Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 162

AN INTERVIEW WITH GIANNI RIOTTA NEW YORK, 12 OCTOBER 1996 (A RETROSPECTIVE)

uestion: As an observer of the Italian scene, how do you view Qthe relationship between intellectuals and political society? Riotta: You've just told me that you have been interviewing a few other people about the role of the intellectual in Italian society today, one of whom is Luigi Manconi, the present spokesperson of the Verdi, the Green Party. To be honest, I wouldn't rate him as an intellectual at all. We're friends and so I can say this. I've known Luigi for a long time, for about 25 years, since he was the head of the servizio d'ordine for Lotta continua. Then, to make a living, I started writing for newspapers and Luigi went to work at the University. But he's a politician, always was, he was never an intellectual. In a sense, that's my position too. I'm not a politician, but neither am I an intellectual. That's to say that the difference between me and many of the people you have interviewed, many of whom are friends, and even close friends of mine, is that they are intellectuals and they always feel forced to give you opinions. I was raised professionally in the Manifesto newspaper and later at Columbia University as a journalist and when I consider politics outside of my fiction writing my attitude is always that of a journalist. In Italy, this is very bizarre, and it is even more bizarre because I always use the word "fairness", or "fair", which I think are quite nice words. But we don't have anything like that in Italian. We have oggettività, but it gives you some coldness that "fairness" does not have. After thinking about it for quite a while I came up with equanimità, which means that your animus is equo when you consider issues.

Q: If the position you have adopted as a journalist is, as you say, so eccentric in the Italian context, how does that effect the way you are An Interview with Gianni Riotta 163 seen in Italy and how are your opinions received?

Riotta: In Italy the Right doesn't particularly appreciate me, and the Left considers me a stray dog. I'm giving you all this as a premise because this is what will drive the rest of the things I have to say in answer to your questions. I will try to give you a fair analysis of what is going on in Italy, not an opinion on what I think should happen, because the day I start thinking in terms of what I think should happen I will run for office and be a politician myself. So, if what you are looking for is a more angled position, you might end up being disappointed.

Q: Let's begin with some general rather than specific questions. In the Italian tradition the figure of the intellectual has been most closely studied by Antonio Gramsci. Even though you personally may want to take your distance from the figure of the intellectual, for Gramsci the journalist, like the teacher, the doctor, the priest etc., is an intellectual insofar as they are figures who shape consciousness and help form a world view.

Riotta: The more time passes, the more I come to think that we have, of course, made a big deal of Gramsci. Yet, the real figure that has formed, and is still forming, the paradigm for the Italian intellectual is not Gramsci, but Benedetto Croce. Gramsci has a great line, not one of his best known, but it is still one of my favorites. He says: after you have spent years studying Hegel and Marx what is the real difference between these two? What really makes Marx different from Hegel? And the answer he comes to is this: Marx had experience as a journalist, by which he means that Marx got his hands dirty in the contradictions of everyday events, while Hegel always stayed at a comfortable distance from the everyday. Hegel distilled his wisdom and did not allow any contradiction to cross over his thought. Not so Marx. And what is true for Marx is also true for Gramsci. The Gramsci that we know is the Gramsci sanitized by Fascist and Communist censorship. There is no doubt that Gramsci was an Italian Tito, but it was purely by chance because he didn't go in exile to Moscow. If he had gone to Moscow he would have either ended up dead or become a Third Internationalist like Palmiro Togliatti. The fact that he was in jail, paradoxically, allowed him - painfully - to have a clearer point of view. Gramsci really let science, journalism, sociology and the American way of thinking cross his thought, within the limits, of Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 164 course, of the access he had to these areas. Piero Gobetti did that too. They both knew that there was more around them than what the idealists of the time were willing to admit.

Q: If this is one of the lessons left by Gramsci to intellectuals, but a lesson that, if I follow you correctly, has been to a large extent ignored, what about the lesson imparted by Croce?

Riotta: Croce, on the other hand, has left a great inheritance to Italian intellectuals. First of all, and you can say this both for Croce and for Giovanni Gentile, we get from them the idea that the intellectual is someone who gets his rubber stamp, that is to say his or her position of authority, from the academy or the university. The intellectual is someone who works in the university and for a living does exams and reads dissertations. From Croce we get what I think are two very wrong ideas: the first is that the intellectual is someone who deals with the humanities, not with the sciences. I clearly remember when I was at the Manifesto - my wife is a scientist, by the way - and what Rina Gagliardi, who then went on to be editor of the newspaper and is now head of cultural policy at Rifondazione comunista, used to argue. She got her degree at the Scuola normale in Pisa and would honestly and with a lot of passion make the case that scientists were not real intellectuals, because the real intellectual deals exclusively with the humanities. And this comes from Croce. You see this, by the way, in how we consider university or college courses on creative writing. We still tend to think that fiction writing is not something you learn but something which comes from the inspiration of the genius that strikes you. Things are changing a bit, Alessandro Baricco is running a school of writing in Turin, and Grazia Cherchi, my former editor at Feltrinelli, who was a great editor but sadly passed away in 1995, also helped push things in this direction. Now that I think about it, there was a report on editing I came across last week in Corriere della sera and it mentioned a writer who is on record as saying that his pages will never be touched by an editor because they are sacrosanct. But enough of this, let's get back to politics.

