The Italians by John Hooper review: land of the little envelopes

The Italians

Author: John Hooper

ISBN-13: 978-1846145445

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £20

In some ways the Mafia, with its powerful matriarchs and clan loyalty, is a grotesque parody of Mediterranean family life. Rival clans gain strength in numbers, of course, so families have to be large, women have to be strong and children had better be male.

The roots of organised crime lie in Sicily: clientelism and family-based nepotism (from the Latin nepos, nephew) have been woven into the island's social, political and cultural life at least since unification in 1861. Cosa Nostra clans are often referred to as cosche, from the Sicilian dialect for an artichoke's leaves. The clans fit snugly inside one another, overlapping tightly.

Traditionally, in Sicily the Mafia dealt in loan-sharking and citrus fruit scams. By the entrepreneurial 1980s, however, it had spread into northern Italy as far as Milan and was involved in the multinational heroin trade. During the 1980s, mobsters began to kill reporters, magistrates, police – anyone who obstructed their massive drugs traffic. “Here dies all hope of honest Italians”, bewailed a bystander in 1982 after Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, prefect of Mafia investigations in Sicily, was brutally murdered with his wife.

As John Hooper points out in this social history, north-south antagonism intensified in Italy during the post-unification years, when Italy freed itself of its abhorred Hapsburg and Bourbon overlords. The patriots who fought for national independence in Italy’s Risorgimento were mostly from the north; annexation of the “corruptible” south was tantamount (in the words of one Piedmontese grandee) to “getting into bed with someone with smallpox”.

So Turin and not Rome became the first capital of united Italy. The city’s austerely arcaded piazzas and geometric avenues were considered a salubrious alternative to Rome’s dark, pestilential backstreets.

Hooper, who is Italy correspondent for the Economist, writes of the country's kickback and bribery culture, known as la bustarella ("the little envelope"), as well its football, film and food fads. Like many British expatriates, he is intoxicated by the jolly carnival of Italy: "What other people of comparable numbers can lay claim to such an extraordinary catalogue of achievements?" Such enthusiasm is a bit cringe-making.

Along the way, Hooper writes of the Italians’ enviable ability to make the best of a bad deal and even their gift for crisis management. (“How’s your crisis going?” Ronald Reagan asked an Italian politician in 1985. “Very well, thank you”, came the wry reply.)

The so-called values of the Risorgimento – unity and liberalism – were dealt a blow by Silvio Berlusconi, who has dominated Italy more effectively than Mussolini ever did. During his decade in power, Berlusconi used his TV channels to spread propaganda for his party and build a “videocracy” such as the world has never seen. Like Mussolini, Berlusconi provided entertainment for the masses (boobs, football, money) and patronage for family and friends. Today more than ever, Italians are weighed down by debts and doubts, as are all Europeans.

Entrepreneurial nous

Hooper is not, however, unduly pessimistic about Italy. The Italians remain a various and wonderful people, he says, with reserves of entrepreneurial nous and creativity. The country’s salvation will lie not with a slyboots politician such as Berlusconi, but with Italy’s legion of medium-sized firms.

And its banks. In contrast to banks in boom-bust Britain and America, Italian banks have never been prone to speculative, casino-style economics. In fact, Italian capitalism has rarely been about punters or gamblers; family-run firms, and the local banks that support them, thrive on budgetary stringency.

A model Italian company, in Hooper’s view, is Milan-based Luxottica, which produces the discreetly stylish Persol sunglasses, and gives the label “Made in Italy” a good name. But for all of Italy’s family-run success stories, tax evasion is widespread, beaches polluted and museums falling down. Corruption is now so widespread in Italy, indeed, that it would be difficult to imagine a property developer bothering to apply for planning permission, or a businessman not bribing an engineer for a speedy installation.

Hooper sees furbizia (cunning, foxiness) as a national characteristic, and Berlusconi was in many ways the embodiment of it. He put family and business ties before those of government; under Berlusconi, much of Italy became prey to sinister hoodlum financiers. Political power was sought, not for the common good, but for nefarious purposes.

In his chapter on organised crime, Of Mafias and Mafiosi, Hooper looks at the Cosa Nostra’s long-standing disregard for government rules and its growth in the absence of the state and civic values. From the post-Risorgimento 1860s onwards, Mafia members bullied their way into local power elites, whether Communist or Christian Democrat. The Mafia still performs childish initiation rituals that require blood from a pricked thumb, along with the swearing of pseudo-Masonic solemn oaths.

As Roberto Saviano showed in his powerful reportage, Gomorrah, the sprawling outskirts of Naples in particular generate ever larger flows of narcolire, the liquid currency of the world heroin trade. Morphine refineries masquerade as "couture" warehouses or construction firms. Proceeds from heroin are pumped into industrial waste disposal operations and the hundreds of textile shops run in Naples by the Chinese. (The Neapolitan Mafia, the Camorra, was ahead of the game, establishing business ties with Asia long before "legitimate" Italian companies did.)

For all that, says Hooper, Italy is not a particularly crime-ridden country. Organised crime is found elsewhere in the world, after all – Japan's Yakuza gangs predate the Camorra by some 100 years. Moreover, Mafia pentiti, or penitent ones, have helped to convict hundreds of politicos, big-time hustlers and shakedown artists.

Hooper is an uneven writer, his prose alternately overheated and cliche-ridden. (The British embassy in Rome, we are told, looks like “a colossal, concrete semiconductor, torn from the motherboard of a gargantuan computer”). A tendency to generalise does not help matters. (“No people on earth express themselves as visually as the Italians”).

On the whole, though, The Italians is a useful guide to the virtues and misdeeds of a nation long bedevilled by bad governance, but also blessed by magnificent art and rare physical beauty. To look out across the Bay of Naples is a visual education in the grand style; and Palermo, ragamuffin capital of Sicily, is an Arabo-Norman jewel.

To my knowledge, Sicily is the only place in the world where they make jasmine ice cream. It was the Arabs who bought ices and sherbets to southern Italy, and jasmine is surely a Saracen touch.

Ian Thomson’s biography Primo Levi: A Life is published by Vintage