82 The New York Review
Will Covid Change Italy?
Ed Vulliamy
Viale Ernesto Pirovano in the north-
ern Italian city of Bergamo connects
the center of town to the cemetery,
with its imposing neo- Egyptian portal
and the peak of Monte Misma as back-
drop. It is a pleasant but unremarkable
cypress- lined boulevard that passes the
Kia dealership and the local headquar-
ters of the Italian Federation of Blood
Donors.
This was the route down which an
abnormal military convoy made its
way on the night of March 18: thirty-
six trucks carrying body bags and cof-
fins for cremation across northern and
central Italy, since all local facilities
had been stretched beyond capacity
by Covid- 19. The harrowing scene was
repeated throughout Lombardy. In her
short book Virus Sovrano, Donatella di
Cesare, a philosopher at Rome’s Sapi-
enza University, describes footage of
t h e c o nvoy a s “ i m a ge s t h at s e e m t o b u r s t
from the darkness of a bellicose past, a
wound never healed. Images of a denied
right: the ritual of collective farewell.”
They circulated internationally, so that
this beautiful city and its surroundings,
less than an hour’s drive from Milan,
became widely known as harder- hit per
capita by the corona virus—with an esti-
mated 4,700 deaths in a province of 1.1
million people—than any other com-
munity in the world.^1
There is a much- reproduced pho-
tograph by Alex Majoli of a priest in
Novara blessing the dead in the back of
a truck that had just arrived from Ber-
gamo (see illustration on page 84). But
another priest, Don Mario Carminati at
the church of San Giu seppe in the Ber-
gamo suburb of Seriate, refused such
rites, instead piling up coffins in his
aisles and apse. “They are not merchan-
dise!” he insisted to me. “I knew many
of them—some came to Mass here, and
we took who we could from the funeral
homes into the church. We received
195 coffins here and blessed them one
by one, name by name, before releasing
them to the military and crematoria.”
Fr. Carminati reflected on those
days: “What I remember most is the
roaring silence. Sirens, then just si-
lence, day after day, night after night,
as though it would never end.” He also
looked forward: “Italy must learn from
this. We met it with strength, but now
understand our fragility. My greatest
fear is that we carry on as before, re-
gardless of what the virus has taught us
about ourselves and the country we live
in.”
Fr. Carminati speaks for many Ital-
ians. The first nation in the West to face
Covid- 19, Italy emerges into its precar-
ious aftermath—if that is what it is—
with an unprecedented level of public
self- questioning and a will to learn
from the coronavirus.
Nowhere is the impatience for a reck-
oning more palpable than in Bergamo,
where the staff at Pope John XXIII
Hospital were pushed to their limits.
Bed Manager Cinzia Capelli said her
work had been “like emptying out the
sea with a spoon with a hole in it.”
“There’s no school of management that
can prepare you for a pandemic,” the
hospital director, Maria Beatrice Stasi,
told me. “We’ve discovered things in
ourselves we did not know existed. We
had to let go of a chain of command
and act as equals. It brought out the
best, and from now on, we need to close
our eyes every so often, and go back to
who we were then.” She adds, with a
shiver, “In the outside world, there is
this idea of Italians singing opera ariasfrom balconies.... Here, no one sang.
Here, there was just a terrible silence of
solitude and fear.”
Her colleague Dr. Luca Lorini, di-
rector of anesthesiology, concluded a
Zoom meeting with colleagues across
Italy by asserting:This was nothing to do with “war,”
as some politicians said. We were
together against an unseen enemy,
and there’s no return to “pre- war”
life—there was pre- Covid, and now
there’s post- Covid. This cannot be
a lesson that serves no purpose.
Our values have been inverted; we
must redefine wealth and redistrib-
ute it differently, as a health system
and a society reflected in its health
system. Covid has taught us: the
medical class operates at the high-
est professional level—the politi-
cal class not. I studied nine years
to do this. How do the politicians
qualify? They need to train too: in
ethics, and government. But they
don’t, and Covid has laid that bare.What was Italy on the eve of
Covid- 19? A decade ago, I interviewed
Paolo Conte, a jazz pianist and singer
whose music expresses a way of living
and loving that he considered to have
been lost in “superfluity and vulgar,
bad taste.” Conte’s yearning was for an
Italy of romance and style, a quotidian
dolce vita: “Nostalgia is entirely the
wrong term. No, it is genuine mourning
for that romantic Italian spirit, its little
secrets and little mysteries, lost in this
time of mediocrity, when things aremore vulgar than beautiful.” And what
had happened to Italian politics during
the 1990s seemed to bear him out.
