In July of 1867 Mark Twain set foot in Europe for the first time, reaching Italy after spending two weeks in France. In his travelogue letters (subsequently collected in his bestseller “The Innocents Abroad”) he annotates the following: “As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery.” In Florence, while kneeling to worship in the Duomo, he suddenly realizes to be encircled by beggars, later prompting him to write "Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?”
A stroll down the streets of Milan these days can bring to mind this last paragraph, when noticing the increasing amount of supplicants dwelling at crossroads and shop entrances – Africans most of them, Italians a few, and - a mainstay of the landscape - the primadonnas and method-actors of the panhandler guild, the gypsies. Most of the newcomers from the land of the Sahara originate from west African states, where there's no real widespread war or famine, places like Nigeria, or Ghana; you don't see any east Africans such as Somalis or Eritreans capitalizing on the street, although they can be noticed wandering - visibly more undernourished and haggard than their west-African counterparts. Perhaps living through hell on earth, surviving it and finally escaping it, tempers a man into a state of dignity that can't coexist with the art and science of sidewalk funding.
In 1867, Mark Twain's Italy was a six year-old country burdened by the cost of (brutally enforced) territorial unification, a country obligated to deal with the complexities of consolidating the assets and liabilities of the extinct dukedoms and monarchies; lacking the resources to do so, it forced unto the population the first-ever income tax, abolished gold-backed banknotes (through the May 1st 1866, “corso forzoso” decree, conceived by the newly appointed Neapolitan Finance Minister, Antonio Scialoja), kicking off a centralized money-printing machine, rampant inflation and widespread misery. Twain states in the Innocents Abroad that “..for every one beggar there was in America, there were one hundred of them in Italy.”; in the decade later to come, millions of Italians had no choice but to emigrate. La Dolce Vita was as far as another planet.
Italy is now one-hundred and fifty-five years old but what hasn't changed since 1867 is that its government, once again, has forced its young (and even brightest) to flee the peninsula - by staggering numbers. Nearly five million Italians are currently living outside of Italy, many of them under the age of forty, with London now the “13th largest Italian city”, inhabited by 250,000 young Italians. Inversely, the peninsula now hosts over five million immigrants, some from eastern Europe, the majority from north Africa, while western, central, and eastern Africans, are arriving in scores. But whether only partially subsidized, or entirely living off the piety of the State, these immigrants in most cases couldn't care less what is La Pietà, let alone reason on what the master work suggests.
According to one theory, government is the mirror reflection of the collective consciousness of a nation – innocently reflecting the tendencies, aspirations, virtues and vices of the collectivity. Consciousness-based hence abstract in its mechanics, the theory would suggest that just as puppets are moved by the puppeteer, politicians think and act on the basis the inherent tendencies of the population of their country. They are literally bound by the nation's sum tendencies and as the collective consciousness rises, or falls, so does the quality of the government. The theory, only apparently simple, has its merits. If one for example drives through Switzerland, observes carefully, and maybe cares to interact with the Swiss, it doesn't take long to add one plus one, and understand why Switzerland is they way it is. Or America, or any country.
If the theory is true, it would at least indicate that in Italy's past, one short government after another was perhaps an indication of restlessness, but of change as well, and - possibly, of growth in the collectivity; change is, at its least, a sign of vitality. But during the tenure of Berlusconi, and the current legislation, governments have become more stable, longer lasting - more vile - and Italians more depressed. Ray Dalio a couple of years ago was speaking candidly when he commented that southern European countries were not in a recession in fact, but in a controlled depression.
For what it's worth, in 2013 Freedom House (www.freedomhouse.org) rated Italy's press to be as “not free”; lately, press and government are like bottle and cork, so one doesn't need to bother checking the site. Prime Minister Renzi's recent and utterly embarrassing gabble in English on the state of the Italian economy at Harvard University, (on Youtube), only further exposes him and politicians alike to be Commedia dell'Art marionettes, used to entertain the children while the adults are in some other room of the house, having a really good time.
How to jack-hammer the Italian political class and their cemented government, which international studies show to be the western world's most inflexible, ingenerous (ironically, especially to its native citizens) – yet invasive, is anybody's guess, so the focus might be to see what tools are available to defy it, and give some respite to a moribund economy. Currency is one tool, and in this regards Italy has a well-known and peculiar history. Prior to 2000 and the Euroenslavement, Italy was famous for its weak currency and strong economy – the exact opposite of the last sixteen years. If during this time the Italian air force had dropped bombs on the peninsula, from Sicily to Milan, it may have done less damage to thousands of businesses than what the Euro and the government has achieved. Medium and medium-small businesses surviving the burden of Italian taxation could be awarded gladiatorial medals, especially in northern Italy where the temptation of the greener grass of Ticino (the most southern tip of Switzerland), offering to any relocated business a third of the taxation in Italy– is always an option on the table.
Hangers-on is one way to define Italian politicians. Another more appropriate term would be parasitic. If Kissinger was Italian, he'd most likely be on national TV every week, or maybe he'd be the president of the Republic (president Napolitano left office last year, at political mummy-age of 88). The more the future will be disruptive, the faster it might send the termites running. Bitcoin, and digital currencies, could pull at least one or more rugs from under the feet of Italy's gerontocracy although, as of now, hardly anybody in Italy has even heard about it. There are some bank managers that barely even know how Bitcoin works. In general, Italians don't embraces technology very fast, except maybe for cell phones; in the 90's the country nearly owned the world record for cell phone ownership and conversation minutes per person, but that was probably because, as the saying goes, one Italian is an individual, two is a social event.
A dog may be a man's best friend, but in this modern day and age, so is the cell phone; a digital wallet is a good start in bobbing and weaving out of reach from the bankbullies' next swing. Since probably not enough people (at least not in Europe) are stocking up on small gold coins, therefore enabling a solid, modern, but back-to-basics economy based on gold and silver, digital currencies may end up being the fastest and cheapest tool to progress ahead. When things heat up, societies tend to chemically function more like boiling milk than boiling water - milk boils and surfaces in a second – and the Berlin wall came down in forty-eight hours. If something critical enough happens to the global economy, and if the news goes viral about a digital currencies escape route, things might finally take an interesting turn. Until then, until people feed on intravenous TV, it's just wait-a-land. Politicians always find the newest place called Hope to talk about – but the only hope I see here is in the mass-adoption of a decentralized digital currency – with people dropping the Euro as if paper on fire.
New discoveries and significant technological innovation somewhat depends on the growth trajectory of the collective consciousness, of the sequential unfolding of the deeper, most inner layer of creative intelligence (the subconscious, some might call it); the subsequent adoption by the masses of that same technology is likewise dependent on wide-reaching, collective consciousness development. Calmness a prerequisite for the former to manifest, peace for the latter to flourish. The global rise in collective consciousness happens regardless, mostly all by itself, so while governments can build houses over trees, eventually the trees will just grow through the roofs.
As for Italians, they might soon get fed up and explode in protest, but I hope they won't; ultimately they are lucky because if the situation really gets sticky, all they need to do is step out the house, walk a block or two – and rob their church.