... two unrelated topics!

The story of Silvio gets sadder and sadder. Apparently most Italians admire him (most Australians probably admire Rupert Murdoch - though the difference here is that there are probably only about 10 who would actually vote for him to run the country). Anyway, he made a shitload of money and, since they only watch TV, he basically controls what they know about him. Moreover, the Pope is upset with him which makes them like him even more.

The rest of us should be feeling sorry for him. In the latest hilarious development he has denied ever having paid for sex. Because, he said, he would miss the pleasure of "the conquest". I kid you not. This came up in the context of the story of the sex worker who was paid to attend one of his parties. She claims that she slept with him and has tapes to prove it (I sincerely hope that we never get to see/hear these!). What a brilliant conquest Silvio! What a Man you are!!!

In the other news, the Spanish Inquisition will be out hunting today. The USA (what??!) handed out the national team's first defeat since 2006. The reason, however, is fairly easy to see. The European season finished late last month and the US season is much shorter. The pre-season training starts next month. The guys should've been on vacation.

The other night I was discussing the Italian south again with my two friends. One mentioned the time his father had purchased his first pair of trousers. This had occurred in about 1957 and the father (who was aged about 10) had been working, tending cows, for several years already. I was dumbfoundedly wondering what he'd worn before that, but it turns out it was only the first pair of newish, unpatched, second-hand trousers. They were white and were worn only on special occasions. He'd wanted to buy a hat with his savings, but they were insufficient, so it had to be trousers. Having met the man in question - he is now my age - I found it quite hard to believe that he was ever so poor.

Ship loads of people left that region in the 1950s, precisely because of that kind of poverty. They traded everything that was close and familiar for what might have been a truly ghastly life in a foreign country. From my own childhood I remember three such Italians. I have no idea where they came from (most likely Calabria). There were two brothers, Renzo and Taviano, who worked as farm labourers on a farm where my family used to stay during school holidays. I don't remember a lot about Renzo, who was married. But I remember his younger brother Taviano who wasn't. When I was about 16 Taviano drowned in the dam and I'm now wondering if it was suicide. Taviano must have been in his 20s when we first started going there, when I was about 5. For a decade he was just a wonderful guy that entertained us kids endlessly (there were 7 of us from 3 families - 2 girls and 5 boys). Looking back on it, I realize that he must have been desperately lonely stuck out there in the bush with no wife, no prospect of a wife and no kids except us - we only turned up during school holidays - and maybe Renzo's kids. I don't remember Renzo having any kids though (I should quiz my mother about that). My parents, I found out decades later, suspected Taviano of being a child molester. Because he apparently wanted to spend time with us kids. A similar suspicion was held against, the third Italian, a gardener that my parents hired from time to time. I used to traipse around the garden after him while he pruned fruit trees and actually bothered to talk to me (or probably I should say 'listen to me'). So they sacked him on suspicion of being a child molester. My only experience of actual would-be child molesters is that they were Anglo, one a friend of my parents and one a complete stranger.

Anyway, some time in the 1980s or '90s a lot of these immigrants from the '50s started to go home to retire. There, while they felt like fish out of water, having spent 30-40 years becoming Aussies, they found the life of their old friends and family transformed. In material terms the present population of the south don't live much better or worse than working class families in Australia. So unless you're one of the tiny minority who was actually able to turn the migration process into a gold mine, it's not at all clear that the massive personal trauma of the migration experience was worth it.

I was forced to attend a rather dull training course on Thursday and Friday and found myself basically brain-dead on the weekend. I did loads and loads of laundry and read two more detective stories. The latter rekindled my energy a bit.

The first was the latest Donna Leon. It is called About Face and I think it's one of her better ones. I realized while reading it that she is quite influenced by Sjöwall and Wahlöö, or at least by the sub-genre, as her books are more and more about the corruption and inequalities of Italian politics and society. This one was about the garbage crisis and the inexorable gains being made by the Camorra as it takes over the European disposal trade. I don't think Leon has the same innate sympathy for the less advantaged classes that Sjöwall and Wahlöö had, but she does her best to mingle a straight police procedural with social commentary. In this book I think it's quite successful.