During my years as Italian corre-
spondent for The Guardian, I wit-
nessed the end of the First Republic,
born from the ashes of war in 1946, and
the creation of the second in 1992, as
an entire political class came under in-
vestigation for corruption and collusion
in so- called tangentopoli—kickback
city. Examining magistrates uncovered
a system in which bribes were routinely
distributed to those who arbitrated
public contracts by those who wonthem, invariably a percentage deducted
from the public purse. According to the
definitive account of the scandal, “Not
even the public had imagined the sys-
tem to be so thoroughly corrupt.”^2
The investigation was called Mani
Pulite—clean hands—which nowadays
refers to washing them frequently, but
then signified a purge of corruption.
With the collapse of the main political
parties—the Christian Democrats, So-
cialists, and Communists—after Mani
Pulite, the vacuum was filled by Silvio
Berlusconi, who won the 1994 election
and has embodied much about Italy
since. He was a television and advertis-
ing magnate who flooded Italian homes
with what came to be called TV spaz-
zatura (trash TV): silly quiz shows and
dancing girls, accompanied by Europe’s
highest proportion of commercials per
hour; sometimes he would appear on a
show himself to endorse a product.
Berlusconi entered politics in part to
duck the sights of Mani Pulite’s magis-
trates, who had charged his brother and
a number of associates. Once elected,
he assailed the judiciary and brazenly
pursued his own interests rather than
those of the nation, but with popular
approval.^3 The historian Paul Ginsborgwrote presciently of him in 2004, “He
can be compared to a figure like Don-
ald Trump.”
Berlusconi was reelected twice. His
party, Forza Italia—the slogan of the
national soccer team—allied with one
revived force, neofascism, based in
the South, and a new one, the separat-
ist, right- wing Northern League. The
descendants of both accompany Ber-
lusconismo into the present: the neo-
fascist Italian Social Movement, later
the National Alliance, is now called
Fratelli d’Italia. The Northern League
has been successfully converted from
a Lombard separatist party into a na-
tional one—called the Lega—primar-
ily mobilized against immigration by
its current leader, Matteo Salvini. Sal-
vini was until recently minister of the
interior in the coalition government
of a third, more recent force—the
mercurial, sometimes nihilistic Five
Star Movement, founded by a former
comedian, Beppe Grillo. Five Star re-
mains the major partner in the current
government and nominated Giuseppe
Conte, a politically unaffiliated law
professor, as prime minister.
Filippo Ceccarelli, in his vast history
of power in modern Italy, Invano (In
Vain, 2018), writes of Berlusconi:Rich in means, and an authentic
messiah of the spectacle, the Cav-
aliere [as he was known before
being stripped of Italy’s knight-
hood] was preparing to close the
cycle of words, of analysis, of ratio-
nal persuasion—and therefore of
representative democracy.“Italy has two faces,” Ceccarelli told
me, both drawn from the opera:La Commedia, whereby nothing
can be serious for more than two
days; and Melodramma, emotions,
arguing, gesticulating, and tears,
because sooner or later in the
opera, everybody cries or faints, or
otherwise trembles. Berlusconi’s
world managed a banal combina-
tion of the two.But “it was not Berlusconi who cre-
ated Berlusconi, it was Italy that cre-
ated Berlusconi,” cautioned Giuseppe
Genna, one of Italy’s most intrigu-
ing modern writers, whose dystopian
novel Italia De Profundis presents the
country as a patient on an operating
table. “From Berlusconi to Covid,” he
continued,Italy had become a reality show
that was not a show, it was reality.
It was pure postmodernity: realize
your dreams! But the realization of
dreams is not a value. Berlusconi
also removed the idea of a public
servant who may have a conflict of
interest, by making everything in
his interest.Then came Covid- 19 and, argued
Genna,the way Italy lived since the rise of
Berlusconi suddenly seems to mat-
ter less. What was all that about?
Nothing. We’ve come face to faceThe Monumental Cemetery of Bergamo during a performance of Donizetti’s Requiem
in memory of Covid-19 victims, Bergamo, Italy, June 2020Alessandro Bremec/NurPhoto/Getty Images(^1) Approximately 455 per 100,000. This
figure comes from the affidavits of the
Noi Denunceremo group of bereaved
families, who are taking legal action
for negligence. It includes an attempt
to count deaths at home and in nursing
homes.
(^2) Gianni Barbacetto, Peter Gomez, and
Marco Travaglio, Mani Pulite: La Vera
Storia vent’anni dopo (Milan: Chi-
arelettere, 2012), p. 91.
(^3) This is not only my way of describing
Berlusconi and those years, it is a view
widely shared by serious historians of
Italy. See Denis Mack Smith, Modern
Italy: A Political History (University of
Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 488–491.