Smoke (and Mirrors) Without Fire?

This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice in 1807. When Garibaldi was born there, Nice (or Nizza) was Italian-speaking and had been ruled by the House of Savoy (Casa Savoia) since 1388; it was ceded to France in 1860 as a trade-off in the Unification of Italy under the Savoy monarchy. Thinking perhaps of the lack of self-interest and the talent for self-effacement that he shared with Roman Republican hero Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, British historian A. J. P. Taylor declared: “Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.”

Cincinnatus was appointed dictator in an emergency in 458 B.C., when Minucius was besieged by the warlike Aequi tribe on Cold Mountain (Mons Algidus) in the Alban hills. He defeated the Aequi but, despite invitations to stay on, he resigned his dictatorship after sixteen days and returned to the relative obscurity of his farm across the Tiber. In Garibaldi’s case, the place he went to to step out of the public eye was the barren wind-swept little island of Caprera off the northeast shore of Sardinia, where you can still visit his house and his tomb.

A. J. P. Taylor’s enthusiasm for Garibaldi has not always been shared by contemporary historians. It was certainly shared by George Macaulay Trevelyan, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who devoted a classic trilogy—Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic (1907), Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909) and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (1911)—to the Hero of Two Worlds, as the Italians know him. Come to that, the whole of the Italian Risorgimento has met with a mixed reception from the revaluators or professional debunkers.

This week’s New Yorker magazine (July 9 & 16, 2007) features a review, entitled “The Insurgent: Garibaldi and his Enemies,” of another academic historian’s somewhat jaundiced view of Garibaldi. The reviewer is novelist and essayist Tim Parks, author, among several other fine books, of Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona (1992), who lives and teaches in Italy and knows Italian mores like few others. The volume under review is Lucy Riall’s  Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (Yale, 2007, published more or less simultaneously in Italian by Laterza), which presents Garibaldi’s career in Brazil and Uraguay—the two countries recently issued commemorative postage stamps—as well as in Italy as so much smoke and mirrors, a well-managed Victorian publicity stunt. Parks defended General Garibaldi against another skeptical account—cultural historian Daniel Pick’s Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi (Jonathan Cape, 2005, Random House, 2006)—in the July 21, 2005 issue of the London Review of Books. There, Parks’ article, which discussed among other things Garibaldi’s support for a well-meaning but anti-historical public health project to reroute the Tiber away from Rome, was entitled “Stewing Waters”.

As Parks points out, there was certainly no need to defend Garibaldi against his followers. Garibaldi fancied himself as an author of historical fiction, and one of his admirers was a literary colleague, the most important Italian fiction writer between Alessandro Manzoni and Giuseppe Verga. Ippolito Nievo (1831-61) joined the Expedition of the One Thousand and fought alongside the General in Sicily. He died in fact at sea between Palermo and Naples, carrying the records of the Sicilian campaign back to the north, when the ship on which he was a passenger foundered. His ironically named Confessioni di un septuagenario (he died at 29) was published posthumously in 1867. The work was partially translated into English as The Castle of Fratta and is available in a Greenwood Reprint.

Nievo dedicated a naively enthusiastic poem, entitled “The General”, to his commander and companion in arms.  It goes in part like this: “He has something in his eye / that shines forth from his soul / and seems to incline people / to go down on bended knee; / even in a thronging square / I have seen him step courteously and humanely through the crowd / and offer his hand to the girls. // Whether on flower-strewn streets / or in the midst of songs and music / or among whistling bullets / and the blasts of cannons, / he was born with a smile / and he cannot change his nature. / Only to the enemy is his eye terrible, / and to the coward. // Exhausted, in disorder, / they sometimes mill around him, / the soldiers press him. / With a word he revives them, / he shares their many hardships, / he shares their scanty sleep, / and never once did it occur to him / to observe that they were ragged. // His horse, aware perhaps / of who is in the saddle, / gallops over all terrain / and never sets a foot wrong. / Sometimes, white with foaming lather, / he halts, and on either side / the jostling soldiers / applaud their living god.”

Generals Washington or Wellington could hardly have asked for greater adulation. But then, maybe Nievo was part of the scam.

