Articles by: Judith Harris

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    Berlusconi Back Again!


    ROME - He had no sooner bowed out the back door than former Premier Silvio Berlusconi came rushing back through the front door, and slammed it hard behind him. Only a few days ago Berlusconi had explained that he declined to run for premier again. Instead, he explained graciously, in the time freed up from politics, he would occupy himself with three primary and fulfilling tsks: promote his soccer club, mentor a university he has recently established, and devote his energies to charity, building hospitals for the needy in Africa.

     
    But never mind. In a stunning about-face in grand style, speaking on his own Channel 5 TV network to a cheering throng of supporters, he threatened to bring down in coming days the emergency government headed by economist Mario Monti. He blamed his country's economic woes on Angela Merkel's German austerity enforcers, an argument that will not fail to find sympathetic listeners here. And he vowed to continue the "modernization of Italy" left incomplete by his forced resignation last autumn. "I'm obliged to remain in the field in order to reform the justice planet," he explained. In an earlier phone interview with a TV Channel 5 interviewer he also said that he was compelled "to react against the barbarism." Behind the scenes he reportedly also whispered that it would be a good idea for Italy to be plunged into national general elections in January 2013; never mind that this would leave scant time for the primary elections that his own Partito della Liberta' (PdL) has been touting.
     
    In short, Berlusconi, who has dominated Italian politics for over seventeen years, is not leaving the political scene just yet. What happened? Well, after his dramatic announcement this week that he would not run again as premier, a lower court in Milan convicted him on Oct. 26 to a four-year prison sentence for fiscal fraud involving his TV network Mediaset, convicted of having paid out kickbacks on over-priced entertainment acquisitions.
     
    By all accounts the sentence after six years of stop-and-go trial hearings came as a shock to Berlusconi and his lawyers. Many here saw a connection between the two - that is, between Berlusconi's promise to "take a step backward" (this is the current phrase used to mean "bow out") one day and the court decision the next. Scuttlebutt would have it that his legal staff headed by Niccolo' Ghedini had talked an unwilling Berlusconi into announcing his withdrawal, in hopes that this would mollify the court sufficiently that the conviction would be toned down or dropped altogether. (This version presumes, of course, the unprovable: that Berlusconi's attorneys had received advance word of the conviction to come.)
     
    In the event, the court, under the guidance of the dignified and media-shy Judge Edoardo D'Avossa, was not mollified. On the contrary, there was insult on top of injury: Berlusconi, the court decreed, demonstrates a "natural tendency toward crime" (naturale capacita' a delinquire), and was guilty of sponsoring a criminal system to defraud the Italian state from tax revenue via off-shore companies created ad hoc by Berlusconi and his "most trusted advisors." Although three years of prison sentence were wiped out on legal technicalities, the one-year sentence stands along with prohibition to hold public office for five years.
     
    According to the court, his company managers at Fininvest/Mediaset inflated the costs of acquiring rights for foreign movies to be broadcast on Italian TV in order to create slush funds and dodge paying taxes on profits. Three thousand films in four years were purchased with something like 12,000 different contracts, in order to inflate the earnings between 2001 and 2003 by $50 million, said the court. . Some sales were completely "fictitious," according to the court, which found that altogether some $250 million remained in Fininvest coffers. An American producer accomplice named Frank Agrama was allegedly implicated, according to the prosecution.
     
    Despite the sentence, it is unlikely that Berlusconi will actually sit inside a prison cell. His age is one reason. Needless to say his lawyers are filing appeals, and judgments by two higher courts lie ahead with predictable long delays. Berlusconi's legal staff are protesting that this "incredible sentence" failed to take into account earlier decisions by the Italian supreme court, the Corte di Cassazione, and a Roman judge, who - they say - had already acquitted Berlusconi of the same charges.
     
    The news of Berlusconi's semi-resignation, his conviction and then his aggressive re-entry into active Italian politics went worldwide in a flash. BBC TV put the news ahead of a devastating report of mass murder by religious fanatics in a Burma village. And within minutes of the conviction an American commentator said jokingly that he hoped there would be a perp walk. Berlusconi himself called the sentence "intolerable" while PdL supporters called for the judges to be sent to jail. From Catholic centrist leader Pier Ferdinando Casini came the comment that Berlusconi, in his rapid about-face, risks finding himself alone because "there are a great number of moderate voters, decent people in the PdL, who won't be willing to put the country's future at risk."
     
    In recent public opinion polls the PdL the party created by Berlusconi and - before their split - Gianfranco Fini claims under 17% of the electorate, less than half of its support at the last elections in 2008 (38.7%). 


     
     
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    Monti: "Attacking Corruption is our Priority"


    ROME - Corruption costs, in Italy as elsewhere. But according to the Corte dei Conti (the Italian government's Court of Auditors), in Italy the costs here have become unsustainable, bringing from 25% to 40% in losses in industrial growth and business. Put another way, corruption means that to do business here costs from 25% to 40% more than it should, making countless Italian manufacturers uncompetitive by comparison with those elsewhere who are not being shaken down.

     
    A new 400-page study, presented Monday to Premier Mario Monti, is called the Rapporto della Commissione per lo studio e l'elaborazione di misure per la prevenzione della corruzione, or Report by the Commission for the Study and Development of Measures for the Prevention of Corruption, and is a group project directed by Roberto Garofoli of the Ministry for Public Administration. As an obviously concerned Premier Monti commented, "Corruption undermines confidence in the markets and in our companies, and we are losing investments from abroad. To attack corruption is a Government priority."
     
