The Italian Connection

Chamuyo wasn't such a good thing, said Isabella. The chamulleros want something - usually to take you to bed. Speaking to people from other Latin American countries I had heard, over the years, that Argentinians are famous chamulleros. Isabella and I agreed that Italians, in our experience, could be the same. The New York Times reports one foreign minister as saying: '"Argentines are Italians who speak Spanish who think they are British.'' There is noted cultural proximity between Italy and Argentina. The European-influenced architecture of Buenos Aires is littered with buildings from the late nineteenth century, designed by Italians or using Italian marble or Venetian glass. The Palacio Barolo, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy is probably the most famous if not necessarily the most representative of the Italian style. Soledad, the guide at the National Congress, showed me the coloured marbles on one of the free tours of that building the initial plans for which were also designed by an Italian. The Italian connection doesn't stop there. Nearly all the tango orchestra leaders from the Golden Age of tango have Italian names: Carabelli, D'Arienzo, D'Agostino, Donato, Di Sarli, Troilo, Biagi, Pugliese. Between 1860 and 1920 more than two million Italians, many of the poorest from the south of that country emigrated to Argentina. Today, over half the country's population has Italian ancestors.

My experience with Italians began when I arrived, unexpectedly, in Italy. I had left a summer job in France that hadn't worked out. Before the summer, in York, I had mentioned to an older Italian friend, recently married: 

- I have a bad feeling about this job. 

- If it doesn't work out, come and see us in Bologna, she had said, presciently.

A few weeks later I made a phone call from France. The next morning I sat on my brother's metal tuck box in the street of a small French village in the Alpes-Maritimes waiting for the bus. From Nice, I caught a train into Italy. I was tall, slim, about twenty and had a Vidal Sassoon, height-of-fashion, 'waif' style haircut, dyed a white blonde. 

The first word I learned was BINARIO. I saw it capitalised like that when the train stopped briefly after we crossed the French-Italian border. I had never heard of the place. While the train paused, I left my compartment to buy water in the station. In English, I asked the self-assured guys at the counter about Binario. The word, it turned out meant 'platform'. They teased and flirted with me before selling me the water, doing so on the proviso that I would learn Italian. Mi raccomando, one said, wagging a finger. It was a phrase I was to become familiar with. It was said, usually, but not inevitably in jest, always in a warning tone, something like: I’m telling you; or You’d better do as I say. The men sounded faintly affronted, as well they might, that I would waltz in and expect to speak English. It was all hard to read. I left the shop disconcerted by the confusing ebbs of that conversation. This was not at all how retail transactions ordinarily went in Britain or Germany, nor even usually in France. The second word I learned in the concourse of Bologna station: Ehi! Bionda!  Escorted away by my friend I felt more relieved than flattered. I had a distinct sense of intimidation, which may not have been intended, but I was alone, foreign, young and vulnerable, even if, at the time, one doesn't think of it in those terms.

Over the next few years, I dated Italians, worked for Italians in Britain, worked in Italy and made Italian friends. I travelled there for tourism, work and pleasure. I went to Bologna, to a village, Montese, in the hills nearby; to Rimini, to Rome many times, to Civitavecchia, Cassino, Milan, Genoa, Venice, the Cinque Terre, Salerno, the Roman site of Paestum, Matera, Foggia, Pescara, Selinunte a small village on the southern coast of Sicily and to Sardinia several times. I travelled through Lazio, Campania, Basilicata, Apulia, Abruzzo. I took the train from Bologna through the north of Italy and the Alps, to Munich.

