Although I promise to move on to drink, forgive me for beginning with a less interesting but even more complex subject: government. It is easy to patronise the Italians. The Risorgimento was a failure (See David Gilmour’s superb The Pursuit of Italy). Since the days of Cavour’s Machiavellianism and Garibaldi’s Cav and Pag bravura, the Italian political system has suffered a steady haemorrhage of authority and prestige, with the partial exception of the Mussolini era.
By the 1950s, the serious people in Italy had come to one of three conclusions. The first lot decided that the Italians were not fit to govern themselves. This explains the Euro-enthusiasm of the Montis, the Draghis, the Prodis (though he, that most afflicted of mankind, a stupid intellectual, is not worthy to be bracketed with the first two). They all hoped that a man would arrive on the flight from Brussels and tell the Italians what to do. Fair enough. But they also hoped that the Italians would do what they were told. No Italian had been more deluded since Tosca. The second group were the Marxists. They too believed that the Italians were not fit to govern themselves, but they thought that this applied to the whole of mankind. Gradually, a sophisticated and humane Marxism in the Gramsci tradition displaced the Stalinist brutalities of Togliatti. Given the persistent hopelessness of Italian politics, it is surprising that the Italian Euro-communists never managed to come to power. For that, we have to thank the Catholic Church — and the third group of serious Italians.
They, the largest of the three, had a radical solution to the problems of the Italian state. They gave up on it. On an average day, the Italian government was incompetent, corrupt and chaotic.
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