Andreotti (right) with Nixon in 1973. Image via the Wiki.
“The great winemakers,” said my client Silvano “die during harvest or during Vinitaly,” Italy’s annual trade gathering in Verona where we were meeting.
He was referring to the passing of Franco Biondi Santi, whose death — at 91 years — cast a long shadow over the fair when the news broke on the first day of the event.
And so is the case with Italian politics.
Today, Italy has new Pope, a new prime minister (elected last week), a new president (also recently elected), and Giulio Andreotti, the seven-time prime minister who defined politics in Italy and reshaped the country’s political and economic legacies in the twentieth century, has died at 94 years of age.
When I traveled to Italy for the second time, to spend the 1989-90 scholastic year at the university in Padua, Andreotti was in his last term as premier.
In every way, he represented everything that my leftist Italian counterparts and friends abhorred: he was the face of Italy’s right wing, considered by many a torch-bearer of fascism, a censor (who once repudiated De Sica for the fim Umberto D.), a mafia-tainted and wily politician who was implicated in the assassination of his friend and political rival, Aldo Moro, not to mention the murder of a journalist who had become a nuisance to him.
In 1993, during his mafia-association trials, authorities revealed that they had obtained a photograph of Andreotti shaking hands with mafioso Vincenzo Pernice at a private ceremony in a church in Rome. There was also an account that he had exchanged a kiss with Salvatore Riina, the boss of bosses at the time.
I’ll never forget how Professor Branca — one of my mentors and a staunch supporter of Andreotti’s Christian Democrats, a rightist in an academic world dominated by the left — finally conceded that Andreotti was as crooked as the figures with whom he’d been linked.
“Si è fatto fotografare con quel mafioso,” he said to me and my dissertation advisor, another one of his protégés. “He allowed himself to be photographed with that mafioso.”
There was no denying that Andreotti was a criminal, not even for Vittore Branca.
Italy’s current generation faces enormous challenges — economic, political, and cultural. Some would even go as far to say that the current financial crisis is one of the greatest crises Italians have faced in the history of the Italian republic (born after the second world war).
In the light of recent events, it’s as if Andreotti’s death were a congedo, a coda to his twentieth-century legacy. It’s as if he were saying, I don’t know where you’re going but don’t forget that I’m the one who got you here…
Above: Hamilton 90, the Boccaccio “autograph” manuscript, from the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Image via Quirinale.it.
In the world of rare books (a world I used to inhabit in my academic days, when I studied and wrote about Italian incunabula and humanist amanuenses), most “special collection” libraries observe the same protocol when two scholars request the same manuscript or codex on the same day: the librarians give the manuscript to neither.
One of the most notorious anecdotes from my days as a student of scribes was that of two illustrious Italian professors — one Italian, one American — who competed to discover the earliest autographed redaction of Boccaccio’s Decameron, in other words, his first “authorized” version of the work, transcribed in his own hand (a holy grail among philologists and paleographers like myself).
When the one professor discovered that the other was headed to the library in Berlin to request a viewing of the vellum, he raced to arrive before his colleague and he swiftly put in a request to view it as well. As a result, the librarians gave it to neither that day.
Ultimately, the one professor stole the manuscript, took it to Rome, had it x-rayed, and became the first to prove its connection to the fourteenth-century author. He replaced the manuscript before anyone noticed.
Not long after, the other professor killed himself.
That’s a true story.
There’s a saying in academics, the competition is so fierce and the enmity so ferocious because the stakes are so low.
One of the ugliest episodes in the history of oenography has been playing out over recent months, with Montalcino as its backdrop.
If you haven’t been following along, the Brunello consortium announced last week that it was expelling and suing one of its members for defamation. (Here’s a link to my post on the legal action; it includes links to my reporting of events that led up to the consortium’s move).
December 2012: Soldera’s winery is vandalized; six vintages purportedly destroyed.
December 2012: Consortium offers to donate wine to Soldera winery out of solidarity.
March 2013: Soldera accuses consortium of encouraging him to commit fraud when offering to donate wine; announces he’s leaving consortium; announces that he’s recovered a good quantity of wine and that he plans to sell it.
If GramsciPasolini Marx were alive today, he surely see the situation in Montalcino as a text-book example of his theories.
In the 1950s and 60s, Montalcino was still an agrarian economy, with a few patrician families — like Biondi Santi — who served as stewards of its production of fine wine.
