Italy? An Immorality Play

When I first started primary school I was enrolled in a private Catholic institute. My teacher was a strict nun who would slap you very hard if you misbehaved in class or committed something less criminal like making a mistake while reading aloud. Sister Maria had a peculiar way of slapping you, something between a whack and a slap that would hit you between your ear and your cheek, tingling in your head for quite a long time like the persistent trumpets of Doomsday. After that first year I was moved to a public school and started living a slap-free existence, but the memory of those thundering and powerfully roaring blows are still with me. I’m actually looking back upon those slaps with a certain nostalgia. In fact, I wake up every morning dreading to read the latest news about Italy and wishing in my heart that Sister Maria could still be around to deliver her thunderous blows to many Italian politicians.

Italy has become, physically and metaphorically, a worn out boot: entire villages illegally built on hydrological risk areas are sliding downhill as if they were made with butter; unemployment is rife and many Italians don’t manage to get till the end of the month with their wages or pensions; due to policies that condemn multiculturalism and spread ignorance, the tension between local and immigrant communities is on the rise; the textile industry is basically stagnating while Milan Fashion Week is just starting with an embarrassing calendar that features scantily dressed TV showgirl turned lingerie designer.

But that’s not all: a few weeks ago Massimo Ciancimino, son of the late Palermo Mayor arrested on Mafia charges, stated that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party was a product of negotiations between Cosa Nostra and the state; intercepted telephone calls cast dark shadows on head of the Civil Protection Agency Guido Bertolaso being offered bribes and sexual services at a spa by businessmen bidding to win contracts to build facilities on La Maddalena, Sardinia’s island originally chosen as the G8 site; a recently released report stated that corruption cases rose in Italy by 229 per cent last year, while Premier Berlusconi’s trial for bribing British lawyer David Mills may or may not take place at the end of February; an investigation about a mafia money laundering operation involved over 50 people in Italy and abroad, suspected of fraud and laundering at hundreds of millions of euros, among them there are also Silvio Scaglia, the founder of Italian broadband provider Fastweb, and Senator Nicola Di Girolamo, a member of Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party, elected with falsified voter ballots of Italian voters living in Germany, arranged by the 'ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia.

In the meantime, the lists of candidates who are running for the next regional elections are being prepared and Mr Berlusconi is proving once again that legs are more important than brains by presenting in his People of Liberty party list Nicole Minetti, officially an oral hygienist, actually an ex-dancer from one of the programmes on his TV channels, and model and “actress” Graziana Capone, who last year compared in an interview with an Italian gossip magazine Berlusconi to Jesus for the way he speaks to and attracts young crowds.  

You name it, we have it: sleaziness, stupidity, corruption, bribery, fraud, ignorance, sexism, machismo and viagraism - a philosophical doctrine launched by old men glued to their thrones of power who see young women as purveyors of sexual favours.

Hard to believe it, but while talking about the trafficking of illegal immigrants at a press conference with Albania Prime Minister Sali Berisha, the winner of the international faux pas championship Berlusconi suggested Berisha to send to Italy only “beautiful girls”.

I was born in a country where a member of the Catholic hierarchy teaching in a primary school was authorised to slap you if you couldn’t read; I grew up hoping I could have become a crossover between Noam Chomsky, Nancy Cunard, Ennio Flaiano, Anna Magnani, Alda Merini, Rita Levi Montalcini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Joe Strummer. I wanted to be a poetically and politically engaged witty rebel who could always speak her mind. Selling my body to obtain favours or repaying favours with sexual services were never on my agenda. Nowadays in Italy women are expected to use their bodies to obtain a job, they are supposed to laugh at misogynist jokes and generally aspire to an inflatable doll’s existence. 

There are thousands of Italians who are genuinely worried about the conditions their country is lying in (the so-called Popolo Viola - Violet People Group - is organising another demo on Saturday to highlight how the law is the same for everyone) and what scares them – what scares me – is the fact that particular behaviours such as bribes, scandals, sleaziness and prostitution are nowadays considered as acceptable and justifiable things. It’s perfectly fine also to try and escape from justice, call all magistrates liars and going to TV programmes strongly denying you are guilty of whatever you are accused of.

Let’s be frank: there was more politics in the statements made by adult film star Cicciolina when she served as MP, than in what goes on now in the Italian Parliament. Indeed Italy is at the moment a wonderful “immorality” play, a third-rate movie with a bad script based on a “Carry On” film written by Machiavelli, Mussolini’s ghost, Berlusconi and his court minstrel Mariano Apicella, Professor Pickup from Ignazio Silone’s School for Dictators, and Gollum.

As an ordinary citizen you are expected to abide by the laws, pay your taxes and lead a boringly ordinary life, in the meantime the representatives of the political class have a “licence to kill”: they can preach about family issues and then get divorced three times in a row, proclaim themselves against drugs, prostitution and corruption only to be found positive to anti-drug tests, regularly visit prostitutes and transvestites (yet a law against sexual exploitation doesn’t seem to be on the government’s agenda…) and be caught stealing and accepting bribes.

So, yes, everyday I wake up with a pang of nostalgia for Sister Maria. I’m sure one or two of her deafening slaps could really put back a little bit of sense into the minds of quite a few Italian politicians. As much as that may sound drastic, it may be worth trying.

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