An Ideal Journey Through Italy: Modern Characteristics of Historic Regions
by GUIDO PIOVENE
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No COUNTRY in Europe can compare with Italy in the variety of its landscapes or in the multiplicity of its art forms, regional characteristics and local customs. This multiformity, evident from the mountains of the Trentino and the Po Valley in the North to Sicily in the extreme South, is greater than in France or even Spain, perhaps even greater than in any other country.
Italy is only in part European in the way France and Germany can claim to be European. In other ways it belongs to the unmistakable family of Mediterranean peoples. Where it is European, it is so in a clear-cut way, witht ies that arcdeep and strong; where it is Mediterranean, it is so in just as unequivocal a fashion; in sum, there exist in Italy a North and South whose characteristics are more northern and more southern than mere geography might tend to indicate. On the other hand, its very form as a peninsula extending gradually from a green, humid, foggy North toward an almost tropical South which looks across to the coasts of Africa; the foreign invasions that have swept in from the Mediterranean or down the Alps; constant internal migrations and shifting of populations . . . all these have contributed to the formation of endless gradations and amalgams between the two extremes. Rome, the capital, is itself a metropolis of mixed characteristics — the only metropolis destined to be half Mediterranean and half European. This diversity may make the Italians appear, at first glance, to be a people lacking in cohesion. After the achievement of national unity in 1870, Italy continued to have, alongside her official capital, many unofficial, de facto capitals — Milan, Naples, Florence and Venice — each of which has always functioned as the center and symbol of a particularized culture. It is safe to say that every large provincial city in Italy—from Verona to Bologna, Siena to Lucca, Perugia to Aquila, Bari to Palermo —is still a capital, on however modest a scale. The civilization of Italy has always been differentiated and diluted, varied and diffuse;Italy’s leading cities are therefore more “provincial” than any foreign metropolis of corresponding size, but in compensation the province in Italy is, on the whole, more “metropolitan.” Italy is a nation with virtually no dead zones, and when such exist, they are quickly restored to life as soon as something systematic is done to abolish the oppressive poverty that is at the root of their troubles.
Traveling in Italy, for the person who is interested in more than a superficial tour, is pleasant in the extreme, but not without difficulties. To begin with, it is essential to bear in mind that the warp and woof of the national fabric is delicate, ever changing and without breaks. In Italy, the periphery is as important as the core, the province as vital as the great urban centers. It is advisable to discount the anti-Northeern bias reflected in some of the literature dealing with Italy — the notion that the South is more Italian and therefore more interesting than the North. Italy is as typically
Italian in the North as it is in the South and in the Center, although in different ways.
The great flowerings of art —of the visual arts in particular — and the pressing need to wrest sustenance from a territory as limited as Italy have humanized the countryside to such a degree that it is usually enough to look at a region to make out the temperament of its inhabitants. The landscapes of Venezia, for instance, are the most quintessentially filtered of all Italian landscapes. Venezia, looking more like the paintings it has inspired than actual reality, takes bemused delight in its own charms. A veil of barely perceptible exoticism, a semi-Oriental light, hang over everything, from the foothills of the Alps to the busy market squares where piles of vari-colored fruits and vegetables gleam like precious stones. The visitor cannot help feeling that he is among a people who take a frank pleasure in the picturesque and who enjoy watching the parade of life as it unfolds: a conservative people, preferring chiaroscuro to sharp contrasts, averse to unhappiness, shrewd in their observations but loath to pronounce harsh judgments on the reality of things, and tending always to achieve a compromise between their mordant psychological acumen and the danger of being carried away by it.
Venezia is among the most intelligent yet least revolutionary of Italian regions. It prolongs the tradition which enabled Venice during the fifteenth century to go on building its palaces in a wondrously refined Gothic style when the Renaissance was already securely established in Florence. Verona, Vicenza, Treviso and Padua are the cities and provinces of the mainland in which the civilization of Venezia found its purest expression, and Venice was once their metropolis. It is impossible, of course, to pin-point the marvels of this city which offers an endless series of images to satisfy every whim and taste. Built over an agglomeration of islands, Venice has become the world’s most human city. It is like one big house — the streets are its corridors. The most frequently used means of locomotion is also the most human: the legs. He who sees it only from a gondola gets little more than a glimpse of the lifeless Venice of the decadents. Venice reveals itself only to those who are willing to see it on foot. The overcrowding of its houses, often dark and crumbling, has driven the Venetians into the streets which serve them as additions to their homes. In its own way the street also becomes a giant interior and is by turns kitchen, dining room, pantry, kindergarten, living room, theater, laundry and workshop.