Q: Yes, let's get back to the question of influence. Whether as fully- fledged intellectuals within the academy or, like you, I think, as an intellectual who fashions himself along the Gramscian lines you just mentioned, what is the intellectuals' role within political and civil society? An Interview with Gianni Riotta 165

Riotta: Intellectuals bring something that the politicians can not: namely, prestige. There have been two seasons: the season when the intellectual would run simply to cover up for the Party. The Christian Democrats were a little corrupt so they would ask, say, Franco Zeffirelli to run for them. Or the Communist Party would seek to justify its position as a liberal party by asking the singer Gino Paoli to run for office. I would still like to know why on earth Gino Paoli ran for office, I don't understand. He's a great singer, but...

Q: And the footballer Gianni Rivera?

Riotta: No, Gianni Rivera is different. He's pretty much like Jack Kemp here in the US, Bob Dole's running mate in the last elections. Rivera is a former sports jock who gave up playing football, went to another profession and performed very nicely. He could have gone with Berlusconi and been a hero for Berlusconi, but he chose to go with Mario Segni and stayed with Segni. He was always very serious. Rivera was elected on account of his fame but then he did his homework and became a politician. And I say this as an Inter fan, while Rivera played all his life for our archrival Milan, Berlusconi's team.

Q: What about someone like Massimo Cacciari? A Professor of Philosophy at the University of Venice who stood for election as Mayor of his city in 1992 and won.

Riotta: Cacciari used to be a professor. Since 1972 he is a politician who has the hobby of writing philosophical books. He wrote Krisis in 1976, and he was elected to Parliament in 1972. Cacciari is a politician. What I don't like about the present attitude about politics and intellectuals in Italy is that the intellectual is still considered a high priest. You see this in the way intellectuals are treated once they enter Parliament. Political parties never recruit intellectuals on the basis of what they can do, for their actual expertise: for example, Sergio Romano, the ex-ambassador, runs for office and you employ him in foreign affairs, it didn't happen; my friend Brutti Liberati, the judge, runs for office and then you employ him in law, it didn't happen. The fortunate, but rare case, is Luigi Berlinguer, ex-Rector of the University of Siena, who is now Minister of Public Education. But this, I repeat, is a rare case. Berlusconi recruited intellectuals like Saverio Vertone, Marcello Pera, Lucio Colletti and a fourth one whose name I can never Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 166 remember because he's like the fourth musketeer, and you can never remember his name. What are these people doing that they weren't doing before? Vertone already split and went back to the Left! When Michele Salvati, the economist, ran for office in the Olive Tree Alliance I told him that I didn't think it was a good idea to run because he was a very prestigious columnist for Corriere della sera. I told him that he would influence and direct public opinion much better through his liberal commentaries and editorials than he would if he were just one of those who says yes or no in the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate. Still, he ran, he was elected and he's not enjoying it. Another example is that of my journalist colleagues who were elected to Parliament at the last election. All of them, without exception, have had disastrous experiences. In 1994, for example, Corrado Staiano, one of our best journalists, ran for office and was elected; Miriam Mafai, one of our greatest women journalists, ran for office, and was elected; Sandra Bonsanti, a very good reporter who did all the P2 scandal for La Repubblica, ran for office and was elected: none of them, I repeat, not one, will run again this year, in 1996. Why? Ask them and they tell you: "We were doing nothing, we were spaced out, it wasn't our place". The same goes for academics. Just as the arena of politics is not the best place for journalists, it's also that way for academics. In 1993, the left asked Umberto Eco - very few people know this, by the way - to run as their candidate for Mayor of Milan instead of Nando Dalla Chiesa. Eco refused, saying: "I can't, I'm a Professor, and I hate it when people say 'no' to me, I'm not used to that. My good friend Furio Colombo, a former professor at Columbia University, ran for office in 1996, he wanted to serve the progressive ideals. Did the Left make full use of his formidable talent and experience? No...".

Q: Eco also turned down the chance to be Minister for Cultural Affairs in the new government.

Riotta: More than turning down the chance to be Minister for Cultural Affairs, he said no to being the Chairman of the RAI, the State television company. No one else knows that, but we can say it now since it has almost become history. What I'm saying is this: these people are never given the jobs on the basis of their expertise or talent, but only for their names. After a while some of them realize that and they become full time politicians, and very successful ones, like Giuliano Amato, Antonio Bassanini, Luigi Berlinguer, Cesare Salvi, Professor Elia, the former Christian Democrat, Antonio Martino and An Interview with Gianni Riotta 167

Giulio Tremonti, the Forza Italia economists. I expect Marcello Pera to be a very successful politician, too. They can call themselves intellectuals, although to me they are politicians. What's the difference? Equanimity. Professor Martino is a very intelligent man who has a lot to say on many issues, but now he cannot say what he thinks because he has to say what is right for his Party.

