Customer Reviews

The Dark Heart of Italy

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

When I saw the title of this, at first I thought, "hatchet job". But even the introduction drew me right in. I love to travel, and it's always easy to think the grass is greener elsewhere. That's why now and then I like to get a more critical view of a place. It's easy to be seduced by a place as beautiful as Italy.

This book does a beautiful job of presenting a portrait of Italian life. As an example, the byzantine process of buying a house there left me shaking my head. And the peculiar ways of the government and religious establishment are mind-boggling. Yet, he clearly loves it there, and points out the everyday beauty of life there very well.

Somebody made a fairly sarcastic comment about how Jones thinks Italy is a beautiful place as long as you eliminate the people. To me, this person got it entirely backwards. If anything, Jones is saying that the people, the language, the artisan stores, the conversations, and the amateur football are beautiful, it's the government that ruins the situation, and guess who is at the helm? The guy who owns half the country. No conflict of interest there. But Jones even admits that there are things about Berlusconi that he does like. Of course, I'm sure that many readers can't tolerate a critical view of anything that they have personal feelings for, but that's another woeful topic entirely.

I did bog down a bit in the descriptions of the many political scandals. There are so many of them that one would probably need a timeline or chart to keep them straight.

The many stories of individual Italians are delightful. The very old lady at the football game hilariously stands out.

I suppose he could have been less controversial by calling it something like The Complex Heart of Italy, but I can't blame him at all for having a bold title, and I think it's more effective. All in all, a great read!

3 stars for all the drawbacks noted by other reviewers (the political excerpts and citations were not handled all that well, the book felt discontinuous, and he could have easily found out why mysteries are called "gialli" and so on -- there is some laziness).

His analyses of Italian culture are not far off, though. If he had reinforced some of his theories by hashing them out more with real Italians or spending more time in Itay I don't think it would have changed the book much. Italians are indeed jaded with their systems, and it is not so much laziness as a keen and entirely justified sense of futility that keeps them from open revolt.

Soccer is written about extensively because it is the national obsession and mirrors Italian life in many ways, as the author describes. If you don't like soccer you start out at a considerable disadvantage here.

I think that with more time and care this could have become two books: one on general culture and life, and the other focusing more on politics. I can kind of see why he's attempting to weave them together, but I can't say that I have met many Italians who are in any way interested in politics; the one or two who have been look at it completely from an opportunistic point of view. Americans have a hard time understanding how much the "party" controls everyday life here.. party contacts get you a job, a building permit, your company magically wins a bid, your red tape goes away, and so on... This is what life is like here; it is not Jones' "claim."

The only strong principled stance I have ever heard expressed by politicians is that against the death penalty; the rest is just a perpetual motion conspiracy machine that keeps them rotating in their 'poltrone' -their comfortable positions- in a never-ending game of musical chairs. As another reviewer pointed out, figuring out Italian politics is like nailing Jell-O to the wall, or herding cats. The targets are always moving, the story never ends, the facts never come to light. (I tell people to imagine if every news story in the U.S. were to play out like the Kennedy assassination, only with no Zapruder film and no Warren Commission). However, my Italian husband highly recommends Indro Montanelli's "L'Italia del Novecento" (20th-Century Italy), so keep an eye out for that if it ever gets translated, for a thorough, level-headed overview by one of that nation's top journalists, that carries through the 2000 elections.

"The Dark Heart of Italy" is a good book if you want to dip your toe into the murky waters.. If you've got scuba gear check out "In God's Name" by David (?) Yallop..

If your interest in Italy goes beyond travel guides to Tuscany, Florence, and Rome (which I have also reviewed on this website), you might find this analysis of Italian politics and society at the turn of the century very informative. Even while I was enjoying monuments and countryside in Venice and Tuscany, I found it hard to put down the sober assessment of Italian society and politics in this book which I picked up in a Roman bookstore.

For Jones, a British author, is not an occasional visitor to Italy, but instead spent four years travelling through the Italian peninsula seeking to unravel some of its enigmatic political institutions and attitudes. Much of the book is solidly researched and he extensively draws from numerous references in Italian which he translates himself. Knowing well that much of this beautiful country is well described elsewhere, he does not seek to prettify any of the issues he discusses, whether it is political corruption (a major theme of the book), religion, or football.

