Rebirth of a Nation: Why Italy Works

RAVELLO, ITALY — On April 11, Bernardo Bertolucci and his Italian associates won nine Academy Awards for the film “The Last Emperor.” The press made much of the fact that Italy had, at last, made a successful, international, “epic” film. Bertolucci did his best to reassure us: The picture really wasn’t all that Italian. He had got financing from everywhere, even from far Cathay. But he was too tactful. The victory really was one of Italian talent and entrepreneurship, which includes the ability to get international financing. The success of this movie is yet another outward and visible sign of the Italian re-Renaissance.

Italy has now moved to fourth place in the world’s gross national products; only West Germany leads in Europe. The Italian commercial presence is everywhere. Recently, an Italian businessman almost bought Belgium, leading to a sulfureous European debate on what is nationality . Can one Carlo De Benedetti own 51% of the shares of Societe General de Belgique, which controls most of Belgium’s financial assets? Meanwhile, Pirelli bids for Firestone, and the fire sale continues. What’s going on?

As a longtime, part-time resident of Italy and honorary citizen of the town of Ravello, I have watched, in half a century, Italy go from a Third World agricultural country to its current position atop the economic and cultural ladder down which we are painfully stumbling, while the Soviet Union is still unable to negotiate the bottom rungs. The origin of Italy’s re-Renaissance is due, in part, to the special relationship between us and them. When the Allies defeated Germany, Japan and Italy in 1945, Italy came under our rule and, to this day, we occupy, militarily, the peninsula with close to a dozen air, ground, sea and nuclear bases. The fact that during the last crucial decade our occupation has caused so little distress is due to American diplomacy as personified by Maxwell M. Rabb, now in his seventh year as ambassador to Italy, which makes him our longest-serving ambassador here as well as, whisper the word, viceroy.

To this day, Japan, West Germany and Italy are very much on the American military leash, but as we fade away economically, thanks to having wasted our capital on arms while the defeated nations concentrated theirs on the making and selling of things, our three client states are now growing restive. Fortunately, more soon than late, we will be gone, and the fact that this time of transition has been handled with such grace in Italy is largely thanks to Rabb, a master of crisis-containment, from the kidnaping of an American general by terrorists to the installation of a nuclear base in Sicily. He is also a master of the art of saying with absolute sincerity nothing at all, an art not only appreciated by Italians in general but practiced superbly by their politicians in general.

Since World War II, the West has come full circle. For more than 2,000 years, the “known” world was centered upon a small sea called the Mediterranean--or Mid-land--by the Romans. China and India were known to be out there somewhere; and that was about it. All that mattered was the doings of the white race--a minority race even then--cooped up in Europe, Asia’s wild west. For 2,500 years we have been, to ourselves at least, center-stage.

Now, in the 20th Century, the world has grown very small (jet travel brings us much too close together), as well as very large: 5 billion people now crowd the planet. Asia dominates the world’s economy while Europe is, literally, “eccentric”; and our own imperial republic, once Europe’s salvation--and human landfill--has entered its listless Manchu phase or, as a Japanese minister of trade recently put it, “in the next century, the United States will be our farm, and Western Europe our boutique.”

Although in the West there is a general sense of drift, one finds at least in what was, for most of our civilization, the very center of our boutique--I mean culture--Italy. Thanks to toll-roads, creative litigation, and the happy invention of cement, ancient Rome became the first world power. Since the empire was most of Europe and much of the Middle East and North Africa, it is pointless to generalize about the Roman character, much less about the Italian character when Italy, as such, was just a name. But today the nation-state of Italy has become the West’s principal center of entrepreneurial energy, combined with a cultural life considerably richer than that of any of those nations which once were Rome’s provinces.

The arts: Fashion is a form of art in which Italians now lead the world. One sees Italian fashion in the streets of Chiang Mai as well as in Duluth. Factories, prefabricated in Italy, rest now on the steppes of Russia, like intricate works of metal sculpture.

During the last half-century, Italy has produced perhaps the only major world novelist, Italo Calvino, while the late Primo Levi, in marked and bitter contrast to certain American contemporaries, was able to define the true nature of 20th-Century genocide.

Since Americans, by and large, do not like to read foreigners, it is a source of surprise, even to our schoolteachers, that the most brilliant and original critic of 19th-Century English literature was Mario Praz, whose “The Romantic Agony” is the definitive study of romanticism’s disorders and discontents. Then, to be right up to date, the most unlikely world best-seller, “The Name of the Rose,” was the work of one Umberto Eco, a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, who decided to apply the arcana of his discipline to popular fiction, with a most astonishing result.

In film, where directors are taken far too seriously in all countries, Italy has gone through a golden age from Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini to Michelangelo Antonioni to Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi and Bertolucci.

In music, Luciano Berio is a master like no other. Theater--well, a country with so vivid a piazza-life does not need to go indoors for drama.

In journalism, Italians are more politicized than Americans. But then they have political parties, which we don’t. As for their politics, contrary to the legend that Italy is an unstable republic with governments falling, if not right and left, right and center, Italy has been governed by the same group for 40 years. When Benito Mussolini was asked whether he found it difficult governing so restless a people, he said, “No, it’s not difficult, it’s just pointless.” Where the American political genius is the separation of state from church, the Italian genius is the separation of state from people. The government does not bother the people; and the people leave the government alone. For reasons that deny reason, Italy’s combination of the worst aspects of capitalism with the worst aspects of socialism works.

I think the chief Italian virtue can be summed up in a word--curiosity. It is no accident that Marco Polo, made it first to the court of Kublai Khan. It is no accident that the Western Hemisphere is named for Amerigo Vespucci, having been discovered, more or less, by Christopher Columbus. It is no accident that we might never have had atomic power if Enrico Fermi hadn’t broken the first atom.

So as the sun sets, for now, on the American Raj, Rabb presides gracefully over the last days; and, quietly he arranges things. When the mayor of Ravello told me that a 5-year-old girl needed an operation that only a certain doctor in Boston could perform, I told Max. Within a day, he had made an appointment. Max modestly takes no credit. I, on the other hand, went on the Italian equivalent of Johnny Carson, and hogged enough credit for both of us.