Q: If those intellectuals who go into Party or parliamentary politics find themselves shackled by their ideological allegiances, be they to Left- or Right-wing parties, what other ways are there, besides standing for office, for intellectuals to bring their insights to bear on civil society?

Riotta: I hate to be repetitive, but it is only by adopting a position of equanimity that you can be effective nowadays in a country like Italy. Intellectuals who tie themselves to a political party cannot adopt such a position, their Party won't let them. Let me tell you an anecdote: A few years ago I hosted a TV program called Milano, Italia and on one of the shows we held a debate between the philosopher Gianni Vattimo, representing the moderate left, and Luigi Pestolozza, a musicologist, representing the positions of Rifondazione comunista. And I thought, only in Italy would it be possible to have a Professor of Aesthetics and a Professor of Music fighting over political issues on national television. What I'm trying to say is that Italy is very divided now, it always has been, and is used to politicians, intellectuals, journalists taking up partisan positions, taking sides. We are not used to people who do not take sides and who try to address public opinion and present every issue with some fairness. That's the only way you could really be effective today in the Italian debate because Italy has changed in the past few years. It has been through not, perhaps, a revolution, but some kind of very deep and profound change. The result of this is that you really cannot understand Italy any more if you limit yourself to using black and white squares. Let me give you an example: for months, there were very reasonable and educated people claiming that Berlusconi won the 1994 elections because he owned three television stations. In fact, in 1996 he had more than three stations: he had his three stations, plus the three channels of the state broadcasting company, the RAI, whose news broadcasts were edited by his clients, the ones he had put there. Nevertheless, he lost the elections. So, if you try to think not as a propagandist, but as an analyst you have to explain to me why he won with three television stations and lost with six. Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 168

Q: So, why did he win in 1994 and lose in 1996?

Riotta: Berlusconi didn't win in 1994 only because he had three television stations, although they didn't hurt. He won because he ran one hell of a campaign. His 1994 campaign was the best run I have ever seen in Italy. His people were very serious and enthusiastic, and he realized something important that Massimo D'Alema only realized in 1995, that Italy is a Center Right country wearing Center Left make-up. All our TV stars, movie producers, writers, even sports champions like Alberto Tomba are leftists. People come away with the idea that Italy is a leftist country, but it's not. 45-48% of the people in Italy do not vote for the Left, and that is a solid bloc. So, in order to form a winning coalition the left has to strain from the far left of Fausto Bertinotti and Rifondazione comunista as far as the center right of Lamberto Dini. That's the only way they can make up the 53% you need in order to govern. But the right wing of that coalition is so fragile that it is likely to crumble at the slightest push.

Q: If the dominant political culture of the country is conservative, what did the Center-Left coalition do right to win in 1996, after losing in 1994? Even in 1994 they tried to form a coalition that stretched from the far left at least as far as the moderate left.

Riotta: The genius of Prodi, D'Alema and Veltroni in 1995 was that Pds actually accepted that Italy was a basically conservative country. And they accepted that because for the first time ever D'Alema sat down with pollsters, he sat down with people that ran focus groups. These are all techniques that Berlusconi used widely in 1994. He had that funny looking fellow, Gianni Pilo, the one who looks like a skinhead, running his focus groups. I remember, once I asked Achille Occhetto, the former leader of the Partito democratico della sinistra: "What about you people? Are you using focus groups to find out what people think?" And he told me: "Oh, the people who push those are buffoons". I replied: "But if someone is holding a revolver to my head and a buffoon can help me, I go to a buffoon". But Occhetto was not impressed. I was with him in March 1994 for an interview in Bologna before the debate with Berlusconi and I asked him what kind of training he had been doing to prepare for the debate. He said that he had been in politics for thirty years, so what kind of training did I expect him to do. I said: prepare for a TV debate, you've never been on one before. But he didn't prepare and he was crushed by Berlusconi. And then D'Alema An Interview with Gianni Riotta 169

shifted. He understood that if you run in this kind of new first-past-the post-election system you have to learn a few tricks. And he understood that they had to go with a different approach. I remember clearly the day after March 1994 when Berlusconi won I was covering the election for Corriere putting together a column explaining how Berlusconi won and what his techniques meant. While I was doing this I ran into one of the paper's editors, who comes from a New Left background, what we call in Italy an extremist, always was, and he asked me what I thought about Berlusconi's campaign. I said the Right ran a good campaign and won, the Left ran a lousy campaign and lost. He said that the Left needed to be much more gung-ho and continue to say what Bertinotti, the Rifondazione comunista leader, had been saying. Are you sure of that? I said. I then asked him if he remembered Michele Melillo, the capo redattore at L'Unità for many, many years, Luigi Pintor's brother- in-law, a Partisan, capo redattore for Manifesto for more than 20 years and a father figure for a generation of Communist reporters. Of course I remember, he said. You know he voted for Forza Italia, I said. And tomorrow Corriere is going to explain why someone like Michele Melillo, over 70 years old, who has spent sixty plus years of his life in the Left, voted for Forza Italia. Because the Left failed to convince even him. Take Mirafiori, for example, the historical working class neighborhood in Turin. There they elected one of the worst Forza Italia politicians, a psychologist called Meluzzi who defeated the Left coalition's candidate (after that Meluzzi spent his mandate in rave parties and went back to the Left...)