In the late 1960s, “big wine” arrived: American-based Banfi set up shop, not to produce Brunello but rather to produce sweet sparkling wine (Moscadello di Montalcino).
In the 1970s, Soldera, a rich Milanese insurance broker, who was unable to acquire property in Piedmont, bought land in Montalcino and started to produce fine wine.
By the 1980s, Banfi had shifted to the production of Brunello and helped to make Montalcino as a brand in the U.S. through high volume and aggressive marketing.
There were many other players in this equation but these two more than any other reshaped the way Brunello was perceived beyond Montalcino’s borders. And in doing so, they changed the way that the Montalcinesi viewed themselves.
On the one hand, Banfi opened up the world’s largest markets to Brunello. In the 1960s, there were only a handful of Brunello bottlers. Today, there are more than 250.
On the other hand, Soldera transformed Brunello into an extreme luxury product, delivering bottles that fetched astronomical sums.
Along the way of this dichotomy, Montalcino passed from de facto feudalism to full-throttle capitalism.
And the tension that has come to a head here is, in many ways, a dialectic held taut by a battle between agrarian and capitalist values, with indigenous growers on the one side and outsider financial interests on the other.
Add to this mix that Soldera is generally considered a carpet-bagger (he is) and that his cantankerous personality and his unbridled egotism have won him few friends there. After years and years of acerbic commentary (public and private) from Soldera, it was only natural that a situation like this would arise (many in Montalcino predicted something like this in 2008, when it was rumored that Soldera had sent a letter to authorities igniting the Brunello adulteration scandal).
Let’s face it (and it’s high time that someone wrote this): when news broke that Soldera’s winery had been vandalized, many observers of the Italian wine world (myself included) couldn’t help but think, to borrow a phrase from Lennon, instant karma’s gonna get you.
Was the consortium right to sue him? It’s not for me to say or pass judgment.
Most on the ground in Montalcino believe that his “resignation” stunt in March was a means to let the world know that he had miraculously recovered wine to sell.
No one can know for certain. But the consortium and its members had to do something. If they didn’t, they’d be allowing the “broker from Treviso,” as the consortium’s lawyer has called him, to exploit their brand in the service of his own personal agenda (this is how many in Montalcino view the situation).
Does any of this matter? Maybe to Marxists like me. The bottom line is that the renewed controversy has only helped to keep Montalcino in the news. And as any public relations veteran will tell you, all news — even bad news — is good news when it comes to raising awareness of your brand.
These political acrobatics (as the New York Times has called recent developments) are remarkable: Letta, center left, has emerged as “bridge builder” from a seemingly intractable deadlock, with the support of the most vitriolic opponents on either side of the aisle.
Only in Italy, some have said, shaking their heads (myself included).
But it’s all part of our my fascination with Italy and the enigmas of its greatness.
In the words of the great Harry Lime, “in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
My backlog of tasting notes, winemaker profiles, and food photography brims over from our recent trip to Italy.
But all I can think about this morning is Monday’s tragedy in Boston.
Maybe it’s because of the fact that, for the first time, I felt compelled to shield Georgia P from the news. She’s walking and talking up a storm these days. She certainly can’t understand what the newscasters say (and the media outlets have been conscientious about not showing graphic images from the tragedy; something, as parents of a toddler, we appreciate very much). But we felt compelled, nonetheless, to make sure that she wasn’t exposed to the reports.
I can’t help but be reminded of the 1980 Massacre in Bologna, when a terrorist attack killed “killed 85 people and wounded more than 200.” A bomb went off in the crowded Bologna train station, one of the busiest traffic hubs in Italy, and a new era of terror — one that came in the Years of Lead — had dawned.
In 1980, the year I was bar mitzvah, I was hardly aware of Italy or the Bologna Massacre. But when I traveled to Italy in 1987, the tragedy was still very fresh in the minds of the Italian students with whom I lived. The first time I took a train from Padua to Rome, my cohorts urged me to visit the station memorial when I changed trains: a part of the wall destroyed by the bomb is filled with glass instead of brick to remind travelers of how the explosion blast through the station.
The thing that set the event apart was that no one was certain who was behind the attack.
Note the subtitle in the headline above: due iptoesi: attentato o sciagura? (two hypotheses: attack or accident?).