If it isn’t too late you might want to add a day trip to the walled city of Ferrara (or an overnight stopover) to your summer itinerary. Less than half an hour north of Bologna on the line to Padua and Venice (all trains between Rome and Florence and Venice therefore pass through it), the intriguing and elegant medieval and renaissance city center with its magnificent Castle and Cathedral is only five minutes from the station by bus. From the Middle Ages till the end of the sixteenth century, the lords of Ferrara were the Este family. Like the other noble families of Italy, the second sons often went into the Church, and the Este produced a number of cardinals. The splendid Villa d’Este in Tivoli near Rome with its fantastic fountains was built by one of them, Ippolito d’Este. At the turn of the sixteenth century, between 1492 and 1510, Duke Ercole d’Este revolutionized the city’s layout hiring architect Biagio Rossetti to design the broad and elegant streets lined with sumptuous palaces (the unmissable Palazzo dei Diamanti modern art museum is one of them) of the so-called Addizione Erculea. The family were great patrons of art and letters, and yesterday, July 4, an important exhibit, Cosmè Tura and Francesco Del Cossa, l’arte a Ferrara nell’età di Borso d’Este was inaugurated by Francesco Rutelli, Minister of Culture, in the Church of Santa Marta. (Controversial Vittorio Sgarbi, an art historian and TV personality from Ferrara who served in the former Berlusconi government, was conspicuous by his absence.) In October 2007, by the way, the gallery of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg is planning to open an Italian exhibition space in Ferrara. Cossa and Tura collaborated with Ercole de’ Roberti and a team of Ferrarese painters (including Baldassare, a bastard son of Duke Borso) to complete the cycle of frescos in the Salone dei mesi at the summer palace of Schifanoia (it means something along the lines of “Begone, Dull Care”) in an whirlwind two-year campaign (1469-70). For centuries, these and other Quattrocento Ferrarese masters took a back seat to the Florentine hegemonists pushed by Mannerist painter Giorgio Vasari until University of Bologna art historian Roberto Longhi rediscovered them in his Officina ferrarese (1934). The frescos at Schifanoia inspired some of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. If Ezra was an antisemite (despite his biblical name), the Este family were not, and in 1492 they invited the Jews exiled from Spain to settle in Ferrara. Ferrara still had a thriving Jewish community in the 1930s, when Giorgio Bassani (a novelist from Ferrara we recently met in Acquerello italiano) wrote about the plight of Ferrara’s for the most part “assimilated” Jews, capturing their consternation when their Fascist neighbors decided after nearly 500 years that they were after all different and shipped them off to Auschwitz. Some of the greatest names in renaissance Italian literature—Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, authors of delightfully long narrative poems (you don’t want them to end) celebrating the feats and follies of the knightly hero Orlando (Roland), as well as the hapless Torquato Tasso, author of an epic poem on the First Crusade, Jerusalem Delivered, that influenced John Milton—are associated with Ferrara. Tasso, born in Sorrento, actually went crazy there and you can visit the cell where they locked him up. Ferrara has a place in the history of Italian cinema too. Luchino Visconti, just back from France, where he served as assistant to director Jean Renoir, the son of the painter, set his magnificent Ossessione (1942), his take on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (and far and away the best film version), in the countryside outside Ferrara. It is the provincial capital where the protagonists Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti buy the insurance on her husband. Another of Ferrara’s native sons is Michelangelo Antonioni (who has his own museum), the poet of late 20th-century alienation (L’avventura 1959, La notte, 1961, L’eclisse 1964, Blow Up 1966) and exquisite industrial decay (Deserto rosso 1964). Not far from Ferrara is the Po Delta and the Adriatic beaches of the Lidi ferraresi and the Lido di Spina, a Greco-Etruscan port dating back at least the fifth century B.C. (if not to the descendants of the Argonauts), which, legend has it, witnessed the fall of Phaethon who mishandled the chariot of the Sun and Icarus who flew too close to it and melted his waxen wings. Hot stuff!