Q: What kind of failure was this? A badly organized campaign, something which could be corrected fairly easily, or a more general failure which bears on the failure to be a hegemonic force?

Riotta: It comes from the failure of intellectuals. The 1994 campaign was a campaign run by intellectuals. "Hey", they said, "we've read the good books, we've been to the good universities, we have the good friends, we know how to do politics, these pollsters and focus group fellows are buffoons, they wear make-up, look at them, they're wearing make-up...isn't that funny". Well, when you want their vote, you wear make-up. "No, we're going beat them, they wear make-up, can you believe it? Politicians in make-up?"

Q: So the Left was behind the times? Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 170

Riotta: The Left was way behind the times, they hadn't learnt the tricks of the trade, the tricks of the first-past-the-post system. You need one leader, one message, and one program, which has to be very short and succinct. People knew that if they voted for Berlusconi they got Berlusconi; if they voted for the Left they didn't know who the leader was, if it was Occhetto or Bertinotti or Ciampi. They were never able to agree on who should be the leader.

Q: Was Berlusconi's victory only the result of strategic errors made by the Left coalition or was it not that his message also tapped into a culture that was deeply rooted in the Italian electorate?

Riotta: Those people who voted for Berlusconi wanted change, and the Left wasn't willing to acknowledge this. Berlusconi's argument, the argument with which he won the election, was this: I will give you change without pain and without paying. We can be a part of Europe without paying taxes, without cutting the welfare state, without cutting health care, one million new jobs will be created. And if you go to the South, where there is 35-40% unemployment, nevertheless you see that most of these kids really work. Some of them have two or three jobs, they sell books, they sell insurance. But they're a frustrated generation. As my father says, they reach 35 without ever receiving a paycheck. And Berlusconi addressed their needs well. In Sicily, the Right won the election in 1996 too, the Left didn't make a dent in their constituency, which is still there. And to tell the truth I don't see the Prodi government making any difference. Neither do I see Left-wing intellectuals serving the Left well. D'Alema made a great speech in the Fall of 1996 when he closed the Festa dell'Unità in Modena. The problem of Italy, he said, was the ruling class, we need a new one. Last summer, I was looking for names for my new novel Il principe delle nuvole (The prince of clouds, Farrar, Straus, Giroux) and I bought a copy of the Albo d'oro della nobiltà italiana, a bit like the social register in the US, which lists all the aristocratic families in Italy. As I was browsing through it, looking for good names, convincing names for characters - it costs L.360.000, by the way - I noticed little by little that pretty much all the Italian ruling class came from this aristocratic background. I met many of my colleagues, a lot of journalists, a lot of politicians, including the Berlinguers, a lot of managers both from the public and private sectors. And now when I see these people I tease them, I say: "Look, I know you are a Baron". And they say, "How do you know?" Still, it's impressive how Italy was and is an oligarchical An Interview with Gianni Riotta 171 society.

Q: This sounds like the Gattopardo. If the ruling class is drawn from such a narrow sector of Italian society, what can be done to get personnel from the middle classes into positions of power? How, in other words, can a new ruling class be formed?

Riotta: The new ruling class and new breed of intellectuals will come only if the education system changes. Right now we have a system that is egalitarian on the surface, but then the brilliant kids and the rich go to study at Columbia, or the Sorbonne, or Oxford. Daddy pays, and the poor kid tries to get a job. We don't have anything like City College here in New York where kids who have talent but no money can go to university for free, and to a university that will give them the kind of knowledge with which they can make a run in the job market. I recently met a group of students from my home town in Palermo who came to visit me. They were complaining that there are companies in the North who were only hiring engineers from the North, from Turin and Milan, and were not hiring engineers from Palermo. They gave me a petition to sign to protest against this. I signed the petition, but I told them: what is the problem, what is going to change? The point is this: the reason those companies don't hire you is that you get a lousy education. So, go to talk to these fellows, ask the chief of personnel what he likes about the Turin and Milan colleges. Write it down on a piece of paper, go back to Palermo, then ask the Ministry to set up in the South one school with that high standard, and if they don't give it to you threaten to burn down the city. But burn down the city asking for something. They will tell you: Sure, fine everyone is equal on paper, but then they'll take your letter and toss it away. I don't think you'll find many intellectuals in Italy who would go for this. It's far nicer to address the students saying everyone should be the same, all schools should be the same.