    Transparency International points out that Italian corruption has worsened in recent years. The perceived level of corruption - more formally known as the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) - posits Italy at number 69 down on the scale of countries, in the neighborhood of Ghana and Macedonia. Among the types of corruption, Transparency adds, is political corruption first and foremost. (An example from recent days: Domenico Zambetti, the Lombard regional politician, elected by the Partito della Liberta', who was hauled away in handcuffs Oct. 10 for having allegedly paid an 'Ndrangheta boss $250,000 for 4,000 votes.
     
    On the CPI scale of 1 to 10, Italy ranks 3.9 as compared with the European median of 6.9. This report goes on the say that the situation is actually worse than the Court of Auditors suggests because of such other costs as in administrative delays, dysfunctions in the public bureaucracy, public works that are sometimes futile and poor public services. The result is "an increase in creeping costs and an extraordinary increase in the costs of major public works."
     
    Although both these Italian and international reports indicate a worsening of corruption, prosecutions have dropped from 311 cases in 2009 to 223 in 2010, or by almost one-quarter. By the same token individuals charged with corruption have shrunk about one-third during the same period, from 1,821 during the same period to 1,226. Definitive court sentences echo this dismal trend, down from 1,700 in 1996 to 239 in 2006.
     
    Those with a long memory will recall that the Tangentopoli scandal that brought down the First Republic in 1992 began with a Socialist accused of corruption. Such was the outrage at the reports of corruption that Socialist party leader Bettino Craxi fled Italy. The majority Christian Democratic party was dissolved. "This is a second Tangentopoli, but worse," Monti's Justice Minister Paola Severino declared in an interview with Sky TV. "The quantity of cases that we are examining and that are under the eyes of us all makes this obvious...a series of extremely grave and diffuse cases of corruption, which are inserted within a framework of very serious political weakness. The very real needs of the country make these episodes extremely serious. Making money illegally from public funds while Italians are being asked to make sacrifices is of unequalled gravity."
     
    What is to be done? The Government is putting before Parliament an anti-corruption law which, it is hoped, will be passed within a month. But the political disputes continue. Nichi Vendola, speaking from the left, accuses what is still former Premier Silvio Berlusconi's party of being "obsessed" with attempts to block a new anti-corruption bill. In turn, Berlusconi's shadow, Fabrizio Chicchitto, retorts that, "Vendola lies knowing that he is lying," for the original anti-corruption bill was presented by the PdL itself in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, where, "It wasn't obstructionism, but a debate on the merits of the bill."
     
    It is a fact that the original anti-corruption bill was presented by Angelino Alfano when he was Justice Minister in 2010. With the fall of the Berlusconi Government, however, the punitive measures became considerably more severe. The measures this government proposes would increase the number of years before charges are automatically dropped under the statute of limitations (prescrizione).
     
    It is no coincidence that among the most ardent promoters of anti-corruption legislation is the financial daily Il Sole-24 Ore. An editorial Oct. 6 urged legislators to get busy. "'Hurry up,' we wrote, and we have repeated it often because we need a healthy economy, loyal competition, fiscal justice, growth, legality, public ethics. Honest citizens are paying too high a price and have been for too many years because of the political inertia caused by more than two decades of the spread of corruption." Political candidates with serious pending judicial inquiries would be prohibited from running for office.
     
    Corruption does not strike only on the highest level, of course. Moving downard, corruption also means giving buddies jobs which they fulfill in a sloppy way, if at all. One small example: a doctor vouchsafed that three members of the same family were blind and hence entitled to monthly welfare wages. Tax police from the Guardia di Finanza filmed them, and proved that their blindness was entirely fraudulent. Another phony blind individual at Tivoli near Rome got away with his fraudulent claims of complete blindness for 25 years, receiving in the meantime nearly half a million dollars.
     
    Another hideous example? When a tourist at Saint Peter's collapsed and was taken to a hospital in an ambulance, the driver requested payment of $1,600.
     
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    A Mussolini Painting Stirs Controversy

    Ouch. The painting was made by Aldo Castelli (1900-1965) in 1939, not exactly a great year for Italy and Europe, and the soldier portrayed is Mussolini, who aspired to restore the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world. In the event, only four years after this triumphalist portrait was painted, Mussolini would instead be removed from power by King Victor Emmanuel III. and in the end Mussolini would be responsible for Italy's losing a war and the deaths of 291,376 Italian military. More Italians would die in concentration camps in Italy, Germany and Poland. Others would die in the two years of civil war that followed Mussolini's flight from Rome and the division of the country in two.

    When local leftist politicians realized that Castelli's grandiose painting of Il Duce was hanging in a technical high school in Ascoli Piceno in the Marches on the Adriatic Coast, they not unreasonably raised a fuss. Students deomonstrated, and the organization of surviving partisan fighters ANPI was among those protesting along with the Partito Democratico (PD) and a group called Giovani Democratici (Young Dems). As a result, the painting was removed last week from the school wall, but not before the issue turned into a lively national debate. 

    "I thought of it as art," the school principal, Arturo Verna, has explained. "It is more anallegory than a portrait." At any rate he had the huge painting removed from the wall to avoid futile polemics, he went on to say in a letter to the PD provincial party organization, but "in reality the portrait of Mussolini has no ideological value" but rather an "historical and cultural significance" (finalità). CasaPound, the nationwide Fascistoid organization, protested that asking the painting's removal from the school wall is "Stalinist-style censorship from the ANPI [partisans' group] and the leftists", and that principal Verna is a coward who "lacks courage."  

