Perhaps the most impressive and unexpected achievement of the Italian Republic born of the anti-fascist Resistance was to change all this, and in doing so to demonstrate what was always evident to any unprejudiced foreigner, namely that Italians had not lost any of the intellectual, artistic and entrepreneurial gifts that had produced such amazing and universally admired achievements between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In some ways the postwar paths of French and Italian culture have followed opposite directions. While France after 1945 lost the cultural hegemony it had so long taken for granted, and retreated into what was, in effect, a francophone ghetto, the prestige of Italian art, science, industry, design and lifestyle was rising, the image of Italy was moving from the margins to the centre of western culture. Even the talents that had flourished or been tolerated under fascism – such major figures of Italian cinema as Rossellini, Visconti and de Sica were in action well before Mussolini fell – were liberated by Resistance. In the 1950s it would have been inconceivable that the international high-fashion industry would one day look to Milan and Florence rather than to Paris.
Nevertheless, except in completely transnational fields such as the mathematical and natural sciences, Italian thinking found it hard to shake off the provincialism of the past; not least because of the long resistance of the Italian university system, with its deeply ingrained combination of control by national bureaucrats and politicians and the manoeuvres of its own ‘barons’ with their powerful patronage system. Hence the exceptional importance in the Italian intellectual life of the first three or four postwar decades of commercial publishing houses such as Laterza, Einaudi and Feltrinelli. In fact, as in postwar Federal Germany, they largely substituted for the unreconstructed universities as intellectual and cultural powerhouses or, if one prefers the fashionable post-1989 jargon, organs of ‘civil society’.
The prince of these cultural architects of post-fascist Italy was Giulio Einaudi (1912–99), my friend and publisher, son of Italy’s most eminent free market economist and later the country’s first President, who had founded his publishing house at the age of twenty-one in 1933 and led it for fifty years thereafter. Paradoxically, he was not himself a very intellectual figure, but he headed a team of advisers that combined exceptional intelligence, learning, wit, cosmopolitan culture and literary creativity. All were united by anti-fascism and the active Resistance – either in the communist or the liberal-socialist tradition of Giustizia e Libertà – most by the severe and independent intellectual milieu of Turin and they created what was almost certainly the finest publishing house in the world in the fifteen years after 1945.
The word ‘prince’ is chosen deliberately, for in spite of his communist sympathies, Giulio’s style, his magnificent bella figura in town or country, was royal, or at least feudal. Even as a guest in a Hampstead sitting-room, he radiated a seigneurial affability. Even in bathing trunks on a Havana beach, he was recognizable as a patron. The feudal spirit extended to his approach to business debts, including those to his authors, which eventually bankrupted him. (On the other hand, authors were likely to receive as a New Year’s gift cases of Barolo wine from the Einaudi vineyards, a wine so serious that the Einaudi cellars recommended letting it breathe for at least eight hours before drinking.) Like absolute monarchs, he thought of his kingdom as an extension of himself, and in the end it was his refusal to listen to financial advice, or even to consider the post-Giulio future of the house, that broke him. Such was the prestige of the firm that he was more than once saved from bankruptcy as a national treasure by a conjunction of the Italian anti-fascist establishment, co-ordinated by the great banker Raffaele Mattioli (the one who, in 1937, had hidden the dead Gramsci’s manuscripts in the bank safe until they could be passed, via Piero Sraffa, to the foreign HQ of the PCI). In the eighties he finally lost control, and in 1991 Giulio Einaudi Editore was sold to Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire. I cannot remember when I saw Giulio last. Probably at the eightieth birthday party which was organized for me in 1997 by the City of Genoa, old, sad and no longer quite upright, in an Italy very different from the one of his days of glory. Once he and Italo Calvino had formed part of the guard of honour at the coffin of Togliatti, who had recognized both his prestige and his political sympathies by granting to the house of Einaudi the rights to publish the works of Antonio Gramsci himself. Alas, by then what had once been Togliatti’s PCI was also in decline.
Italy between 1952 and 1997 combined dramatic social and cultural change with frozen politics. By the end of the Cold War the inhabitants of a traditionally poor country owned more cars per head of population than practically any other state in the world. The Pope’s country legalized birth control and divorce, taking to the first with enthusiasm, though notably abstaining from the second. It was a different country. But from the start of the East–West confrontation in 1947 it was clear that the USA would under no circumstances allow the communists to come to power in Italy, or even to elected government office. This remained Washington’s basic principle, one might say its ‘default position’, so long as there was a USSR and a PCI, and for a few years thereafter. But it also became equally clear that a mass Communist Party could not be eliminated either by police repression or by constitutional finagling, although the great rural revolt in the Italian south, whose by-products attracted my attention to ‘primitive rebellion’, faded away by the mid-1950s. As realists Christian Democrats accepted this, allowing the PCI political space in its regions, in culture and the media. After all, they had founded the Republic jointly with the communists. Inside Italy the Cold War was not a zero-sum game.
The Italy into which I came had therefore begun to settle down for the foreseeable future, rather like Japan, as a spectacularly corrupt political dependency of the USA, under a single party, the Christian Democrats, maintained in permanent government power by the US veto. When I first arrived in Italy I noted that the modest postwar Sicilian Mafia was still virtually undocumented and undescribed, while the Neapolitan Camorra, perhaps even more powerful today, then appeared to be extinct.9 Both are products of the Cold War political system. In the course of the decades after 1950 the Italian Republic became a strange, labyrinthine, often absurd and sometimes dangerous institution, increasingly distant from the actual reality of life of its inhabitants. The joke that Italy showed a country could do without a state, thus proving Bakunin right against Marx, is not strictly true, since Italians spent much of their time sidestepping what was on paper a strong, all-embracing and interventionist state. Italians were and had to be good at this game, since the massive transformation of public power, resources and employment into a nationwide patronage system and protection racket made it increasingly necessary to find ways of circulating the blood of the body politic by a million capillaries bypassing its increasingly clogged arteries. ‘Fixing it’ – by relations rather than simple bribery – became the Italian national motto.