In May 2013 one of Italy’s leading newspapers, La Repubblica, published an article entitled “Nimby effect on renewable energy – Italy allergic to biomass electrical generation.” Living in an agricultural area where green energy subsidies have boosted the production of biomass power stations over the past few years, I couldn’t help laughing at a similar condemnation of protests against the economical power games that lie behind green economy policies, and in which I have gotten increasingly involved over the past year. Yes, many of the people involved in the numerous bottom-up committees are worried about what is going on in their back yard, but perhaps that’s also because local politics have no interest whatsoever in defending those back yards. Moreover, a sound collaboration among various committees and associations that operate both locally and on a regional and national level prove that this is more than a group of residents concerned about their neighborhood. So it’s not all that simple. Hiding behind the ever so popular green economy business, in these times of crisis, it is easy to put off any criticism of biomass electrical generation as plain nimbyism. Yet the threat is real.

Other than the discomfort for residents, i.e. the stench and the frequency of heavy vehicles passing continuously (and often without considering speed limits) on the narrow country side roads to transport corn, grain and grass to the power plants, there are a number of very serious risks, problems and ethical issues involved.

Health: experts have demonstrated that these plants produce noxious gas that may cause cancer and birth defects. Medics, university professors and scientists have sound the alarm on more than one occasion, participating in counter-informative events and protest demonstrations, but local governors – with some minor exceptions – and media have remained indifferent to their criticism.

Profit: the presence of a relatively high number of power plants in small areas, producing energy not for the purpose of disposing biological waste in return for energy but for the sole purpose of gaining subsidies, is highly problematic. For one, what to do with all the energy that is being produced? With the companies being privately owned, the energy is not being invested in the community. It is sold at a much higher rate than “ordinary” energy, whereas the subsidies are at the citizen’s expense.

Farmland: to be able to feed the anaerobic digesters of such an excessive number of power plants, farmers are being “encouraged” to one-crop farming, which is eventually harmful for the farmland. In fact, for a few years now a large part of the farmland in my area is used to grow corn, which is harvested when it is still green and grinded. A potential disaster for the local food industry!

Ethics: this also brings along the ethical problem of harvesting crops not to feed people but simply to burn them, without using the energy that is being produced.

So these are the main problems in a nutshell. Anyone who has been attending meetings and protests over the past few years knows this. Yet, local governors ignore the problems or downplay them. They treat citizens as nimbies, or pretend not to have any say in the matter, which is untrue. Currently we are collectively struggling against a project to build a renewable energy park with no less than four power plants, only a few miles from my town, adding to the existing four to five power plants already in function
or under construction, not to mention a landfill and an incinerator nearby. Is one power plant not more than enough? But the mayor of San Pietro in Casale, a town nearby which is granting one authorization to build power plants after another, yet always on the border with adjacent communes, is indifferent to the citizens’ concerns. Undoubtedly he has business interests in green economy, and the anaerobic digesters are only a part of his master plan. Thus, he has completed the construction of a long-awaited swimming pool, in an attempt also to boost his popularity, no doubt. In doing so he has had over 40 poplar trees nearby the swimming pool and adjacent sport centre cut down: they were accused of casting shadows on the solar panels located on the roof of the sport centre. Is this, then, green economy?

The problem is universal, though. A brief article in a British current affairs journal caught my eye during a recent trip to the UK: it speaks of both solar energy and green energy subsidies for biomass electrical generation threatening UK food production. Protests occur in other European countries as well as in the States and in Canada. Going against the grain of green economy is very difficult, because green economy is necessary. We cannot continue exploiting the earth without considering alternative sources of energy, especially in countries which have important natural resources, such as wind, water and sun. If only we could find a way of keeping out profiteers, greedy politicians and the mafia.

Metaphorically speaking, Italy has had its share of earthquakes over the past few years. After Berlusconi’s government was dissolved in order to make way for Mario Monti’s technical government, life was turned upside down with the introduction of new taxes, the eruption of financial scandals involving all major political parties, and the success of comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in the elections of February 2013.

Further, in May 2012, Italy was shook up in a more literal way. The Northern region of Emilia-Romagna was struck by a heavy earthquake, which was repeated ten days later. A year has passed and much has yet to be done. Nevertheless, during the anniversary, politicians and the media indulged in a triumphant rhetoric that highlighted the great commitment of citizens and institutions in the reconstruction of “Emilia” (the western and north-eastern part of the region, where the epicenter of the earthquake was based). A reconstruction has yet to begin, leading to an explosion of local grassroots committees consisting of people who were affected both by the earthquake and by a bureaucratic rigmarole. The state bureaucracy has complicated the lives of the locals, this in a climate of crisis and austerity. As the state has responded only to the degree that it serves private corporate interests, citizens were left to fend for themselves, repeating a historic pattern.

The Emilia earthquake represents the last in a series of natural disasters in Italy, which never really produced any progressive legislation capable of transmitting know-how to future generations. A law was first passed in the 1970s, in the wake of two catastrophes that drew wide media attention. In 1980, a disastrous earthquake in the mountainous Irpinia region (Southern Italy) further sensitized public opinion, leading to the creation – in 1982 – of the Ministry of Civil Protection. However, the national civil protection system originated only in 1992, whereas the first legislative decree that would give the Italian regions executive powers was created years later (for a brief history of civil protection in Italy see David E. Alexander, “The Evolution of Civil Protection in Modern Italy,” in John Dickie, John Foot and Frank M. Snowden (eds), Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860: Culture, Politics, Society, New York: Palgrave, 2002).

