlier hearings. Each of the lawyers had his or her
verità
. It was only fair that they should be allowed to air it. How on earth the lay judges who sat alongside the professional judges were expected to get at the truth is anybody’s guess. But then, when the case was over, the presiding judge gave an interview in which he appeared to say that the task was anyhow impossible.
“Our acquittal is the result of the truth that was created in the trial,” he said. “The real truth will remain unresolved, and may even be different.” Lewis Carroll could not have put it better.
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I have sometimes reflected that the last part of that comment—“The real truth will remain unresolved, and may even be different”—deserves to be carved in marble on a suitable monument that could then be erected in the center of Rome. Time and again, important turning points in Italy’s modern history have been wrapped in a dense fog of discrepancy and contradiction as the various players aired their particular
verità
. You might start with the fate of its Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
On the morning on April 27, 1945, at Dongo on the banks of Lake Como, a partisan commissar, Urbano Lazzaro, was checking trucks carrying German troops out of Italy when he discovered Mussolini in the back of one of them. The dictator was wearing glasses, was wrapped in a greatcoat and had a helmet pulled down over his face. Two days later, as dawn broke over Milan, early morning strollers were confronted with a gruesome sight in Piazzale Loreto. Hanging upside down from meat hooks attached to the roof of a petrol station were the bodies of the dictator; his mistress, Clara Petacci; and three senior Fascist officials. But what exactly happened in the intervening forty-eight hours will probably never be known.
The official version is that the decision to execute Mussolini was taken at a meeting of partisan leaders and that the job of killing him was given to Walter Audisio, a Communist commander whose nom de guerre was Colonnello Valerio. But in a book he wrote in 1962, Lazzaro said the man he saw and who was identified as Colonnello Valerio was not Audisio but Luigi Longo, a very senior Communist official who, two years later, would become the leader of the Italian Communist Party. The implication was that Longo’s involvement had been hushed up so as to wipe the blood from the hands of a man destined for the top. Meanwhile, Audisio, who originally had said Lazzaro had been present at the execution, named a different person in his memoirs published thirty years later.
Officially, Mussolini and Petacci died at the gates of a villa overlooking Lake Como on the afternoon of the day after they were caught. But in 1995 Lazzaro complicated matters further by saying they had been killed earlier, after Petacci tried to grab a gun from one of the partisans who had been escorting them to Milan for what was intended to be a public execution.
At about the same time, yet another version began to emerge. It came from a retired Fiat executive, Bruno Lonati, who had been a Communist partisan. Lonati said
he
had killed Mussolini on the orders of a British secret agent and that the execution took place even earlier in the day, at eleven a.m. In 2005 the state-owned Rai television network broadcast a documentary containing new evidence in support of Lonati’s version. According to this, the British agent’s mission was to ensure Mussolini was killed and to recover compromising letters written to him by Winston Churchill. The wartime British prime minister was claimed to have secretly considered with Mussolini the possibility of a separate peace—a clear breach of his agreement with the U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, that they would not cease hostilities until they’d secured the unconditional surrender of each of the Axis powers.
As the bodies of Italy’s dictator and his lover were being stoned by the mob in Piazzale Loreto, the first moves were being made in what would later come to be known as the Cold War. A few days earlier, Russian troops had fought their way into Berlin and on May 2 would raise the red flag over the Reichstag. The division of Europe that followed was to provide fertile ground in Italy for the nurturing of mysteries. And this was particularly true of the years following the student revolts of 1968, when the spirit of revolution swept across Europe and fears grew in Washington and elsewhere that Italy risked falling into the hands of Marxists.
On December 12, 1969, a bomb went off in Milan a few hundred yards from the Duomo, in Piazza Fontana. Sixteen people were killed. To this day, nobody can say for certain who planted it, or why. The police originally blamed the attack on anarchists, but the case against them soon fell apart and suspicion fell on neo-Fascists, one of whom had close links with an officer in the Italian secret service who was also a convinced far-right-winger. The suspects were tried, but cleared on appeal. Every year, to this day, friends and relatives of the victims gather on the anniversary of the bombing to call in vain for answers and justice.
The Piazza Fontana bombing was the first in a succession of unexplained terrorist attacks over the next fifteen years. Bombs exploded on trains, at an anti-Fascist rally and—most lethally—in the railway station at Bologna in 1980. Altogether, more than 150 people died in what is thought to have been a campaign by neo-Fascists and rogue members of the intelligence services. The supposed aim was to create an atmosphere of constant trepidation in which people would be more apt to back conservative, or perhaps even authoritarian, responses.
Bombs, though, were not the only causes of mysteries that have proved insoluble to police and judges alike. In 1974 a young magistrate uncovered evidence of an organization called the Rosa dei Venti (“The Weather Vane”). It was suspected of planning terrorist attacks and of having links to an organization set up by NATO. After a warrant was issued for the arrest of the head of Italy’s secret service, the investigation was transferred to Rome, where it rapidly lost momentum.
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The Rosa dei Venti has since been all but forgotten. What exactly it was and what exactly it did will probably never be known. Equally impenetrable mysteries were to develop out of the crash of an Italian airliner off the island of Ustica in 1980 and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II the following year.
For true connoisseurs of the unexplained, however, nothing is perhaps quite as tantalizingly baffling as the story of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last, unfinished book,
Petrolio
. After the poet, novelist and film director was murdered in 1975—and the reasons for his death are themselves a mystery—it was found that Pasolini had left a manuscript running to more than five hundred pages. It was divided into numbered sections the author called
appunti
(notes). The central figure in
Petrolio
is a man (who turns into a woman halfway through) working for the state-owned oil and gas company, Eni. The book was not published until seventeen years after Pasolini’s death, by which time one of the
appunti
—number 21—had disappeared. Pasolini’s family has always denied it was stolen. But there has long been speculation that “Appunto 21” was made to vanish by someone because it contained embarrassing revelations about Eni and/or its executives. One theory is that the missing section contains the key to the death in 1962 of the corporation’s swashbuckling boss, Enrico Mattei, who was killed in a plane crash. Another hypothesis is that the disappearance of “Appunto 21” has something to do with the fact that Pasolini owned one of the very few copies of a pamphlet that claimed to reveal secrets about a later Eni president, Eugenio Cefis. The pamphlet disappeared from circulation immediately following its publication in 1972.
Thirty-five years after Pasolini’s death and eighteen years after the publication of his strange, unfinished work, another hugely controversial—and inscrutable—figure, Marcello Dell’Utri, dropped a bombshell at a press conference ahead of the opening of that year’s antiquarian book fair in Rome. Dell’Utri, a bibliophile, advertising executive, politician and close associate of Silvio Berlusconi, said he had been offered part of the manuscript of
Petrolio,
prompting excited speculation that the typewritten sheets he had seen included the missing “Appunto 21.” Dell’Utri said he would put the pages on display during the book fair. But he never did. The only explanation he gave was: “The person who promised them to me disappeared.”
That person—whoever he or she may have been—would have fit nicely into the cast of a play by the Sicilian author Luigi Pirandello. And the same could unquestionably be said of Marcello Dell’Utri, a fellow Sicilian, who in 1997 was put on trial, accused of colluding with Cosa Nostra.
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Pirandello is a quintessentially Italian writer—perhaps
the
quintessentially Italian writer—forever gnawing away at the boundaries between reality and fiction, madness and sanity, past and present. The audience at a Pirandello play is repeatedly disconcerted and misled. Apparent certainties are undermined. Ostensible facts prove illusory. His works are, in short, very much like the experience of living in Italy.