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.