Rather than being focused on the prevention of catastrophes and the safeguarding of citizens, civil protection legislation in Italy has thus been subjugated to political games and economical lines of reasoning.

An earthquake that struck the Northern Friuli region, in 1976, played an important role in this process. For the first time, both the first aid and the reconstruction phases occurred on a more local level. As a consequence, the reconstruction of Friuli followed a logic which was also adopted after a 1997 earthquake in Central Italy: it consisted in the safeguarding of the original organization of the affected locations as opposed to relocation and decentralization, which had instead been applied in Irpinia in the 1980s and – more recently – in the city of L’Aquila, devastated by an earthquake in 2009. Here the Italian Civil Protection regained the hierarchical and centralized format of the pre-Friuli period, in line with Berlusconi’s attempts – throughout the 2000s – to expand the power of the head of government through the Civil Protection.

This reflects what Naomi Klein (2008) has defined “disaster capitalism” or “economic shock treatment”: the exploitation of the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, in order to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein criticizes Milton Friedman’s ideas about the pushing through of reforms in the wake of catastrophic events, a mechanism that was also adopted by the Italian civil protection system. In the management of the Irpinia earthquake of 1980, for example, “modern” forms of living were pushed through, such as the widening of the typically narrow streets of the medieval towns so as to create more parking space. Similarly, the imposition of a specific way of life upon people marked the reconstruction of L’Aquila, in particular through the creation of New Towns. The latter consisted of a mass of buildings in a peripheral area for some 15,000 evacuees, creating lucrative building opportunities exploited by major companies supervised by the state, at the expense of local businesses. In addition, the New Towns strongly isolated people from the urban context and eliminated those collective places where people used to meet and socialize, resulting in the persistence of a sense of trauma.

The city of L’Aquila itself, however, has remained untouched. Four years later it is a ghost town, a future prey to real estate speculation. The reconstruction process has turned out to be no more than a political and economical bargain for the Civil Protection and for Berlusconi’s government, aimed as it was at accelerating “processes of privatization and the embezzlement of space, power, rights, nearly always to the advantage of a few, and profiteering choices at the expense of a democratic decision-making procedure.” (Stefano Ventura in Sismografie, Ritornare a L’Aquila mille giorni dopo il sisma, 2012, p. 20).

The L’Aquila case, then, reflects the incapacity and unwillingness of the Italian state to intervene adequately in similar situations, as also happened after the Irpinia earthquake, where “[s]elf-help was the only form of aid” (Alexander, p. 171). The absence of the state is indeed reflected in the fact that Italians have often had to find alternative solutions to natural disasters, such as self-help and volunteerism. Similarly, delay in bringing aid has been “a recurrent theme in Italian disasters” (ibid.): first aid after the Irpinia earthquake was delayed by 24 to 30 hours, whereas squanders and scandals in the reconstruction process earned it the nickname of “Irpiniagate,” contributing to a highly negative, collective memory of earthquakes in Italy.

Perhaps it was this memory that induced the mayor of L’Aquila to make the provocative statement – in a TV interview during the 4th anniversary of the L’Aquila earthquake, in April 2013 – about “disconnecting” L’Aquila from Italy if funds were not released for the reconstruction of the city. His anxiety reflects the risk that L’Aquila will end up like the Irpinia region or like Messina, the port city near the northeast corner of Sicily which witnessed massive emigration after a devastating earthquake in 1908.

In spite of the rigid and military control of the Civil Protection in L’Aquila, in the tent camps that were set up after the earthquake, a number of initiatives developed in which local inhabitants tried to gain a more active and democratic role in the reconstruction process, allowing them to become social actors in a bottom-up process. The grassroots mobilization in Emilia offers another example of this type of engagement. If a state fails to provide adequate civil protection and resolve bureaucratic problems, all the while promoting a false image of the reconstruction process, it is up to the people – as happens too often in Italy – to speak out and claim their rights.

“…were it not for our perseverance, for the fact that we turned our anger into the courage to say ‘We will not accept being denied the truth’ – were it not for this, then the stories  [of our loss] would just end, they would have ended on that day. And we realize that, as we go on, we are the only power that we have.”

This is how Ilaria Cucchi – the sister of 31-year-old Stefano Cucchi, who died under mysterious circumstances in an Italian prison in 2009 – described the situation of her family and, by extension, of other families of victims of police repression in Italy, in her appearance on a television documentary about her late brother. Remembering requires a memory agent who will “actualize” or “activate” the memory in question, if it is to remain vivid. The Cucchi case demonstrates that in Italy the role of such memory communities has proven essential, considering the low commitment or unwillingness of the State to bring justice to the victims of police repression.

I have studied one such case – the violent death of Francesco Lorusso, on 11 March 1977. Lorusso, a medical student and sympathizer of a left-wing extra-parliamentary group, got involved in a conflict between left-wing and Catholic students which resulted in severe police repression during which Lorusso was shot in the back. The incident provoked an urban upheaval in which Lorusso’s friends and fellow students vented their anger in the city center, resulting in more public order measures. Lorusso’s death thus marked the final stage in the conflict between a newly arisen student movement and the local Communist authorities. The chapter on 1977 was, however, all but closed off, as the police officer who shot Lorusso was absolved on the basis of a disputed public order law, while the numerous requests by Lorusso’s family to open a new investigation remained unanswered.

