Among the leading stereotypes surrounding Italy are the pervasiveness of the mafia, and the fundamentality of football (or, in North America, soccer) to Italian cultural identity. This past weekend, and despite every theoretical attempt at keeping them separate, these two institutional strongholds came together to prove both stereotypes true -- to the disappointment and dismay of many Italians, for reasons that expand beyond their typical lament.
Here's what happened: on Saturday evening, Naples's football club faced off against Florence's in the championship match of the Coppa Italia (Italian cup) tournament. Naples hosted the game on its home pitch to the screaming excitement of a sold-out stadium. That is, when the game finally started. For hours before it, Naples's tifosi (fans), the Ultras, dominated the scene with a display of riotous outbursts uncustomary even to the Italian south, responding to the injury of one of theirs presumably at the hands of the Fiorentina's fans. The rioting ended when a mysterious tattooed man in a black T-shirt, assured of the rumor's falseness, called off the hoots and hollers and gave the green light to begin the game. That man, spectators later learned, Genny a' Carogna, was a camorrista -- or, in other words, a boss in Naples's mafia, the Camorra.
His appearance and, more specifically, the importance it was given on the scene, instantly sparked a conflicted reaction that within minutes spread through the annals of Facebook, even among non-football enthusiasts. There were the comments we might all expect -- This country should be ashamed of itself; I am disgusted with this place; How disgraceful -- comments acknowledging both Italy's frustration with the power of its mafia groups, and its inability to change the status quo that their influence has generated. But by the match's end, this indignation, once directed (rightly, if ineffectively) at a state that repeatedly leaves its people wanting (both morally and economically), was rerouted and dumped heavily onto those displaying it. "This match isn't about the mafia, it's about soccer. Why is everyone talking about the Camorra, when they should be focusing on the game as our national sport, pass-time, and pride?"; "The mafia has always existed. What's so different about today?" These were the new proclamations taking shape. In their own way, this latter group was probably foreseeing what eventually followed: by the next morning, Genny a' Carogna had become a brand of its own, the subject of countless internet memes, even the figurehead of Facebook fan groups. The space between Saturday's game and Sunday dinner had witnessed the development of three variants of an entirely Italian coping mechanism: 1) Rejection of the Institution and Self-Loathing; 2) Resigned Acceptance Mistaken for a Progressive Attitude; 3) Resort to Well-Intentioned but Perhaps Pointless (or Even Counter-Productive) Humour.
What's more is that participants in each of these variants believed they were getting it right (to the exclusion of the other two), that their attitude was the one most befitting of the situation.
There is no need to rehash the history of Italy's mafia. It's not all The Godfather by any means, but by and large, what you read about it is true: there is at least one mafia group unofficially governing each of Italy's regions. Some are better known than others: Sicily has Cosa Nostra (Our Thing); Calabria has the 'Ndragheta, Campania has the Camorra. If you've read Roberto Saviano's Gomorra or seen Matteo Garrone's filmic adaptation of it by the same name, you'll know what local mafia presence means in concrete terms: fiscal control of enterprises at all levels (small to large), property ownership and abusive rent control, loansharking and debt collection, political corruption, misuse of state resources, black market monopolies, drug cartels, movement of illegal weapons, laundered money and, perhaps most problematically, the recruitment, training, and brainwashing of youths for mafia preservation and growth. If you've studied Italian history or literature to any extent, you'll likely also know that mafia presence in Italy is neither a thing of the only recent past, nor a plague to Southern Italy alone; mafia groups exist throughout Italy, some dating as far back as the early nineteenth century. You'll likely also know how dangerous these groups can be to anyone who refuses to adhere to their code -- the 1992 murder of anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone most immediately comes to mind -- a code centered on omertà , or silence respectful of the mafia and its ties.
But let's get back to our Facebook protesters, shall we?