But in my late twenties, my voluntary relationships with Italians ended. I no longer wanted to seek them out. I had had enough. Too many Italians, I had found, would use and cheat their 'friends' and acquaintances for money, sex, work, status. Twice I had worked for Italians and not been paid. There was no thanks, no apology, no excuse. The people I worked for simply disappeared. Whatever the good times we spent together, these friendships or business agreements always ended badly, not with disagreement or a row; they just decided they had got as much out of you as they could and no longer needed to hold up their end of the deal.   I began to sense that the attitude towards another person was: What can I use them for? Eventually, Italians struck me to be more inclined than other nationalities I had encountered, to treat people as a means to an end. It is that slippery, sleazy frame of mind, even more than the betrayals themselves that is so distasteful. I suppose I found too many of them fundamentally egotistical. I was glad to have learned this lesson when I was young because later I watched women in their thirties, forties and fifties being exploited by various Latin chamulleros.

One summer I dated a guy who made no secret of the fact that he had a long-term girlfriend back in the city. He had vague qualms, enough to make him appear sensitively conflicted.  Back then, if you had a girlfriend that was self-defining, especially in Catholic Italy: naturally, you could only be in an official and monogamous relationship. The social pressure around sex and relationships could, in Italy, be prohibitive. But the whole country was sensual. It was Stealing Beauty and Call Me By Your Name, for real. I was never sure, whether that was because of the attractive, well-dressed people, the sun, the gorgeous countryside, the good living, the power there, of youth, or the sense of religious and familial strictures over sex and relationships that made those things illicit and tempting, but it was a heady mix. 

A few years later - only twenty-odd years ago - I knew a couple who moved to study in Scotland so that they could live together before getting married. Her parents wouldn't have allowed it otherwise. This was not uncommon in Italy. For that matter, my parents or at least my mother didn't like the idea either. After they had been away on holiday she found a used condom in the spare room bed she had made up for granny's impending visit.  My brother had had a party and his friends had overindulged. She demanded to know who had been in the bedroom and sent the offending article, in an envelope, back to the young man in question with a terse note: I believe this is yours. I hadn't been at the party but I recall, around this time, a brief, cross, excruciating lecture to which I think we were both party: Your father and I didn't sleep together before we were married and we don't expect you to either. Nobody ever mentioned anything related to this topic again. This was around 1990 but by then my parents were probably out of step with the times in Britain and anyway, didn't have the same influence as my Italian friend's parents. Once we were earning, our lives were our own, even if we, and our respective partners, had for years - absurdly, so it seemed to us - to obey parental rules of separate bedrooms on our returns to the family home.

In Italy, the significance of infidelities seemed less. Perhaps it was the bleaching glare of the sun. In those days the relationship and sexual flavours that many are open about, in at least the West today, were not discussed the same way. Now you can be not just straight, gay, bi or trans, but heteroflexible, homoflexible, pansexual, questioning, demisexual, sapiosexual, asexual, non-binary, genderfluid and even more. Your relationships can be polyamorous, monogamous, openly non-monogamous or ethically non-monogamous. These are all relatively new things or at least are more openly discussed - although maybe even now, less so in Italy. At a recent queer tango marathon, while there were many attendees from Germany and Scandinavia and a sizeable contingent from Paris, there were only two guys from Italy. I thought of the immaculately dressed Italian male dancers I had encountered in Italy and Berlin and said to the scruffier, green-haired, more anarchic looking of the two queer dancers: It can't be easy being a queer tango dancer in Italy... He nodded, ruefully.

My friend and her husband went to confession before getting married. It was to be forgiven their pre-marital sex.

- Isn’t there something not quite right with doing it anyway if you believe it's wrong and you know you're going to ask for penance?, I said, feeling that things were not quite straight.

- No, she said, lightly. Not really. It's just what we do.

- And what was your penance? I asked, thinking it must be something particularly dreadful if they already knew they were going to later ask forgiveness before knowingly committing a sin.

- Oh, just some Hail Marys, she laughed.

