BBC Good Italy Bad Italy: Girlfriend in a Coma

Imagine you have a girlfriend, and she is Italy.

You love her deeply, but she is in a coma.

She has been sick for a long, long time.

Good Italy, beautiful, full of promise,

has been knocked out by Bad Italy, selfish, and cruel.

I've come here to find out why. With a little help from an old friend,

Dante Alighieri, who has seen this all for me, 700 years ago.

Ah abject Italy, you inn of sorrows,

you ship without a helmsman in harsh sees,

no queen of provinces, but of bordellos!

It all began in 2001, when I was editor of The Economist .

We looked at Italy, and we were shocked. Corruption, private power, media domination.

A precious Capitalism was destroying something even more precious: Democracy.

On our cover, we were a trifle provocative about Silvio Berlusconi.

He sued us for libel, and said we were communists.

His proof: that I look 'like Lenin'.

We won the legal cases, He won two more elections.

Bill Emmott!

So I set out to make sense of it.

I had the nasty feeling that Italy was an early warning of the West decline too.

I was surprised that Italians didn't seem to mind a foreigner speaking frankly.

Even when I was just saying the bleeding obvious.

Italy started to seduce me when I was a fairly innocent teenager.

I got there on my first ever trip abroad, in our version of The Magic Bus .

Here I am in Florence with my mates and a rather dodgy haircut.

But while we were awestruck by Venice's beauty, our van was emptied out by thieves.

Buona Italia, mala Italia. It taught me a lot about girlfriends.

2011 was an incredible year: tyrannies were falling down, borrowing costs were shooting up.

Europe's sovereign debt became the new bogeyman, endangering the Euro.

Yet the real story lies deeper, Europe has for years been crippling itself.

Now our lack of solidarity and our leaders' shortsightedness risk a collective suicide.

Taking central stage, Italy at least provided some comic relieve,

thanks to the entertaining talents of Sivio Berlusconi.

But the play was about to reach a crescendo.

# dicendo... dicendo cose dolce, amore, amore mio, mon amour. #

- The sun may be shinning in Italy's capital but the economic forecast is distinctly gloomy.

The trend is accelerating, not decelerating.

- Italy's debt is about 2.6 trillion dollars, more than 5 times the debt of Greece.

Italy's PM Silvio Berlusconi has resigned.

- News of his resignation brought his opponents out onto the street,

to celebrate what they are calling 'a liberation'.

It looked like a salvation too, with new PM Mario Monti

swapping bunga-bunga for fiscal bondage.

Yet salvation takes time, and repentance. Italy had neither.

Truth, intelligence, courage, fine words.

But are the people who run Italy really listening?

Here they are, the elite who over the past 20 years presided over Italy's decline.

They bear the responsibility for leaving my girlfriend in a coma,

for what they have done, and especially, for what they've not done.

Fine offer, but when I tried to take it up, he claimed that I had misunderstood him.

Again.

Time in Italy often seems to stand still. Sometimes it even takes you backwards.

Here in Orvieto the frescoes of Signorelli, one of the most beautiful depictions ever

of the universe of judgment.

Here, after the Black Death 700 years ago, one of Italy's more spectacular cathedrals was built.

It symbolise the desire for moral rebirth, for thinking in new ways.

For Italy then was divided and fractured, corrupted and dispirited, just as it is today.

That was the Italy that angered Dante.

Europe's greatest poet united Italians for the first time in their own language.

Now, culture seems to be the only thing that keeps them together.

Signorelli's frescoes were a passionate call to face up to our sins, and repent.

That was Dante's call too.

I began to wonder what vices Dante would name today. And what virtues.

So I went to my own, very personal journey, to find out.

Of course, it would send me straight to hell.

Dante: Here one must leave behind all hesitation, here every cowardice must meet his death.

Truth, so important, but so easily abused.

The loudest and simplest messages prevail.

Deeper truths are hard to explain, painful to accept.

So the easy way out is to avoid them.

This is so true in Italy.

Once Europe's more dynamic economy, it's 20 year decline...

has been horrified, much worse than most people realise.

When we foreigners enter the corridors of Italian power,

we are told we'll be baffled. But the truth is easy to see, ant it's ugly.

20 years have passed since the huge corruption scandal cleaned hands,

but political hands are now dirtier than ever.

It's so different from 150 years ago.

Then the heroes of Unification, Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini, were patriots,

who devoted their lives to radical action and public service.

What would they think of today's politicians

devoting their lives to timidity and self -service?

Monti does have authority. We called him Supermario when he was in Brussels

for the way he took on Microsoft and other giants.

But with a short mandate even a superhero can't be enough,

amid corrupted politics and fierce resistance to change.

20 years ago, Italy gave another professor a year to save her.

It didn't work.

- What you can't do in a year is to really reform branches of your public apparatus,

that require time to enter into your patterns,

and constant and continuous pressure on them.

Otherwise bureaucracy will resist following the principle expressed in Neapolitan

'A da passà a nottata' 'The night will be over'.

