However, almost anyone who travelled in the remoter rural parts of Italy in the 1950s found people ready to ask and answer questions from foreigners. This was, after all, still a country of oral communication, face to face. In places like Spezzano Albanese (Cosenza, Calabria) such few papers as reached the place still had to be read aloud to the illiterates in cafés, artisan workshops and the PCI ‘Sezione’. In 1955 the telephone had reached San Giovanni in Fiore, the home of the great medieval millennial theorist, Abbot Joachim of Flora, only a few months ago. Strangers, Italian or foreign, brought news – even to people who whether they liked it or not knew that new times were inevitably coming. ‘Things are changing,’ I was told more than once in 1955 Sicily. ‘Our customs are getting like those of the North, for instance women going out. In the end I expect we’ll be like the Northerners.’
At that time the PCI seemed the main gateway into these new times. It had a membership of about two million – about one quarter of the national electorate – which continued to rise with every election until at its peak in the later 1970s it more or less equalled – enthusiasts claimed it was about to pass – the 34 per cent of the party of permanent government, the Christian Democrats. Socially the PCI was a cross-section of Italian society as much as a class party, especially in its massive strongholds in north–central Italy: Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria – regions of culture, prosperity, technological and business dynamism, and honest administration. Italian communism was not the whole of Italy, but a central and a wonderfully civilizing element of it. But, like nonconformity in Britain, it was and remained a minority.
Nevertheless, it was a huge and deeply rooted movement. The popolo comunista (communist people), as the cadres called it, was more than merely a collection of crosses on ballot-papers or annually renewed membership cards. Its major regular manifestation, nominally a way of organizing financial support for the Party’s daily newspaper, L’Unità (which the vast majority of communists read no more than most Italians read any daily paper), was a pyramid of regular popular festivals with its base in every village or city district, which culminated in the annual Festa Nazionale de l’Unità in some major centre. My connection with Italian politics began when I was described as a ‘fraternal delegate’ and had to address such an occasion, God knows how, in 1953 in a village near the Po. The Festa was essentially a collective national family holiday excursion to spend money for the cause and to have a collective good time with wives, children, friends and trusted leaders. It is said that, on the first occasion it was held in Naples, the population of that great city, conscious that the influx of visitors was not tourists to be fleeced, but plain folks and compagni, listened to the appeal of its leaders and for twenty-four hours abstained from its proverbial activities. The Festa was, of course, also a political rally, for in the days before television, political oratory by a visiting star, its merit proportionate to its length, and its technique based on that of open-air thespians, was also the biggest public entertainment likely to be seen by the faithful. Since the ‘communist people’ were also the only part of non-middle-class Italy given to self-improvement and reading, progressive publishers relied on these occasions, especially the national Festa, for a major part of their annual sales, particularly for the multi-volume series of encyclopedias, histories and other intellectual consumer durables. With his usual sense of the national market, my publisher Giulio Einaudi chose to launch the multi-volume Storia del Marxismo (which I co-edited with others) at what was both the peak of the PCI under Enrico Berlinguer and the start of its (unforeseen) decline, the great Genoa Festa of 1978. Unfortunately, like the PCI, the popular interest in Marxism was also about to dwindle, though the first volume of the Storia still sold well. It was the only one translated into English. Nevertheless, this was an unforgettable occasion of oratory in the vast amphitheatre above the blue sea, food-loaded tables in great marquees full of family parties and the greetings of friends, and hopeful communist leaders (except for the quiet Berlinguer), chatting and joking in the hotel lounge.
I was lucky to be guided into Italy by a strikingly impressive group of pre-war and Resistance communists. The full-time politicians among those I knew tended to maintain their standing as intellectuals and writers – Giorgio Napolitano, Bruno Trentin, the large Giorgio Amendola and the small, chubby and universally erudite Emilio Sereni, from one of the most ancient Jewish families of Rome, jailed by the Germans in wartime Rome, who wrote with equal originality about the history of the Italian landscape and the prehistory of Liguria. The academics among them tended also to double as politicians. Several were on the Central Committee. Renato Zangheri, an economic historian, was brilliantly successful as mayor of the wonderfully preserved yet modern medieval city of Bologna, Italy’s greatest ‘red’ metropolis; Giuliano Procacci and Rosario Villari (with his wife, Anna Rosa, our closest friends) had spells in the Italian Parliament.
From the start I found myself getting on exceptionally well with Italian communists, possibly because so many were intellectuals, but also because they were disarmingly kind. Not every national leader would have quietly visited Cambridge, as Giorgio Napolitano did, simply to hold hands with the dying Piero Sraffa, desperately fighting senility; or, for that matter, would have interrupted his work as the country’s Minister of the Interior for a few hours, to take part in a public celebration of my eightieth birthday in Genoa. Within a few years of first arriving I found myself drawn into the penumbra of the PCI establishment as an official patron of, and the only person from Britain present at, the Congress of Gramsci Studies in January 1958, the occasion for the first formal recognition of the Italian communists’ theorist by the watchdogs of ideological orthodoxy in Moscow. It was also the only occasion on which I met the Party’s leader, Palmiro Togliatti, himself. In turn, I took to Italian communism, found its dead guru Gramsci marvellously stimulating, and after 1956 its political position welcome. Unlike in Britain, in Italy it was still worth joining the Party after 1956.
Why was it so easy to get on with the Italians? Unlike the French or the English, Italians are charmed, flattered, and even encouraged by foreigners’ interest in their affairs, even or perhaps especially when these outsiders are visibly unlike themselves, or – as in my case – when their knowledge of the Italian language is shaky and that of the country superficial. It is, I think, partly due to a lengthy history of belonging to a country treated by the outside world as enchanting but not totally serious, a country united since 1860 but underperforming in peace and war. I think this led to an ingrained feeling of marginality and provincialism. Italians had reconciled themselves to the belief that the real historical action, the centres of civilization and intellectual authorities were elsewhere. Since the seventeenth century nobody had actually looked to Italy for models of cultural and intellectual achievement and example outside music; since the nineteenth century not even in opera. Fascism, though in some sense strengthening a feeling of national identity, had tried and failed to cure the Italian sense of political and military inferiority, and certainly did nothing to deprovincialize Italian culture. Post-fascist Italy, it was felt, had an enormous amount of cultural catching-up to do, and, one way or another, the place to look for it was abroad. Translations of foreign authors still remain more prominent on the Italian book market than in any other country of comparable size. And almost any foreign recognition of Italian achievement was welcomed. Giulio Einaudi knew very well what he was doing even as late as 1979, when he launched the publication of Gerratana’s superb critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, not in Rome but in Paris, as he had launched his great multi-volume Storia d’Italia (History of Italy) in Oxford. The stamp of Paris approval or Oxford prestige was still the way to market them in Italy. And of course after the eighteenth century Italian culture was largely provincial, as is evident from Gramsci’s own reading and writing. Even at its best, leaving aside mathematics, opera and a temporary interest in futurism, nobody had taken much notice of Italian productions outside.