At the end of my first trip to Italy, I was on the station platform saying goodbye to my friends. One of them was a tall, good-looking basketball coach in his mid to late twenties. He felt much older than me. He was a happy-go-lucky, attractive guy, well over six foot with floppy, dirty-blonde hair, a magnetic personality and a roguish grin. Although he had lived all over the country, he lived at that time with his family in Sicily. He looked at me and shook his head, wondering, disbelieving. There you go, he said, off on your travels, all alone. I have to go straight home to Sicily. My father keeps tabs on me. He wouldn't let me go gallivanting about, even now. And look at you, just twenty and a girl.  At the time I was just struck by how different this culture was. My freedom had a new value. But the cultural difference was already evident. Even among the young people only some of them spoke English. Italy looked in on itself and why not, when life was so enjoyable there? I was to discover his point was more practical. On the return journey, I changed trains somewhere near the border. A much older French-Italian guy, in his thirties at least, would sit opposite me in the train compartment. We would chat for a while before his conversation and his gaze changed, and he began rubbing himself through his trousers while I stared at him, chilled, despite the heat, into immobility through shock, dismay, disgust and shame, before managing to shake life into my limbs and leave.  I probably did not realise it consciously, but I had been exploited and already it was not the first time.  

Nonetheless, Italians are, at least outwardly, a beautiful, gregarious, fun and charming people. No-one minds generalisations when they are positive. They dress impeccably, somewhere between elegant and showy. But life, as I found it at that time, is lived on the surface. Presentation is all. What is important is how you appear rather than any kind of depth. They even have a phrase for it: fare bella figura, not just looking good, but making a good impression, more about seeming than being. That in itself is a kind of deception.

In York, I met a gentle Italian philosophy PhD student. He was friends with the girl I knew from Bologna. She was also about twenty-seven, recently married to a businessman who was back in their home town. When I met him the following year, he drove carefully and was as quiet and reserved as the philosophy student. They had a home filled with designer fittings above the business. Here, hospitably, they hosted me. Tall, slim, confident and fashionable, she had worked as a lingerie model for Valentino, and as a hostess for business expo type events.  It was all work by word-of-mouth and through contacts.  She wore designer clothing and was doing a Masters in Economics in Britain. Before graduation, she was expecting their child. She apparently intended to be a wife and mother.

- But what about all your education, I asked - unable at that point to see my own future. What was it for? 

She shrugged, unconcerned.

- That is what we do, she said, unconcerned, almost as though it was planned. But I was sure she would work again. 

The philosophy student also dressed well. He wore an exquisite long, brown cashmere coat. Both these academics described themselves as communists - that was what educated Italians seemed to do at that time. They saw no incompatibility between that and the things they bought or how they lived. I don't think it even occurred to them because fare bella figura was the most important thing. Professing oneself a communist was just the intellectual version of that. It didn't really mean anything. Perhaps it was a token gesture against the seemingly more corrupt Democrazia Cristiana.

I wondered if a nation so obsessed with appearance had produced any famous philosophers. It seemed not. Not unless you go back to the thirteenth century to the religious scholar, Thomas Aquinas. In the sixteenth century, Giordano Bruno is a notable and noble exception and not as well known as he should be. Where he is known, it is more for his martyrdom than his philosophy. Today, we would think of both him and Galileo more as scientists than philosophers. Italy has, in fact, produced a famous philosopher of sorts; one most known for his work on - unsurprisingly - politics. His book describes and sometimes seems to encourage in political leaders, a lack of scruple and a moral bankruptcy, excusable if it achieves the ends of power. It seems those Italian traits have deep roots because Niccolò Machiavelli lived five hundred years ago.

Maybe Italy is short on philosophers because I was often struck by the extent to which Italians are herd creatures, sticking together, repeating the same phrases, the same notions. Forever surrounded by people it is hard to think. I found they enjoyed meeting up at home or outside with friends and family, going out as a group, eating as a group, having drinks and coffees and ice creams in groups.  At this point, I was reading this piece, trying to to make corrections while my son pestered me to play cards. He remarked on the previous paragraph: 

- You can't stereotype people. It's like saying all Scots drink Irn Bru and whisky, are ginger and wear kilts. 

