THE ITALIAN CHARACTER

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32775, 27 November 1971, Page 10

THE ITALIAN CHARACTER

From Caesar to the Mafia. By Luigi Barzini. Hamish Hamilton. 335 pp. Ever since sixteenth-century Englishmen “discovered” Dante and Petrach the character of “modern” Italians has fascinated peoples from more temperate climates. Nor have Italians been slow to examine themselves with dispassionate and discerning eyes; from Machiavelli onwards urbane and sometimes harsh critics of the descendants of Imperial Rome have looked at the extremes of virtue and vice which go to make up Italians. Luigi Barzini, perhaps the best-known Italian observer of Italy in the twentieth century, achieved prominence in the Englishspeaking world some years ago with his book “The Italians.” In its successor, “From Caesar to the Mafia,” Barzini turns his attention to selected personalities and themes in a series of sharp, perceptive essays. With a prefatory warning that Italians’ art of living has been called duplicity by unsympathetic observers, Barzini sets out to show that Italians are usually the victims of their own machinations. His subject is the career of Casanova. Other men with half Casanova’s gifts of grace, wit, stamina and intelligence have reached safe positions of power and renown. Yet Casanova, for all his exciting career, died penniless and alone. In nis time he had mixed with the great men of Europe, he had taught the French Government how to run State lotteries, seduced all six daughters of the Mayor of puritan Geneva, and discussed philosophy with Voltaire and Frederick the Great. But he never turned his abundant natural advantages to any purposeful or stable activity. As an Italian, and a Venetian, says Barzini, Casanova only wanted to enjoy life; he wanted to play the part of a great man, not to become one, and in the end he was left, with nothing but his act. In Gaius Julius Caesar Barzini finds an altogether different aspect of the Italian character. Never was a great man’s murder predicted more clearly and more insistently by supernatural and natural signs. Yet Caesar made no effort to protect himself and appeared to contemporaries, including Cicero, almost to welcome death as the only way out of an intolerable constitutional impasse. On the other hand, Caesar’s life had been built on the taking of successful risks, from his youthful days as a libertine and spendthrift bent on achieving power with borrowed money and borrowed wives. Barzini’s Caesar is an ambitious young man in a huny who succeeded so well that by middle age the fruits of military, political and sexual victories had turned to ashes. At the time of his death he was planning a great new war in Persia as a means of escaping from the incubus of ruling in Rome. He died alone, unarmed and apparently unperturbed.

These are terse, entertaining historical vignettes; Barzini, as becomes the son of one of Italy’s great liberal newspaper editors, writes of his own experiences with acute observation and an economy of words. His verbal sketch of Mussolini interrupting vast military manoeuvres before a galaxy of foreign diplomatic observers to answer a call of nature against a nearby stone wall—in which he was joined first by a British diplomat and then by the whole corps except for the Russians—is pure comic opera. His description of a meeting between a group of enthusiastic young Italian Communists and the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg captures well the flavour of Left-wing literary salons the world over. Ehrenburg is pictured “eyelids half shut over eyes that peered about like those of an alligator lying awake in the mud” while a dozen young "friends of Soviet culture” pranced about him dressed in new suits like “guests at a country wedding.” Barzini can be serious enough when he believes the subject deserves it. The end of the Italian monarchy in 1946 has a. special significance tor him. King Umberto had played an important part in the overthrow of Mussolini and the restoration of Italian democracy; yet in a referendum at the end of the war Italians voted for a republic instead of a monarchy by 53 per cent. The King’s alternatives were to abdicate voluntarily; to stage a military coup and ignore the results of the vote; or to stay in power until the republicans forced him out. In the end he chose the most dignified and peaceful course of self-exile. His last night as King when the decision was finally made was spent at Barzini’s house. Barzini writes with deep affection: “Umberto was a civilised man.” From these essays, the same might be said of Barzini himself.