The Dark Heart of Italy

When I saw the title of this, at first I thought, "hatchet job". But even the introduction drew me right in. I love to travel, and it's always easy to think the grass is greener elsewhere. That's why now and then I like to get a more critical view of a place. It's easy to be seduced by a place as beautiful as Italy. This book does a beautiful job of presenting a portrait of Italian life. As an example, the byzantine process of buying a house there left me shaking my head. And the peculiar ways of the government and religious establishment are mind-boggling. Yet, he clearly loves it there, and points out the everyday beauty of life there very well. Somebody made a fairly sarcastic comment about how Jones thinks Italy is a beautiful place as long as you eliminate the people. To me, this person got it entirely backwards. If anything, Jones is saying that the people, the language, the artisan stores, the conversations, and the amateur football are beautiful, it's the government that ruins the situation, and guess who is at the helm? The guy who owns half the country. No conflict of interest there. But Jones even admits that there are things about Berlusconi that he does like. Of course, I'm sure that many readers can't tolerate a critical view of anything that they have personal feelings for, but that's another woeful topic entirely. I did bog down a bit in the descriptions of the many political scandals. There are so many of them that one would probably need a timeline or chart to keep them straight. The many stories of individual Italians are delightful. The very old lady at the football game hilariously stands out. I suppose he could have been less controversial by calling it something like The Complex Heart of Italy, but I can't blame him at all for having a bold title, and I think it's more effective. All in all, a great read!

This is a cleverly constructed book of several parts and a few recurring motifs. Jones, a Welsh Methodist, Everton FC supporter, London hack and Oxford (Arts?) graduate, goes to live in Parma, Italy where his beloved has established herself. He divides his book into nine separate chapters and tries to weave them together as well as his excellent English and his motifs will allow. The first chapter discusses nuances of the Italian language and he uses those nuances to propound that Italy is a much more nuanced country than England and that its culture is infinitely more refined. An entire chapter brings the nuances of Italian culture to bear on football and he waxes very lyrical about the local youth and whatever immigrants are around playing ball as the sun goes down. The football allows us to place Italian village life in our minds and to empathize very much with it. The last chapter is an entire ode to Italy. It is written largely in the second person and it tells of "you" going through the village and everything there appealing to the aesthetic in "you". The English is beautiful and it achieves its purpose in making you close the book with a warm glow. Mission accomplished. The chapter on Italy's Catholic religion and its Protestant and other minorities could have done with much improvement. Italy's Catholicism is more complicated than the Padre Pio cult and the Protestants of the north surely have their faults as well. The chapter looks like it came from several previous publications he wrote. The politics chapters build on the hypothesis that the fascist and proto communist factions are still at war with each other and that politicians like Berlusconi exploit this for their own nefarious ends. He does a good job of tying the warring World War Two factions in with the protagonists and antagonists of later squabbles. He does not like Berlusconi and his polished prose does not quite hide this fact. My opinion of this book is that Jones sat down with his material and tied it all together into a very passable but rather superficial book which is nevertheless well worth the money being charged.

Tobias Jones circles toward the center of subjects that are not entirely polite to even bring up: cultural differences between Catholics and Protestants, the distinctions between Northern and Southern Europeans, and very specifically between the English and the Italians. The topics would be difficult ones for any writer to approach seriously because they are so riddled with stereotypes, prejudice and folklore. I thought Tobias Jones made very good job of it. He writes beautifully - you can tell immediately, in the first few lines of the book, that he is an exceptionally gifted writer and observer. He starts with the useful and understandable idea that Italy is a visual culture, and that England is a verbal culture. Italy is beautiful, the Italians are beautiful, the art is breathtakingly beautiful, etc. England is not so beautiful. The light is bad. The art is not that great. The English culture is Verbal rather than visual. The English read a lot. Italians do not read very much. Statistics are presented to support this assertion. Italy is a picture culture and quite susceptible (therefore) to television. This is politically significant because Berlusconi is a television magnate - he owns or controls almost every TV channel. (Imagine Fox News on every channel in the US. And imagine Rupert Murdoch as President.) The visual/verbal distinction seems to be a core idea of the book. It turns out to be a Catholic/Protestant divide; At one time, both England and Italy were more like modern Italy -- visual, artistic and deeply Catholic. Then came Henry XVIII, and the Anglican Church. The reformation was a verbal revolution against a religion based on striking imagery, and the revolution was made to work by massively printing and spreading the Word, i.e., the King James Bible. And insisting that the power of the Word was accessible to readers. The difference between Italy and Britain is to be understood (in this book anyway) as the difference between a warm country where stories are told with pictures painted on the ceilings of churches - and on the screens of the TV -- and a cold country where stories are told with words. The verbal English are more informed, skeptical, argumentative. The artistic Italians are a little too beautiful and a little too credulous. The author is caught up in the tension between his two cultures, image and word, ancient and modern. As an organizing principle, it actually seems to work pretty well; it seems to discover the roots of a lot of Italian behavior that would otherwise remain mysterious to the Anglo-Saxons. He also suggests that the Catholic Church is the prototype, or template, for virtually every other important Italian institution: including football and especially the Law. Italy has more laws than any other country. As a canon, the law is incomprehensible to ordinary citizens, who must turn to lawyers to have the law explained. The role of the lawyer as an interlocutor, that is, as a priest, is em

After all the praise for Tuscany and the Italian charms, let's welcome a realistic discussion by an Englishman who was disappointed after living a few years in Italy. It's funny how hasty tourists usually celebrate Italy while those who actually live there, like Jones, or Tim Parks, or Donna Leon, find a lot of negative aspects. Probably, this comes from the fact that Italians nurture appearances ("bella figura") while hiding their true feelings. So, when strangers get to know the real Italy, they feel betrayed. In the past, strangers felt obliged to be nice to Italians who were economically underdeveloped compared to northern Europeans. Today central and northern Italy has a per-capita income which is 20% higher than the average income in France, Germany or the UK. It is time to judge Italians without condescension.

If your interest in Italy goes beyond travel guides to Tuscany, Florence, and Rome (which I have also reviewed on this website), you might find this analysis of Italian politics and society at the turn of the century very informative. Even while I was enjoying monuments and countryside in Venice and Tuscany, I found it hard to put down the sober assessment of Italian society and politics in this book which I picked up in a Roman bookstore.For Jones, a British author, is not an occasional visitor to Italy, but instead spent four years travelling through the Italian peninsula seeking to unravel some of its enigmatic political institutions and attitudes. Much of the book is solidly researched and he extensively draws from numerous references in Italian which he translates himself. Knowing well that much of this beautiful country is well described elsewhere, he does not seek to prettify any of the issues he discusses, whether it is political corruption (a major theme of the book), religion, or football.For example, his chapter on the workings of Italy's Slaughter Commission, a parlimentary investigation into a series of bloody bombings in Italian cities from the 1960s to the 1980s, is a chilling account of paralysis of Italian political institutions. Documenting the almost surreal investigation of the Piazza Fontana bombings of 1969, he observes: QUOTE The irony is that Italy, so painfully legalistic, is as a result almost lawless. If you've got so many laws, they can do anything for you. You can twist them, reaarange them, rewrite them. Here, laws or facts are like playing cards: you simply have to shuffle them and fan them out to suit yourself UNQUOTEAs the title suggests, this book is a far cry from the more bucolic images found in Italian travel guides. I found it highly readable and insightful.