- I'd be very happy if I could, with many others, contribute at avoiding the train derailing,

but also, perhaps, changing the course of the track for the future,

and try to have the country concentrate a bit more seriously,

on what should be the place of Italy in the world at large in 2020, 2030.

- As they say in Italian, this is 'the last beach', l'ultima spiaggia .

For us, there's a multinational *** for this country, because what Monti is doing,

and the way in which he's trying to sell the virtues of this country internationally,

is the last attempt that we can make.

- There is an opportunity to relaunch the country, but we have to be very honest.

It's almost the only chance that we have, probably the last one.

Otherwise, it will be decline, decline, decline.

To look better by 2030, Italy would need a cultural revolution,

on the Right and the Left. That means replacing media domination,

lies, and patronage, with competition, truth and merit.

- So when you have such a lesson of immorality,

proposed as a public example of dealing with public affairs,

you become popular. In a sense he was a genius,

an evil genius, but a genius.

Dante: There's he who, through abasement of another hopes for supremacy.

- Is it true or false that Mr. Berlusconi was able, while Prime Minister,

to criticise, or in effect, distort on many of his critics,

trough his newspapers, or is that false?

- The newspaper is Il Giornale , Silvio Berlusconi is not the owner of Il Giornale .

and if his brother is the owner... no, is that easy, OK!

- One of the... the biggest problem of the last few years was this hyper-partisanship,

hyper-polarisation of the society and of politics.

The strategy to adopt there,

is that of imposing a mutual disarmament.

and to generate coalitions of the excluded,

that could help us overcome the coalition, many times,

of those resisting change, that is the coalitions of the incumbents.

- Italy is a very fragmented economy, and a very fragmented country.

There is the traditional division between North and South,

there is a division between gender,

and there is a division between generations. So this divisions are pervasive in our society.

We are a country that likes gradualism.

But when gradualism is too slow,

then it creates an exasperation.

- The state has also played its part. Its brutal response to protest

has provoked distrust, and strengthen resistance.

With reforms blocked and divisions deepening,

minds are even turning back to the violent era of 40 years ago.

Many believe that in those days of the Cold War,

the State murdered its own citizens, sometimes supported by the West.

The bitterness lingers.

Dante: For now we near the stream of blood, where those that injured others violently boil.

- What the Italian mafia does in Sicily, in Calabria, in Campania,

is to enforce the control of the territory. So they extort, they protect, they control access to markets.

However, once they make all this money in Italy, they have to reinvest them.

So what they have been doing abroad, mainly, is to reinvest the money they have gained in Italy.

So for instance they are present in this country, in the UK, they are present in Eastern Europe,

they are present in North America, this is certainly an international problem,

and it certainly requires international cooperation,

especially tracing the money that goes from one banking system to another.

They have a very flexible organisation structure that allows them to be present in many countries,

in Germany of course, as you remember, there was major massacre in Duisburg,

and that was extraordinary because it meant that the 'Ndrangheta was able to organise

a massive *** operation in a foreign country, as part of *** originating in Calabria,

but then playing out in the European stage.

I have the feeling that Italy allows these organisations to operate as state within the State.

In the mafia in the North of Italy is a *** interconnected with business,

if there are several businesses to enter a given market,

what the mafia is very good at doing, is to exclude some and promote others.

- I think but perhaps the national scene of the Italian women,

has been to be core perhaps, or not courageous enough.

Every woman in Italy, perhaps also myself,

we are in a way afraid to loose approval, and not to be approved by men.

And approval for us is a lot, because this is the country of belle donne, bella figura,

and you are really alone. Sometimes we lack determination.

We were not strong enough to say Basta . Not only women, because this is an insult to any human being.

I think the image of women in the media

in the last 10-15 years has been simply devastating.

On average, women in Italy are paid a third as much as men,

but we have to work twice as hard,

and if you are not ugly, you are supposed to be dumb.

and if you want to become a mother, as most women want to, naturally,

you have to think well about this, because you might lose your job.

Things are so bad. I've been reported that there are companies that when they hire you,

they force you to sign a resignation letter without date

so that if you get pregnant, you have to leave.

They call it the most terroristic method of contraception.

- The access of women in the labour market in my country is simply pathetic.

But it is also totally divided. It's a 60% again in the North,

dropping down to 30% in the South. - The rate of occupation of women is by far the lowest

not only of Europe, but is one of the lowest in the OCD countries.

And there's a problem of growth, but there's also a problem of culture.

- The first priority, the only priority of women is to be a good mother.

and a good wife, a good lover, well, if she still have some energy,

and if she has some time left, going out to work.

- Women in Italy are the only effective and existing well-fare system.

- If we have the same rate of occupation in women as in *** Europe,

we can have a bigger growth of 11 point of GDP.

Nobody knows. But then they resisted one.

- So the only way, I think, is to work with the young generation in order to empower them,

and to find the courage to say 'I don't like this, I don't accept. I will not vote you'.

There are many horrors in Italy, but in the South, I found a shocking case of the failure to act,

where something is clearly wrong: for 50 years jobs have been traded for human life.

ILVA told me that the experts report is full of errors.

They are fighting the plant's closure, or promising a clean-up.