- But that's we did! I replied. It was a lovely, shallow life. What else can I say? They make great pizza, pasta and ice cream?

- That's stereotyping too, he pointed out, calmly.

- It's also true, I said.

I looked up a list of things Italians are supposedly good at. It was almost a list of Fs: food, fashion, family, (a!)ffection, fa' niente [doing nothing]. And design, I read aloud. My son mentioned an Italian or half Italian friend at school whose mum is, apparently a shoe designer. I looked at him, eyebrows raised to Well, then... 

- Those are still all stereotypes, he repeated, ever as calm. 

- At least they're more positive stereotypes, I grumbled. Anyway, look, his mum's a designer. It may conform to the stereotype but it's still true. That's the thing about stereotypes. 

We looked it up: 

A preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.; an attitude based on such a preconception. Also, a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

Stereotypes aren't the whole story, I said, reminding myself more than my son. They are a caricature. But things that are true can feed into them. If you don't want to see a stereotype you have to think of the exceptions. I'm not saying my impressions are widely held. I'm just saying these were my impressions. If they happen to conform to a trend then, like the shoe designer possibly Italian mum, that might not be surprising.

I wondered if I had thought of the exceptions. Primo Levi. A writer of stature, commanding international respect - no stereotype he. But what had I found in Italy? They serve delicious food, they have too many illustrious painters to list, and have produced poets, explorers, composers of great classical music and transfixing opera. Rome, indeed the towns and countryside of Italy as a whole, holds a plethora of cultural and historical riches. The cultural heritage is second to none. Their houses are immaculately clean, as are their habits. But, I realised I was dodging the issue - what about the people? Yes, I had had friends and good times in Italy. I was in love with Italy until my mid to late twenties. I visited as much as I could. I would like to say that ultimately, I found Italians to be honest, reliable, and trustworthy but it just isn't the case. It would be like saying the Dutch are quiet, euphemistic and don't worry about spending money. Or that the British are generally fashion conscious, healthy and drink moderately. This was not my experience, in general, of the Germans or the French, but it was my experience of the Italians.

Not everyone is a well-dressed Dolly-sheep. There are plenty of people dressed ordinarily. And occasionally you find the odd, angry reactionary. But if you are alone, I found Italians tend to worry and wonder if you are unwell.  It's a gentle trait.  The Spanish are the same - a sociable and smartly dressed people, but you have to go back nearly a thousand years to Averroes to find a philosopher that it would still be a stretch to call a household name. Averroes was, in any case, a Muslim long before the end of the Reconquista at the end of the fifteenth century. But just as Italy has produced an embarrassment of world-famous painters Spain too has a surfeit of world-renowned artists between Francisco de Zurbarán and Eduardo Arroyo.

I used to think the ideal life would be to work somewhere in northern Europe and go home to Italy. But I discovered that many Italians are like the Argentine chamulleros - almost entirely untrustworthy; not just to the point of letting their friends down, but of using them, of getting what they can out of them.  I asked an Italian I met in passing if there was an Italian word for it: un pallonaro he said. It is someone who lies, fibs, a storyteller. Un cazzaro sounded a lot more more vulgar. The equally coarse verb: cazzeggiare appeared to have the British sense of to mess around with someone which can have a sexual sense and not and also a sense that is both innocuous and a sense which is not, where harm is caused.  Our translation would, more accurately, also be more indelicate.  Men and women alike will do it. Italians themselves will regale you - and always have - with tales of the corruption endemic in their country. It is a cultural problem in the sense that it is spread through the culture, through individuals. It is not merely confined to a few corrupt politicians. The notion of extortion runs through the country from its criminal organisations, through its politicos to the person in the street, out for what she or he can get.

Perhaps it starts in childhood. My friend said they were going to run a basketball camp for children. They needed a waitress; I could have the job. I did it two years running. I also opened the tuck shop for the children. In the second year one of the organisers mentioned that there seemed to be a problem with the cash takings - what did I know?