    The artist's three children Fioretta, Paolo and Simonetta Castelli joined in the protests at the removal of the painting, which had been executed specifically to draw attention to the then novel institution of a technical high school, considered relatively democratic and pragmatic as opposed to the classical Italian liceo high school whose curriculum was and is based on studies of Latin, Greek and history.  "You are exposing our father to an unworthy trial by the media,"  his children protested. (See the video >>>) In a letter they said, "We find ourselves in the embarrassing situation of having to protect the memory of a dignified artists whose personal history, unknown to most people, was based upon a value system very far from Fascist ideology. We do not believe that any member of our family can be included among those who have not yet taken history int account." Our father is being called a Fascist propagandist, they went on to say, and "this has caused us pain beyond description." 

    It is easy enough to agree with the angry who want to painting removed. They include not only the surviving partisan fighters who risked their lives to save Italy from Fascism, but also concentration camp survivors and their children, who have been phoning in to talk shows, writing emails and sending irate letters. But a few Italian intellectuals--and not only from the right and far right--are asking for a distinction to be made between Fascism as a totally discredited political, military and ideological concept, and the arts developed during the twenty years of Italian Fascism. This distinction is already made by scholars the world over, including the two American scholars whom I accompanied on a tour of Italian Fascist architecture. The question becomes whether or not a painting can have a purely aesthetic value if it includes a portrait of Il Duce. That is, is only architecture pure enough, and sufficiently independent of ideology, that it can be appreciated but painting cannot? 

    This is a problem not only for Italians. The great poet Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite and supporter of both Mussolini and Hitler. After living in Italy throughout the Fascist era, he was deported forcibly to the United States in 1945. Because he had notoriously made broadcasts in Italy in favor of the Fascist cause, he was confined in a steel cage for 25 days and then was to be tried for treason in the United States. To avoid this, his friends managed to have him declared insane and confined in St. Elizabeth's hospital  for the criminally insane in Washington, DC. There he remained for more than a dozen years. Nevertheless he is considered one of the greatest of American poets, and his works are taught at U.S. universities. In his case a distinction is made between his writings and his belief system.

    Can the same be asked for Castelli? Is it right that the painting be removed from its wall (as it has)? This writer has no answer, but it would be interesting to hear what you readers have to say on this. Is the portrait a legitimate part of history by now? Or still too dangerous to be put on view? 
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    The Trial Inside the Vatican

    ROME - By the end of this week the Vatican press corps will know how the butler's crime is to be punished. The butler, Paolo Gabriele, was the pope's manservant who risks 4-1/2 years in an Italian jail after confessing to have leaked secret Vatican documents that wound up in a book. Reporter Gianluigi Nuzzi's Sua Sanita', Le carte segrete di Benedetto XVI (His Holiness, The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI), published by Chiarelettere, caused a sensation when it appeared in late May. Such was the scandal of what was immediately dubbed Vatileaks that Gabriele was arrested and held in a jail inside the independent state of the Vatican. Another arrest followed, an IT worker, also on trial as Gabriele's accomplice.
     

    What the Vatican press corps, and the outside world, will not know is more important than Gabriele's conviction, which is not in doubt. The Vatican, as an independent state, has the right to conduct trials as it chooses. This case illustrates those choices. First, Cristiana Arru, the woman who is serving as Gabriele's lawyer, is under a gag rule order and cannot speak to the press. Secondly, the charges and defense arguments are in writing only; there is no open debate and no cross questioning of witnesses although Gabriele is expected to answer questions from the presiding judge. Witnesses are identified not by name but only by letters, A,B, C, etc.
     
    This is important because it means that his motive, whatever it was, will not be explored. Third, for a trial which has generated interest all over the globes, there are few witnesses: a pool of only eight reporters, who change daily by lottery, can attend trial sessions. Finally, although only two individuals are on trial, all those with some inside knowledge of the Vatican are convinced that Gabriele was not in fact alone with a single henchman. Not even the name of his reverend confessor, who received photocopies of boxes of documents from Gabriele himself and frightened, burned them, has ever been released.

    Further complications are the forced resignation of Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the non-clerical president of the Vatican bank, the IOR, apparently as a result of an overly cooperative statement he made to Italian investigators on the trail of a suspicious multi-million-dollar deposit in an Italian bank branch from a still anonymous IOR account. The point is that international bank policing organizations and the Italian government as well have put pressure on the IOR to avoid any activities that might screen money-launderers. Some inside the Vatican, but not all by any means, argue for more transparency. Some of the leaked documents refer to this scandal.

    One banking detail did emerge at the first hearing on Sept. 29: that the E100,000 ($125,000) check found among the 82 boxes of papers found in Gabriele's apartment, apparently overlooked by him, had been given to the pontiff, not in Mexico (as had been reported), but last March during the pope's trip to Cuba by the rector of the University of Murcia in Spain. Among trial documents is a photocopy of the check and a photograph of a gold nugget that had similarly been given to the pope. The court decided, however, to take no action concerning this check.

    A particularly nasty business erupted at about the same time last Spring, when it emerged that a notorious mobster had been buried, on orders of a cardinal, inside an ancient and venerated church in downtown Rome. Possible reasons behind this suspect burial have ranged from the bizarre to the wicked: he was the cardinal's son; the mobster had given huge sums to the Church; the mobster had secret knowledge of a girl's murder and blackmailed the Church. No serious explanation has been offered.

    On Tuesday the pope's foremost aide, the German Mons. Georg Gaenswein, is to testify. He was the first to accuse the errant butler of stealing papal papers, which the butler initially denied but has now admitted. Gabriele spent over two months in solitary confinement. The trial is expected to wind up within the week, if for no other reason than that a synod of bishops from all over the world opens the following week. At this point the most Gabriele can hope is, following his conviction, an act of clemency from the Pontiff himself.

    Lacking news, the reporters have been having a field day harking back to ghastly trials that took place within Vatican walls hundreds of years ago.
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    Federalism Flounders (But What Next?)


