84 The New York Review
but be proud of the fact that when the
moment came, the best hospitals in the
world were in Naples.”
De Luca was referring primarily to
Cotugno Hospital for infectious dis-
eases, where not a single member of
the staff caught the coronavirus. Out-
side the hospital is a large tent manned
twenty- four hours a day, to which any
citizen can come for a free, immediate
test for Covid- 19. Dr. Rodolfo Funzi,
director of the department of infec-
tious diseases and emergency infec-
tion, demonstrated—along corridors,
air- locked doors, and decontamination
chambers—how all professional or an-
cillary personnel don a tunic in a sterile
area and are sprayed with disinfectant
before undertaking a task; once it is
done, she or he disrobes and showers
in an airtight chamber. “We’ve had the
world here,” explained Dr. Funzi,
the poorest, the weakest, the
most psychologically traumatized.
We’ve learned this through our
experience with HIV, malaria, TB,
hepatitis—a protocol for all pan-
demic possibilities. We applied our
usual professional methods, with
more intensity than normal, I con-
fess. All staff are trained to work
in an environment sanitized from
everyone else, knowing that if we
do something wrong, the infection
is unleashed. We have our model
and we were prepared as we always
are, because we have to be.Dr. Funzi could not resist adding: “I
think we’ve shown something to Italy
and the world about the image of the
Italian South. It is just a shame that
we need a disaster to demonstrate our
sense of community.” Yet for all the
preparedness and professionalism of
the city’s hospitals, for all the citizens’
discipline, Naples may yet suffer more
long- term effects from Covid than any
other Italian city.
Early evening in the Sanità quarter: a
wasp’s nest of whizzing scooters, young
people on the streets, and the elderly
surveying the scene from balconies.
“Napule è nu sole amaro” (“Naples is
a bitter sun”) reads a neon sign in di-
alect hung across the main drag, a line
from a song by Pino Daniele. But there
is a sudden, not altogether reassuring
calm as one walks through the gates
of the former San Camillo Hospital,
now the Tenda Community, operated
by the Catholic charity Caritas for
the homeless and the lost, sometimes
in the mind, sometimes because they
could no longer make ends meet. Don
Antonio Vitiello proceeded quietly
through those who gathered around
him, distributing meal vouchers. “To
be honest,” he said, “not a great deal
has changed for many of them. What is
different is that there are more of them
than ever. And while before, there was
a balance of migrants and Neapolitans,
now there are many more Neapolitans.
Covid has made them migrants in their
own city.”
More people in Naples than in any
other major city are dependent on the
“black economy”—cash that does not
show on the books. Caritas’s lay direc-
tor for Naples, Giancamillo Trani, said:
This is the third- largest city in
Italy; a city of poor people with
a capacity to s’arrangiarsi, to ar-range themselves. But “black
work” describes one third of the
city’s economy, and with Covid,
these people could not sell mobile
phone covers or key rings, so could
not pay the rent or electricity. It’s
been exhausting, on the streets
throughout lockdown; in one week,
we reached out to eight thousand
people and spent €72,000 in dona-
tions, bequests, and church funds.He reflected on where this would lead:
“The pope speaks against an eco-
nomic model of progress, but I wonder
whether people are ready to change
their way of life. And even if they want
to, will they be able to?”
The work of those in Naples’s so-
called black economy is often con-
nected to the Neapolitan criminal clans
known as the Camorra. Roberto Savi-
ano, an exper t on the ma fia (and a
contributor to these pages), warns
of Camorra syndicates preying on
desperation caused by the corona-
virus and operating almost like a
charity, providing “daily home de-
liveries of essentials” to “the most
disadvantaged neighborhoods of
Naples.” They are, as Saviano puts
it, “investing in consensus: desper-
ate people who today receive the
Camorra’s help will be grateful or,
rather, will have to express their
gratitude when everything gets
back to normal and the clans need
labor for their illicit enterprises.”
As Italy figures out how to
spend the €209 billion it is receiv-
ing from the European Union’s
post- coronavirus recovery fund, Inte-
rior Minister Luciana Lamorgese has
added her own condition to the EU’s: a
“mafia test” to prevent embezzlement
of EU grants and loans by criminal syn-
dicates. But this will be a challenge not
only in the South, for just as poverty
presents the mafia with an opportunity
in Naples, so does wealth in the North.
Nando Dalla Chiesa teaches sociology
at Milan University and runs an insti-
tute that monitors organized crime; his
father, the Carabinieri general Carlo
Alberto Dalla Chiesa, was appointed
prefect of Palermo in May 1982 and
assassinated by the mafia the following
September. Nando ran as the center- left
candidate for the mayoralty of Milan in
1993 but lost to the Lega candidate; he
later served as a parliamentary deputy.
Dalla Chiesa’s antimafia research
focuses on what his book Passaggio a
Nord (Northern Passage, 2016) calls
“the great transferral”: criminal con-
tamination of the northern Italian
economy, including money- laundering
through its financial markets, and pred-
atory investment to take advantage of
privatization in health services, which,
Dalla Chiesa writes, “present a formi-
dable accumulation and lubrication of
personal dependencies, an indispens-
able resource in the realization of a
mafia model.” In conversation, Dalla
Chiesa said: “If we want to correct
things, we have to pay the price of cor-
rection, and submit ourselves to the
law. Law means nothing in Italy. What
is the constitution if the mafia is omni-
present in our economy? Our libera-
tion must be enshrined in lawfulness.”The pollster Antonio Noto pointed
out that Italy’s experience of Covid- 19
has sustained the popularity of Italian
president Sergio Mattarella, who enjoysan approval rating of 60 percent, and of
Conte, whose approval rating is 43 per-
cent. The governing parties, however,
are struggling in the polls: the center- left
Democratic Party (PD) i s a t 1 9. 5 p e r c e nt ;
Five Star is at 17 percent. Salvini is also
down; “he seems to fail to understand
that the country has been considerably
changed by this, [he’s] still reading from
the same script,” contended Noto. Per-
haps, as Giuseppe Genna suggested, “in
a moment of uncertainty, even people
who want to hate cannot do so yet; hate
has been suspended by fear.”