For example, his chapter on the workings of Italy's Slaughter Commission, a parlimentary investigation into a series of bloody bombings in Italian cities from the 1960s to the 1980s, is a chilling account of paralysis of Italian political institutions. Documenting the almost surreal investigation of the Piazza Fontana bombings of 1969, he observes: QUOTE The irony is that Italy, so painfully legalistic, is as a result almost lawless. If you've got so many laws, they can do anything for you. You can twist them, reaarange them, rewrite them. Here, laws or facts are like playing cards: you simply have to shuffle them and fan them out to suit yourself UNQUOTE

As the title suggests, this book is a far cry from the more bucolic images found in Italian travel guides. I found it highly readable and insightful.

After all the praise for Tuscany and the Italian charms, let's welcome a realistic discussion by an Englishman who was disappointed after living a few years in Italy. It's funny how hasty tourists usually celebrate Italy while those who actually live there, like Jones, or Tim Parks, or Donna Leon, find a lot of negative aspects. Probably, this comes from the fact that Italians nurture appearances ("bella figura") while hiding their true feelings. So, when strangers get to know the real Italy, they feel betrayed.
In the past, strangers felt obliged to be nice to Italians who were economically underdeveloped compared to northern Europeans. Today central and northern Italy has a per-capita income which is 20% higher than the average income in France, Germany or the UK. It is time to judge Italians without condescension.

The truly interesting bit of this book? How did someone with such a superficial knowledge of Italy manage to get published & get such great publicity...Jones says he's been in Italy four years -- he must've been working on it the moment he arrived, when he didn't know any Italian or any Italians and unfortunately it shows. There are a ton of errors big and small -- that derive from the fact that he simply hasn't been around enough to know. He bases part of his initial fascination with the 'darkness' in Italy by noting into how odd it is that Italian mysteries/thrillers are called 'gialli' or yellows -- apparently no one told him that traditionally the book covers for mysteries are yellow in Italy...One of too many non-observant observations...Like Italians watch four hours of TV every day -- the average person in theUS watches 5 hours, for as much as we can take those kind of statistics to be precise, what's the big difference? That a green journalist from Britain is scandalised by the pulchritude on Italian TV? Now *that's* surprising and insightful...

To minimize his own lack of knowledge, he uses endless quotes from Italian books -- there are pages and pages of italicized material, often without any clear attribution, apparently having to explain who was saying what would just muck up a quick read. Since when did translating pass as investigative journalism? Likewise a lot of quotes from unnamed 'Italian journalists' without noting who they work for -- when in just about any country to understand you have to know what side of the political fence the person is from...Clearly, few would be able to read the original Italian, but it doesn't excuse him from the general shoddiness of the work.

This book is interesting to those with some acquaintence with Italy, particularly us foreigners who live here and don't understand what the heck is happening very well. I got to know a bit about the politics, and in particular the insidiousness of the Berlusconi politico-business machine, as well as a bit about the culture, such as why their television programs are perhaps the worst in the developed world. There is also a lot about the Italian penchant for wild conspiracy theories in a very interesting investigation into the many unexplained acts of terrorism of the last few decades. However, while there was nothing patently wrong in it that I found, the more I read the less I felt like I was learning - that is an odd feeling, but the author starts to repeat himself and meander into more and more personal stories that lack relevance, at least for me. (Did I really need to know that his "favorite student" at the Univeristy came on to him in the spring by pumping her hips in her chair?) In addition, as I am not a soccer enthusiast, I grew very bored with the large amount of coverage the sport got as a "reflection" of the culture.

While Jones has a pleasant writing style for a journalist, when he attempted to expand his good - though definitely throw-away - articles into a book, his talents appeared to fall short to me. At the end of each chapter, for example, he adds some silly observation that leads to the theme of the next chapter, which becomes a very tedious and contrived device.

This is a good intro, just not that good. Recommended tepidly.