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NORTHEAST of Venice, beyond the Tagliamento River, lies that wonderful but little known section of Italy called Friuli. Gone are the hazy, opalescent tints and diaphanous mists that are the essence of Venice. On these peaks all is sharp contrast, dynamic color, vibrant in the metallic shimmer peculiar to sea air which has somehow found its way to these lofty heights. In Friuli, Slavic and Germanic elements have been grafted to the native trunk, and there appear vestiges of an Orient less fanciful and exotic and more earthbound than that of Venice. Here too is Cividale, with its impressive remains of a Longobard city of the Middle Ages.
To the west of Venezia lies Lombardy, where the picturesque and the nostalgic give way to a civilization rooted in practical realities. Lombardy, and Milan, its chief city, form together one of Europe’s wealthiest zones, an anomalous insert in a nation that is poor as a whole. Milan and its suburbs are the heart of Italy’s heavy industry, while to the south lies a great agricultural belt, now organized on an almost industrial scale, which leads in the production of wheat, dairy foods and livestock. The vitality of Milan, its complex of tall new buildings and the systematic planned modernism of its facade, suggest an “American” city, but this would be too superficial a generalization. The Po Valley, with Milan as its hub, is a world apart, unique in Europe. This rich earth, made still more fertile by scientific irrigation, inhabited by an active, energetic population whose main interests revolve about industry and commerce, is studded with steel factories that rise alongside Romanesque churches whose walls are covered with primitive bas-reliefs. Ultra-modern store fronts stand in the heart of time-worn medieval towns; skyscrapers cluster on the outskirts of museum cities.
Learned, courtly Pavia is the center of the dairy belt; Vigevano, seat of the once warring Visconti family, boasting a magnificent ancient square, lies among the rice paddies; history-ridden Bergamo, birthplace of the great Renaissance condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, now nestles peacefully against the mountains; Castiglione Olona, with its rare Masolino frescoes, graces the industrial and commercial zones of the Varese; the hills of Brianza and the sparkling Italian lakes — Como, Garda and Maggiore — with their lovely villas and fragrant old gardens add their lyric touch of eighteenthcentury, neo-classical charm. In this land of startling juxtapositions, melodrama is at home and it is no wonder that it has found its rightful temple in La Scala, Milan’s celebrated opera house.
Turin, the metropolis of the Piedmont and home of the great Fiat automobile works, is the most “French” of Italian cities. Janus-like, it has two faces: an austere one and a smiling one. Completely avant-garde in the field of industrial research, Turin is yet the most “closed” of Italian cities, the most conservative in its resistance to all that is “new,” and jealous of its privacy. The Piedmont region is an amazing mixture of progressive ideas and traditional conformity. The most imaginative experiment in labor-management relations and coordinated industrial planning and social work is presently being conducted at the Olivetti typewriter plant, located in the small town of Ivrea. Italy’s only compact group of native Protestants—the Valdesians — live in the high valleys of Piedmont’s mountains, but Turin’s Catholic institutions are second only to Rome’s in scope and splendor.
Coining down to the Ligurian coast, we find Genoa an entirely different kind of seaport than Venice. Genoa rises like a tower-city from the cliffs and steep ravines which surround a deep harbor. On the slopes modern buildings climb over one another in a scramble for air and sunlight, while the narrow, winding streets and alleys of the old port below teem with a vigorous plebeian life that is reflected in the culinary specialties of this region, as hot and tangy as the cuisine of Venice is delicate and bland.