- I don't know anything about it!,  I said, taken aback.

- Has anyone been taking sweets without paying?, they asked

- Well, yes... I said, awkwardly.

The son of one of the men in charge had been helping himself regularly, saying it was fine with his dad, who was aware of it.   He was not a small child.  I left them to sort that out, glad not to be part of that conversation.

I have never met such self-assured young children, which tipped into arrogance in the boys. I suppose if you are going to take your place as world-famous Italian-version chamulleros your confidence must be developed early on. In the youth hostel dining room, pasta pan on my hip, my first full Italian phrase was: Ne vuoi ancora? Or, to a table at large: Chi ne vuole ancora? Without saying No, grazie, these little princelings, if they did not want more, would ignore me or, unbelievably, wag their little forefingers at me, dismissively. Those who did want more simply beckoned me.

To grow up without a sense of corruption, dishonesty and untrustworthiness as the norm you need good role models. But Judge Falcone was assassinated by the Mafia in 1992 about the year that I arrived in Bologna. A film was made about the killing the following year. During my twenties, Berlusconi, never far from scandal, his party Forza Italia and the far-right Northern League (now just called the Lega) was on the rise. If anyone in Europe was going to get an early Trump-alike, Italy was a strong contender. The Mani Pulite (clean hands) investigation into political corruption got underway. But unscrupulousness and rank dishonesty was still everywhere.

Another friend trained as an academic. Luckily she got on well with everyone because getting a job - anywhere in Italy - was all about who you knew. Conoscenza has various meanings but the sense of progress in life being less through merit and more about who you know is so strong that it features as an example in the Collins dictionary: ha ottenuto il lavoro grazie alle sue conoscenze. She got the job because of her contacts. Being able to fix things through who you know isn't even necessarily seen as a bad thing. People who excuse nepotism will say that is how the world works and it sure is, for consolidating your own power. That friend's husband didn't get on with people and ended up setting up on his own, ever-lamenting his country's corruption. But he regularly bullied his wife to tears, drove aggressively, once driving his car onto my foot and leaving it there while his wife and I howled at him to move the vehicle. He was bellicosely charming, patronising towards women and always frightening. The last time I stayed with them, I left, prematurely, one day at dawn, desperate to escape.

I found a word, truffare, that meant to cheat, defraud and swindle. Someone who can wangle things, arrange them to their liking, is furbo, like a fox.   That was a word I learned in Italy - sometimes it was said of someone with guarded admiration.  It reminded me of a French word: futé. Like the noun chamuyo, the adjective furbo is associated with wiliness. You wouldn't trust someone who was furbo. Like a chamuyero, they might be amusing because humour lowers the defences of the prey, but if someone is furbo, he is cunning, shifty, underhand, clever in a low-level, self-interested way. There is a photograph in an article in Foreign Policy magazine on Italian corruption that pictures i furbi to me. 

But like the ambiguity over chamuyo, furbo was not straightforward for everyone. I checked in the Wordreference forums online. ‘Sandra’ said “ it doesn't exactly mean clever... usually it has nothing to do with it… sometimes it is even used with a negative meaning, as to say that that person is willing to cheat or trick...”

But 'Vasilek' said: I don't agree that this word has a negative meaning. It really means "cunning, skillful, resourceful". My italian teacher calls my cat "furbetto"...

Someone else said it meant “false”.  An Italo-French speaker from the province of Québec in Canada said they had a word, fourbe, pronounced furba, which meant to trick and was always used negatively. I realised that was the nub of it.  In Italy, tricking someone or tricking the system can - depressingly - be seen as a positive thing. Someone called 'Ant' on the forum made a point that seemed to confirm this:

I'd say that furbo/a has both positive and negative meanings; I remember an old nursery rhyme '…la furba volpacchiotta...' (the clever, charming fox, i.e. furba as [a] positive characteristic); but you may find the following bitter Italian phrase too:  '

