Agony and the Ecstasy

It's not surprising after such a history that many Italians seem to hunger for strong leadership and perhaps even a strongman. A poll last summer showed that Italians who said they'd vote for such a figure approached 90 percent. But when candidates present themselves as such, the echoes of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship are still too strong for them to find widespread acceptance. Yet with all the frustrations, there endures in Italy what might be called the dolce vita factor. People still think life is sweet. Most Italians (74 percent, according to a Eurobarometer poll last month) say they are worried about the economy. A majority (52 percent) say they think Italy is "moving in the wrong direction." But a full 71 percent of Italians say they are satisfied with their own lives when it comes to family, work and their personal future. "Italians are accustomed to a very rigid separation between their personal lives and what is going on in public," says Federigo Argentieri, professor of political science at John Cabot University in Rome. And while an utter lack of civic conscience makes the country extremely difficult to govern, Argentieri notes that the strength of the family is what allows the society to function when, as so often happens, government fails. "Everything is wrong with that," says Argentieri, "except it's what keeps Italy afloat."

"Family values" may be, in fact, one of the most complex and intractable problems for a country that Sapelli describes as "postmodern without ever having been modern." Although Italians are famously individualistic, their flamboyance is sometimes that of little boys who know they can hide behind their mothers' skirts. Stories are legion about the Italian trader in London whose mother flies there to wash his clothes each month. And it's not at all unusual for young Italians to continue living with their parents until they are in their 30s. "I believe I would kill Italian mothers," says Sapelli, joking, but with a point. "They are a formidable obstacle to economic growth." In a broader sense, the loyalty to family and the sense that protection, approval and respect exist mainly within it has helped to keep Italy a fractured nation with little sense of collective identity and little respect for the laws of the state. People see themselves as belonging to the towns or provinces where their families come from, and where their history may go back millennia, rather than as part of the nation-state that was declared to exist in the 1860s.

One of Pino Arlacchi's best-known books, "Why There's No Mafia in Sardinia," is about the ultimate expression of a family-centric society: the Sardinian culture of vendetta, in which clans mete out their own justice with no deference to any state or to any organization, including the Sicilian mafia. The mafia has tried and failed to "colonize" Sardinia, as Arlacchi notes, and has its own sense of family, of course. One of the most interesting trends in Italy over the last year, and one of the most hopeful, is the extent to which families and businesses in Sicily itself have been turning against the mafia and refusing to pay protection money. Whether the state will resist the gangsters' influence as well remains an open question. But the record is not a good one. Just last week the former regional minister of tourism in Calabria was arrested on corruption charges linked to organized crime. He denies the allegations.

Family issues are also a natural vehicle for the Roman Catholic Church, which is looking to reassert the influence it wielded in Italian politics before the humiliation of the Christian Democrats in the scandals of the early 1990s (many of which also were mafia-related). The question of abortion, which is legal for three months after conception, has become the first clear issue in the current election campaign. But the church also likes to preach to Italians about the details of their sex lives, a cause it might not have found worthwhile at times of stronger secular leadership. For instance, the Catholic Church has criticized the sex scene in "Caos Calmo" because it depicted adultery and showed sex as something other than an act of procreation.

Yet the larger controversy about the film is not so much about what is explicit as what is implicit. The star is Nanni Moretti, whose political satires and documentaries have long sought to prod the conscience of his countrymen. He plays the widower on the bench, who had saved a woman, a stranger, from drowning on the same day that, by coincidence, his wife died in an accident. He is there in the park because it is the only way he can imagine to impose order on life. He knows grief will come, but he is not sure exactly how or when, and he is frozen in place. Eventually, he meets the woman that he saved and has intercourse with her. The scene is played without music or romance. Both man and woman are almost fully clothed, and entirely focused on themselves. It is an unsettling depiction of alienation, anger, confusion and self-involvement, those very Italian emotions of the moment. And for this reason, it has resonated with the Italian people. Except for one thing: in the film, the character manages to move on. Italy has yet to find a way to do that.

© 2008