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As ONE descends toward the South, the Mediterranean characteristics of Italy become more and more pronounced. Emilia, which nearly spans the peninsula just below Lombardy and Venezia, has been one of Italy’s most turbulent regions. This blood-sodden land, sensual in its cuisine and sensual in love, is extremist in politics. But it is an emotional rather than a reasoned extremism. The myths of the revolution, of a new order, of redeeming social movements have been felt with the impact of a physical and, as it were, visionary experience. Great art centers such as Piacenza, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Cesena and Ravenna — whose Byzantine mosaics reach a perfection never attained in the Orient — grace this region, which through the centuries was swept by surging tides of violent and heady passions. Ferrara, purest and most magical creation of the Renaissance, is also the capital of those nomadic Italian agricultural workers of gypsylike nature known as braccianti.
South of Emilia lies Tuscany, with a countryside that is exquisite in the precision and rigor of its design; its clear-cut perfection, shunning the superfluous, is of a severity which its graceful lines barely succeed in concealing. In these hills there are none of the languid and fantastic elements common to Venezia. The very landscape of Tuscany is “intellectual,” as if imbued with the pervasive keen-mindedness of its people. Here lives the most intelligent, or, at least, the most critical element of Italy’s population. The Tuscans are dominated by intellectual realism. They have an anti-rhetorical vision of life and human nature — an impelling need of clarity — which prevails over any desire to be or believe themselves happy. The extremism, the sectarianism so often evident in the political life of Tuscany has very different origins from the extremism of Emilia. It is grounded in the need to push truth to its ultimate consequences, and to pit reality against illusion. This intellectual gusto is apparent in every facet of Tuscan life, from Florence, that sublime masterpiece in stone, to Siena, as perfect as a skeleton — “a single animal, complete with head, heart, arteries and paws, of which there remains only the skeleton, almost intact, lying over three hills,” as Bernard Berenson once described it to me. Yet even ancient Siena is afire with life. Tuscany is Italy at maximum tension.
This tension becomes tempered as we move south and east into Umbria and The Marches, whose unassuming, composed beauty is the embodiment of the median Italian character. Here the most heterogeneous elements have been most successfully fused.
Before venturing into the South, a cautionary premise is necessary. The South, or the “Mezzogiorno” as we usually call it, is a term of convenience which corresponds to no reality. The South of Italy is not uniform in character but as differentiated as the rest of the country. There are various kinds of so-called “South.” In such a city as Naples, the “South” is gay, loquacious, expansive; in other parts it is silent, hidden, mysterious. Too often the South is dismissed as a last stronghold of classical, humanistic, anti-technical culture, now in full decline. This impression springs from the long isolation in which the region has stagnated, unable to explore or test its technical abilities.
Naples is a place unto itself. This amazing city grows more and more beautiful as she reveals the inexhaustible store of her secrets. There is the perspective of her spectacular setting that emerges in all its ancient, mythical beauty. Off-shore, in the unreal, emerald-sapphire waters of the bay, islands and promontories glitter like rock crystal at sunset. And around the city, particularly on the slopes of Vesuvius, lie the most fertile and enchanting truck gardens and orchards of Italy. Here the sheer physical joy of being alive takes over; material needs become unimportant; man enters a state of natural sobriety and sheds the bondage of timetables. To enjoy Naples, take her as she is; capitulate to her way of life. Her busy streets and crowded, colorful back alleys can then convey the feeling of life as it must have been in a metropolis of the ancient world. And this classical metropolis extends from Pompeii and Herculaneum, where the cornédie humaine of Roman times has been preserved, to a poelie spot such as Cumae, where the lonely grotto of the Virgilian Sibyl is still enveloped in a sacred silence as suggestive in its way as the spiritual peace of Assisi in Umbria.
Other yardsticks are needed to understand the secret, tragic “South” of Abruzzi, Lucania, Apulia, and Calabria. Cut off by great torrents that rush into deep valleys, Calabria, the “toe of the Italian boot,” is the strangest of our regions and the hardest to define. A great deal has been written about its poverty. Much is now being done to develop this area but nothing less than a vast project along the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority will serve to solve problems created by centuries of neglect, erosion and decadence. Visually, Calabria is magnificent and startling. Certain mountainous areas, particularly the Sila, where stand the most stately of Italy’s forests, recall Scandinavia. The Tyrrhenian coast resembles the coastal region around Naples in coloration and in the painstaking skills that go into its diversified agriculture. On the other hand, certain valleys look like the canyons of the Colorado River. Along the Ionian coast, land reclamation projects are flanked by stretches of spectral, lunar deserts cleft by swollen streams that spill down from the mountains, producing landscapes of Byzantine grandeur and despair. But just around the corner, the cape of Reggio is covered with wild jasmine and groves of bergamot orange trees.
