*This is pretty good. I really enjoyed this. It's really hard for a political correspondent to stay in Italy without realizing with a kind of sublime frisson that they've ALWAYS been like this. It's rare to read an essay that captures that understanding so thoroughly.
How come Cavour isn't listed among the agents of chaos, one idly wonders
(...)
Another hero of Italy’s unification who didn’t know when to let sleeping dogs lie, Mazzini was obsessed with Rome. It had been the capital of the Classical world, the hub of Western Christendom and so, he believed with an almost messianic conviction, it should be the capital of the new Italy. In 1871, just a year before his death, Mazzini got his way, and Rome took over the role of capital from Florence.
Ever since, Italy has been governed from a city imbued with the conservative values of the papacy. What is more, though Rome may be peerlessly beautiful, its inhabitants have long had a reputation for being idle, conformist, hierarchical, cynical and easily corrupted. The adjective traditionally applied to them by their fellow Italians is pigri (“lazy”), and the one most frequently deployed for their city is caotica (“chaotic”). Non-Romans can often be heard saying that, had Florence remained the capital, Italian politics might not have become so venal and disorderly.
5. Agostino Depretis
Mentions of venality inevitably brings to mind this 19th-century Italian statesman. Born not in Rome but near Pavia, in the supposedly law-abiding north, Depretis was a dominant figure in the period that followed unification. He also has the questionable distinction of being the spiritual father of trasformismo, the practice whereby parliamentarians are persuaded to abandon the party for which they were elected and join another.
The right of parliamentarians to bounce around between parties like balls on a pinball table is enshrined in the 1948 republican constitution, which states that “every member of parliament represents the nation.” In their keenness to represent the nation, rather than the voters who elected them to parliament, more than a third of the members of the last legislature changed sides. Trasformismo is not only at the base of a fair bit of corruption but an important reason why Italy has so many changes of government....