    ROME - Renata Polverini's resignation Monday as President of the Lazio Region has given a severe jolt to an already shaky system. In the largest sense, the scandal of wasted and stolen political funds in the region around Rome symbolizes the failure of two decades of attempts to redress the excesses of state centralism that harked back through the postwar period into the Mussolini regime. Centralism collapsed under the weight of the political-judiciary scandals known as Mani Pulite (Operation Clean Hands), which began with an inquiry into Socialist party (PSI) corruption shenanigans in 1992 and ended with the collapse of the Italian First Republic. With that collapse came the demise of the three largest political parties: Christian Democracy, the PSI itself, and the Italian Communist party (PCI), already weakened by the collapse of the Berlin Wall.


    During the twenty years of the de facto Second Republic since then, a feeble leftist coalition ruled Italy for only three year under economist Romano Prodi before passing the hand to media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics for the next l7 years. Berlusconi's support rested upon the backing of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI); of the truculent populist Northern League, which preached decentralization via federalism, and of the nostalgic rightists of Alleanza Nazionale, heirs to the old postwar Italian Social Movement (MSI).


    The Polverini scandal marks a new sea change in Italian politics because it overturns the idea that decentralization is the solution to Italy's problems. By one estimate, local, provincial and regional governing bodies have wasted at the very least E 30 billion ($40 billion) and perhaps as much as E 70 billion ($85 billion). Despite there being some fine local administrations, localism, known here as federalism, is in disrepute,  and it is no coincidence that the entire family of the Northern League's sullied former leader Umberto Bossi is mired in corruption scandals. A sobering consequence, as many here point out, is that the now compromised local administrations were training and recruiting grounds for national office; now, no one knows where new recruits will be found.


    Polverini is, in her way, a Roman equivalent of Bossi. Born into a trade unionist family in 1962, she boasts of her just-folks origins, and became head of the small rightist trade union UGL in 2006. Running against her in early 2010 for regional president was an experienced Radical party leader, Emma Bonino.  Polverini won with the backing of the Italian bishops, to whom Radical policies in favor of abortion, birth control and euthanasia were and are anathema. Conservatives ate up Polverini's rightist version of populism, and Berlusconi's "People of Liberty" party (PdL) threw their considerable support behind her government.


    Even many leftists found Governor Polverini simpatica for her feisty ways. One day she took a big forkful of a favorite Roman pasta speciality, spaghetti all'Amatriciana, and stuffed it into the mouth of Umberto Bossi, saying, "There, admit it's good!" By this she meant that Northerner Bossi had better not underestimate Rome. The symbolic gesture increased her local popularity, and all the more so for her spilling tomato sauce, cheese and bacon down Bossi's shirt front. But then, as Polverini likes to say, "I'm not scared even of the Devil." One such devil is cancer, and when she was operated for a cancer this summer, she told no one.


    Nor did Berlusconi scare her off when he telephoned at the last minute Monday to try to dissuade her, for a second time, to desist from resigning. This time she not only refused to bow to PdL pressures, caused by that party's fear of national repercussions in elections slated for Spring, but she also publicly declared that the regional council she headed until Monday was "unworthy." Moreover, she vowed, she will "tell the hallucinating things I've seen here" and name names.


    Her resignation has brought praise from Catholic centrist politician Pier Ferdinando Casini, for one. Alessandro Barbano, editorialist of the Romans' favorite newspaper Il Messaggero, sentenced that, "It's a healthy gesture, that weakens some of the perverse energy that informs so many Italian affairs...verbose inertia, ambushes, toxins, poisons that turn it into an impotent caricature of itself." Contorted words, perhaps, but they evoke the climate.


    Just what made her decide, after two and a half years, to call it quits, if she had known this all along? First, she lost the support of the Italian Church, whose bishops say they are disgusted by the immorality revealed in the Laziogate affair, and have severely warned the country's clergy to remain neutral in any coming election. Secondly, there is a wave of citizens' disgust. At the official office of the Region in Rome's La Balduina neighborhood, a wall poster of a grinning Polverini was smeared with the word "Mignotta," a vulgar Romanaccia term for prostitute. A housewife stormed into that same office, saying, "Thieves! How could you steal money that was to go to our schools and hospitals?" Indeed, some hospitals have actually shut down sections for lack of funds and others, like that at Bracciano in Lazio, are close to shutting down entirely. In elementary schools in Lazio parents have come in to paint filthy walls, and children are being asked to bring their own toilet paper and supplies normally provided, down to writing paper.


    I asked a local architect his opinion of her resignation. "I drank a toast," he said. "But don't tell me she didn't know all that was going on a long time ago."
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    Not Only Polverini's Pigs


    ROME - Walk down a street - any street - in the region around Rome called Lazio, and ask a passerby what he thinks of this week's newest Italian corruption scandal, already dubbed "Laziogate." The answer: an eruption of outrage that makes the fireworks of the Fourth of July or Ferragosto pale by contrast. It is already formally admitted that elected regional political representatives have been helping themselves to millions of dollars of public funding, supposedly destined for "relations with voters," and squandering it on lavish dinners of oysters and champagne and other personal perks. Symbolizing the whole affair are photos, splashed in all the newspapers, right and left, of an ancient Roman-style toga party held a couple of years ago that supposedly evoked the Fellini film "Satyricon."


    In at least one photograph the governor of the Lazio Region, Renata Polverini, appears surrounded by grinning guys, girls in skimpy garb and geezers from her governing body, turned out in togas. Female members wore. In this descent into bad taste what took the cake were the big pig masks some party-goers wore.