Tobias Jones' "The Dark Heart of Italy" is an interesting read. I'd categorize it as a combination of two of my favorite books: Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily and Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Modern Japan. I feel like the comparison to Kerr's book is the most appropriate one: here's a foreigner who sees the country with fresh eyes and uses that perspective to make trenchant, well-presented observations about his adopted place. Both Kerr and Jones love their adopted country but are left with a feeling wonderfully expressed by Jones when he says that Italy is "infuriating and endlessly irritating, but in the end it is almost impossible to leave. It's not that everything in Italy is 'troppo bello' ('too beautiful'), or that food or conversation are so good. It's that life seems less exciting outside of Italy, the emotions seem muted."

There are good chapters on Italian television (Jones asks "why is it so bad?") and Italian politics. On the political front, he paints a complex picture of Silvio Berlusconi, calling the former Prime Minister "both fascinating and frightening."

I really enjoyed the foreword of the book, which captures the reaction to the release of the hardcover edition (for this reason, I recommend you get the paperback). Jones notes that "overnight, I was catapulted from near-anonymity in Italy to being a household name." Then he shares some truly thrilling tales of encounters with and letters from Italians who took the time to read the book. As one letter states perfectly: "I have lived in Italy all my life. I love this country. It is obvious from reading your book that you do too. I write to express my gratitude to you because you have been very courageous. You have described...precisely what is happening in Italy in these terribly turbulent times."

This is a cleverly constructed book of several parts and a few recurring motifs. Jones, a Welsh Methodist, Everton FC supporter, London hack and Oxford (Arts?) graduate, goes to live in Parma, Italy where his beloved has established herself. He divides his book into nine separate chapters and tries to weave them together as well as his excellent English and his motifs will allow. The first chapter discusses nuances of the Italian language and he uses those nuances to propound that Italy is a much more nuanced country than England and that its culture is infinitely more refined. An entire chapter brings the nuances of Italian culture to bear on football and he waxes very lyrical about the local youth and whatever immigrants are around playing ball as the sun goes down. The football allows us to place Italian village life in our minds and to empathize very much with it.
The last chapter is an entire ode to Italy. It is written largely in the second person and it tells of "you" going through the village and everything there appealing to the aesthetic in "you". The English is beautiful and it achieves its purpose in making you close the book with a warm glow. Mission accomplished.
The chapter on Italy's Catholic religion and its Protestant and other minorities could have done with much improvement. Italy's Catholicism is more complicated than the Padre Pio cult and the Protestants of the north surely have their faults as well. The chapter looks like it came from several previous publications he wrote.
The politics chapters build on the hypothesis that the fascist and proto communist factions are still at war with each other and that politicians like Berlusconi exploit this for their own nefarious ends. He does a good job of tying the warring World War Two factions in with the protagonists and antagonists of later squabbles. He does not like Berlusconi and his polished prose does not quite hide this fact.
My opinion of this book is that Jones sat down with his material and tied it all together into a very passable but rather superficial book which is nevertheless well worth the money being charged.

Tobias Jones circles toward the center of subjects that are not entirely polite to even bring up: cultural differences between Catholics and Protestants, the distinctions between Northern and Southern Europeans, and very specifically between the English and the Italians. The topics would be difficult ones for any writer to approach seriously because they are so riddled with stereotypes, prejudice and folklore. I thought Tobias Jones made very good job of it. He writes beautifully - you can tell immediately, in the first few lines of the book, that he is an exceptionally gifted writer and observer.

He starts with the useful and understandable idea that Italy is a visual culture, and that England is a verbal culture. Italy is beautiful, the Italians are beautiful, the art is breathtakingly beautiful, etc. England is not so beautiful. The light is bad. The art is not that great. The English culture is Verbal rather than visual.

The English read a lot. Italians do not read very much. Statistics are presented to support this assertion. Italy is a picture culture and quite susceptible (therefore) to television.

This is politically significant because Berlusconi is a television magnate - he owns or controls almost every TV channel. (Imagine Fox News on every channel in the US. And imagine Rupert Murdoch as President.)

The visual/verbal distinction seems to be a core idea of the book. It turns out to be a Catholic/Protestant divide; At one time, both England and Italy were more like modern Italy -- visual, artistic and deeply Catholic. Then came Henry XVIII, and the Anglican Church. The reformation was a verbal revolution against a religion based on striking imagery, and the revolution was made to work by massively printing and spreading the Word, i.e., the King James Bible. And insisting that the power of the Word was accessible to readers.

