This week, Fool’s Cap is in Italy, which is currently in the throes of an extended electoral campaign. As many people will know, Italy too has newspapers, some of which are not at all bad. Though not according to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, owner of the losing finalist in last year’s Champions League, who believes all newspapers, other than the ones he owns himself, to be in collusion with the forces of an international communist plot.
And as in Malta, there is no shortage of sages expounding their opinions on all shades of human endeavour in the papers. Indeed, possession of an opinion and a readiness to wield it seems to provide a livelihood for many Italians who might otherwise resort to a life of organised crime and bag-snatching, as so many of their compatriots have done. And because the country’s media is such a messy gruel of light entertainment, quizzes, improvised strip shows, sensationalism, carpet-bagging salesmanship and low journalism, there is no want of formats for these individuals to nestle themselves within.
Consider the case of one Giampiero Mughini, who most Maltese people will know as the Juventus-supporting boor that regularly crops up on some Sunday football programme or other. With the sense of shamelessness that only the supporter of such an unreconstructedly plutocratic sporting outfit could muster, he routinely bills himself as a polemicist, which is apparently considered in Italy to be a legitimate professional class.
Indeed, while my dictionary informs me that the English word ‘opinionist’ is to considered archaic, the Italian variant is bandied around with careless abandon, as though the practitioners of that dark art were somehow noble descendants of Cato himself. One should be mindful to distinguish the opinionista (a word that sounds uncannily like some Fleet Street neologism) from the columnist, who will in normal countries be relied on to provide a specific tone and style alongside the rash of standard, ill-informed views. In Italy, however, the essence rather than the form of the opinion is paramount, provided it comes from the mouth of a certified opinion-holder.
When the Saturday edition of Il Foglio, a paper owned by none other than Silvio Berlusconi’s wife, indulged in some gentle joshing of its beloved Prime Minister, it was done in a coordinated communion of erstwhile and current Mediaset trough-feeders, from the grotesque Guiliano Ferrara, once of Radio Londra and other similar programs, to Carlo Rossella, formerly head of TG5 and Berlusconi’s once-favoured nominee for the chairmanship of RAI, and Giampiero Mughini, who pockets weekly cheques in the football season for irritating the viewing public. The exercise of soft-pedal satire, at which the Italians are so adept, was designed effectively to convey the impression of an affable aptitude for self-mockery, which Berlusconi indulges in so frequently. Mercifully, most Italians recognise this oleaginous sycophancy for what it is, and will hopefully act accordingly on the given day.
But the opinionist does not need to be instrumentalised (another charmingly non-English Italianism) to become contemptible. In a way, the readers and correspondents of Italian newspapers are complicit in the Brahminisation of the columnist. In the Italian version of The Times, Il Corriere della Sera, a letters page editor sits in attendance awaiting the calls of counsel of his salivating readership. Though the requests of illumination from up on high, in this paper’s case from the patrician Sergio Romano, normally relate to current affairs, this need not necessarily the case. His long-standing predecessor Indro Montanelli, who left the post for reasons of death, was quite able to field questions about historical matters ranging as far back as the Napoleonic Wars, as he was in fact 250 years old and had been reporting conflict since the Battle of Austerlitz. Romano’s style, on the other hand, comes across as more schoolmasterly, and it is with its accordingly avuncular superciliousness that one Saturday, he answered a request for information about Cardinal Richlieu that sounded as though it had been written by a student preparing a school project. The letter:
“Mi piacerebbe leggere un suo «ritratto» di Armand-Jean Du Plessis, meglio noto come il cardinale Richelieu.
La sua azione politica, oltre alla sua leggendaria capacità, è fonte per me di grande ammirazione.
Lorenzo Trabalza”
Caro Trabalza,
debbo supporre che lei non sia stato, negli anni della sua adolescenza, un accanito lettore di Alexandre Dumas. Per i ragazzi che sono cresciuti divorando «I tre moschettieri» e «Vent’anni dopo», Richelieu è un prelato intrigante e maligno, continuamente intento a fabbricare trame e complotti contro le nobili figure del re e della regina… [and on and on, he continues in this vein]”
No comments:
Post a Comment