One of the things I forgot to mention when writing about my last Italian trip was the furs. Italian women of a certain class wear an awful lot of animal furs. Full length coats of it. I don't know what fur they were, but they were all over Torino in the January snow and Leon mentions them in this book (also set in January) about Venice.

The second book was The Laughing Policeman, number 4 in the Sjöwall and Wahlöö series. I think the title is about the fact that Martin Beck never laughs (except right at the end he laughs at a really ghoulish joke), because the people in the story who do laugh are not policemen. The story in this one was inspired by the guy who went up a tower at a university in Texas and gunned people down. Here a man gets on a bus on a rainy night in Stockholm and massacres the passengers and driver. But instead of the mass murderer being a crazy loner, it turns out he has a motive linked to an older crime. As usual, you get to see a side of Stockholm that isn't very nice - the part inhabited by homeless people, alcoholics, junkies, prostitutes and immigrants in over-crowded accommodation rented to them by avaricious landlords. Also the people who complain about the neighbours and the ones who couldn't care less. It's a pretty depressing picture - especially when the rooms are all so smoke-filled.

These goats were very friendly and cute. The bells, apparently, cost a fortune and only the rich farmers have all their animals belled.




Some cats of Piaggine.

( Cut for 5 more cats - by no means an exhaustive selection )
A really sweet dog called Piccolo.


A cattle dog.


The same dog with Roseanna the charolais cow.


Another dog with a Podolica cow. The Podolica cows are the traditional variety of the Cilento area. It's their milk that makes the regional Caciocavallo cheese.


The dogs and cows get on very well together. We were told to stay close to the owner of the cows or the dogs would attack us.


Cow bells are even more expensive than goat and sheep bells. G. who owns these cows has spent as much as 5000 euro on a single bell (which is currently $A10,000!). All his cows are belled. Only the bull refuses to wear one. As with N. and his goats, each bell is distinct and the owner can identify all his animals by the bell tone.

Downstream from the old bridge.


The mediaeval bridge and its waterfall.




Sidestream entering the river just below the bridge.


Landscape across the river.

2CV. Want.


Me and you "four" metres above the sky. (I checked with my Italian friends; they didn't know what it means either)


Through an open door.


Christmas lights.


Horse ring at the Palazzo Vairo.

There are there piazzi in Piaggine. This is the largest one at the top of the village. I've forgotten its name, but it is rather pretty with its palazzo, allegedly built with the proceeds of brigandage in the 18th century.


It was a chilly morning and these guys definitely had the warmest spot.


Some streets in the old quarter.








Looking upwards.

Here in Sydney it's wet and gloomy weather. So the weekend ramble will be virtual. Here are some wintry skies from the Cilento area.
Near Bellosguardo.


Near Corleto Monforte.


Dawn at Piaggine. The view from my balcony.


Also from Piaggine.

On the eve of the wedding and the next night the visitors from beyond the locality (i.e., those from Sydney, Dublin, Turin, Baghdad, etc.) stayed in the Villa Vea (pictured). It is run by some people who've returned from the US. The morning after the wedding I set out from here and followed the Via Istmica towards Bellosguardo. (The Via Istmica is designed for hikers and it crosses the Park from Paestum, on the Tyrrhenian sea, in the west to the other side of the mountains in the east. It is paved with bitumen and mostly accessible to cars!)

Looking back to Villa Vea.


The view of Bellosguardo from Villa Vea.

( + 12 )
I didn't go all the way into the village of Bellosguardo - partly because it involved an extra uphill climb, but mainly because it was getting late and nearly time for more feasting!

Whenever the people around me were busy, or else I just became exhausted with trying to speak Italian, I went for a walk. On this occasion it was just an exploration of the village, which is known in the local dialect as Fogna, but officially as Villa Littorio. Basically it consists of two almost parallel streets along the side of a hill, connected by a bunch of narrow alleys. So I walked one way along the main, or lower, street and back along the upper one.

Starting point.

( 11 more under the cut )

Via Roma. Late afternoon.


An arcade.


In the Via Po.


