The Dark Heart of Italy - Reviews - Book Review

Contemporary Review, July, 2003

The Dark Heart of Italy. Tobias Jones. Faber and Faber. [pounds sterling]16.99. 266 pages. ISBN 0-571-20582-8. The author of this book, an expatriate Briton now living in Italy, set out to write a study of those bits of Italian life and history missed (or ignored) by visitors to the country: language, football, television, the Church and judicial and political corruption which even on an E.U.

scale is horrendous. Wherever he turned over the four years he spent studying modern Italy he came across the influence of Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, a politician who combines the charm and flummery of Tony Blair and the wealth of Midas. Thus 'Berlusconi's career became the thread that links the following chapters because he is, I realised, the "owner" of Italy'. This does lead to a presentation of Italian life in what the author admits is an 'ugly light'. He looks at the subtleties of the Italian language, the work of the Parliamentary commission investigating corruption, the 'murky waters' of Italian fo otball, contemporary Italian aesthetics, her 'visual culture' (television and cinema), the as yet incomplete 'revolution' of Italy's constitution (which began to unravel the hideous legacy of proportional representation and political jockeying), the 'monolithic structure' of the Church, Berlusconi's coming to power and the growing resistance to it. Because the author writes with first-hand involvement there is a heady mixture of personal preferences (and prejudices) with an immediacy that adds enormously to the picture being painted, even if it is not altogether a pretty one. (G.R.B.)