However, the Lega leads in the
polls—25 percent of Italians say they
would vote for it if elections were held
tomorrow—and “represents the work-
ing class more than any other party,”
Noto said. Intriguingly, he claims that
“there is no left- wing party in Italy.”
To the extent that Five Star was aradical force, “its appeal was protest
in opposition, not in government; its
popularity halved the moment it won
the 2018 election.” The PD, said Noto,
“became so centrist that big finance is
no longer with the right, it is with the
PD.” Now the drift of Five Star and the
PD has created yet another vacuum in
Italian politics, filled this time by none
other than Pope Francis. “All this,” con-
cluded Noto, “opens a space for social
elements of the church, which are now
among the most radical influences in the
country, though they have no obvious
parliamentary affiliation.” Even the er-
udite leftist Francesca Fornario, after
addressing a demonstration against a
post- Covid government policy summit
at Villa Pamphili in Rome, conceded:
“One third of the CGIL [the former
Communist trade union federation] vote
Lega. There’s a chance for change,” she
said, “but it’s all very sgangherata”—
rickety—“and many Catholics are now
further left than the heirs to the Com-
munist Party.”
According to a 2015 poll, 88 per-
cent of Italians describe themselves as
Catholic.^5 But Italian Catholicism is a
broad church. There is its darker side: a
history of intolerance, shady finances,
mafia connections, Opus Dei, pedo-
philia, cover- up, and Vatican intrigue.
But there are also people like Don
Mario in Bergamo and Trani in Naples,
who draw on a heritage from scripture
and Saint Francis of Assisi, which con-
stitutes the moral compass in Man-
zoni’s novel and found expression in
Liberation Theology across the Amer-
icas. (Both wings were represented in
the Christian Democrat party, the left
faction often uncomfortably: the anti-
mafia mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Or-lando, felt obliged to resign in 1990 to
found his radical Network party.)
Secular media tend to be squeamish
about religion; like the Victorians and
sex, they prefer to overlook religious
faith as a widespread motive for social
action. So while Italy’s laudable dailies
cover national, European, and interna-
tional politics and culture, the Catholic
newspaper Avvenire contains, more than
any other, reports on the suffering of
refugees and (usually ecclesiastical) sol-
idarity with them. For obvious reasons,
“we are now read by many who are not
believers,” observed its editor, Marco
Tarquinio, at the offices the paper shares
with Corriere dello Sport in Rome.
Tarquinio was born, appropriately
enough, in the Umbrian town of Santa
Chiara, neighbor to Assisi; its founder
and patroness, Saint Clare, was Saint
Francis’s close follower. “Our newspa-
per held its fiftieth anniversary in
2018,” he recalled,and I was standing next to
Pope Francis for forty- five
minutes, introducing our
staff. He said to me: “Your
agenda is dictated by the
poor, the outcast, the last.”
He’s right; I think that with
the advent of Pope Francis,
we’re in a change of epoch,
not just an epoch of change.
The usual alibis have fallen
away. Covid has hastened the
changes. Something is falling
but has not yet fallen. And
something emerges, in eco-
logical awareness, in a reas-
sessment, an assertion of our most
fundamental values: solidarity,
family, friendships, understanding
the beauty of nature.Politically, Tarquinio sees this current
as “heir to both the left of Christian De-
mocracy and the left of the Communist
Party. We combine both, to be the nem-
esis of consumerism in a society that has
consumed so much it cannot consume
any more, and envisage a society based
on spiritual values and redistribution of
material wealth.” As Trani put it, “To be
a true Catholic in Italy now means this:
if I give bread to the poor, I’m a Chris-
tian benefactor. If I ask why the poor
have no bread, I’m a Communist.”Every country stands at a fork in the
road as Covid appears to abate then
returns sporadically, but Italy seems
to know this more than any other. The
grants and loans from Europe “are an
opportunity,” proclaims Conte, “to
make Italy greener, more digital, inno-
vative, sustainable and inclusive.” But
beyond this rhetoric, Italy has deeper
choices to make. Politics can either carry
on, as they did in the anticlimactic after-
math of tangentopoli, or can seriously
challenge clientelism and corruption. A
first test will be the regional elections on
September 20. Noto sees many of them
as, effectively, Covid referenda. “De
Luca, on the left, is overwhelmingly pop-
ular, likewise Luca Zaia, the Lega gover-
nor of Veneto; both did well during the
pandemic. Conversely, if there was an
election in Lombardy, [governor] Attilio
Fontana, also of the Lega, would prob-
ably fall on his Covid performance.” But
in other places, the battle feels more like
one for the country’s post- coronavirus
political soul, nowhere more than in the
Mediterranean coastal region of Liguria.A priest blessing the coffins of Covid-19 victims
from Bergamo, Novara, Italy, April 2020Alex Majoli/Magnum Photos(^5) John Hooper, The Italians (Penguin
Books, 2015), p. 127.