Ancient Apulia, the “heel of the boot,” gives the lie to anyone laboring under the mistaken impression that the South is dirty. Nowhere is the love of cleanliness pushed to such extremes. Everything sparkles, including the houses of the poor which, while reduced to the bare essentials, always look freshly scrubbed, polished and whitewashed. Apulia is secret, gentle, withdrawn, well-mannered, softspoken. It is a land of Romanesque cathedrals and medieval castles. Octagonal-shaped Castel del Monte with its eight symmetrical towers, standing solitary on its hill, is a tribute to the beauty of geometry, a medieval anticipation of the Renaissance. The taste for the geometric is carried over to the trulli, those primitive peasant dwellings crowned by conical-shaped cupola roofs which make some of the Apulian valleys look like the ancient tent grounds of some exotic army. The old port of Taranto with its open fish market piled high with every conceivable type of fish, mollusk and crustacean, might well be an illustration out of a book of Oriental tales. Apulia is truly legendary and this quality grows the farther one goes toward the heel of the boot, reaching a climax in the Salento region and in the city of Lecce with its ornate, refined baroque style. Here one encounters a culture-loving, lighthearted, slightly ironical population that betrays few of the accepted Mediterranean physical characteristics, being for the most part fair-skinned and blond.
In Sicily, history has blended elements from Greek, Roman, Arabic, Spanish and Norman civilizations. These surviving strains take on dramatic intensity in the present transitional phase of the island’s astonishing modern development. Palermo has its jewel-like marvels of Arabic architecture, Noto and Catania, their fabulous, lyrical baroque. The glowing, luxuriant Greece of Syracuse, Agrigento, Selinunte and Segeste, is so different from real Greece. And interwoven in all this, the challenge of modern technology and the drive toward industrialization are symbolized by the oil wells rising on the ancient, sun-baked soil of Ragusa.
Our other large island, Sardinia, is in many ways very different from the rest of the Italian South. Never conquered in the real sense of the word, Sardinia has remained extraneous to the great civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean. It is still largely virgin territory, only now beginning to be developed for modern agriculture. It is enough to go toward the interior to realize that this is a most uncommon land, particularly in the central parts with their hallucinated, lunar-white mountains against which other colors seem projected as by concealed giant reflectors.
Rome is the great crucible in which the diversified traits and elements of Italian society have been fused. In spite of its millennial age, Rome emerges from the darkness of night on radiant days with all the pristine freshness of a new city, without the slightest trace of senility or impairment. This miracle is her exclusive secret. Many a European metropolis half Rome’s age seems older by comparison. There is a sort of lusty, dishevelled vigor that animates this city, so heavy with history, and keeps it ever contemporary: the stupendous ruins of classic Rome, medieval and Christian Rome, Renaissance and baroque Rome, the undisciplined eruption of today’s building projects, the composite crowds, the whole luxuriating in dazzling sunlight.
The traveler who really desires to know Italy must begin by rejecting many of the clichés that have resulted from false comparisons between Italy and other countries. Perhaps the most specious is the one that presents the South as warm and irrational by temperament. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The South is basically colder and more rational than the North. In fact, Italian philosophy stems in the main from the South. Or it is maintained that Italy is a conservative country with a predisposition toward immobility. Again, quite the contrary is true. Italy has one of the most fluid and least conservative societies in Europe. The typical Italian is anti-ideological— he does not seek change for theoretical reasons — but he is highly realistic. He is surrounded by the past, but is far more responsive to modern needs than most of the other Mediterranean peoples. Italy’s political society is in full evolution. Half European, half Mediterranean, neither provincial nor cosmopolitan, Italy is as removed from nationalism as it is from “internalism” in the old sense of these words. It is this vigorous, European-minded Italy, keenly alive to contemporary problems, which looks forward to the future, confident that it can and will continue to play the special role it has always played in world history.
Translated by Hélène Cantarella