If Italy were my country of birth (and not just of gradual adoption), I, too, might want to cry out against the Camorra or otherwise publicly display my disappointment in a system that had managed to fail even the only communal source of joy left to my people. But then, my complaints would likely fall on deaf ears. If my political leaders hadn't listened to me and to millions of others like me in the past, indeed, if they'd found it reasonable, instead, to negotiate with mafia groups in order to advance their own political agendas until then, why should they listen to me or to anyone else now? What would be the point of my political protest? What good could come of it? Mightn't I be better off, or at least more serene, focusing on the more pressing issue at hand? After all, don't they always say:
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference ...
And mafia strength is certainly not something I can change.
Or, in turning a blind eye to an issue so clearly ubiquitous, would I only be adhering neatly to the law of omertà that had ruined my country and its peace? Maybe the best approach would be a subversive one. Rather than waving my banner against the mafia or in accordance with the silence it had culturally asked of me for years, I should draw as much attention to it as possible -- only to mock it and if not to domesticate it, then at least to reclaim its impact on my own terms.
They are competing models that, despite their common root, continue to cause stir among friends (at least online). The second group views the moral finger-wagging of the first a snobbish, hypocritical, and useless behaviour. To it, the first group responds by underlining the need to react outwardly to a state of emergency that, no matter how long-standing or precedented, can otherwise never effectively be addressed. The third group's preferred external reaction is one of farce, of which both other groups disapprove; the first, because it quite literally makes a mockery of an issue that has serious consequences nation-wide; the second, because it puts the spotlight on and renders celebrity an entity worth eradicating from the face of the earth. But at least by making fun of it, we're all laughing, aren't we? And everybody knows that:
If you weren't laughing about it, you'd be crying
or
Better tears of joy than tears of sorrow
or
Laughter is the best medicine.
Each group has its catch-phrase, its central philosophy, its modus operandi. It's hard to prefer any one to another. What remains striking, to me at least, is the synthesis that comes of this dialectic exercise and in response to its earlier thesis (group one) and antithesis (group two): misdirected humour. It's the synthesis that perhaps comes of all Italian dialectic exercises; it's the final and half-hearted plea of a nation that for centuries has found solace in beffe, burle, caricature and other grotesque inversions of reality. In the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries (as in Mario Monicelli's much later Amici miei triology), the beffa - or practical joke - was used to make fun of members of society either too easy not to dupe or too reprehensible to spare discomfort and embarrassment. It was a cunning man's sport, used to exclude unwanted members of society (or, more generously, to laugh momentarily at someone's simplicity and gullibility) not in lieu or for want of a more serious or appropriate alternative, but simply for jest, for the personal satisfaction that sometimes comes of giving someone his just desserts. But, I think, there is an unbridgeable gap between this kind of light-hearted and active joking, and the passive creation of a Facebook page dedicated to Genny a' Carogna memes. They generate nothing if not more publicity for Italy's mafia groups, already notorious the world over. But they are not alone in doing so. Members of the other two groups do the same in their approaches, too. Whether they are railing against him, chastising those who do, or photoshopping him into different backgrounds and situations, all of Italy is talking about Genny a' Carogna and the Camorra. And few are doing anything about it.
But not all talk is cheap. News reports released yesterday confirm that Genny a' Carogna has been banned from all stadium events for the next five years, on the grounds not of his ties to the Camorra, but of his decision to wear a T-shirt deemed controversial and prone to instigating violence (it called for the liberation of a Sicilian inmate incarcerated for the murder of a police officer). It is an official decision that will likely find its way into - and successfully out of - a court of appeals, and one that fails to speak to the larger problems surrounding the presence of the Camorra in Naples. But it at least demonstrates that someone, somewhere, was listening to Italy's variegated social criticism, and felt the need to concretise it in some way that the general population simply can't. It's as much as you can hope for as a person dependent on the responsibilities and privileges of public officers. It's a success in its own right.
Italy's three grief models may never agree with each other on the proper way to cope with a collective crisis, and perhaps they shouldn't: it is their disagreement and the propagation of the conversation it breeds that keeps Italian officials aware of, if not interested in, its country's collective concerns, and holds them accountable to their reaction to them.
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