People and Power in Italy

...An oil company without oil manufactures soap and fertilizer, operates a woolen knitting mill and builds a nuclear power plant...

...Several sections—for example, those on Cola di Rienzo and Mussolini, Cagliostro and Casanova, or the chapter on foreign tourists—are excellent independent essays yet are only loosely related to the central concern of the book...

...and the government itself owns, besides Il Giorno, at least one Right-wing daily...

...Italians have repeatedly supported inferior politicians and ignored first-rate leaders...

...It now owns methane deposits, pipelines and refineries, gasoline stations and motels, chemical and electric installations, a textile mill and even a newspaper...

...Reviewed by MAURO CALAMANDREI U.S...

...Thus the book ends up as a collection of essays offering sharp insights and unproved generalizations...

...Although Votaw does not condone the behavior of the giant companies of the international oil cartel, one wishes he had gone into more detail on the relationships between the cartel and the government...

...But Barzini believes that beyond regional and social differences it is possible to find a common heritage of customs and beliefs, and to identify an Italian national character...

...Italy is the country of the perennial Baroque, where regimentation and paternalism join hands with "la dolce vita.' Barzini is a brilliant writer and many pages of his book are original, witty and amusing...

...it is not even a tentatively systematic study, such as The Genius of Italy by the late Leonardo Olschki...

...The profound differences that divide individual regions, the many centuries of separate histories, the disparity between classes—all these factors make generalizing difficult...

...But examination of the role of ENI and the other giant public corporations is essential to an understanding of contemporary Italy...

...A civil servant dominated the government by which he was employed...

...ENI was the single-handed creation of one man, Enrico Mattei, who has been variously described as Italy's gray eminence and the most powerful man in the country, and has been compared to Rockefeller and Garibaldi, Napoleon and Cromwell, the condottieri and the robber barons...

...In some quarters Mattei was given credit for Italy's "economic miracle," in others he was considered a poisonous influence on Italian life...

...Studying the habits and attitudes of Italy is not an easy task...

...On the grand stage that is the Italian peninsula, from the Alps to Sicily, Italians appear cheerful and competent, gregarious and open-minded, endearing and lively...

...One of the most obvious but also most significant attitudes of Italians is their love of spectacle, their passion for mimicry and performance, their urge to act...

...At the same time, the indifference of weak governments and the unrelenting opposition of foreign groups encouraged Mattei to operate as a government within the government, with the result that on several occasions his decisions did in fact force the hand of the government...

...By the time of his death in 1962 in a mysterious airplane accident, it was even suggested that most of Italy's problems could be solved by putting him in prison...

...In fact, says Barzini, they are incompetent and cowardly, egocentric and clever, but also cynical and sentimental, sad and frustrated...

...The conviction that life is a continuous spectacle brings with it a preference for appearance over substance, a discrepancy between behavior and belief, and a confusion of illusion and reality...

...A petroleum boss without petroleum became a major influence in the international petroleum industry, began the construction of a pipeline through the Alps for petroleum he did not have, and provided almost one-third of the gasoline required by Italian motorists...

...Italy is the country that has filled Europe and most of the world with the fame of its larger-than-lifesize famous men," he says, but remained uninfluenced by most of them...

...But the real trouble is not formal...

...A public corporation is subject to audit by no one...

...Curious incidents, and quotations from such books as The Mimicry of Ancient People interpreted through the Gestures of Neapolitans, by Canon Andrea De Jorio, make the reading of several of his chapters a real pleasure...

...Much of the Italian press, for instance, is owned and controlled by powerful economic groups...

...Votaw acknowledges that many of these paradoxes are less startling in the context of Italian society, but he does not delineate all the contradictions of the Italian social system...

...Votaw has no doubt that, in the short run, ENI and Mattei have been good for Italy economically, but he is not so sure about many of the eventual political, social and economic ramifications of their activities...

...Since in the interval little has occurred to lessen the accuracy of this lament, Luigi Barzini is to be congratulated for attempting to fill the gap with The Italians...

...One of the controversial developments of postwar Italy ignored by Barzini is brilliantly examined in Dow Votaw's Six-Legged Dog...

...Votaw's book describes with clarity and precision the violent controversies generated by the fantastic growth of ENI, and the uses to which Mattei put all the power that he accumulated: "Mattei and ENI are both paradoxes...

...The Six-Legged Dog is ENI, the government agency created to overcome Italy's shortage of energy which in the last decade has become a power in the world oil market, one of Italy's industrial giants and a significant political force...

...An anti-capitalist conducted his affairs in close imitation of the capitalist robber barons of a half century ago...

...Correspondent for the Rome weekly, "L'Espresso" More than a century ago Giacomo Leopardi said: "Italians do not write or think about their customs, as if such studies were not useful to them...

...Today ENI is not much more autonomous than older and bigger Italian corporations...

...Over the centuries Italians have valued flattery over sincerity, success rather than real accomplishment, smartness and cynicism instead of honesty...

...Economie and social factors are also largely ignored in the discussion of previous centuries...

...An anti-monopolist sought to drive out the competition wherever he found it...

...Mattei boasted of having broken 8,000 ordinances and laws...

...it is the failure to embrace enough events and characteristics of Italy and derive from them any general interpretation...

...The last paradox was that with the advent of a Left-leaning government more in tune with Matter's convictions, his power started declining...

...without ignoring laws and regulations his dream could not have been realized...

...As a study of national character, however, The Italians is disappointing...

...4.00...

...A government-owned corporation operates a newspaper in order to influence public opinion against interference by the government...

...A serious flaw is its disjointed organization...

...Barzini gives us a chapter on Guicciardini and one on the Battle of Fornovo (1492), but no systematic study of the return of democracy, the role of popular political parties, the economic and social changes of the last decade, the role of government-owned corporations like ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi), or of personalities like De Gasperi and Einaudi, Togliatti, Nenni or Enrico Mattei...