The plot thickens over the government’s attempt to sell 49.9% of the national airline (la compagnia di bandiera) Alitalia to the highest bidder. Or maybe we should say, the plot thins. When bids were first invited by Economic Minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, there was a field of 11 contenders. Only 5 of these were admitted to the final round, and then the 5 were trimmed down to 3. On May 29, the alliance among the Texas Pacific Group, Mattlin Patterson and Mediobanca announced its withdrawal, leaving 2 bidders still standing. Yesterday the Russian press agency Interfax reported that one of the 2 remaining, Aeroflot, would be opting out also. The announcement was later denied by Aeroflot’s spokesperson, but it still looks as if something fishy is going on. Aeroflot says that the price is too high (but wasn’t it supposed to be an auction?) and that they will make their final decision on July 2, the deadline for closing bids. If Aeroflot drops out, that would leave only 1 bidder, AirOne, owned by Italian financier Carlo Toto. Representatives of AirOne have been talking to Alitalia’s unions. Last year Alitalia lost 626 million euros. Passenger traffic last month showed a 4.5% loss over May 2006. And the strikes go on. Meanwhile, we learned today that Giancarlo Cimoli the ex CEO of Trenitalia, the national rail service, who was moved over to run Alitalia and subsequently replaced (he left the railroad far more deeply in debt than the airline), took home almost 3 million euros in compensation in 2006.

Just when we thought the hype was over, this weekend we got the news that the Procuratore della Repubblica (call him the District Attorney) of the port city Civitavecchio in Lazio is about bring an “obscenity” suit against film director Ron Howard and a dozen other people involved in the production and distribution of the 2005 movie The Da Vinci Code, over a year after its Italian release. The Code is long gone from the first-run screens here, but, after the absurdly high-profile London trial for plagiary, and with production about to start on the movie of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (for which Tom Hanks has signed a contract that will apparently dwarf all previous records), you begin to wonder if the courts are simply ingenuous or part of the publicity team. A lawsuit never hurt sales. The plaintiffs are local celibate clergymen offended by the notion that Christ could have fathered a child or Mary Magdalene have been invited to the all-male Last Supper. They want to know why the movie wasn’t forbidden to minors? Apparently, they had no problem with minors getting their fill of the sadistic Aramaic gore of Mel Gibson’s Passion.

I don’t regret never reading or seeing The Da Vinci Code (or Mel Gibson’s Passion). I imagine that it is typical far-fetched scandal-seeking sensationalist fiction, with no claim whatsoever to being historical, inspired among other things by the success of Umberto Eco’s comparatively sober-sided 14th-century mystery The Name of the Rose, which is set in a Benedictine monastery. (The movie, starring Sean Connery, turned out to be something of a flop.) Eco, an Italian Catholic and a true medievalist by formation, treated the monks in his novel like a group of normal people (there are always a few in any group who aren’t normal). He certainly treated them better than Boccaccio in his Decameron, who actually wrote in the Middle Ages, when there were far more of them around. And what Boccaccio didn’t do to them, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his film based on the Decameron, did.

As of June 15, 2007, a  photographic exhibit at the Museum of Catalonian History in Barcelona, Spain (I specify “Spain”, because Italians spell the name with with two l’s, and there also is a Barcellona in Sicily) is displaying the Spanish Civil War photographs of Italian Lieutenant Wilhelm Schrefler. Schrefler, who was born over the border from Austria in the South Tyrol, changed his name to Guglielmo Sandri when he enlisted in Mussolini’s Fascist army. In 1936 his unit was despatched to Spain to the aid of El Caudillo, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. An amateur photographer Schrefler took many photos of his fellow soldiers, but they were lost until 1992 when a neighbour who was tidying the attic of the Shrefler home come upon the cache and began to classify and put them in order. There are reports of veteran of the campaign who have recognized their pictures. Shrifler died of wounds received in World War II. The exhibit is in tune with the rehabilitation of the losers, the soldiers and civilians on the right who fought against the Allies and the underground Resistance in the Italian Civil War launched when Mussolini was installed by his German allies at Salò on Lake Garda. You can read about it from the viewpoint of a Fascist volunteer in the novels of Giose Rimanelli. My nostalgic Sicilian barber explained to me only yesterday that what Italy needs is another strongman, that she had become a parliamentary democracy too quickly right after the war and had not enjoyed a maturing period under un uomo di polso (a firm and forceful leader) like Franco, head of state until his death in 1975.