Gli italiani si dividono in due categorie: i furbi e i fessi'

[It means] Italians are divided into 2 groups: sly persons and fools (fools pay tax, drive their cars properly, do not steal and so on…); people like me are used to whisper bitterly "sono proprio un fesso…" on many occasions

At first, I wondered if mere inexperience had meant I made poor choices in my friendships and that I had just been unlucky with the Italians I had met.  I met more of them in subsequent years. There are usually innocuous enough for the exchange of courtesies, or easily avoided when they became less so. There is perhaps no more earnest student than an academic Italian; I have never proofread academic theses by foreign students that are more bamboozling in their convoluted written English than those written by Italians.  I have met Italians who are quiet, hard-working, hospitable, probably honest. The Italian husband of a friend of mine just now is all those things, gentle, sensitive, polite and pleasant to boot - a delightful man. 

But aged about thirty I had another encounter with an Italian, this time with unashamed political ambitions. His avidity and subterfuge were work-related. His rapaciousness was cold-blooded and calculating whereas that of many Italians is merely improvised. He was disorganised as well as dishonest. His callous little coup failed though he made sure it was a British, female side-kick who fronted that failure for him. Later, I encountered an Italian with a penchant for empire-building. This one established a controlling monopoly over all the local milongas, even stopping dances to lecture the attendees. They used propaganda and spread lies to bolster their own status and discredit those who disagreed with them. But people could read the character. One after another the milongas failed, the number of attendees dropped away. Finally, they left. The community heaved a collective sigh of relief. Some of those who had stopped attending dances started to return but it was too late for others who had been turned off for good. This Italian and their acolytes surpassed in deceit, in nepotism, in an appetite for power and status and in sheer viciousness all others I have met to date. An Italian is rarely outwardly unpleasant - it is usually some kind of silent back-stabbing, a shameful, treacherous, cowardly behaviour. It comes as no surprise that that nation's wartime history is also shameful

Just after writing to this point I watched the American newsreel report of Mussolini's death.  Here is the transcript:

Bombastic Mussolini. The sawdust Caesar comes to his end in the gutter. A fitting climax to a life of treachery and doublecross. He led his country to ruin when he threw his lot in with Hitler. Oh yes, they saw some [unclear] days when Il Duce confidently stabbed France in the back. He had dreams of empire before the bayonets of the Allies deflated this false prophet [....] He was brought before a firing squad and in this manner he died, as tyrants should. He was hung up by his heels, a fitting, inglorious end.

One realises, with a jolt, how far, in seventy-four years, the media have come from those chilling statements: "as tyrants should" and "a fitting, inglorious end.

But I was astonished how many words - and even one phrase - were used in that reel that were the same or similar to those used in this piece to describe many of my experiences of Italians: treachery, doublecross, stabbed France in the back, dreams of empire, false, tyrant, inglorious.

Last year, the British writer, Martin Amis, spoke in Toronto's Appel Salon about The Zone of Interest (2014) his second novel about the Holocaust and its publication in France and Italy:

I went around Germany a bit with this novel and I admired the Germans very much for all the work they've done to purge their history of this great shame, this disgrace - which is what it is - and crime. In France where they've made no effort at all to speak of - that's not fair - but they have not made the concerted effort Germany has made by teaching it in schools and so on. You don't hear much about it in France. They certainly don't teach it....and Mitterand saying I will never apologise for La France. Their history is nothing like as shameful as Germany, but it's very shameful.

How much more is that true in Italy, where, furthermore, high and low, one still finds an excess of the cheating, double-crossing traits of their infamous Nazi leader. In Foreign Policy magazine’s article on Italian corruption in September last year there is even a claim that this failure to confront its fascist past is why it is now susceptible to populism:

Of course, this raises the question of why Italy was so vulnerable to this style of populism in the first place. Some blame two decades of Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant tycoon-turned-prime minister who anticipated some of the eccentric leadership qualities of U.S. President Donald Trump. Others say it’s because, unlike Germany, Italy never fully confronted its fascist past. 