The difference between Italy and Britain is to be understood (in this book anyway) as the difference between a warm country where stories are told with pictures painted on the ceilings of churches - and on the screens of the TV -- and a cold country where stories are told with words. The verbal English are more informed, skeptical, argumentative. The artistic Italians are a little too beautiful and a little too credulous.

The author is caught up in the tension between his two cultures, image and word, ancient and modern. As an organizing principle, it actually seems to work pretty well; it seems to discover the roots of a lot of Italian behavior that would otherwise remain mysterious to the Anglo-Saxons.

He also suggests that the Catholic Church is the prototype, or template, for virtually every other important Italian institution: including football and especially the Law. Italy has more laws than any other country. As a canon, the law is incomprehensible to ordinary citizens, who must turn to lawyers to have the law explained. The role of the lawyer as an interlocutor, that is, as a priest, is emphasized. Similarly in football: the game is so complex as to be opaque. One turns to the referee for guidance, clarification.

Tobias Jones develops this idea, this strange parallelism between the Law and the Church, as a way to explain the essential lawlessness of Italy. It becomes apparent that the country is not only politically led but also owned by a man who appears to be outside the Law.

And once again football. The author really understands and relishes football and his chapters on the Italian obsession with this sport read beautifully at every level. Sportswriting. Sociology. Philosophy. They are just works of art.

Finally, the Jones does not insist on any of his working premises - he writes from inside the problem of trying to understand Italy, and where he is bewildered by the project, he successfully conveys this too. After a long essay into the surreal and dangerous political history of the 1970s, he has to simply walk away, write about something else, because this ferociously politicized history makes so little sense at the outset and --after intensive study-- even less.

The problem is, there is not much Italian perspective on history - you cannot stand on the platform of the present and look back at what happened, and analyze it coolly because it is comfortably over. It isn't over. The past is still boiling mad.

The Italian sensation of time is blurred and continuous - the past and the present co-exist. Events of many decades ago - murders, bombings, massacres, betrayals -- still have immediacy and political impact today. In this respect Italy is curiously like the Middle East, where one faction may berate another over events that occurred 8 centuries ago, or like the China, where people occasionally talk to their ancestors.

So there is a lot in this book. Image versus word. The church as a model for absolutely everything. Football. Television and Politics. And the past and present melded. I should add that Tobias Jones has a wonderfully light touch and a sense of humor that could only be described as Italian.

My father brought this home from Italy, where needless to say it is a controversial book. Judging from the cover and title, it would appear to be an expose of the current Italian administration, but the author attempts to widen his scope to include all aspects of Italian life which, he claims, are by nature affected by corruption. As a result, he loses not only his focus, but his credibility as well.

Jones is the descendant of a long line of English writers who view Italy as some sort of private playground that would be a wonderful place if the Italians themselves did not live there. His barely polite snobbery reveals itself particularly in the chapter where an Italian friend takes him to the hometown of a recently canonized saint, as he barely describes the place or the person (Padre Pio) before launching into the now tiresome rant about the inherent corruption of the Catholic Church, which unfortunately comprises nearly all of that chapter. The rest of the book follows suit, taking on the government, family life, and even soccer in turn as he attempts to justify his less-than-subtle hypothesis that Italy is a mess because the Italians are too jaded and lazy to do anything about it. At the end, I was absolutely mystified by his insistence that he cannot imagine living anywhere else: he revealed so little of himself (aside from his many prejudices)and worse, so little of the Italians that he claims to know and befriend. Instead, he relies on endless quotes from news sources and un-named individuals to pad his writing - perhaps because he has nothing else to say.

Certainly Italy is not paradise, but neither is any other country on this mortal planet, including the United States or (dare I say it?)England. I and thousands of other people visit Italy and other places abroad because we want to learn about the culture and the people, especially the differences and similarities that exist between us. If Jones was not willing to accept this, he could have done us all a favor and stayed home. For a more edifying look at Italy, read the translations of Giovanni Guareschi or "Dances With Luigi" by Paul Paolicelli, but do not waste time with this.