In my forthcoming book on the public memory of the 1977 incidents, I interpret the family’s role in the process of getting justice in terms of “affective labor.” Post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define affective labor as an “immaterial labor,” one that “produces or manipulates affects” (‘Value and Affect’, boundary 2, 26.2, 2004). Rather than producing a material object such as a monument, it provokes an “affective state in another person” (think, for example, of a commemorative march, or any other type of memory work that manages to transform private suffering into collective grief). It expresses a moral duty to remember which is evident, first of all, in the attempts of the Lorusso family to have the police investigations reopened.

In order for this to happen, the family had to gain more public consensus. Considering both Lorusso’s difficult victim status – having been involved in riots with the police and therefore not an entirely innocent victim, in the eyes of the public opinion – and the overall negative reputation of the student movement, this could only be achieved through affective labor. In other words, it was only by producing “affective states” in local citizens, who would have no “automatic” sympathy for an alleged rioter, that his family could counter the official memory of the events of March 1977, according to which Lorusso’s death was no more than a tragic accident.

The second driving force behind the family’s affective labor was the need to overcome the trauma of Lorusso’s death, a trauma caused not only by a sense of injustice, but also by the feeling that the community no longer existed for the family. In fact, authorities never really listened to Lorusso’s parents’ pleas for justice and truth. Moreover, the political nature of the incidents exposed their loss to misinterpretations and moral judgements by the community. The loss or inability to narrate one’s traumatic story in public results in the victim’s loss of a place in history and, subsequently, the continuation of a sense of trauma. In this as other cases of political homicides in the 1970s and more recently, such as the Cucchi case mentioned above, the family was therefore excluded from society.

In short, affective labor was employed not only for the creation of a wider public consensus that would help the family gain truth and justice: it was also crucial in the very process of coming to terms with Lorusso’s death, considering the family’s silenced position in society. Attempts to provoke “affective states” in other people include participation in an annual commemorative ritual, which saw the occasional participation of families of other victims of political violence in those years, and the various appeals Lorusso’s family made to local and national politicians to have the investigations reopened and the injustice of his death acknowledged.

Unsuccessful in these attempts, the family next sought to gain public consensus with a series of public debates and the creation of local memory sites. But memorials and monuments alone cannot keep the living memory of an event alive, and risk disappearing into the urban landscape. As Michael Schudson has argued, memory sites tend to become “invisible” (and are thus forgotten) as a result of their deliberate way of recalling the past (‘Lives, laws, and language. Commemorative versus non-commemorative forms of effective public memory’, The Communication Review, 2.1, 2007).

Other, more “creative” ways should be sought to keep memories alive: an annual demonstration on March 11th, for example, managed to give visibility to the Lorusso incident but eventually disappeared, due – in part – to the shortcoming of some form of generational renewal. In more recent times, the families of victims of police repression have found an outlet in investigative documentaries, as in the Cucchi case. The internet has also become a powerful medium for contentious politics and counter-information. The Archival Network against Oblivion, for example, brings together all the victims’ associations and documentary centers and archives in Italy that work on political violence, while the Invisible Networks represent grassroots associations that do research into historical memory, truth and justice. The aim of these memory communities is to construct a “memory culture” that goes beyond traditional, official commemorative rituals, bringing the “dead memory” of violent incidents back to life, turning them into living memorials, and thus, preventing them from becoming a sort of common place in national historiography. For these groups it’s not so much about grieving, as it is about the moral duty of stimulating a more “correct” version of the past.

The value of these memory communities became clear only recently, when the Court absolved the police officers who had mistreated Cucchi, arguing that the latter had died as a result of malnutrition and dehydration (Cucchi had gone on hunger strike while in prison hospital), completely ignoring the serious bruises and fractures on his body. In another case of police brutality which has also been denounced in a documentary, the four police officers who beat to death 18-year old Federico Aldrovandi were initially sentenced to a ridiculously low prison sentence of 3 years and 6 months. They were pardoned and saw their sentence reduced to 6 months. One of them has now been released, after less than 2 months in prison. Ilaria Cucchi’s statement that “we are the only power that we have” seems truer than ever.

With Italian media being largely compromised by political parties, cooperative companies, media and business magnates and financial strongholds, Italians have remained with only two real outlets for their frustration and disillusionment with contemporary politics and society, the Internet and satire. Blunders, scandals and a wide array of political issues that leak out into the public sphere instantly reach the web, where people vent their anger or have a (bitter) laugh at the guilty party by leaving comments on Twitter or circulating satirical cartoons on Facebook. And then there is satire, a particularly popular means of political criticism and contestation in Italy. Of course it is not new, and has been applied for a long time in the democratic world. Yet, with the various political scandals of the past year, as well as Monti’s harsh austerity policies and rigid attitude, seemingly unconcerned with the disastrous effects of these measures on the lives of many Italians, political satire in Italy is increasingly putting the finger on the sore spots, serving as a sort of mediatized vox populi.