Q: From what you have been saying, it seems that your major critique of Italian political culture, which can be attributed to the limits of intellectuals, is that it prefers to concern itself with high matters of principle at the expense of detail, or the nitty-gritty. Let's talk about how you see your role in this context. As a journalist, what role can you have in correcting this situation? How do you position yourself vis-à- vis your readership? Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 172

Riotta: I don't try to influence my readership, I try to explain. I tell my readers: if we don't get into Europe, Italy will be like Portugal in the 1940s and '50s. Portugal was a backward country, people were leaving, the poor were very poor, the rich were very rich, there was absolutely no social dynamic. And that is what will happen to Italy. To compete with the other European countries is what will make Italy more alive. There are lobbies in Italy, in the left, in the right, in the Catholic Church and even in the Central Bank of Italy, who really feel it is against their interests to go too deeply into Europe because they don't have the kind of political personnel that can handle the European bureaucracy. Their horizon is at once a national and protectionist horizon. Protectionism of ideas and values too! These people will never cut the welfare state, they will never cut the public owned companies. They're not used to a society that runs outside the parameters of public control, they cannot deal with it.

Q: You are painting a picture of social and political immobility, a ruling class that is drawn from the aristocracy; political parties whose culture is deeply rooted in what seems to be an outdated terrain of public control. Where if anywhere can young, ambitious middle class Italians go if they want to make something of themselves and have a career?

Riotta: There is a debate going on in Italy nowadays about the judges and whether they have too much power. But, it seems to me, nobody goes to the root of the issue. The problem is this: you get to be a judge when you have a degree in law and after you pass an exam. You don't need any money, you don't need any support, you just have to be brilliant. If you are very ambitious and talented and you want to make a career for yourself, what do you do? You go to a private company and they won't give you a job, you go to a newspaper, and you have to go three or four years with no salary and even then it's very difficult to find a position. If you win the state competition to become a judge, you start earning a salary straight away. That is one of the few social elevators people have. Antonio Di Pietro, like him or not, was a very ambitious young man, he even went to work as a Gastarbeiter in Germany for a while. And then he wanted to be someone, he wanted to be a judge. The managers are a closed society, a closed shop, the Italian Stock Market is closed like crazy. In Italy, there were two social elevators: one was the mass parties like the Socialists, Communists and Christian Democrats, where a kid could go and make a career. In the An Interview with Gianni Riotta 173 case of the magistrates, none of these kids come from a very prestigious background, they are all lower middle class and they came across a ruling class like ours. Either we start having places where we form a new ruling class or I don't see a very bright future.

Q: If, as you said, Italy has come through some very radical changes in the last few years, what impact do you think this will have on the recruiting of a new ruling class?

Riotta: A lot has been done already. On the Right, all the people who were frozen in the Movimento sociale italiano have been brought in and are now part of the game. And, of course, being bitterly in opposition and in hibernation, they never learned any of the tricks of the trade. I'm sure, I hope at least, that now that they are running Sicily - don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly happy, by the way, that they are running Sicily - they're learning the tricks of democracy. They're learning that they have to listen to people, rule by consensus etc. I have a little joke: when I was 18 I wanted to introduce socialism to Italy, but now that I'm past 40 I want to introduce capitalism. The real problem is that the Italian economy is closed, it's run by very few families and very few companies. You get to the high ranks of the Italian economy either through political or family connections. The family company needs to go. Why are so many managers corrupt and get arrested? Because there is no control. The Press is owned by these companies. In the past it was worse. Now at least we've gone a few miles ahead. If Fiat, which owns La Stampa, does something wrong then La Stampa covers it; when a few managers from Gemina, which owns Corriere, were indicted, Corriere ran it on the front page. And when Carlo De Benedetti was indicted, Repubblica, which he owns, ran it on the front page. That level has been achieved, but it is not enough. The Wall Street Journal is a bastion of Wall Street and capitalism, but its constituency is readers and investors who need to know if a company is being run poorly. The Wall Street Journal covers that thoroughly. What is happening is a kind of Darwinism, a weeding out of the weak. In Italy, we don't have that. We can have a company that is being very badly run, like Alitalia was for many many years, but nobody was covering that. All of a sudden we find out that it's going belly up. Let me go back to the intellectuals. What decent intellectual wants to waste his time thinking about Alitalia, they want to think about the Zeitgeist.

Q: But you as a journalist are an intellectual and you think about these Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 174 things, and it seems you aim to pass on to your Italian reading public the kinds of truths that otherwise might not be expressed, many of which seem to have some basis in your US experience. More generally, what do you think Italy in the late 1990s can learn from the US?

