‘A man who has not been in Italy,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘is always conscious of an inferiority.’ With a twelve-year-old daughter living there, I myself have avoided this fate. Yet, for all the trips back and forth to see her, I know little of the country, beyond noticing that the romance of Cinema Paradiso or the clowning of Roberto Benigni are, though one side of it, also highly misleading. There is a melancholy here, and a seriousness too. Recently I’ve been delving into books on Italy, to try to pierce my way beneath the surface.
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Not that surfaces are trivial to the Italians – most writers agree they’re paramount. In The Dark Heart of Italy, mentioning the relative lack of readers there, Tobias Jones (long-term resident of Parma) points out that it’s a ‘visual rather literary culture.’ This means ‘it’s often hard to find anything that is remotely ugly, be it a building or a painting or, especially, someone’s clothing,’ but can also lead to an unhealthy obsession with appearances. Jones goes on to quote the Italian proverb ‘Bisogna far buon viso a cattivo gioco’ (‘It’s necessary to disguise a bad game with a good face’) and concludes that Italy is a country ‘peerless in the art of illusionism.’