And political satire is increasingly becoming a site of contestation. In mid-February, for example, Maurizio Crozza – best known for the satirical impersonations of politicians during his ten minute sketch on the weekly current affairs program, Ballarò, aired on the most left-centered of the three state-run RAI channels – was attacked by members of the audience at the yearly musical festival of San Remo. At the end of an unflattering imitation of a Silvio Berlusconi trying to buy the Italians’ votes, with which Crozza started his performance, people shouted that he should leave the stage, and that there should be no politics that night, making it apparently impossible for the comedian to continue. Although Crozza seemed affected and offended by the attack, and nearly walked off the stage, necessitating the intervention of host Fabio Fazio, it is likely that the entire scene was set up so as to boost audience ratings. Nevertheless, it shows how important satire has become in debates about politics, and in society as a whole.

Satire mostly surfs the web, though. One comedian in particular has drawn advantages from this, creating his own, grassroots political movement which communicates and organizes itself primarily on the web, completely knocking over traditional politics: Beppe Grillo. After a career in commercial television and (initially) without any apparent political conviction, in the early 2000s, Grillo began traveling across Italy, performing in theaters and out on the street where he unloaded his anger over ecological issues, warfare and Berlusconi. In 2005, he created, along with Gianroberto Casaleggio, an Internet entrepreneur who eventually became the guru behind Grillo’s “5 star Movement”, the Beppegrillo.it blog. In 2007 and 2008 the duo organized the so-called V-day (where the ‘V’ stands for ‘vaffanculo’, the Italian F-word), an unofficial protest day against traditional politics – from left to right – that took place across Italy. Grillo indeed claims to promote neither left-wing nor right-wing ideologies. (Hence, his recent opening up to the neo-fascist Casa Pound movement in the name of non-partisanship.)

It is mostly on the web that Grillo’s anti-politics take shape. Journalist Giuliano Santoro – author of an interesting study of the Grillo phenomenon (Un grillo qualunque. Il movimento 5 stelle e il populismo digitale nella crisi dei partiti italiani, 2012) – claims that Facebook in particular favors Grillo in that it creates “a bond between the Comedian and the People which makes possible keeping together […] both the propagandist strength of the “logo” that is so typical of the classical relation of consumerism, and the emotive and intimate power of ‘friendship,’ typical of social networks such as Facebook.” Put simply, Facebook allows Grillo to provide people with a sense of identity and belonging to community, a “product” which he can sell without having to gain the consumer’s confidence, considering his notoriety and Facebook’s capacity to create online – and subsequently also real – communities. And what Grillo has to sell, sells well, particularly since the political scandals of 2012. Recent opinion polls indicated that the “5 star Movement” is gaining support and may do well in the upcoming elections, due also to Grillo’s so-called “Tsunami tour” across the peninsula, these past few weeks. Grillo’s returning to old-fashioned street politics and online democracy seems to be paying off.

Yet, there is a big downside to the “5 star Movement,” and to Grillo’s character. His blog, for example, is not really a blog, as Grillo himself admitted: it is mostly a site of communication and propaganda, with no interaction between Grillo and his followers. Nor did the two highly successful V-days originate “from below.” Rather, they were programmed and effectively “sold” by the Casaleggio-Grillo duo. Similarly, Grillo’s political rallies – which are often filmed and put online –are more a one-man show, which, again, do not promote interaction but simply reproduce the stand-up comedian format of television. Accordingly, the people who attend these meetings are spectators rather than demonstrators. His activities, therefore, represent no more than a shift from television to new media. Things apparently change, but are essentially the same.

The obsession with new media reached a climax when it was decided that people could present themselves as candidates for the 5 star Movement primaries in 2012 by uploading videos of themselves to the Internet, where they would receive votes, a form of democracy from below. But this failed horribly as only a very small number of Italians voted, which was to be expected, with Italy still lagging behind in Internet usage.

Grillo’s hierarchical and undemocratic nature, finally, was revealed when he expelled a regional and a communal councilor of the “5 star Movement” in the city of Bologna. One of them had participated in the abovementioned TV program Ballarò, a decision which clashed with Grillo’s number one rule of complete absence from the mainstream media, although he does not always apply that rule to himself. In October 2012, he pulled off a publicity stunt as he swam the Straits of Messina for the launch of his local election campaign in Sicily, where the “5 star Movement” would be very successful.

Clearly, Grillo is afraid of losing control. Or maybe he just doesn’t like it when someone draws attention away from him, as also became clear after a member of the “5 star Movement” was elected mayor of Parma during local elections in 2012, leading to polemics with Grillo who tried to dictate his next moves. The Movement does indeed come across very much as an army of little soldiers, who are dismissed as soon as they step out of line.

So how would they govern Italy, should they win the elections? Of course, they won’t, but if they would, Grillo-Casaleggio would probably dissolve the movement. It is indeed likely that Grillo has no intention to govern, but simply wants to obstruct other parties and bring about some kind of revolution. At a local level, though, the Movement is doing well, which illustrates an increasing call for local activism and participant democracy, due not in the least to a discontent with European politics in these times of crisis and austerity.

Grillo’s success also shows how traditional politics are being affected ever more by the power of satire and democracy via the web. In a way, this is not very surprising, Italy having been run for nearly 20 years by a man many consider a clown, and who has indeed built much of his popularity on the Italians’ (bad) sense of humor.

Yet, to a certain degree, Grillo’s assault on the political caste is a good thing. In a country where traditional political parties have exploited ordinary citizens for far too long, distracting them with semi-nude ballerinas or simply brainwashing them through television, it is time people wake up and smell the coffee. But I’m afraid Grillo is not our man. Although many of the things he says are true, they do no more than feed grudges. Grillo does not offer any real alternative, so that voting for him is not a vote for something but against, and that is never really productive.