But the main argument is that populism arose in Italy with the indictment at the climax of the Mani Pulite investigation, of the socialist leader Bettino Craxi, for corruption. Mani Pulite charged hundreds of people and finished all the political parties. But these good intentions left a vacuum for Berlusconi, Forza Italia and the problems of populism. It is not unlike the issues we’ve seen in other countries with sudden regime change: with the best of intentions you swap out one evil, but with no plan for the future, you find you’ve just changed one set of problems for another. Why did populism fill that vacuum.? Because according to Mattia Feltri, an analyst quoted in the article, people didn’t trust politicians any more and the antipolitica movement was born. 

Italians do superficial very well; winningly we might say. But trust is a finite resource. Broken trust is like Telephus' wound, caused by Achilles.  The wound does not really heal. The oracle had said of Achilles: "he that wounded shall heal" and he did heal it, eventually. Tellingly, only the wounder can heal the wounded.  Sometimes though, they refuse, and with some justification.  Oenone, spurned by Paris for Helen, felt betrayed and was abandoned.  She refused to treat Paris when, years later, he was mortally wounded. Remorseful, she killed herself. Such are the fruits of broken trust.

I find now that it is best to keep interactions with Italians brief and on that superficial level - if, that is, one can. Because, recall, their persuasive charm can be a virtuoso performance. It is probably what made the Argentinians famous as chamulleros. Where trust is in short supply, corruption can be endemic. It is still a running sore in both countries.

I wondered if things were changing and looked up Italy on the Corruptions Perceptions Index for 2018. It slumps on the third page of the list with a rating of 53, below Georgia, Rwanda and Costa, Rica and not far above Croatia, Saudia Arabia and Oman. It has been sliding over at least the last five years. But Argentina is way down the list with a rating of 85, between Turkey and Benin. Its corruption rating has doubled since last year.

So why did Italy not clean up its act after Mani Pulite?  I don’t think it can just be ascribed to populism.  Populism doesn’t always equal corruption. Brexit is perceived as a populist movement, and in part it is, but there are no grand claims that the British are suddenly a corrupt nation because of it. They are calling us stubborn, parochial, closed-minded, even anti-immigration, but not corrupt. I don’t think people are saying that the real problems with Trump supporters are that they are all corrupt.  But Italy does have a strong populist movement now and it still is corrupt.   Post Mani Pulite with the antipolitica movement, trust had gone in politicans, the people were the future. But you need politicians to run a country.  People are politicans and vice versa.  The problem is not with the politicians, it is with the people.   The article says:

In fact, some of the figures who first jumped on the anti-corruption bandwagon eventually turned out to be, well, corrupt.

 And that is my point: that corruption seems to be endemic in Italian society which is why a change of political parties in power has not changed things. One isn't enamoured about saying things less than palatable about others, especially a whole culture, even when the things one says are tempered. And yet, one can't sit on one's convictions, hope they'll shut up and not test them out. I was relieved to find that I was not alone and that it was not prejudice borne from personal experience that had brought me to a false belief that corruption and exploitation exists in the mightiest of offices and in a smaller way in modest houses, cheating the government and even between 'friends', neighbours, acquaintances, employers and employees, because the article ended thus:

In the end, [Gherardo] Colombo [one of Mani Pulite’s top judges] said, Mani Pulite “didn’t solve the corruption problem.” Despite the overarching anti-corruption rhetoric, Italian politics is still corrupt “on every level,” he said, from top politicians taking bribes to the general public cheating on their taxes. The paradox is that Italians are constantly “complaining about politicians who repeat, at the top, the same behaviors that many ordinary citizens demonstrate, on a smaller scale, on a daily basis.” 

While that phrase i furbi e i fessi is still bandied about in Italy, scamming people, taking advantage of them, using them, is not just something many Italians will continue to do, it will remain something they are proud of.