The Children of the Past

The Italian Brand

Many U.S., British and Canadian tourists and wealthy ex-pats really like Italy.  And in ways the Italians feel much the same way, especially the jingle from tourist money.  Just listen to the pop music or watch Italian movies or TV, much of which comes from the U.S. and Hollywood. Check out the T-shirts, many of which are in English. My take on this is that ‘Americans’ feel Italy is a ‘beach beneath the street’ kind of place, to turn a phrase from the Situationists on its head.  A place where ‘la dolce vita’ is really true.  Italy is imagined as one long beach town between two seas where people eat, drink, swim and shop in an ancient culture providing a refuge from the present.  Party towns like Florence/Firenze bring this out the most, as tens of thousands flock the streets eating and drinking long into the night.

Trying to Get Into the Uffizi Art Gallery, Firenze, Italy

FOOD

But is la dolce vita true?  Take the food.  In the small town I’m in in Tuscany, (Estruscany!) there might be 35-40 ristorantes, trattorias, osterias and enotecas.  All but one serve only Italian Tuscan food, though two have hamburgers in a small part of the menu.  The same limited cocktails are served – Negroni, Campari spritz, Aperol spritz and plain prosecco.  Most do have large Italian-only wine selections - but only Italian.  The menus look suspiciously familiar – the same dishes seem to be repeated. The cooks are trained not to deviate from old recipes.  Fusion is almost unknown. Multiply that by every other Italian town in this area and you can see the uniform, ingrown, nationalist slant to the food culture.  

Some of the larger towns are getting Asian food due to a recent influx of Chinese.  Our best meal in Venice was north African, but we only found the ristorante by accident.  For urban U.S. citizens who are adjacent to food cultures from all over the world, this is extremely odd.  The beer and cocktail culture in the U.S. is years ahead as well, though Italians have recently added small selections of birra.  Even U.S. pizza surpasses the Italian version. 

The pasta is almost all white; the wine is mostly alkaline due to the soil; everything is bathed in olive oil (much as I love olive oil there is a limit); and being a vegetarian or vegan is like being a leper who slipped out of the colony. Italy’s food has the feeling of small town rural fare located perhaps 20-30 years ago, though certainly more organic, unprocessed and local - which is its big strength.  Inevitably if you are in Italy, you begin to look for non-Italian restaurants.  So one 'leg' of the Italian vita is not so sweet.

Gringos, tourists and Italians enjoy public eating and drinking in the piazzas and narrow streets. It’s the view! Yet eating close to a passing crowd seems somewhat suspect.  It is a bit like showing off and that might be the point.  The display, the ability to afford, the view of those not eating or who cannot afford to pay that price, who instead subsist on cheap focaccia street sandwiches.  Food seems to be around which modern Italian 'culture' circulates, as the evening meal is the focus of the day.  Most of the ads on TV feature food.  Many Italians eat out frequently, though they don’t all visit higher-end places with white table-cloths, mulitiple wine glasses, service fees and priced water, as classes exist in Italy too.  They might eat just a simple and inexpensive pizze or spaghetti. (By the way, in nearly all of the world, tipping is not done, but in Italy higher-end ristorantes charge a low fee for service, though nowhere near 15-20%.  Sorry U.S. service workers, but something is wrong in the States regarding tipping.)

CULTURE

A visit to Florence/Firenze, Venice/Venezia or Siena cements a certain essential symbiosis between shopping and aesthetics.  Once you’ve taken in the archaic church Duomos, Renaissance art museums, religious icons, the same Madonnas and child and crucified Christs and other innumerable ancient museums while walking the narrow cobble-stone streets admiring the very old architecture, you have paid your obligatory cultural dues.   

After all that somewhat boring religious hokum you, the tourist, have earned your just deserts.  You can now enter shop after shop and buy, buy, buy or ristorante and eat, eat, eat or enoteca and drink, drink, drink.  Antiquated aesthetics becomes the justified background to this commercial foreground. Tourist dollars and euros and real estate sales to ex-pats have pumped massive amounts of money into chosen towns, which were poverty-stricken after WWII.  The ones that aren't, still are.

Along with you, most Italians are also out for food and a stroll.They enjoy Sunday mornings as well, as many of their main churches have been turned into art and architecture museums.  And when they do go to church, most attendees seem to be over 50 or 60.  Canes are common.

What you then notice is that Italy lives off this hoary cultural history as their ‘brand.’  Yet its present ‘high’ culture is not painting or icons or frescos or sculpture, not Leonardo or Michelangelo.  It is the commercial industrial art of Ducati and Moto Guzzi motorcycles; Maserati, Lamborghini, Ferrari and Alpha Romeo cars; Vespa scooters, Murano glass, world-class textile machines and Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Ferragamo and Versace clothing and accessories.  After all, its last real cultural explosion, long after pre-war WWII Futurist painting, was post-war Italian cinema.  This brought a plethora of neo-realism and post-neo-realism, political comedy and art-house wonders from world-famous directors like Pasolini, Bertolucci, Fellini, Pontecorvo, Wertmueller, De Sica, Rosselini, Visconti, Monicelli, Antonioni and Leone.  They made Italian culture known world-wide. But that kind of culture brand and 'vita' is over.