On the eve of WW II—Germany was about invade Poland on September 1, 1939, Italy, which had promulgated the first of a series of ever more strict anti-Jewish laws in September 1938, would enter the war as Germany’s ally in June 1940—, conservative Pope Pius XI (Achille Ratti) composed an important speech, to be given before the assembled Italian bishops. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Pacts between Mussolini’s government and the Vatican, which constituted their so-called Conciliazione or Reconciliation. The speech was written only ten days before the intransigent pope died.

In his speech the pope intended to denounce the latest policies of the Nazi-Fascist Axis and reaffirm the independence of the Catholic Church against the pressures being brought to bear on it by the Fascist government. Pius XI passed away before he could make the speech, but he had seen to it before he died that printed copies of the text be made for distribution to his prospective audience.

Documents recently brought to light by Vatican archive researcher Emma Fattorini and illustrated in a book published this week entitled Pio XI, Hitler e Mussolini, La solitudine di un papa (Einaudi) prove beyond doubt that it was the pope’s Secretary of State and confidant Eugenio Pacelli who prevented their distribution and insisted that all copies of the defiant speech be destroyed.

Pacelli was destined to be elected as Pius XI’s successor with the name of Pope Pius XII.

We were already aware that Pacelli had censored the encyclical letter Humanae Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race) prepared by the American Jesuit John LaFarge and a couple of Jesuit colleagues at the express request of Pius XI. The encyclical, the draft of which was published by French researchers Georges Passeclecq and Bernard Suchecky in the 1990s (English version: The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, Harcourt Brace, 1997), condemned Fascist anti-semitism but not without indulging in a little old-fashioned Catholic antisemitism of its own.

The publication of this new document calls into question once again the role of Pius XII in combating Nazi atrocities. In last week’s Sunday’s supplement to the economic newspaper Il Sole-24 Ore (May 27, 2007), Emilio Gentile, author of a book on the 1937 Oxford University international conference of Christian churces against totalitarianism, to which the Roman Church declined to send a representative, characterized Pius XI’s fulminating approach as “prophetic” and Pius XII’s circumspect approach as “diplomatic”. Pius XII wanted to avoid at all costs a counter-productive confrontation, thinking there was more to be gained by attempting to persuade the Duce and the Führer to change their policies. I guess there’s no reasoning with some people.

May 24, 2007. Yesterday the Istituto nazionale di statistica (ISTAT) released its annual report of facts and figures. The report sums up the statistics for 2006. Reacting to the findings, Prime Minister Romano Prodi observed that Italy’s three most worrisome problems are an aging population, widening economic gap between North and South, and the difficulties new applicants, especially women and young people, run into when trying to find a job. The job situation in Italy, declared Prodi, is more comparable to that in North Africa than in the rest of Europe.

People are being born less frequently in Italy, but they are living longer. The ratio of those under 15 to those over 65 is 100 to 141. Only Japan, with a ratio of 100 to 154, has an older population. The birthrate, which went below 2 children per adult woman in the mid-1970s and reached an all-time low of 1.19 in 1995, is holding at 1.35. Life expectancy here—78.3 years for men and 84 years for women (as against 77.6 and 83.2 in 2005)—is the highest aggregate in Europe (though in Sweden the men live longer) and among the highest in the world. Attempts to explain why cite the Mediterranean diet and improvements in national health care.

14.7% of Italian families (one out of six) say they have difficulty stretching out the family income till the end of the month. In the South, this figure rises to 22.3%. In Sicily, the hardest hit region, 11.1% of families (2.5 million) live below the poverty line. The average monthly wage for an Italian family in 2004 was around 2,750 euros. In the same period 57% of Italians declared no change in their incomes from the previous year, while 5.3% said they earned substantially less. The average family income in Lombardy it was more than 32,000 euros, whereas in Sicily was 2,100, three quarters as much.