Riotta: I really don't think that there is anything happening in this country that we can export to Italy and make work because the differences are too wide. This is the only country where capitalism really works. In other European countries like Germany or even Britain after Thatcher, or France people are much more protected than they are here. I wouldn't particularly want Italian women to give birth and then leave the hospital within eight hours as they do here. I'm not advocating that. There are things that are difficult for us Europeans, us intellectuals to acknowledge. The extreme social mobility is one. Take Bill Clinton, for example. If you go and check the neighborhood where he grew up and where he went to school and the High School itself you realize that it is remarkably positive for a society not that he made it to the White House but that he made it to Yale, Georgetown and Oxford. The distance that separates Yale from the White House is much shorter than the distance that separates Clinton's public High School in Arkansas from Yale. Dole, in a different generation and a different context, is an example of the same phenomenon. He was a crippled kid from nowhere in Kansas, and he made it in politics. This is a mobile society - of course, it's more mobile for some than others - but it's mobile nonetheless. The point is to take inspiration from what works, not from what doesn't. I still see Italy and Europe in general as a closed society. I see Italian colleagues of my wife's, who are scientists working here in the US. I know some of them would like to go back to Italy, but the academia in Italy makes it impossible for them to return. They should say: "We want to create the best Department of Biology. You are a biologist, you come, you're in charge, you bring your own people and you work". But they don't.

Q: The role that one of your former colleagues here in New York City, Furio Colombo, who was correspondent for La Repubblica and before that La Stampa, gave himself was that of transmitting to Italy those positive sides of American society - its mobility, its multiethnicity, its multiculturalism, its way of dealing with questions of citizenship and national identity etc. - that he thought useful to the Italy of today, especially as concerns Italian society's struggles with the question of immigration. This was a left-wing intellectual, albeit a moderate one, An Interview with Gianni Riotta 175 praising the US. Now after many years in which the Italian left had condemned the US out of hand as a non viable model, we find an intellectual saying that there are at least some elements of US society from which we can learn. Is that part of your brief, as you see it?

Riotta: Yes, but I repeat, I don't think we can learn from the US. To explain why we need to examine the differing historical situations in which both countries found themselves after the last war. There was a fundamental difference that needs to be underscored. The US is a country that is accustomed to being very united, is used to having a common shared sense of values. It is a winning society. Italy, on the other hand, lost the war. This is something that Italy as a society and culture has always repressed, to use Freudian terms. That is where intellectuals are guilty at the highest level. We lost the war, but what did we do? We told ourselves that we fought a brave Partisan war, which we "won". And in our history books, the day that counts is not September 8, 1943, the day of the Armistice, but April 25, 1945, Liberation Day. But this gives a false impression. Because, first of all, half the country from Rome down, the South, didn't experience the Partisan victory, and so lost the war. All the Italian soldiers who were on the front and were either made prisoners by Germany or the Allies came back thinking they had lost the war, except for the few who joined the Partisans. And, given this, it is remarkable that they went to rebuild the country and be so very successful after their experience of a broken society. The cliché, and British historians are guilty of spreading this, that the Italian army fought badly, is completely false. In fact, they fought well and gave up when it wasn't reasonable to fight anymore. But we have no discussion of this. The Left, for example, has failed to acknowledge that there were more volunteers in WW II than in WW I. The Left has always failed to acknowledge that, leaving the stage clear for the Right to make of it a propaganda weapon and claim that we could have won the War. And reasonable people would say, forget about it, it's good that we lost the war. I'm very confident about the new generation which is growing with parents who did not experience the war. They are very cynical, very focused on their objectives in life. In a recent article, a right wing intellectual wrote that leftists should stop this nonsense about the so-called new patriotism. The new patriotism that we need, he went on, is pragmatism - we don't need unifying myths. But, of course, that is wrong because every society needs unifying myths. What was great about Reagan, like him or not, or Margaret Thatcher with the Falklands war, was how they Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 176 were able to create myths which people could feel good about and identify with. This is what I think the Left should do in Italy, give people something they can rally around, but they are not doing it.

Q: But the failure to address questions like that of national identity has been a failure of the left for a long time. There was always the fear they were treading the same path as Fascism, which made an abuse of the question.

Riotta: I come from the New Left and I have to acknowledge that the Communist Party was so much better at playing the patriotic card than we were. Do you remember when they chose the Party symbol in 1945 they had the Italian flag with the red flag and the hammer and sickle? At all the demonstrations they had both Italian flags and red flags. For us the Italian flag was something you either took to a soccer game or it was Fascist. We were very wrong in this. In 1972 I bought a tricolor bumper-sticker "Italian Power". Nobody really liked it. There were only three patriots at the Manifesto: my buddy Giorgio Casadio, the great Melillo and myself.

Q: But if the left is to come up with some symbolic language, something around which people can rally, are they to draw on their historical past - the hammer, sickle and tricolore on the Party flag - or invent something ex novo?