     
    This was not Mardi Gras: it was hedonistic politics alla Romana, and no one is denying the charges. They are instead passing the parcel along to others they say are guilty. A key regional counselor, tubby Franco Fiorito, who is known to his buddies as "Er Batman," in a mix of English and Romanaccio dialect, was hauled in by police for questioning. Instead of taking the Italian equivalent of the Fifth, "Batman" told investigators that he's been disgusted at the goings-on, and had personally written a letter of warning to Polverini, who, he claims, did not bother to reply. "Batman" Fiorito then furnished investigators the names of those he considers guilty of theft from the public trough. A furious Polverini's reaction to the mountain of evidence of colossal sums of stolen and wasted public funds was to stand up in front of TV cameras inside the Regional assembly building, and courageously threaten to resign.
     
    This former trade union leader's governing coalition for Lazio has the backing of Berlusconi's PdL, and by Friday her show of repentance had dissipated, reportedly under pressure from fellow conservatives including Angelino Alfano of Silvio Berlusconi's Popolo della Liberta' party (PdL), and following a phone call from Silvio himself, fearful of his party's being branded the wrong way. On national TV Polverini explained, with pathos,  that she'd been upset enough that for the first time in her life she "took some drops to get to sleep." She'd known nothing of all the waste: "I did not know how much Fiorito spent because it was not my official business to know it." As for her spending some $100,000 a year on photographs, "And what am I supposed to do - cancel the history of the Lazio Region?"
     
    Nevertheless, the next day, Sept. 21, she bullied the Regional governing assembly members into making cuts in their perks (fewer free limos with drivers, no more funding for the tiniest political groups, whittling down from 19 to eight the number of well-paid members of the Regional administrative council). In the end, she withdrew her threat of resignation. And whyever should she quit? she added aggressively, "Bersani should explain to me why I should resign when no one made Lusi and Penati quit."
     
    She has a point: although Polverini is personally under an inquiry begun in 2011 by the Court of Accounts for misuse of public funds, she has plenty of company. When Pier Luigi Bersani, head of the left-leaning Partito Democratico (PD), was president of the Province of Milan, Filippo Penati headed his political office, a Rahm Emanuel to President Obama. Penati is under investigation for corruption by magistrates from Milan. Senator Luigi Lusi, former treasurer of a fledgling political party associated with Rome's former mayor Francesco Rutelli, was investigated by the Court of Accounts and formally accused of misappropriating public party funding in excess of $60 million which allegedly paid for biweekly $2,500 dinners, stays in luxury hotels like the Ritz Carlton in London and a vacation in the Bahamas.
     
    Polverini failed to mention two other official investigations into the goings-on in Palermo and Naples. In short, the North of Italy, the South of Italy and the center - Lazio - are all hotbeds of corruption to an extent which few here imagined, and involved off-shore bank accounts and private real estate investments, as well as toga parties.
     
    What makes all this particularly painful is that the evidence of the deep roots of corruption in politics smear the right, the center and the left. Few parties seem untouched - the Radical party is a noteworthy exception, but has a mere handful of votes. The scandals range moreover all over the country, with investigations underway in North, Center and South. It is plain that the economic crisis, which becomes more severe with each passing month, has prompted investigators to look harder for waste. But where were they a decade ago? And what will happen now? "This is worse than the scandals that ended the First Republic in 1992," one old Italian hand sentenced. "But where do we go from here? Who is to take charge?" Who indeed? Until the present election law is revised (and it has not been), the answer can only be one of legitimate concern.
     
    Sentenced Massimo Franco, editorialist for Corriere della Sera, "The year 2012 risks becoming the tomb of a way of governing, just as the judicial inquiries were two decades ago. The power vacuum that's on the horizon makes heads spin."
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    Italian Politics, from Topless to Toppling

    ROME - Who'd have ever thought that a photo of a topless princess could bear reflections on Italian politics? Italian political analysts, that's who, and nothing escapes their attention. So, Kate Middleton, wife of Prince William, is snapped by a paparazzo in France, and a sleazy French magazine runs the photos--not all of them, mind you, only a few. The British complain; the British press refuses to print them as an invasion of privacy; even Rupert Murdoch, who ran the photos of foolish Harry, declined to run these. At that point the English Royals announce they are suing the French magazine.

    And then what happens: an Italian magazine called "Chi" buys them and prints the photos in a26-page spread which at least some of those discarded by its French counterpart in sleaze. Why should we care? Because the magazine belongs to the mega-publisher Mondadori, which belongs to former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, who remains a possible candidate to succeed today's Premier Mario Monti. In printing the photos of Kate, pundits here point out, the invasive photos risk becoming a weight on Italian diplomacy should Berlusconi is ever again a head of government. No one is forgetting his vulgar comments about German Chancellor. According to the reliable Nick Pisa, Rome correspondent for the Daily Mail of London, in early July 2011, "Mr Berlusconi referred to the then 57-year-old Mrs Merkel as ‘an un****able fat ****’." Just to spite Berlusconi, moreover, a left-leaning newspaper here has just published photos of his daughter Marina, topless.

    Other fireworks involving Berlusconi come from his Mediaset company's reported bid to purchase the leading opposition TV network La7. This shoestring TV network has challenged both the three networks of the state system RAI and the trio of Berlusconi-owned Mediaset networks, and is the favorite of the Italian intelligentsia. Its popular anchorman Enrico Mentana announced Saturday night on live TV that he would resign in protest at what he considers a monopolistic maneuver.