In a previous article I argued that Italy is witnessing a sort of end of ideology: Prime Minister Mario Monti’s technical government responds to the economic market alone, while Beppe Grillo’s a-political grassroots movement is winning over disappointed voters. But with the elections in sight, the old political guard is warming up, eager to regain control over the country. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has governed the country on and off since 1994, is first in line: after months of tactical holding off, the Cavaliere – as Berlusconi is also called – decided to get back into the game as it became clear that Monti might run for the elections. For some weeks now he has been appearing on every single political and current affairs show on Italian television, primarily on his own TV channels but also on the more critical, independent La7, where he engaged in a highly media hyped duel with a critical journalist Berlusconi managed to have removed from state television back in 2002. On another talk-show, old times again revived as Berlusconi took it out on magistrates who ordered the former PM to pay €36 million ($48 million) a year in a divorce settlement with this ex-wife Veronica Lario: they were accused of being Communists and now also feminists.

The sense of history repeating itself was reflected in a satirical cartoon, where we see Berlusconi’s face on TV as he yells “Happy 1994!” to a terror-stricken viewer. Unless Monti’s newly found political list, “Civic choice,” can put a stop to it. Positioned neither to the left nor to the right, Monti seems to want to do away with traditional polarities in politics for good and give continuity to his technical government, with no one to respond to but the European Union. In fact, when criticized for the rigorous measures taken in order to bring down the government bond spreads, i.e. the spread between Italian benchmark 10 year bonds and safer German Bunds, Monti inflexibly shifted responsibility to bad management by previous governments. In the name of rigor and economic reconstruction, he has thus been able to pull off tricks none of his predecessors could ever have dreamed of getting away with. “Europe wants it” and “I respond to the market,” were Monti’s stoical replies to criticism.

During an international conference on protest cultures in Italy, sociologist Donatella della Porta argued that Monti’s government disguises a “corrupting democracy” and what she coins as “clean corruption,” in that it presents itself as an a-political and neutral government while in reality it is very much immersed in economical politics in the Euro zone (unsurprisingly, Monti is connected to Goldman Sachs). Consequently it has pushed through anti-Constitutional measures that may work in Northern countries such as Germany, but not in Italy. Sponsored (at least until recently) by politics on the left and on the right as well as by mass media, Monti’s government thus follows a neo-liberal program with a highly non-democratic way of decision making, where trust is not sought among citizens but economic markets.

And Monti is not ready to give that up yet. Before his formal decision to participate in the upcoming elections, during the holiday season, he declared that he was “open” to lead the government if he was “asked” to do so. More recently, he invited the Italian center-left to “silence” the more radical, anti-reform elements in its ranks, including the left-wing union organization CGIL. Should the “civic choice” he is offering Italians perhaps be read in ironical sense then? It leads Della Porta to conclude that Monti is more Berlusconian than Berlusconi, whose many trials, gaffes, indecent behavior and political incapacities have made him the official laughing stock of Europe. Monti, on the other hand, is somewhat of a wolf in sheep’s clothing: with the European Union behind him, the serious and polyglot professor is far more respectable than his predecessor. He is indeed the absolute counterpart of “Mr Bunga Bunga,” and even those Italians who didn’t/don’t see through Berlusconi’s game seem to get that: opinion polls reveal that what people most appreciate about Monti is the fact that he has given back “credibility” to the country, a catchy formula which is often repeated in the press, but actually reflects a linguistic media habit where complex issues are reduced to slogans.

In reality, he is not as innocent as he would like us to believe, and I’m not so sure Monti is really doing Italy any good. Recent figures show that youth unemployment has reached 30%, while more and more companies and factories (and not just small and medium enterprises) are closing or being relocated to East-Europe, Asia and Latin-America. Even Fiat, the country’s biggest private-sector employer, is no longer made in Italy. Italians’ purchasing power is staggering, as they are continually faced with tax increases and new taxes such as the much debated council tax, whereas wages – for those who can claim any – fail to grow accordingly. All these problems are arrogantly sidetracked by pulling out the “Europe wants it” story, or by placing Italy on the same level as other European countries, forgetting that Italy seriously lags behind wages – again, for those who (still) have a (paid) job – and civil rights, in comparison with Northern European countries. And what about Monti’s raising of the retirement age? Surely, he could have made exceptions for old age pensions? Contrary to more advanced European countries, in Italy many workers from older and poorer generations have been working since their early teens, and therefore no longer see the end of it. On top of all of this, Monti’s ministers have attempted to defend the measures indulging in offensive, selfish and downright stupid comments, for example about Italian youngsters being “choosy” and pretentious when it comes down to getting a job, completely ignoring the privileged positions of their own children who have clearly been favored by their parents’ connections.

Perhaps Monti’s “Civic Choice” list is an attempt to make amends, and make up for some of the harsh measures he was “forced” to carry out by the European Union? He has in fact announced that he wants to modify the law on council tax and suspend a future tax-increase. But is he to be trusted? Or does Italy risk ending up with something worse than Berlusconi?