The fabulous Mole. It is an 1860s building, originally begun as a synagogue for the capital of Italy. But the capital was moved away and the cost of this huge building was too much for the Jewish community to bear. In recent times it has become the National Museum of Cinema - one of the best museums I've ever been in. Under the dome there are reclining chairs from which you can watch a series of film clips on big screens - or become mesmerized by the glass-walled lift going up and down through the centre of the dome to the viewing platform just under the spire. In some side rooms there are exhibits on the history of moving images and various cinematic genres (in one room you get to sit on a toilet while watching that scene from Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty).


Chestnut roaster near the Faculty of Humanities.

Piazza di Castello - looking south towards the main railway station. God knows what kind of planning allowed the block of apartments to go up in such a precinct. It is hideous. The building on the left is a facade - there's a medieval castle behind it! I'm standing in front of the palace which is elegant baroque.


Bit of medieval castle.


On my right in the previous photo is the church of San Lorenzo, the home of the famous shroud. It is not on show, but you can look at full scale photos of what you've probably seen 50 times before and get a lecture from a volunteer guide. The guide was very interesting - not a religious person at all. The shroud was the prize of war - brought here by the Savoy king from France where it had previously resided. I didn't follow the story all that well, but the guide was very strong on what he described as the "secular role of the church" in Turin.

When you first enter the church you are in the oldest part. There is a sign saying you can only go up the steps on your knees, as the guy in the photo is doing. My camera has really captured the lighting extremely well. It was golden.


A bit of the ceiling.


Passing through this old bit, you enter a spectacular octagonal building with a stunning dome built in the 17th century. Its designer, Guarini, was, according to our guide, a mathematician and scientist - not really religious - hence the unconventional shape of the church. Guarini wanted light entering from above rather than from the side. Back then, however, I don't think there was such a contradiction between mathematics and religion. Newton, after all, thought he was finding god the mathematician.


Part of the dome's exterior. The windows at the bottom are not part of the church. According to the guide, Guarini's design influenced German church architecture.


When my friend told him I was from Australia he said "I've never been there, but I lived in Tonga for a year." I guess for him they're both roughly in the same direction.

Another nearby church. I forget the name, but lettering engraved over the front door announces the daily availability of indulgences.


Our guide at San Lorenzo had alerted us to the fact that Erasmus had studied for his doctorate in Turin and directed us to this place.


We weren't sure, but a woman in the street who seemed to know the place told us that this apartment block was in fact the university where Erasmus worked. We were impressed.


Yet more to come.

On the third day we flew to Naples and the day after that drove down to Cilento National Park, a further 200km to the southeast. It was much warmer in the south. 13 degrees in Naples instead of 3 in Turin. But the blue skies gave way to drizzling rain - though it gradually cleared over the next few days.

Roccadaspide is a largish town - the first one you come to in the highlands after the plain which, although part of the national park, is full of mozzarella factories and cheap tourist developments.


It's only after Rocca that the landscape improves. We also had to take a long detour along the old road because the new, shorter one had been washed away by heavy rains.


This is the river in the valley below out destination - a village known as Fogna by the locals, but named Villa Littorio by Mussolini. The last time I was here it was a mere trickle, but this time it is in full flood. Despite the fact that it's January a lot of the deciduous trees, particularly oaks, are clinging to their leaves making wonderful colours.

The flight into Turin was wonderful. I went mad taking pictures out of the window (please remember that I'm from Sydney and I've seen this quantity of snow about twice in my entire life - and the last time was 25 years ago!). The transformation of the landscape was fascinating.






We flew right over the top of the city. In the lower part of this picture is the original Fiat factory at Lingotto. The inputs went in on the ground floor and the finished car came out at the top where they built a test track. Nowadays the factory is closed and there's an art gallery within. We really wanted to visit it, but didn't have time.


The tall dome and spire is La Mole - a 19th century construction that is easily the tallest building in the city. More on this later.

Turin is quite a compact city with an excellent public transport system (I love trams). Everyone we met told us how it was the original capital of unified Italy. It has loads of colonnaded arcades and, I thought, a bit of faded elegance around the old centre.

Piazza Vittorio Veneto - a huge square leading down to the river bank.


River Po.