    Berlusconi himself remains a canny possible candidate to try to succeed Monti. Economist Monti is widely tipped to succeed himself either in early national general elections in November or when regularly scheduled in the Spring. The ongoing quarrel over a revised electoral law remains unresolved, and Berlusconi maintains that he will make a bid only when he knows how that proposed revised electoral law will read. But Berlusconi, pushing 76, is not out of the running, and to prove it has gone on a diet, losing 15 pounds or so. The truly nasty here, scrutinizing him Sunday as he boarded a ship out of Venice for a party-organized cruise, added that he seems to have had a new face tweak.

    Spring will also bring the choosing of a new president to succeed Giorgio Napolitano, whose prestige remains high despite his stumbling over the relationship between presidency and the magistrature. In the meantime, Monti remains a possible candidate both to succeed himself as premier and to succeed Napolitano. But other names are bruited about including that of Romano Prodi. If it would be Monti, a new premier will be required, and here a certain jostling for position is already underway, with Monti's minister for industry (Ministro per lo Sviluppo Economico e Infrastruttura) Corrado Passera, 59, in pole position. Other undeclared candidates are Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, 65, industrialist, who is chairman of Ferrari and former chairman of Fiat SpA. A woman just may be in the race as well: Emma Marcegaglia, 47, former head of the national manufacturers association Confindustria, and - in recognition of her powerful family's industrial base - sometimes called "Lady Steel."

    In the meantime, the left-leaning Partito Democratico (PD) is gearing up for primary elections in coming weeks. The battle is engaged between the present leadership headed by Pierluigi Bersani, party secretary, and the more boyish looking (he is 37) mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi. Renzi's platform is essentially that it is time to kick out the old geezers. The left which Bersani, more than any other, continues to represent is, exactly as Berlusconi says, fragmented, with Nichi Vendola and Antonio Di Pietro all fighting for pieces of the same pie. Their primaries matter, for the PD leads the pack in all the national polls.

    If nothing else, unlike Berlusconi's PdL, where he remains the undisputed leader, the ongoing, endless inside quarrels show a lively debate underway in the party. Nevertheless, in the PD fray Bersani seems the likely victor: according to pollster IPR Marketing, as of last month he led the pack with 39% of the vote. But Renzi was not all that far behind with 30%, followed by Vendola, 25% (see www.sondaitalia.com). Among the others, as of last week Berlusconi's PdL had regained some of its lost consensus, and now stands at around 20% of the electorate, while the more radical Beppe Grillo, comic and politician, has dropped from his summer peak of 19% to 15% in mid-September.

    On the other hand, a substantial majority of voters tell pollsters that they are either uncertain about their vote, will throw away their ballots or stay home. At the moment, the winning coalition, which accounts for well over half the voters, is composed of indifference and disgust with all the parties, seen as toppling over under their own weight.
  • Art & Culture

    In Venice, the Other Biennale

    ROME - The Venice Biennale of films tends to steal the show, and why not? But there is a second Biennale, the 13th International Architecture Exhibition, which was inaugurated August 29 and - happily - continues through November 25 so that autumn visitors can roam its fascinating halls. Among its participants: Bernard Tschumi, who has offices in New York and Paris, and was the architect of the highly praised New Acropolis Museum.
     

    In its way this year's architecture Biennale is all the more important because it takes place exactly when the unique city of Venice itself is struggling over a tough architectural decision: to build or not to build the mammoth high-rise proposed and designed by the 92-year-old French fashion designer Pierre Cardin. Cardin was born in the Veneto, but left here at age two when his family moved to France, and he bills the project as his homage to his native region A model of the 60-story, 800-foot-tall mostly glass skyscraper he has offered to Venice is on view in the Biennale pavilions in the Giardini and the Arsenale (for full details of exhibits and meetings, see >>>

    Cardin's project has been described alternatively as a "spaceship that crashed into the lagoon, a shining fishing lure, or an illuminated mushroom," to quote the Associated Press. Elsewhere it's been called, snidely, "stuff for the emirs." Others say worse: that it is a monument to Cardin's arrogance, a "kitsch flower vase with views of Venice." To this observer it resembles most of all a gigantic food blender. But perhaps all this is beside the point, for, as one thoughtful critic has remarked: "In a horizontal area of the Venetian countryside, this is a vertical that produces nothing that is edible or exportable," but can nevertheless give bread to people in an area that is "at present avoided like the plague."

    Cardin's plan is for what he calls the "Palace of Light" to be would be built, at a cost of $3 billion, within 2015, he specifies, and would house private luxury apartments, a hotel, a fashion school, offices, conference center, movie theater, restaurants and shops. Most importantly, it is to be situated at the Marghera industrial port, a blighted district today sorely in need of the revival, which is what Cardin is proposing. This is all the more important, for Venice itself risks blight due to its reduction to a cruise ship stop for thousands of day-trippers, descending upon the city in droves from ships almost as big as Cardin's more discreetly removed skyscraper. These giant luxury liners overwhelm Venice and the few Venetians still residing there; today this city is home to 60,000 residents, 10,000 less than just six years ago (1996) and 100,000 less than in 1951. At 55,000, the daily tourist flux is almost as large as the resident population. "We're becoming just one big shopping center," a resident complained when teen fashion chain Benetton announced plans this summer to install a shopping center to overlook the Rialto Bridge and the oldest oudoor market in the city. 

    As a result, although there are plenty of protests that Cardin's glass food blender will overpower Venice, it would stand at a distance (unlike the multi-storied cruise ships) and, with luck give the sort of work to Venetians that will keep their city vital and real, as opposed to a mausoleum populated by day, like Pompeii, by zillions but empty by night. For these reasons, and because other private investment in Venice is not forthcoming, the city authorities are backing Cardin's project. The Italo-French engineer in charge of outfitting the building, Rodrigo Basilicati, has furthermore promised that the outfitting of the building, from furniture to tablecloths, will be entirely of Venetian manufacture. Cardin's people are also optimistic that they can meet the timetable. "The Empire State Building was built in 13 months," A final decision is expected this month.

