Italian Sketchbook

...Politicians are another matter: They can easily be corrupted, if not with money then with the promise of votes...

...The unifying element is the radiant, reasonable style of this graceful writer...

...They would have become decadent, effete, corrupt, and impotent...

...The old, rural, backward Mafiosi, Barzini confirms, have been replaced by "an urban, well-dresed, well-traveled, well-educated, slick, middle-class Mafia, which knows how to muscle in on big legitimate business deals, organize 'protective societies,' and rake in billions of lire in cuts and kickbacks...

...Yet their very greatness was rooted in their obsolete virtues...

...Curiously, the Mafia succeeded in transplanting its organization and method of operation into the law-abiding, egalitarian society of an industrialized America, even though it could never pentrate such cities as Messina and Catania, just a few hours from sunny, rotting Palermo, its west Sicilian stronghold...

...The most daring exposes of muckraking journalists, the Mafiosi know, tend to leave things pretty much as they were...

...Somehow managing to equate Rome with Italy, he suggests that Caesar acceded to his own assassination because his problems as a statesman evaded solution...

...Or they may not...

...Luigi Barzini Jr...

...The last, sad words of Barzini's book are: "The ways of the Mafia may slowly, very slowly, go the way of all primitive and quaint folk habits, curious traditions to be recounted to tourists and evoked by decrepit old men...

...Italy's Liberals, largely bristly centrists born out of the wealthy industrial class before Mussolini, are orderly people who believe in accepting the changing times without being swept up in them or swept away by them...

...This, of course, is the problem of many successful republics...

...From Caesar to tire Mafia implies a flowing continuity justified neither by the book itself nor, for that matter, by Italian history...

...Reviewed by David Bernstein Editor, Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin' THE TITLE of this collection by the accomplished Italian journalist Luigi Barzini is misleading...

...Mindlessness and crudity are more pervasive than ever, while character and flavor are no longer cherished in Rome, Sicily, the rest of Italy, or anywhere else...

...Ironically, he could not change the conditions that were responsible for his gaining power: "The Senate was no longer able to start or stop wars, curb the generals' ambitions, discipline the rich, keep order in the city, or defend the Roman world from invasions...

...He also gives an affecting account of his heart attack 10 years ago and tells some amusing stories about, of all people, Benito Mussolini...

...Even Barzini, a meticulous man who wrote part of his book directly and fluently in English (as he did the whole of The Italians) and himself translated much of the remainder from Italian, is poorly served by his publisher...

...They had to transform themselves and reform the State...

...His father was Italy's foremost editor and journalist, one of the best in Europe...

...Perhaps that is why a campaigning Governor Rockefeller last year rushed to announce that no official of the State of New York would ever again refer to the Mafia by name...

...Perhaps the most interesting fact about Barzini's final essay is that while he could write frankly about the Mafia and be reelected to the Italian parliament, no politician could mention that word in New York today and still hope to conduct a winning campaign...

...They had to cling to their old traditions, ideas, institutions, beliefs—without them they would have lost their identity...

...The Italians, came out in 1964 he at last won international fame...

...He notes that no people has yet learned "how to become prosperous without at the same time becoming mindless and cruel . . . how to make life better materially without making it flavorless and characterless...

...It would never occur to them to start an antidefamation society in Italy, or to tell movie producers which scenes to delete...

...In this country the newspaper or magazine writer must crawl all over the event of the moment or, when he relaxes, set out to make the reader agonize...

...He loves Italy and the Italians, not with the passion of the patriot but more subtly, as a stranger might love them and feel at home with them...

...He is comfortably at ease, a bit of a name-dropper, a gossip with frequent refreshing insights...

...After nearly two millennia Barzini can say of contemporary Italy: "The fact that the taste and dignity of Italy's old life could not be poured into its modern one, that it was not possible, for example, to preserve completely that living-together of the different classes which went to make up the pleasure of so much of our existence, to retain the taste for beautiful, well-made objects, for elegant and disinterested deeds, all this is particularly deplorable because the old Italy, with all its defects, was a precious construction of man and, bereft of these things, life has since become more impoverished than elsewhere...

...Along the way he had become one of the small band of Liberal deputies in the Italian Parliament...

...That is not Barzini's method...

...gradually earned a reputation as a reporter in his own right, and when his excellent book...

...as for the reformers, they burn out after a while...

...Barzini is vitriolic about the aggressive incompetence and venality of the Italian bureaucracy, and he thinks most of the country's perplexing problems could be solved if only this fatal flaw were erased...

...These pieces, many of which appeared in Encounter, the New York Review of Books and, in the case of the brilliant study of Julius Caesar, in Life, are examples of a genre too rarely found in American periodicals...

...The proofreading is atrocious, and a good editor might have urged him to omit one or two superficial essays for the sake of the others, which are incisive and at times important...

...In Italy, where Barzini regards himself as one of the latest in a long line of unsuccessful Mafia fighters, it is politically safe to call attention to the embarassing fact that virtually all elements of the Establishment have collaborated directly or indirectly with the Mafia...

...The venerable virtues which had made the simple and sturdy Latin farmers invincible and allowed them to conquer vast possessions and immense wealth were clearly inadequate to govern those very possessions and to administer their new wealth...

...He is to be read for enjoyment, though that may not be fashionable these days...

...In his best pieces Barzini muses on the decline of the Italian aristocrat, the perseverance of the Italian mistress, the ideas of Antonio Gram-sci—the founding father of Italian Communism—and the apparently insoluble problems of southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno...

...Nonetheless, he is acutely aware of his heritage...

...Barzini can report candidly what Governor Nelson Rockefeller apparently cannot report at all, that the Mafia is making huge profits from smuggling dope into the United States...

...The Sicilian Mafiosi, unlike their American cousins, are not sensitive about what foreigners, journalists and reformers may think of them...

...All the title really means is that Barzini has gathered 21 essays on different subjects of interest to him, and that the first is about Julius Caesar and the last about the Mafia in Sicily...