Riotta: Invent. First of all, on the subject of national identity and the issue of immigration, they have that God-given gift that is Bossi. Don't forget that there is such a thing as an Italian national identity, and people are and feel Italian. Since the Lega has been saying let's split the country into three parts, people have discovered Verdi and are singing and dancing along to his patriotic music, as a reaction. So there is something that is Italian. People speak Italian, and this is the real unifying element, because the people who founded the country were people who read books. People who speak Italian are Italians. It's very moving for someone like me who lives abroad to see the progress Italy is making vis-à-vis immigrants: at the Atlanta Olympic Games two Italian medal winners were African-Italians (at the Games in Sydney the Italian flag was carried at the opening ceremony by an African- Italian, the basketball player Carlton Myers); this year's Miss Italy was born in Santo Domingo; one of the players in the Italian national Under-21 soccer team was born in Nigeria. People accept these people An Interview with Gianni Riotta 177 because they speak Italian, it's easier when a shared language is the unifying element. Italy, however, is and has always been a racist country. I am Sicilian and when I went to work for La Stampa in 1986, after living for three years in the US, the newspaper's accountant said to me: "Oh, you are from Sicily, we already have three other Sicilians". And I said to him: "How many do you have from the Marche region". He went blank. The poor fellow, I was young and nasty then, but it seemed ridiculous to me that he should know exactly how many Sicilians were working at the newspaper. And when I was at the Manifesto, if people saw me with Valentino Parlato they would often say here comes the Sicilian clan. Italy was always a racist country. However, I'm more confident in the people now than I was before.

Q: Yet, the Lega, one of the newest social and political phenomena in Italy, practices racism at an institutional level.

Riotta: Yes, of course, but don't forget that the Lega's was and is first and foremost a fiscal revolt, like Proposition 13 in the US in the early 1980s. People were paying too high taxes, they were not getting the services they demanded. Politicians in the South were wasting billions of Lire and people got sick of it. Bossi didn't quite realize that it was a fiscal revolt because he doesn't have the cultural tools to realize this. But he's a natural politician and so he saw that something was brewing and started working on it. He gave the Lega a racist overtone in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When he won the only big election he has won so far in Milan in June 1993,1 was working on a TV talk show because I was interested in what was going on. I used to get my hair cut at a certain barber shop whose helpers were all from the South. They told me they were all going to vote for the Lega. I couldn't believe it and asked why. They told me that the Lega was the only party that was going to protect them from the marocchini, the Moroccans, the word they used to describe all black immigrants. They felt they were Milanese. Bossi soon realized that the racist overtones were going to cage him in the North and cut him out of any chance of winning in the South. I told Bossi this many times, the paradox of Catalano, my local pastry maker in Palermo. I told him he was going to lose because of the Catalano syndrome. Catalano is a fellow who runs a Pastry shop which he started when I was 6 years old. He's there Monday to Sunday, works every holiday, his kids work there. And he would say, in broad Sicilian dialect, that he'd vote for Bossi because he wants to cut taxes, help the small business community. But, he told me, I don't like it when Bossi Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 178 keeps on saying that all Sicilians are stupid. If he quits saying that I'll vote for him, otherwise I won't. And that's where Bossi stopped. But the fiscal revolt is still there and Bossi nevertheless certainly introduced a lot of racist poison into the Italian debate. Ten years ago nobody would say terrone [Southern scum] as a word in conversation, and now people do much worse. But it was Bossi who made it politically correct to say it. I made a flag of the word terrone. Recently I addressed more than one hundred students from Bocconi, Italy's best Business school. "How many terroni are there here?" I asked. Many hands flashed up, lot of proud smiles around!

Q: How does the question of national identity in Italy sit with the increasing globalization of the world economy?

Riotta: What we don't realize is that competition within the EC takes place in the same way as competition between companies. Italy lost a lot of money for the upgrading of the Malpensa airport in Milan which the EC wanted to give because the Right- and the Left-wing Parties in Italy squabbled at the European Parliament and the money went elsewhere. Now governments have to go to Europe and fight like a company, a company called Italy to have money. You have to go there and say: "Where's my money?" If you want a British company to invest in Italy you can't say go to the North, go to the South. You have to sit down with the politicians on one side and the company on the other and explain why it's wise for Jaguar, say, to produce cars in the Naples area. But this is where I still don't see any change. It's not possible any more for country to depend on one or even a few companies. I was reading the other day, and laughing and crying at the same time, about the Trade Union at the Olivetti company not wanting to leave the strategic sector of computer production. Nobody in Europe makes computers, nobody makes hardware, and is it possible that only Olivetti can make and sell computers in Europe? It's the duty of the Trade Union to be honest and tell its members that there's no future in doing this. They should have done this ten years ago, in fact. Otherwise they're fooling themselves and their members.