    Besides those by Tschumi and Cardin himself, other exhibits at the Biennale are by a host of international architects from the U.S. (from Houston and Ann Arbor), Germany, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Portugal, France (a generous contingent), Great Britain, Belgium and Austria. This session's director is David Chipperfield. The Biennale began in 1980 under the guidance of an Italian star architect Paolo Portoghesi of Rome. Chipperfield says that the stress this season is upon "Common Ground"--the existence of an architectural culture that reflects "a common history, common ambitions, common predicaments and ideals."
  • Facts & Stories

    The President vs. the Magistrates

     ROME - The ongoing dispute that pits a courageous magistrate in Palermo against the much admired and admirable President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, is one of the saddest Italian stories ever told. For that matter, it is also hard to tell.

    The story begins with a sub rosa negotiation in 1992 between top Mafia bosses and representatives of the Italian state, purportedly including high military officers. Although some still question whether the negotiation took place at all, an Italian court is on record affirming that it did. As a result, many here are asking tough questions: was such a negotiation legal, who did it, in exchange for what, what were its consequences? Was this negotiation related to the Mafia murders of magistrate Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and, if so, how?

    From Palermo, prosecutor Antonio Ingroia is fighting to have those responsible for what he considers an illegal negotiation brought to trial. Most unfortunately for all concerned, the phone taps he ordered as part of his inquiry led straight into the Quirinal Palace (the Italian White House), where Nicola Mancino, one of a dozen men under investigation, was overheard appealing for help in dodging involvement in the Palermo inquiry. Although no one knows what was said, in two phone taps the President himself is heard speaking to Mancino. A former Senate president, Mancino was Interior Minister during the presumed negotiation. In a phone tap already in the public domain Mancino seems to express fears of being indicted for false testimony in a previous trial.

    That the conversations took place is certain, but what was said between Napolitano and Mancini is unknown, and probably never will be. The Quirinal Palace takes the view that the Italian constitution prohibits the tapping of Presidential telephone conversations. Since not everyone agrees on this, Napolitano himself asked the Constitutional Court (the Italian supreme court) to rule upon the legitimacy of the phone taps, on grounds that to allow them as trial evidence would create a precedent. This reduces the issue, as Professor Maurizio Viroli of Princeton University has put it, to the Court being asked to choose between declaring the head of state "untouchable" or abandoning the prosecutors in Palermo. Few believe the Court will find against the President. 

    Assuming that the negotiations actually took place, their apologists say that the decision to block Mafia mass murders and terrorist-style bombings of tourist sites gained time for the state to bring the Mafia to heel. The counter-arguments are, first, that the state took the exact opposite high moral ground when it refused to negotiate with the Red Brigades in order to save the life of Aldo Moro: what exactly was the difference? Secondly, the Mafia was not at all brought to heel--on the contrary, the work of all those who contributed to the success of the maxi-trial in Palermo was squandered when hundreds of convicted mafiosi were, apparently thanks to the alleged negotiations, released well ahead of time. Third, the Mafia seems to have been given carte blanche to go on with its newly precision-style murder campaign, with the resulting deaths of the inquiring magistrate Giovanni Falcone and prosecutor Paolo Borsellino. 

    Among those in Ingroia's investigation are politician Marcello dell'Utri, who spearheaded creation of the formidable Sicilian branch of Silvio Berlusconi's Partito della Liberta' (PdL) in 1992. Speaking for that party, one of its top leaders, Fabrizio Cicchitto, a former member of the clandestine P2 Masonic Lodge, criticized Ingroia for "violation of all the laws." An editorial in Giuliano Ferrara's rightist Il Foglio went further, in particularly shrill language. "The political puppet firecracker [Ingroia], who has been passed off as an anti-Mafia icon but unmasked, goes on aiming ever higher. Now he wants either to get rid of or to invalidate the head of state. He's a Taliban....with methods worthy of the Spanish Inquisition." 

    However, it is obvious that some of those leaping to the defense of Presidential prerogatives are using the conflict as a convenient way to curtail other Palermo investigations into the Mafia. As Ingroia himself said this week, "To reduce this to a clash between the Palermo Prosecutors and the Quirinal, and moreover [between me and] the President of the Republic, is distressing and essentially false.... It is obvious that the legitimate conflict of attribution raised by the Quirinal has been exploited to attack the Palermo prosecutors." 

    In his editorial Ferrara added that the very officials under investigation, who include military officers, were precisely those who "successfully penetrated the criminal organization of Cosa Nostra, and virtually destroyed it." This is more than debatable. The military wing of Cosa Nostra lost its cutting edge, money and world power as a result of the pressure put on it by the Sicilian magistracy in the 1980s with the help of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, as this reporter can testify. 

    In a broader sense, the Mafia depended upon Big Heroin from Southwest Asia, but were undercut in the Nineties by the cocaine traders of Latin America; by the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta working with the Russians; by the Camorra in Naples working with Chinese shipping importers; by manufacturers worldwide of synthetic drugs and others still. The Sicilian Mafia reverted successfully back to the door-to-door protection racket and to improving its connections in the North of Italy. 