Piazza di Castello - in front of the royal palace (of the kings of Savoy). At 10 on a Monday morning there were three people strolling up and down with a sign saying "Listen Israelis. Don't kill." Everybody else was just enjoying the sun.


As in Sydney, the old railway workshops have been turned into a technology park. This is some distance from the old centre.

I would never have picked up this book on account of the cover, which makes it look like a gangster movie full of macho violence. In fact it is a book about the economy of the Campania region, of which Naples is the centre. The violence is certainly an important feature, but it is not the central one.

The first thing that strikes you is that the book begins with the story of a Chinese clothing manufacturer based in Naples. It turns out that Naples is the heart of the Italian clothing industry - where clothing worn by Angelina Jolie at the Oscars is manufactured (even if the designer is located in Prato or Milan). Angelina Jolie's outfit was made by a Neapolitan tailor earning 600 Euro a month. He was told only that the garment was going to the US. Anyway, he was teaching this Chinese businessman how to make high quality clothing so that he could move up market into the Angelina Jolie business (without, of course, ever acquiring the caché of having one's name attached in any way to such a garment). The trick was to learn the high quality business without antagonising the Secondigliano clans who run the clothing manufacture of Naples out of illegal sweatshops located in gutted apartment buildings.

These sweatshops provide a huge amount of employment in Naples - all because the Italian government (or the EU*) affords protection against imports from China and elsewhere. Naples is already the Italian capital of unemployment, so removal of this protection would certainly lead to greater poverty and more emigration.

The first half of the book is devoted to the Secondigliano clans (drugs, apparel) who dominate the slopes of Vesuvius. The second half to the Casalesi - a federation operating from the Caserta to the north of the city. The specialities of the latter seem to be drugs, real estate, cement, construction and trash. The legal and illegal businesses are inextricably mixed. Saviano claims that illegality often provides the basis for the low prices Camorristi are able to charge for their services. He claims, for example, that disposal of toxic wastes from northern Europe can be carried out by the clans for 20% of the cost of legal services. The waste is sometimes dumped around Naples, sometimes shipped to China and sometimes mixed with other garbage to become fertilizer for Italian agriculture.

There is a lot in the book about the clan wars that have attracted much international media attention. Reporters run around looking for drug deals and gun fights. For Saviano, however, the media coverage is pathetic:

Many reporters think they have found the ghetto of Europe in Secondigliano, a place of total misery. But if they didn't run away they would realize that they are looking at the pillars of the economy, the hidden mine, the darkness where the beating heart of the market gets its energy. (pp. 122-3)

These wars are in fact about business. The violence, which is indeed extreme, is a way of imposing discipline within business empires, of effecting mergers and acquisitions - in other words, of defeating rivals in the process of capital accumulation.

The global scope of the Camorra (they themselves scorn the name and prefer The System - which might as well be The Capitalist System), is the only really surprising thing about the book. I'd been told before that the Camorra didn't have the global connections of, for example, the Sicilian Mafia. But this is wrong according to Saviano - he discusses links stretching from Naples to Melbourne, Aberdeen and Peru. The Sicilians are stuck in a rigid, hierarchical mode of operation, while the "post-Fordist" flexibility of the Neapolitan clans and their innovative entry into certain markets has given them the edge. If the book had been set in Somalia , Nigeria or the Philippines nobody would have batted an eyelid at the mix of crime and capital that is represented by the Neapolitan clans. In the Third World it's normal. But in the West (at least in the middle class suburbs) we have forgotten about the violence that accompanies the primary accumulation of capital and the dispossession of the masses. We see only a normal, rather comfortable and well regulated process of exchange. The more production and its corollary, the disposal of waste, are shifted to the developing world, the less we see of the brutality underlying the reproduction of the economy and society.

Saviano's discussion of the relationship between the Camorra and the Italian state is interesting. Saviano claims that where the Sicilian clans attempted to dominate the state by suborning politicians, the Camorra is only interested in business. Instead of attempting to control the state it is content to live alongside the state - not always comfortably, as evinced by the Mega Trial and others. The System cannot be destroyed by picking off individual criminals. Again, the parallels with the developing world are striking. If he'd been writing about Afghanistan we'd have said it was a classic case of a failed state: the key to this concept is the inability of the recognized state apparatus to retain either the monopoly of violence or the allegiance of the population. But the idea that a founding member of the European Union could be a failed state is a sort of taboo. Yet, during the Secondigliano War, when the carabinieri attempted to take control of the area, the people threw plates and poured the boiling pasta water over them.

