ITALY’S REPRESENTATIVES IN NEW YORK

Italian affairs are not my concern and I am not interested in talking about this topic, especially in this forum. However, when Italy sends its representatives to America, they fall in my crosshair. A while ago Italy sent to New York a great and beautiful ocean liner together with an undersecretary who was neither great nor beautiful. The ship spoke very good American, namely it showed every aspect of the ingenuity, the craftsmanship and the flexibility of a people that can learn new languages from other peoples. The representative of the Italian government, to the contrary, was endowed with none of these qualities. He arrived here with a great desire to speak in public, but, since he didn’t know the local language; he was limited to speaking to an Italian audience, any Italian audience, indiscriminately, no matter where and when; as long as he could speak. Out of curiosity I went to his speech at the consulate with a crowd of about a hundred people that the functionaries had managed to herd for the occasion. In front of this public the orator spoke for one hour about the rebirth of Italy after World War II. He didn’t say anything new for we have heard the same things in reports of the Italian Chamber of Commerce, in press releases by ANSA,[1] in Italian newspapers and even by American correspondents in Italy. And yet, apparently, these facts must have been new to the undersecretary because he had to read them from a cheat sheet. And poorly did he read them, in fits and starts, stumbling on words, with long and extremely boring lists of statistics. As an excuse he claimed that in America speeches are full of data—something that is manifestly not true. If anything, speeches by Americans are full of funny anecdotes. Every so often the undersecretary would get stuck trying to decipher whether the figure he was reading was millions or billions. The difference is not irrelevant, and he should have been better prepared. Despite the fact that he was a long-term member of parliament, his Italian pronunciation was awful; with words like burocrassia and democrassia[2] [sic] that reminded me of vernacular theater. Obviously, he had never bothered to correct it. For an entire hour I did not hear a single meaningful word, an intriguing thought, a new idea or a sharp observation that would catch my attention. He paraded in front of us all the trite clichés of propaganda, including the myth that the electoral success of the communist ideology in Italy is the result of poverty; even though even children know that it is the richest areas of Italy that vote for the Communist Party. The other shopworn cliché was that the common sense of the Italian people would eventually reject communism. This would have given us a shiver if we had not already become frozen solid by the time he raised that point. The parade of banalities, of cookie-cutter slogans, saccharine and bromides reached the peak when he begged the public to press the generossa democrassia americana[3] to help Italy. This shocked me more than any other mediocrity that had come out of his mouth because the tone was humiliating and the hope was phony. Nothing of what he said would ever go farther than that room because nobody in New York would ever pay attention to a speech on provincial topics in front of a public of a hundred people. If one wants to be heard in New York, one must reach a different public, in English, via radio or television.

In his speech the undersecretary kept going back to the fact that he had been “close to De Gasperi”; [4] that he “had spoken to De Gasperi”; that he “had seen De Gasperi”; that he “had heard De Gasperi” and he “had worked very close to De Gasperi”. Finally, the entire credit for the reconstruction of Italy was De Gasperi’s, with the help, of course, of the pathetic orator who was gratifying us with his presence. I am not an expert of Italian affairs, but from what I read it seems to me that De Gasperi’s major achievement was doing good and some bad, allowing all the political factions, communists included, to take advantage of his government’s passivity.

Earlier this year, another government representative had arrived on a visit. This one was a lady and the result was even worse. She stayed two months (presumably at tax payers’ expense) with the excuse of a sprained ankle that she could have easily taken care of on a ship heading home. She enjoyed herself by delivering speeches, in Italian of course, to those same identical audiences that understand Italian. In terms of ideas her speeches were at the level of a domestic servant’s; and, in terms of rhetorical flourish, of a bigoted church lady’s. Long and tedious as a rosary, they gave me the impression of a long skirt that is dragging on the floor and is about to fall off but is still hanging by a thread while everybody is waiting for the moment when it will slip down revealing long underwear.

I have seen several representatives of the official Italy in the United States. Before the fascist period the representatives of the liberal governments were often good people, lazy and uninterested. They were happy with a good meal and a good cigar sitting in a comfortable armchair: at least they didn’t bother anyone. The Fascists were arrogant know-it-alls who annoyed everyone; commanded the best cabins on a ship; hit on girls and demanded to stay at the Waldorf Astoria. The latest ones, the Christian Democrats, poor saps, grew up in the most remote parishes of provincial Italy; have never stuck their noses outside their native hamlets; have never traveled first class and are just childishly happy for having the kind of power they had never dreamed of. And of course they have no idea what to do with it. The functionaries who know America well but who must comply with the wishes and orders of these ignoramuses look at them with a diplomatic smirk while they fulfill their desire to speak in front of a hundred Italian Americans, reassuring them that they are really addressing the generossa democrassia americana. In the past it seemed to me that some of the Italians in power wanted to make Italy bigger than it really was, but now I wonder if the remedy isn’t worse than the problem, since they are making it much smaller than it is.

New York, September 17, 1954