The aging of Italy’s population is somewhat offset by the very high number of immigrants, for the most part young men and women looking for work. As of January 2006, Italy’s officially registered immigrants numbered over 2.7 million or 4.7% of the general population. They come from all over the world, including the Philippines, China, Pakistan, Ukraine and Bangladesh, but one third of the overall total comes from three countries: Romania (271,000), Albania (257,000) and Morocco (240,000). 88% of them live in the large towns of northern and central Italy. Foreigners make up 32% of the prison population. Mixed marriages between (mostly male) Italians and foreigners, though still rare, are becoming more common. Last year they made up 13.5% of all marriages, compared with 4.8% in 1995. The number of women immigrants is now equal to that of men and the number of immigrant couples is on the rise.

My next blog will report on Italy’s May 12 Family Day. Why did its organizers give the Rome demonstration an English name? Maybe because, for all the political rhetoric that the event occasioned, Italy is the European state that devotes the smallest proportion of its annual expenditures to the family: a mere 4.4% compared with a European average of 7.8%.

A new book by Italy’s greatest twentieth-century poet? By Italy’s second Nobel prizewinner for poetry (1975—the first was Giosuè Carducci in 1906—the first centenary of his death is coming up in 2007), a poet who died a quarter of a century ago?

In October 2006, the Mondadori publishing house released a 100-page volume entitled La casa di Olgiate e altre poesie by Eugenio Montale (1896-1981).

Well, to call it a book by Montale is a bit of an exaggeration. In the care with which he put his books of poetry together, Montale was almost as meticulous as the founding father of Italian lyric poetry Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who spent fifty years arranging the 366 poems of his one-book Canzoniere.

What we have in La casa di Olgiate is a group of poems that Montale never published and that ended up in the hands of his faithful Tuscan housekeeper Gina Tiossi.

It was Gina who donated the originals to the Fondo Manoscritti, which collects autograph manuscripts of twentieth-century writers, at the University of Pavia.

The philologists at Pavia did the rest. The 56 poems—mostly short, many just a few lines long—were composed between 1963 and the poet’s death in 1981, the bulk of them in the poet’s last two or three years.

Montale’s poetry, from Ossi di seppia (“Cuttlefish Bones”, 1925) to Quaderno di quattro anni (1977) and Altri versi (1981), changed a great deal. His debut volume has a distilled and concentrated feel that made it the voice of a generation. Or better, the voice of part of a generation, the part that did not, could not embrace Fascism, perhaps as much for aesthetic as for political reasons.

The poems commemorating the years leading up to or following WW II or the poet’s experience of those years—Le occasioni (1939), La bufera e altro (1956) are more difficult, more syntacticaly complex, more “hermetic,” more allusive.

The new poems that came out in the 1970s, after a twenty-five year silence, were completely different, simpler, more ironic, more overtly autobiographical, more intimate, more epigrammatic and ultimately more resignedly pessimistic . The poems in La casa di Olgiate belong to this later manner. Just one example, chosen for its brevity rather than its optimism:

Se anche si scoprisse / il come e il perché dell’universo ? venire al mondo sarebbe / tempo perso. [Even if we were to discover / the how and why of the universe / coming into the world would / still be a waste of time.]

Incidentally, an excellent anthology of translations from the works of Montale is the one edited with an introduction by Harry Thomas and published in 2002 by Penguin Books and in New York by Handsel Books in 2004.

Thomas often gives more than one translation of the same poem, though it is occasionally hard to believe (especially since there is no facing Italian text) that the translators were working from the same original. Among them Allen Mandelbaum is one of the more conscientious and literal, while “confessional poet” Robert Lowell is the one who—“imitating” rather than translating (his 1961 collection of translations is entitled Imitations)—does most violence to the translatee’s text (and not only for Montale).

Several of the translators included have won prizes for translation. Which leads one to the realization that translations are often judged on their merits as convincing free-standing poems by people who don’t know the original language.

Fumata bianca! At five minutes to 1 p.m. today, on the fourth round of voting, ballots in favor of Giorgio Napolitano reached the one-vote majority needed to elect him President of the Republic.

It was not a win that bodes well for Italy. The final count of votes for Napolitano was 543, only two more than the Unione’s majority of 541 in the assembly. In other words, there were virtually no cross-over votes from the Casa delle libertà. Mistakes were made on both sides. Commentators are already saying that Napolitano is President of half of Italy.

