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.

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.

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%.