In the early 1990s, the political scandal “Bribesville” led to the emergence of a new political class in Italy, headed by Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing party Forza Italia (“Go Italy”). Bettino Craxi’s political protégée promised the Italians a “clean, reasonable and modern country.” Instead, the media magnate turned Italy into the “sick man of Europe”: “a country still struggling between modernity and backwardness, between the need/will to change and the fear of losing some local or specific privileges.” Twenty years on, a new corruption scandal has emerged, and the country seems to have returned to its point of departure, in spite of Berlusconi’s dismissal as Prime Minister.

This is not just Berlusconi’s fault, as I discussed in an earlier post . After all, he was voted in by many Italians, even if his control over the media (the Berlusconi family owns several TV channels, a publishing house and national daily) suggest a certain degree of political manipulation. The problem is that there is a mindset where getting away with (bad) things is a kind of national sport. It relates to the diffidence of Italian citizens towards the state, as historian John Foot explains in Italy’s Divided Memory:

“T]he Italian state has been in the throes of a semipermanent legitimation crisis ever since its inception. The basic ‘rules of the game’ have never been accepted by many Italians in terms of a ‘rational’ management of the state and the political system. They have, instead, been partly replaced by other, unwritten ‘rules’ that have institutionalized patronage, clientelism, and informal modes of behaviour and exchange.”

This legitimation crisis is evident, for example, in tax evasion but also – on the part of the state – in the use of excessive violence against citizens during social conflicts. The most exemplary case was the G8 summit in Genoa, in 2001, when police killed a student activist, savagely beat up activists and journalists during a police raid in the former Diaz school, and indulged in forms of torture at the Bolzaneto prison, where the nightmare continued for some 100 victims of the Diaz raid. Although the movie Diaz – Don’t clean up this blood (Daniele Vicari, 2012) gives an accurate account of what was defined as a “Mexican-style massacre,” it fails to take a real stance on the matter as responsibilities are split between the police (one of the police officers inside the Diaz school symbolically apologizes to one of the wounded activists, the view of a girl bleeding from her head clearly generating a sense of guilt) and the provocative and violent “black bloc” youth, the pretext for police to raid the Diaz school in the first place. In the movie, a couple of them find a hideout in a bar across the former school, on the night of the massacre: when – the following morning – they explore the abandoned building, traces of blood and debris unveil the horror that had taken place there. One of them penitently cries out that it was their fault.

The Genoa incidents are among a long list of traumatic memories, which remain controversial also because of a corrupt judicial system in Italy: earlier in 2012, ten Genoa activists accused of damaging property risked prison sentences of 10 to 15 years each, whereas the excessive physical violence used by the police in the Diaz school, on the other hand, was left unpunished. The trials for a series of dramatic bomb massacres that occurred between 1969 and 1980 had similar outcomes: 35 years after the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan, for example, the main suspects were identified as the culprits but received no prison sentences, for bureaucratic and legal reasons. On top of this, the families of the 17 victims were summoned to pay the trial expenses.

So Italians have some reason to not trust the state and its legal system. To be “bad,” in Italy, is a virtue, and this might explain the country’s infinite troubles with corruption. Throughout 2012, a series of scandals involving political parties from various ideological backgrounds followed each other up like a tragicomic sitcom. It started with the centre party La Margherita (“Daisy Party”), whose treasurer Luigi Lusi has been arrested for embezzling party funds. Next, it was the turn of the xenophobe Lega Nord (“Northern League”), which for years boasted of being corruption-free, and even built its very identity on the idea that Rome was full of thieves, as opposed to the clean North. Now it turns out that the Lega used party funds to buy leader Umberto Bossi’s son his university degrees, in Albania.

The most recent scandal, finally, involves the heir to Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the People of Freedom party (PDL). Italians were plunged back into the ancient Rome of the Satyricon as news came out of PDL members from the Lazio regional council spending taxpayers’ money on luxury holidays, expensive cars and extravagant dress-up parties. Regional chief Franco Fiorito has been arrested for embezzlement of party funds of over $1,500,000, whereas a councilor spent nearly $40,000 on a toga party attended by 2,000 people – including Fiorito, nicknamed Batman – dressed up as Roman centurions or wearing pigs masks, while fondling women and feeding on oysters and champagne.

Ironically, Fiorito has tried to defend himself by claiming to have been among the angry crowd that had symbolically thrown pennies at Craxi, during the “Bribesville” investigations in 1993, one night when the Socialist leader left his residence in Rome. This historical moment came to represent the political demise of Craxi. Today, Fiorito has become the new face of political corruption in Italy.

This is the social context of the satirical TV show Blob, which I analyzed in an earlier post.  Blob brilliantly hit right on the spot when it opened its episode of 26 September 2012 with the “Mr Creosote” sketch from Monty Python’s satirical movie The Meaning of Life (1983 ). Mr Creosote is a surrealistically obese man who literally stuffs himself with food in a fancy restaurant. As he eats and – at the same time – coughs up his food, the man reaches his limit when the waiter (John Cleese) convinces him to have his final “wafer thin mint chocolate.” Mr Creosote accepts and literally explodes, but we don’t get to see that in Blob: just before the explosion, the scene switches to a shot of the equally obese Fiorito, and we cannot but imagine him on the various nights out, stuffing himself with oysters and champagne.