He doesn't see any way out of this tight symbiosis between crime and the legal economy which both launders the drug money and generates new capital accumulation. He can't be blamed for not seeing a way out, but he also makes it clear that the System has evolved a lot in the past couple of decades. The petty crime for which Naples was always notorious is no longer the province of the Camorra and in fact I think that street crime is no worse than anywhere else in Europe (possibly even better since there is a distinct reduction of attacks on women compared to elsewhere). Who knows where the evolutionary process will take it in future.

The writing is powerful. The first pages suck you right in. Highly recommended. (I've also heard that the movie is not a faithful interpretation.)

( On the port of Naples )

* The author doesn't mention which.

Another Donna Leon story. This one has an unusual structure in which you get drawn first of all into a story that turns out to be an almost complete red herring. This would be very clever except that I'd read the blurb on the back and kept wondering if I was reading the right book. It isn't until you're more than a third of the way in that you get to the bit where they find the dead girl and it is, after all, the right book. Leon writes stories that provide quite up-to-date commentary on Italian political life without actually mentioning names. But there are some silly touches - for example, the police receive a 911 call, though in Italy the emergency number is 113, or 112 which has become more of an international emergency number.

The British use 999, although they're now switching to 112 as well. 999 always struck me as quite irrational because on the old circular dialling phones 9 was the second last number. In Australia we use(d) 000 which was, at least, the last number on the dial if you happened to be trying to dial in the dark. On the other hand, 111 would be more rational as it also took considerably less time to dial. So I have no idea why 112 is the most commonly used number. /digression

As usual, Leon's story gives a nice sense of the local scenery, food, daily habits of Venetians, etc, and the ever increasing pressure from tourism. Commissario Guido's reading this time seems to be mostly Greek tragedies.

Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, Penguin Classics edn. I read the whole book on the flight from Sydney to Bangkok. It is fantastic. Levi was a northern painter/writer with a medical training who was exiled to the far south for his anti-Fascist activities in the mid-1930s. The villages he stayed in were similar to - though far more desolate and poverty stricken than - those in the Cilento National Park that I visited last September. Eboli, which is at the northern extremity of Lucania, the province to which Levi was exiled, is just over the mountains from Laurino and Fogna. The culture seems very similar and Levi (who wrote the book during 1943-44, or 8 years after he left the area) was an acute observer of the differences between this culture of the Mezzogiorno and his sophisticated native north. For him it was obviously one of those life-transforming experiences and, reading it, I was gripped by the powerful descriptions of life there as well as his emotionally draining analysis of the hopeless situation of the peasantry. He describes, for example, the way the peasants gave unreciprocated Christmas gifts to the rich and powerful, to whom they were also irredeemably indebted and whose activities on behalf of the state were largely responsible for their poverty. Not only did Christ never venture this far south, the three Wise Men were also an utterly foreign concept!

There are some moments of cheer, as when a visiting troupe of Sicilian players put on a show or the locals do an impromptu street theatre satirising their overlords, but on the whole Levi (who was there for only a year) subscribes to the notion of an eternally unchanging system of oppression - even while demonstrating that in some parts of the province things were slowly changing. He does a great job of exposing the colonial nature of the Italian state in the south - and there are clear lessons for the modern 'aid community' in this - while generally adopting a humanitarian and accepting approach towards the poor, trying to get along with the oppressors so as not to create yet more trouble for himself, but in the end going back to his cosmopolitan intellectual life rather than committing to the project (that he could see was feasible) of reducing the debilitating impact of endemic malaria.

I really want to visit the area next time I go to Italy to see if and how it has changed. Was discussing this over email with I. whose parents I stayed with in Fogna, and he said that Levi's house is still there.

I've copycatted the idea from frumiousb





(The second one is Monte Cassino.)