    Even were this true, even if the Sicilian Mafia were substantially reduced in power, Italy owes it to Falcone and Borsellino that the full story behind their murders be investigated and known, and prosecutor Ingroia's work allowed to continue with robust support. For, as the subsequently martyred Judge Falcone once said, "To be left alone is to die." For the moment, the plan is for Ingroia to be shipped to a UN post in Latin America.
  • Facts & Stories

    Honoring the cultural heritage

    ROME - The good news is that UNESCO has just recognized five more Italian sites as part of the world's cultural heritage - that is, they meet the United Nations criteria because they are of universal cultural interest, are unique and are irreplaceable. The additions bring the number of  world heritage sites in Italy to 47, more than in any other country. Several dozen other Italian sites are also under consideration for future recognition, moreover. 

    There is also bad news: that Florentine Mayor Matteo Renzi has blocked engineer Maurizio Seracini's thirty-year search for a mysterious Leonardo Da Vinci masterpiece fresco, believed to exist - at least in part - on a wall in the 14th century town hall in Florence by.

    But first, UNESCO. The newest additions to the list of magnificent Italian cultural treasures begin with a series of ten buildings dating from the Arab-Norman period in Palermo. The others are the volcano Mount Etna; the hillside vineyards which produce the sparkling prosecco of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene; the National Park of the Sila and - of particular interest - the 1926 Olivetti "Borgo" of six workers' houses at Ivrea.  For a fascinating tour of these newly listed heritage sites, take the Internet photo tour called "Pedalando per i siti dell'Unesco," (Cycling through the UNESCO sites), a series of nineteen stunning photos by Alessandro Cristofoletti. See here.

    As a study by the Italian national statistics agency ISTAT, based on UNESCO data, showed, Italy placed just ahead of Spain in the number of world heritage sites, followed in this order by France, Germany, China, Mexico and the UK. Official UNESCO statistics released earlier this year showed that, of a world total of 936 heritage sites (725 of them considered "cultural," 183 "environmental," and 28 "mixed"), Italy had 44. Nevertheless, as culture critic cum blogger Federico Giannini has pointed out, an announcer of RAI TV's 2d channel nevertheless recently repeated the old and erroneous saw of Italy having "half" of the world's cultural heritage. 

    The number is huge at any rate, and ownership of such riches is no easy responsibility, as the search for the lost Leonardo in Florence illustrates. Around the year 1503 Leonardo Da Vinci painted a wall scene in the great Hall of the Five Hundred inside the 14th century Palazzo Vecchio of Florence showing the Battle of Anghiari, in which the Florentines defeated the forces of Milan. Considered by art critics to be among Leonardo's greatest masterpieces, it seems to have vanished even before it was finished, for still unknown reasons. Later, the wall was again painted, but this time by Giorgio Vasari, who covered the wall with another boastful battle scene, this one celebrating a Florentine victory at Marciano della Chiana. 

    The commission to Leonardo was granted by the Secretariate of the Florentine Republic, in the presence of Machiavelli; if not exactly a friend of Leonardo, the author of The Prince had a personality which intrigued Leonardo, and the two men are known to have spent time together. What remains today of Leonardo's painting - a few stunning preparatory sketches showing men on horseback in a battle to the death, and a drawing made by Peter Paul Rubens a century after Leonardo painted the wall - suggest that it was an extraordinary work of art.

    But if so, why was work on it left incomplete? One theory has been advanced by art historian Roberto Esposito, writing this week in the daily La Repubblica. According to Esposito, what made Leonardo's battle scene so exceptional was his analysis of the horses in the violence of the battle. Typically horses in battle scene represented the ultimate bestiality, but for Leonardo it was the men in battle reduced to bestiality, taking with them the horses. The few surviving preliminary drawings show "pure violence...enigmatic and extreme," to quote Esposito; was this all too dark vision what made Leonardo halt work on the fresco? 

    Beginning in the Seventies engineer Maurizio Seracini, who lives and works between Florence and San Diego, California, has been conducting a sophisticated search for traces of the lost Leonardo. In an interview some time ago Seracini told me that he believed that Vasari left what he could of the painting in a niche behind the Vasari-era wall.

    Hoping to rediscover the lost Leonardo, or at least a piece of the original, Seracini has utilized ultra high-tech tools to make a series of surgery-style keyhole explorations that, while only minimally damaging the Vasari, theoretically peek through the Vasari surface so as to see what lies below. Seracini's probes have generated worldwide interest, not surprisingly, and the U.S. National Geographic has been filming his efforts.

    Last November, Seracini reported in a press conference that he had found, behind the Vasari, traces of a color that only Leonardo is believed to have used at that time. Most importantly, the color traces prove that a painting does in fact exist in a space behind the Vasari wall, as if left there intentionally by the later artist.

    But poking keyholes into the Vasari did not suit everyone, and a prosecutor opened an inquiry - subsequently dropped - into possible damage. The Florentine administration was nevertheless put on the defensive. "My administration has made culture the keystone of our mandate," Mayor Renzi wrote Minister Ornaghi earlier this year. "The search for the Battle of Anghiari for us falls within the logic of investing in culture as a part of our city's identity."

    Nevertheless, last month the cultural overseer for Florence, Cristina Acidini, speaking on behalf of Italian Culture Minister Lorenzo Ornaghi, wrote Renzi that it would violate Italian law for Seracini to continue hunting for the lost Leonardo because of the risk of damage to the Vasari fresco. A disheartened Mayor Renzi had no choice but to accept the government's decision. 

    Renzi's response, in a letter to Ornaghi: "For almost five hundred years the Florentine community has been discussing the possibility that Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Battle of Anghiari is hidden in the Hall of the 500 behind a fresco by Vasari....  If the Minister fears authorizing what is constantly authorized all over the world, we will wait until a new government comes into office. We may have to wait a few months but we will see this research through to the end." 

    Professor Seracini's work is backed by the City of Florence, the University of California at San Diego, private sponsors, most recently coordinated by National Geographic. 

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