But it’s not just the fact that – in times of austerity – these people feed both on oysters and other people’s misery (in 2010 the Lazio region introduced prescription charges for disabled people). The real problem is that they don’t seem to be bothered with their lack of ethics and sense of propriety. Lazio governor Renata Polverini is exemplary here: according to Fiorito, Polverini was well aware of the misuse of funds within her council, and pictures showing her at the parties have been circulating in the media. Yet she denies that she knew anything of the embezzlements. Indeed, Polverini has been on a kind of media tour to exonerate herself from the accusations, pointing her finger at other parties and their scandals, as if to say that, in the end, everyone has been “bad.” She has also had posters put up all over Rome, where she looks straight into the camera, with pride and determination, as she firmly states that she will “send these people home.” This is, I think, the most outrageous outcome of the scandals: the lack of decency and responsibility among those who are in charge. For, even if Polverini really didn’t know anything, what is her ($15,000 monthly) job about then? For had this happened in Germany, Denmark or the Netherlands, Polverini would have stepped down instantly, quietly and ashamed for not having been more vigilant. Instead, she arrogantly claims to be a victim in the whole affair.

Indeed, the attitude of Italian politicians reflects a symptomatic problem in Italy: that of trying to get away with anything. As a number of Italian journalists have observed, the likes of Fiorito simply and sadly reflect Italian society at large.

Ever since former PM Silvio Berlusconi was forced to make way for Mario Monti’s politics of rigor and sacrifice, Italy has been confronted with major cuts, radical changes in legislation, and a complete reversal of mind-set with regards to life-styles and consumption habits. Whether “Rigor Montis” (from the Latin expression “rigor mortis,” i.e. stiffening caused by death) – as Monti is mockingly called on occasions – will manage to turn Italy into a real European country is still a big question. What I fear will not change easily is the disgraceful condition of women in Italian society. My anxiety was confirmed on a daily basis throughout the summer of 2012, as I followed a contest to elect two new showgirls for a popular show on Channel 5, one of Berlusconi’s TV channels. But what is the big deal with women, boobs and bums in Italy anyway?

Since classical antiquity, female beauty occupies a central place in Italian culture. Not by chance, the nation has often been represented through allegorical female figures. The connection of the “fatherland” with female mother figures or erotic ideals was to encourage men to a “passionate attachment to the nation,”  as Stephen Gundle puts it in his Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy. In other words, beauty was used as a form of (political) persuasion. This is also because Italians have never really had a commonly held, national sense of identity. Therefore, special importance was given to factors relating to the informal culture that Italians did share, i.e. the sexual fixation of men on women, the physical element apparently being more important for Latin males.

Berlusconi’s application of the stereotypical image of women as erotic objects of desire for men is part of both his success at home and his negative image abroad. His sexist and degrading jokes – most notably his vulgar remark about Angela Merkel’s bottom – are sadly famous across the world. Homosexuals weren’t spared either, like when he publicly justified his erotic escapades with a young belly dancer by stating that it was better to like girls than to be gay. But if it was only Berlusconi going through a second hormonal phase, it wouldn’t even matter that much. The thing is that many Italians accept and nurture the gender discrimination that has erupted during the Berlusconi governments, and the former PM’s popularity and public support very much relies on his self-proclaimed virility. As if you are not a “real man,” if you do not chase after young, beautiful women. On the contrary, this is presented as natural and normal behavior, as opposed to those that prefer their own sex. Clearly, the impact of the Catholic Church plays a crucial role here, and the documentary Suddenly Last Winter (2007), offers a good picture of the sad situation homosexuals in Italy often find themselves in. On the other hand, Berlusconi’s adultery and preference for under aged girls is not looked upon with a good eye by the Church. Yet, many Italian men do not judge Berlusconi for his immoral (and illegal) dealings with the women around him, but actually admire and probably envy him for his sexual adventures.

A second problem is the way women position themselves in this highly sexist society. Sadly, the majority tries to live up to the image Berlusconi and the media have created of women: young, slim and stupid. But it’s a tough battle as there are strong expectations of women, not only with regards to their physical appearance but also to their place in society (i.e. subdued to men), and it is hard to step out of this rigid scheme and develop an identity of one’s own without being criticized by both sexes.

Of course, there are successful career women, nowadays, but they often end up “imitating” men in order to gain that respect from their male colleagues, which they would otherwise not gain. I’m thinking of Emma Marcegaglia, the former President of the Italian Industrial Association Confindustria, with her male vocabulary and iron lady-like expressivity.

Alternatively, they just play the role of the beautiful but dumb woman who gets what she wants through sexual favors, as in the case of Nicole Minetti, the showgirl-turned-politician who got herself a job as regional councilor in the Lombardy region for Berlusconi’s Freedom Party. During Berlusconi’s most recent sex-scandal, Minetti – an alleged accomplice in the scandal – tried to turn attention away from her trial by appearing in public with a T-shirt that read: “I’m even better without a T-shirt.” More recently, she has made the news by refusing to step down from her position unless she was offered a movie career in Hollywood.

Women often play into the stereotypical and sexist gender division. This was confirmed for me over the summer as I watched the program Veline. The term “veline” was originally a journalese reference to the paper handouts from which journalists read news reports on TV, before it become the common denomination for female television showgirls. This happened after the satirical program Striscia la notizia – a parody of the daily news – started using glamorous showgirls to hand the “veline” over to the TV presenter. A few years ago, an additional program was created where the two Striscia la notizia showgirls – one blond, one dark-haired – would be selected from a wide range of candidates, during the summer break. Every episode contains six candidates who have a few minutes to talk about themselves and show off any talents (mostly singing or dancing), before they do a final, brief dance. The winner is selected by a group of five jury members, mostly fashion journalists or magazine editors, and then goes on to the semi-finals, and so on.

