Umberto's Blog

Ciampi's Chance

Today, after quitting is post as Italy's premier, meeting president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi for his farewell, Silvio Berlusconi proposed the same Ciampi for a second term at the Quirinale. "Ciampi was good at representing all Italians over the past seven years", he said.
Wether the centre-right's move succeeds or not, the chance of a second term requires an appraisal of Ciampi's tenure, that practically all Italians view in a positive way. I appreciated,like everybody else, the president's insistence on patriotism, down to its basic symbols: the flag, the national anthem. Once he even used a little-known strophe from the "Inno di Mameli" in a speech, and I am sure very few realized where it came from. But it is another of Ciampi's leit-motiv that drew my attention during these years, and a slightly more controversial one. President Ciampi is convinced  that after 8 September 1943 - when the Italian monarchy pulled itself out of the war, the Italians reacted as a nation. He said as much during a commemoration at Porta San Paolo in Rome in 2003, sixty years after the armistice at a commemoration near Porta San Paolo in rome, where the first skirmish between Italian and German troops took place. Now, that is indeed a very debatable statement, and not just to me - I believe - who have been obseded by "9/8" and all it meant.
Ciampi was a 22 year old army lieutenant at the time. I understand and approve his attempt at recuperating a national historical memory, as he  represented the nation. Still. Ernesto Galli Della Loggia, for one, reiterated on “Corriere della sera” the idea he borrowed ten years ago from Sardinian writer Salvatore Satta, who identified in his “De Profundis” "9/8" as the day of the death of our Fatherland. Actually, Galli Della Loggia insisted, all European Fatherlands – meaning the nation-states, I guess - died in 1939, at the beginning of the war. And he pointed out that the winners – the USA, the UK and the USSR, were all three of them sort of “imperial” or “multinational” political entities, as opposed to European nation states. Another writer, from Calabria: Corrado Alvaro, wrote in 1944 that  after the truce with the Anglo-Americans the very unity of Italy – North and South being then divided by the front – was permanently undermined. If I remember well, Alvaro seemed to enjoy the circumstances as if they were a “revenge against Italy”.
The circumstance of Italians turning against Italy is not at all uncommon in the tormented history of this country…
American historian Arthur Schlesinger says he celebrated the event in Washington together with Gaetano Salvemini, who was exiled there in 1943.
Closer to us, he spoke in an interview of his visit to Italy in 1961, on behalf of president Kennedy, to tell the Italians that the White House was not set against a center-left government in Rome (Dick Vernon Walters, one of the US to brass, secretly opposed this line, during a meeting at the US Embassy in Rome, that very year…)
I met Schlesinger in Milan in 1983, when we commemorated the 50th anniversary of FDR’s administration  - and a few months later the infamous events of September 1943 - but we didn’t talk about that trip. On the other hand I remember I was in Bologna when Dean Acheson came to express the same concept at a “Mulino” meeting. It is peculiar that I should talk almost twenty years later, at table in the Tuscan Verazzano castle, of Dick Vernon Walters to Jean Kennedy. I remember she called Schlesinger, who was with us that time too, across the table saying: “Listen to what Umberto here ihas to say about Dick, Arthur. Wouldn’t this be great on ‘Sixty Minutes’?..” Indeed, I had my ideas about the guy's role in US foreign policy, and I turned out to be right.
Now Vernon Walters is dead. Yesterday, a less controversial protagonist of those years amd a member of the Kennedy clan, "liberal" economist John Kenneth Galbraith, also died. I remember translating for "Critica Sociale" Italy's main socialist revue, his essay "In praise of the Multinationals". Ciampi instead may have a second chance, and I'll be glad for him and for us, even if this will make the average age of Italian politics even higher...