Somewhere between a thriving and ever more confident civil society and the esoteric activities of the state, and covered by layers of silence and obfuscation, lay the field of power. It had no constitution and no formal structure. It was an acephalous complex of power centres which had to come to terms with each other locally or nationally: private, public, legal, clandestine, formal, informal. Everyone knew, for instance, that the ‘avvocato’ – Gianni Agnelli, head of the family that owned FIAT and a lot else – was a national power centre, just as he knew that, while no Italian government could fail to come to terms with him, he in turn had to deal with whoever pushed the buttons in Rome. Part of this field of power was subterranean and secret, half-emerging only in periods of crisis such as the 1970s and 1980s. In those periods Italian politics returned to the operatic or Borgia mode, amid endless arguments not so much about who the assassins of the ‘cadaveri eccellenti’14 or illustrious corpses were, but who was behind them, how they were linked to discreet but influential masonic lodges and the obscure projects to prevent the PCI from entering the ring of political power, if need be by military coups.
In the 1990s this system collapsed. The end of the Cold War deprived the Italian regime of its only justification and a genuine revolt of public opinion against the really spectacular greed of the socialist prime minister and his party broke its back. All the parties of postwar Italy were wiped out at the 1994 elections except the PCI, whose relatively deserved reputation for honesty saved them, and the Neofascists, who had also been in permanent opposition. Alas, there as elsewhere the 1990s proved that destroying a bad old regime was possible, but did not necessarily produce the conditions for creating a better one.
III
What is the autobiographer to say about a country that has been part of his and his wife’s life for half a century? Some of the people closest to us are or were Italians. We spoke Italian at home when we did not want the children to understand. Italy has been good to us, giving us friendship in beautiful places, the endless discovery of its capacity for creation, past and present, and more of those rare moments of pure satisfaction at being alive than human beings can reasonably expect past their youth. It has given me my themes as a historian. Its readers have been generous to me as a writer.
Yet as I believe that being a historian helps to understand a country, I must ask myself why the Italy of Signor Berlusconi in 2002 is not one I expected fifty years ago. How far did I fail to see where Italy was going because my observation was deficient, or biased, how far because twists in the road were not yet visible? Was it the democratization of consumer society that widened the gap between the minority of the educated and intellectual whose company elderly historians keep, and the rest of a people who read few newspapers and spent less money on books per head than all but the two poorest members of the European Union? Did the sheer speed of economic and hence social and cultural transformation defeat foresight, in Italy as elsewhere?
Certainly few read the signs right in that coup-threatened period of fear and tension, the 1970s, the peak of the PCI’s electoral support nationally and in the big cities. We did not see that dramatic industrial transformation was fatally weakening the PCI’s political influence in the economic core of Italy, the north: the FIAT assembly-line building in Turin now houses the annual Book Fair. The Party did not recognize that after 1968 it had lost its major political asset, namely the accepted hegemony over the Italian left, and indeed over all forces of opposition other than the remainders of fascism. The small instant book I did at the time with Giorgio Napolitano, then on the Secretariat of the PCI, shows no sign of having been written in the decade that culminated in the kidnapping and murder of the Italian Premier Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, the most formidable European terrorist movement of the left.10 Perhaps, worst of all, the Party, like working-class movements elsewhere, was beginning to lose touch with its popolo comunista, for whom it had been the party of resistance, liberation and social hope, the defender of the poor. As early as the seventies friends from Turin told me: ‘We are no longer a movement; we are becoming a ‘‘party of opinion’’ like the others.’ How could one talk politics in the same way to the sharp, media-wise youngish journalists who telephoned from the (now struggling) Party daily L’Unità as to the journalist generation of partisans and liberation? Rejuvenating its cadres, the Party found it had changed their character. As it slowly declined, abandoning too much of a great tradition with its name, it prepared to make its way through the 1990s in the uncertain shadow of its newly improvised botanical logos – the oak and the olive tree.
Within five years of Berlinguer’s death the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the PCI, dropping its symbols and traditions, reconstructed and renamed itself vaguely as the Democratic Left (the usual fall-back label of the old Moscow Communist Parties), against bitter internal opposition and the secession of a new Party of Refounded Communism.
So in the long run enjoying Italy proved easier than understanding it. Paradoxically, that was easier to do in the era of the Republic’s crisis. Seen from the private watchtower, Italy in the 1980s was a succession of public occasions and academic conversations in places whose familiarity did not diminish their beauty, of days with friends mostly in or around Rosario and Anna Rosa Villari’s farmhouse in Tuscany. It was an unreal country, in which one stretched out with friends on the terrace overlooking the Val d’Orcia after lunch, listening to the voice of Callas singing ‘Casta Diva’ from a record-player in an upstairs room.
Meanwhile, the collective Italy of the 1980s was a sort of reductio ad absurdum of public life, an era of moderately bloodstained Marx Brothers politics. While Craxi’s men bought up former ‘progressive intellectuals’, high-living socialist ministers stepped out with starlets in nightclubs, their bills paid by managements anxious to attract their entourage, enormous government grants after enormous earthquakes disappeared into thin air, the Vatican’s finances were in disarray because of financial speculations by Mafia-connected bankers, one of them recently discovered hanged under London’s Blackfriars Bridge, and a Neapolitan professor succeeded in building himself an academic empire in a municipal palace on the strength of his research, refereed by eminent colleagues who failed to notice that every one of his books had been carefully translated word for word from German Ph.D. theses.
My most vivid memory of those years is of a brief overnight trip to Rome, Marxian in both senses. Italian television invited me to take part in a programme on the great man’s centenary under the title An Evening with Karl Marx.