Q: You've been talking about what happens when an old order comes up against a new one. And without wishing to construct arbitrary bridges, this is also the subject of one of your novels, L'ultima dea (The last goddess). An Interview with Gianni Riotta 179

Riotta: I don't know. I don't know because the jump is too great. The problem with my life is that I live in such different dimensions that it's difficult for me to find a unifying link. I'm glad, however, if you see one. I wrote four books, the first one was very successful because it was a warm book, people liked the third one because it was cute and the last one was well received in Italy, the US and France. The one in- between, Ultima dea, did well too, got great reviews, but I think people were baffled by it. Ultima dea, and I understood this much later rereading it, deals mostly with the angst about living in the final years of this century. I was born in 1954, and I have a very close friend who is much younger than me, 25 years old, who studies at New York University, gender studies, post-modern studies, the body as text, all that stuff. And for many years I thought that most of this was all hogwash...But now little by little I am learning to understand it better. Nevertheless, I will always think like someone who was brought up and had his formative years in the 1960s. I was a Communist and the Fascists were waiting outside my house every night to bash my head in. So I grew up in that kind of late ideological European civil war. Then after Marxism and the Cold War I came to live in the post-modern era, and I tried to live like an intelligent man with my past not as a burden but as a tool for understanding the present. But nonetheless I am like a Napoleonic soldier who has survived Waterloo, my era is over. My wife went to visit a hospital in Newark yesterday and came back in a state of shock. The kind of human beings she saw there with Aids and TB, terrible things only 15 minutes train ride from here. And she came back saying: "Don't get me wrong, but maybe Communism wasn't that bad". The State is spending so much money for these kids, they are sending a person with two guards to deliver the drugs that the TB patients need. They have to take the drugs in front of the nurse and they are paid to do it, that's the only way to ensure that they take the medications. This is costing the State of New Jersey a fortune. They could have paid for a fantastic education for one third of that money. Ultima dea ends in a way that was inspired by a report I read in a British paper about a royalist demonstration in France mourning the death of the King. I was impressed by these people. I realized many years later that the historical season of ideology starts with the King being killed, with St. Just saying it is right to kill the King, and ends up with the Berlin Wall. I used to agree with St. Just: I still do. Europe was better after 1789 than before. We are saddened by the blood, but the leap forward was important. Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 180

Q: Which is the starting point of the novel.

Riotta: Yes, but I am realizing this only because you are telling me now. I had absolutely no idea when I was writing it. The novel started because I had this sentence in mind: "Per mandare in vacanza il Professor Thomas Diognetus ci volle la fine del comunismo" (It took the fall of communism to send Professor Thomas Diognetus on vacation).

Q: Ultima dea is, then, about the post-modern crisis, the lack of a unifying historical discourse, for which Thomas feels nostalgia.

Riotta: What can I say? It's like having four kids: the first is loved by everybody, the third is a great athlete, the fourth went to Harvard but the second is neither good at school nor a jock, and is the one the parents love the most. I think Ultima dea is by far my best book. All my characters have something to do with the end of ideology, like in the first story from Cambio di stagione which is about a spy who works for the Stasi, the East German secret police or Coronel Terzo in The prince of the clouds. They deal with it because I do. Why is this country going through multiculturalism and all these cultural wars? Because people need a totem, people need a common tribe.

Q: But this is the age when common unifying threads are more difficult to establish. This is the age of multiculturalism, which is one of the biggest issues in the US today. You seem to have some reservations about it. What are they?

Riotta: I have a son who goes to Collegiate, a borough school here in NY, first grade. And one day he came home and said: "White men did slavery, daddy, it's very, very, very bad". I agreed with him, I said it was tragic. And he went on: "It's not true that black people are inferior, they are great. They built the pyramids, they're fantastic. We drew them in school today". And so I asked him to draw the pyramids, and he drew them. Then I asked him to draw the people who built the pyramids. And I told him that those people were slaves, and he couldn't believe it. My wife was very upset, "You are confusing him!". What I am trying to do with him? I'm trying to teach him contradictions. Because if the great passage has been from a phase when we were growing up in which the whites were good to one in which the blacks are good then, we get nowhere. I was against the former simplification An Interview with Gianni Riotta 181 and I'm against this new one. What these kids don't have is a unifying value. I envy parents who send their kids through any kind of religious tradition.

Q: Herein also lies the paradox of Ultima dea: there are no longer any firmly rooted values, yet Thomas' greatest moment is when he seems to relive his Resistance experience and save his brother.

Riotta: Yes, in the book everybody gets his/her moment when each character manages to act on behalf of others. Everybody tries to get an answer, the charismatic women, the art dealer and others who look for the totem in Jugoslavia. But those who look for the totem in order to save themselves get lost, more or less. The others, like Cinzia, who try to get the totem by doing something, saving Graham, killing the Mafia goon, accepting the CIA spy, the Vietnamese son, are saved. Those who realize that in order to get the totem they must lose themselves are the ones who come out best. But don't believe that too much, because I'm realizing this for the first time. It's hard for a writer to say this, but Ultima dea has problems with its editing. My editor at Feltrinelli, Grazia Cherchi, kept encouraging me to finish and so some chapters in which Thomas and Graham talk about how they felt about communism were chopped out. Grazia died last year, and had not told any of her friends that she was sick, and so I came to realize that is the reason she wanted me to finish. I'm not complaining, but the book is jagged, not smooth at all. Having said that, it is in its harsh angles that I like it the most. I don't know of many fictional books that deal with the end of ideology. It's tough, it's so easy to become a pompous ass.

EUGENIA PAULICELLI Queens College, City University of New York, New York, New York

DAVID WARD Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts