Local administration regulates an urban life as civilised as any on the planet in scores of towns such as Trento and Bergamo, Pistoia and Arezzo, Mantua and Verona, Lecce and Bressanone. Cremona in Lombardy is a fine example: a lovely city of of pinks and duns, of yellows and ochres, a place of slow rhythms and old, unhurried cyclists, of clean streets and well-kept museums, of small workshops where master craftsmen still fashion exquisite violins. So agreeable and well run is the town that its children want to live there, remain there and die there.

In those early, pre-euro days it was a place of long, leisurely and cheap lunches in restaurants where if you tried to skip a course you were either regarded with derision or treated like a vegetarian, which was worse. In essence, at least on the surface, little has changed over the past two decades. Nowadays, though, you will not be marked as a pariah if you order only one course. It?s even okay to wash it down with mineral water.

But what continues to amaze is the attention to detail, the pernicketiness that is a part of daily life. Everything must be prettily parcelled and artistically presented. On the other hand, the brutalisation of Italy continues apace. Rome is disfigured with graffiti; Naples is buried under a blanket not of volcanic ash but of litter and garbage; the ugly suburbs of Milan and Turin, Florence and Bologna grow like bacteria, covering the surrounding countryside in concrete. Among the numbing facts David Gilmour offers in The Pursuit Of Italy, is that between 1950 and 2005 an area the size of Tuscany and Umbria combined has been buried under asphalt.

It is one of the many disharmonies that bamboozle visitors to Italy. Not, of course, that enlightened Italians are unaware of the horrors that are sent to try them. While naturally proud and protective of their country and, in particular, the part in which they were born and in which they live and hope eventually to die, they recognise there is much that is awry with it. A recent issue of Time magazine featured young Italians who have had no alternative but to emigrate because, no matter how well-educated they are, rampant nepotism, general corruption and lack of opportunity prevent them from getting anything other than menial work.

The riposte, from commentators such as Beppe Severgnini, is that irrespective of its faults, Italy always has style on which to fall back. For him, Italy is an "offbeat purgatory", ?the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis".

Gilmour, whose previous books include a peerless biography of Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard, is the latest in a serpentine line of outsiders to make Italy his subject. In the interests of research he sentenced himself to time in each of its 20 regions, in order to view it not from the centre but from the periphery. Italian unity, Gilmour contends, was not "pre-ordained" and, he concludes, has not been and is not a good thing. Italy is a nation whose differences are much greater than its similarities. Thus, he argues, it was "predestined to be a disappointment", a country that " in the words of the late Luigi Barzini, one of the most perceptive of native writers" "has never been as good as the sum of all her people".

This is perhaps a harsh verdict but, as Gilmour shows, it contains more than a grain of truth. In his book he goes back to the beginning, to the high-heeled boot shape that makes Italy look more like a logo for Ferragamo than a state. Its coastline has proved impossible to defend against invaders and illegal immigrants while the Alps, which look as if they should provide an impenetrable barrier, are actually as porous as a colander. Moreover, its people were diverse in origin and still speak in dialects which, depending on where you are, can make ordering steak and ice-cream something of a linguistic lottery. Nor, as anyone who visits it regularly knows, have such differences disappeared. On the contrary, they are fiercely protected and nurtured. Italians, it seems, do not want to be homogenised in the name of nation-building.

There are, of course, sound historical reasons for this ardent and often laudable provincialism. For centuries cities and towns in Italy vied with each other for supremacy. Often this was bloody and brutal, with artists like Filippo Brunelleschi (famed for his Florentine dome) and Leonardo da Vinci enlisted by their masters to divert rivers in order to flood the lands of rival cities. That neither did so successfully suggests that even Renaissance men had their limitations. Claims in the 19th century by the likes of General Lamarmora that Italy was "far more united than older, more established nations" were mere bluster. Yet countless Italian streets are named after him and other significant figures in the Risorgimento, Italy?s unification, which suggests if nothing else a desire to memorialise those who sought however cack-handedly to defend Italy against its Austrian foes.

It was, however, Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, who in 1847 said Italy was "a geographical expression" rather than a country. It is a sentiment for which Gilmour, who is as witty as he is wise, has much sympathy. But it is difficult to assess its accuracy. Certainly, you feel as you travel around Italy that the rivalries between towns and cities and regions go deeper than mere civic posturing. Nor has the north-south divide been helped by the understandable contempt felt in Piedmont and Lombardy for the vice-like grip the Mafia maintains in Sicily and Calabria. Who would not like to be rid of such a gangrenous sore? 

Having said that, it?s worth bearing in mind that Italy as we know it is a comparatively young country. If Rome couldn?t be built in a day, how much longer ought it to take to build the nation of which it is the capital? 

Local administration regulates an urban life as civilised as any on the planet in scores of towns such as Trento and Bergamo, Pistoia and Arezzo, Mantua and Verona, Lecce and Bressanone. Cremona in Lombardy is a fine example: a lovely city of of pinks and duns, of yellows and ochres, a place of slow rhythms and old, unhurried cyclists, of clean streets and well-kept museums, of small workshops where master craftsmen still fashion exquisite violins. So agreeable and well run is the town that its children want to live there, remain there and die there.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/
book-features/a-nation-gets-the-boot-1.1088779
 
 
 
 
 
 

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