The total number of voters was actually 1,009, not 1,010 as previously stated, because one of the senators of Forza Italia, Berlusconi’s lawyer Cesare Previti was sent to prison last week for corrupting a judge. They say don’t shoot the messenger, but both the corrupted judge and the man on whose behalf the judge was corrupted—guess who—got off.

The way the past two days’ voting went was odd to say the least. Though he turned out to be their one and only candidate (and not a stalking horse for Massimo D’Alema as many feared), the Unione opted not to vote Napolitano’s name but to cast blank ballots for the first three rounds (in which a two thirds majority was called for). The subtleties of this parliamentary tactic for the moment escape me (though I am looking for someone to explain it). More comprehensible was the Casa delle libertà’s decision to cast blank ballots in the fourth round (the first in which a simple majority would suffice). They had little or no chance of electing an alternative candidate.

The tried in the first ballot, writing in the name of Gianni Letta, but he barely got a third of the votes. Then they tried the “Divide and rule” tactic, proposing what they called a “rose” of names that they hoped would split the rival center-left vote: Franco Marini, the recently nominated speaker of the Senate, former socialist prime minister Giuliano Amato, European Commissioner Mario Monti and former prime minister Lamberto Dini. The center left refrained from choosing, reaffirming their one candidate Napolitano.

There was in fact no horse-trading, just the old “wall against wall”, neither side making any concessions. This was a pity, since it aggravated the pre-existing polarisation. There were elements of the center-right, Casini’s UDC and Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale who seemed willing to deal. Casini in fact publicly deplored the stance of the Casa delle libertà he belongs to. But the stubborn refusal of Umberto Bossi’s Lega won the day. Berlusconi vowed he would never, never, never vote for an ex-Communist, not even for a right-wing (so to speak) former Communist reformer like Napolitano, now safely institutionalized as a senatore a vita.

The fact is that for Berlusconi, despite his proposing a German-style grand coalition the day after he lost the elections, reconciliation with the center left and the good governance of Italy are less important than hanging on for dear life to the votes of his half of the country. More important to him, it seems, than the bipartisan election of a President of the Republic is not alienating his electorate by supporting a candidate from the left. Berlusconi has his eye on the upcoming referendum on the constitutional reforms proposed by his government, to be held on June 25-26. The constitutional experts I read unanimously agree that the proposed changes—what goes by the English designation of “devolution” (the pet project of the Lega) coupled with an expansion of the powers of the prime minister—would be nothing short of a disaster. The referendum, in which voters are asked to confirm the laws already voted on by the parliament, will be carried by a simple majority.

It is now 5 PM and the first round of voting for the new President of the Republic (the guardian of the Italian Constitution) has begun. The total number of Grand Electors (630 deputies, 322 senators and 58 regional representatives) is 1,010, which means that 674 votes in favor would constitute a two-thirds majority. The Unione coalition has decided that in this first round they will cast blank ballots, while the Casa delle libertà plans to vote for 71-year-old Gianni Letta, a long-time Berlusconi associate and something of a discreet “eminence grise”. Barring surprises, it is very unlikely therefore that today’s vote will produce a winner. To use the language of the papal conclave, the upshot, in other words, will be a “fumata nera”, not a “fumata bianca”. The vote is taking place as I write in the Montecitorio Palace, home of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, where for once deputies and senators are gathered together. The will be only one secret ballot today, but voting is expected to continue tomorrow, Tuesday, with two additional rounds, also calling for a two-thirds majority. The following day, Wednesday, May 10, a simple majority of one (in other words, 506 votes) will be sufficient.

Outgoing President Ciampi (elected 1999) has been one of the most popular and respected of the ten presidents who have been figureheads of the Italian Republic since 1946. The second most popular was probably Sandro Pertini (elected 1978). After the vote on his successor, Ciampi will join two other former presidents, 78-year-old Francesco Cossiga (elected 1985) and 87-year-old Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (elected 1992), as a life senator.

The remaining former presidents were transitional President Enrico De Nicola (1946-48), followed by Luigi Einaudi (elected 1948), Giovanni Gronchi (elected 1955), Antonio Segni (elected 1962), Giuseppe Saragat (elected 1964) and Giovanni Leone (elected 1971 after what seemed like an endless series of 23 ballots, and by common consent the least deserving of the lot). Do you remember them all?