FILM

Fellini’s 1959 film “La Dolce Vita” (The Sweet Life) was a commentary about the sad empty state of present Roman life, not a celebration of the beach, gluttony and amore.  Like U.S. politicians who use Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” at rallies to promote patriotism, they have not listened to the lyrics.  Or in the Fellini case, they do not remember the actual point of the film.  Fellini’s last film in the 1990s commented on the takeover of Italy’s culture by commercialism, not actual la dolce vita.  The high Renaissance, the “David,” are ancient history. 

Anita Ekberg in Rome's Trevi Fountain in "La Dolce Vita."

The sad state of present Italian film is obvious.  In the late 1990s Italy had fewer movie theaters than France or Germany.  The highest-grossing films were consistently from the U.S. and Hollywood – 75% of those shown - while Italian movies were 14% of the total.  In the 1990s only 15 Italian films grossed 86% of the remaining tickets out of 150 Italian-produced films.   So quality Italian film culture, which was based on the anti-Church, anti-Mafia, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist ferment after WWII is now dead.  The heavy class-war years of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s fueled Italian cinema’s extension and they are over too.  Wonderful later films like “Cinema Paradiso” and “The Postman” provided codas.  Its last remaining survivor seems to be jumping Roberto Benigni, who not so recently turned a concentration camp into a vacation paradise for his son. (Refs. from P. Bondanella’s 2001 book “Italian Cinema.”)

New Claudia Cardinales, Sophia Lorens, Anita Ekbergs or Marcello Mastroiannis won’t be flouncing down your cobble-stone street anytime soon.

POLITICS

There is a larger organized fascist movement in Italy than even the U.S., given the history of Italy and Mussolini.  Rightists still make pilgrimages to Mussolini’s small rural birthplace in northern Italy, Predappio.  Italy was, after all, on the wrong side of the last World War, collaborating with Hitler, enthusiastically sending troops to invade the USSR.  Recently the present far-rightist Salvini was just stymied from taking national power.  Now he has promised to stage another “March On Rome” later this October.  This ‘march’ echoes Mussolini’s call for a ‘march on Roma’ before he took power in 1922 with the blessing of the Italian capitalist establishment. The Vatican is still a stronghold of the Italian right, and still holds enormous political and financial power, even given its long history of scandals.  It owns more real estate than anyone else in the country.  This ache for the ‘power of the past’ is what motivates all rightists.  Not so sweet.

Now that the Italian Communist Party is history and the effort by Rifondazione (Communst Refoundation Party) to bring together ex-CPers, Trotskyists, Maoists, Stalinists and assorted leftists has foundered, politics in Italy is also floundering for those at the bottom of the class ladder, rural or urban. African immigrants are shunned by landowners to the point where few can get paying work from olive or grape farms and subsist on selling trinkets while being homeless. In the cities some are getting the lowest jobs as laborers, doormen or restaurant help – but then this is no different from the U.S. and Latino or African immigrants.  This is a mostly rural country with little ethnic diversity and that rurality mitigates the proletarian influence of Milan or Turin or Rome, though poorly-paid Italian proletarians subsist in every town and village.  Labor in Italy is at present weak and the capos and padrones rule. 

I won't get into the health or vacation policies in Italy, which surpass the U.S. by a mile.  These and other advances are the product of the massive proletarian left that existed at one time in Italy.  Whether these gains will last is another matter.

 

So why do U.S. tourists and moneyed ex-pats love an insular, rural and seemingly apolitical country that lives in the past?  The question answers itself.  Living under the warm Tuscan sun is not just a movie.  Italy has the weather, agrarian isolation and culturally retrograde nature of the U.S. south.  It is like Florida on a really, really good day or like an imaginary beach town in California - though not California’s version of Venice.  It is ‘the beach beneath the street,’ set in a mostly curated and sculpted nature, a supposed escape from modernity, trouble and strife. It is above all, a commercial, aesthetic brand with its slogan ‘la dolce vita’ as a beguiling come-on.  But of course no place can actually provide a real escape or the permanent sweet life.  Italy provides an ostensible substitute for those tourists who don’t want to go a little deeper.

Friday - Rome General Strike Against Incompetent Mayor and Condition of City.  The Forze Proletariano.

In Firenze, there is a famous statue by Michelangelo, "The David," depicting the very naked and very human David on a massive scale staring southward towards Rome, the center of the retrograde Papacy and quite clearly the archaic Goliath in this Renaissance morality tale.  The question remains for leftists, where is the new 'David', the new Renaissance, the new forze proletariano which can conquer the retrograde capitalist Goliath? Certainly not in la dolce vita imitazione. 

P.S. - as my contribution to Italian 'fusion' I made up this drink - an Italian G&T. - 1/3rd Gin, 1/3rd Tonic, 1/3rd Prosecco.  Better!

 

Other reviews on Italian issues below, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Dark Heart of Italy,” “The Unseen,” “Amiable With Big Teeth,” “Spartacus,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “American Vandal – Mark Twain Abroad,” “La Biennale Arte 2019,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “A Travelers Tale.”

The Cultural Marxist

October 16, 2019