The girls that participate in these shows very strongly fulfill the image of the Berlusconian woman: tall, thin and not too bright, or so it seems. In fact, many of these girls are students, either at school or at university, play classical instruments, and occasionally even have a good working position. Of course, not everyone with a degree is a cultured person. But maybe some of them are also just playing the role of the dumb showgirl? More shockingly, the girl’s parents are often in the audience, and seemingly proud. One father even signed up his daughter for the contest! Becoming (or trying to become) a showgirl is apparently seen as something normal and worthy of praise, and it is a common dream for many young girls to become a velina, and marry a football player. This takes us back to the issue of expectations and social conventions. The girls – called not by their names but by the numbers pinned onto their chest– simply do not realize that they are being treated as livestock. Or do they? For many it is probably their once-in-a-lifetime go at instant fame. Who knows, maybe some TV producer is watching and might just make them a star overnight…

A novelty this year is the many Eastern European girls who are participating in the competition. Some of them are adamant to demonstrate their “Italianness,” their rootedness in their new homeland and their desire to respond to the social and sexual conventions in Italy. Optimistically speaking, they are integrating into society, but I doubt they will be better off here than in at home.

Whether Silvio Berlusconi will make his comeback on the political scene or not therefore doesn’t matter much, for the problem isn’t Berlusconi alone. It’s the mentality of the people that – with the help of the Church – upholds the old-fashioned idea about virile (or just rich) men chasing after slim and stupid women. Women’s emancipation in Italy has yet a long way to go.

But it’s not only the younger generations of protesters who increasingly have recourse to digital and mobile media in their activism. Old-timers are discovering new media technologies as well. This was exemplified in the recent publication of a series of photo albums on Facebook, containing hundreds of snapshots of Italian activists from a 1970s student movement, the so-called “Movement of ’77.” This was not the first attempt to reunite the 1977 generation, and yet, it has never been so successful. What makes Facebook different? Are we dealing with plain nostalgia here? I would rather argue that these digital photo albums, which open up a whole new perspective on the 1970s, as they turn attention away from dominant memories of terrorism and violence, have potentials in that they contribute to a more inclusive, alternative “history from below.”

In 2011, Time Magazine elected global activists “person of the year”. That same year, Italian student protests which had occurred 35 years ago revived on the web as photographer Enrico Scuro – class of ’77 – uploaded his photographic collection to Facebook. In doing so, he unchained enthusiastic reactions from former protesters, who tagged themselves into the photographs and left comments of all sorts. People also sent Scuro their own photographs, thus contributing to what has become something of an online family album, currently containing over 3,000 photographs. As they narrated personal anecdotes, complemented by other people’s recollections, the former protesters collectively reconstructed the (hi)story of a generation, a history not tainted by traumatic memories of terrorism and political violence – typical of the official and public version of the Italian 1970s. Furthermore, the Facebook rage led to a series of reunions outside the virtual world and, a few months ago, to the publication of a selection of the photographs in book form. So what made Facebook different from previous attempts to gather the 1977 generation?

Facebook helps individuals develop a sense of belonging to a wider community, for example by joining or “liking” groups. The online sharing of photographs reinforces this sense of belonging. It prompts acts of recollection in an interactive and public context, turning the photographs into an occasion for a collective and oral “show and tell,” like the real-life viewing of, say, holiday snapshots or family albums among family members and friends.

Indeed, Facebook reproduces orality in a very similar way as when you’re going through a photo album. The tags and comments, which read very much like spontaneous, real-life or telephone conversations, substitute the pointing out of people or places in an album. This effect is amplified by the use of a wide range of special characters, text symbols and emoticons.

Facebook also changes concepts of private and public, as personal stories and identities are shared in a collective setting. Some of the most intimate photographs in Scuro’s albums, for example, include snapshots of women during or shortly before/after child labour. But then private photographs are always also public and social, in that they depend on shared understandings and conventions.

Nostalgia inevitably plays an important role here. Unlike other European countries, the 1968 protests in Italy were not a one-off event, but extended well into the 1970s, culminating in 1977. In some locations, such as the popular university town of Bologna, the student movement of 1977 had a highly creative and fun-loving character. Things changed, though, after the violent death of a student during riots in March: terrorism and heroin rapidly disarmed the ’77 generation, leaving the former protesters with little more than beautiful memories and bitter critiques of Berlusconian politics.

But the albums don’t simply reply to the generation’s yearning for what is no longer attainable: nostalgia can also provide empowerment. The 1977 photo albums on Facebook then offer a positive and progressive sense of memory retrieval, as people or events that have been left out of official history are now re-inserted into a collective and alternative history from below, thus allowing for a more inclusive history of the 1970s.

It’s obvious, though, that these digital archives don’t fix memories in time, eventually. The options within Facebook to remove tags, comments and photographs, as well as to add tags without control, allow people to manipulate the past. This may explain why Scuro decided to publish a selection of the photographs in book form, thus bringing the digitized photographs back into the analogue sphere. This underscores the unstable character of social networks while demonstrating how people, in the end, prefer the material and tangible photograph to its digital counterpart.