Many in Italy remember the Bologna tragedy as the beginning of the so-called strategy of tension, whereby the anonymity of the architects of terror played into the hands of the terrorists. In other words, it didn’t matter who committed the act of terror. What mattered was that people were terrorized.
I wish speed upon the authorities as they try to uncover the authors of the despicable and cowardly attack of Monday. And may G-d bless the victims and their families. Our prayers and thoughts are with them.
In other news…
Above, from left: Friends Charlie George, Shawn Amos, and Shawn’s wife Marta in Luca’s vineyard a week ago Saturday.
Above: I took this photo of Angelo Gaja when I met with him in June 2012. He’s in his 70s and looks great. Angelo Gaja for president? Why not?
“The most important battles to fight,” once said traditionalist Barolo producer Teobaldo Cappellano, “are those which you know you cannot win.”
Surely there was a quixotic spirit behind this utterance (he was referring to the traditionalist opposition to Brunello’s inevitable slide into modernism).
But he was also embracing a notion — very Italian at its core — that taking a stand, even when a last and inconsequential stand, has an indisputable intrinsic value that may transcend the stakes in play (does anyone remember the Alamo?).
In the wake of two weeks that our family just spent in Italy (eating and drinking, playing music, and attending the wine fairs), one thing has become abundantly clear to me: Italians have their backs to the wall. The financial crisis, the Euro crisis, and the Italian frugal spirit have the Italian everyman everyperson in a chokehold.
Everywhere I went, winemakers and restaurateurs repeatedly began their discourse with the expression, con i tempi che corrono (in times like these). People simply aren’t spending the money that they used to. I watched one of the richest men in the Veneto sit down at one of the best restaurants in the province of Treviso and order an Euro 8 bottle of wine.
Extreme times call for extreme measures. It didn’t come as too much of a surprise when I received a press release last week from Vinarius, the association of Italian enoteca owners, in which the authors put forth Angelo Gaja as their candidate for President of the Republic.
Above: While in Italy, we visited the beer garden where my band used to play in the 1990s before the Tangentopoli bribe scandal. The mural depicts Italian history through the fascist era, when the gesso was painted. Today, the main dining room is used for “lapdance” evenings (note the pole).
Italy has had pornstar politicians (most famously Staller) and today its “kingmaker” anti-establishment and anti-status-quo Five Star Movement party is headed by a comedian.
So why not a winemaker? After all, the role of President of the Republic (largely ceremonial and not to be confused with the executive Prime Minister or “President of the Council”) has been previously fulfilled by a winemaker (and iconic economist), Luigi Einaudi, Italy’s second president.
According to the president of Vinarius, Andrea Terraneo, who issued the press release last Thursday:
Gaja represents all Italians inasmuch as he is a citizen, a worker, and a symbol of excellence. He is a leader in the world of agriculture and in the view of Vinarius, his candidacy would be a true resource in an extremely complex economic moment…
[He] is by far one of the world’s best known Italian wine world personalities. He possesses extraordinary moral and empathetic characteristics and he has the charisma needed to perform such an important role.
While Italian politicians hardly seem to have taken notice, Italian wine industry observers have set about commenting the implications of a Gaja candidacy (just Google “Gaja” and “presidente” and you’ll find all the links, including posts that have appeared in some of the country’s leading wine blogs and mastheads).
However ceremonial the office, the President of the Republic is the only one who can dissolve parliament and call for new elections. (The current president, Napolitano, who is at the end of his seven-year term, cannot call for new elections because the Italian constitution forbids him from doing so in the last six months of his tenure.)
The austerity and financial crises are only exacerbated by the fact that Italy hasn’t had a government since February elections failed to produce a coalition (according to reports today, Berlusconi would be the next PM “by a hair” if the vote were held today).
And beyond the technical issues that the government-less nation faces, there is also the issue of morale in a Europe that increasingly looks to Italy as one of the sources of its financial ills (the Euro crisis was what forced Berlusconi out of power last year).
Gaja for president? It could only do the country good. The only problem, as Franco Ziliani noted the other day on his blog (one of the most popular and most controversial wine blogs in Italy), is why would anyone who is already King [of Barbaresco] accept a demotion to president?
In the shadow of such rich natural beauty, I can’t help but be reminded of the following lines from Canzone 128 of Petrarch’s songbook, Italia mia, ben che’l parlar sia indarno a le piaghe mortali (My Italy, although speech does not aid those immortal wounds):
Ben provide Natura al nostro stato,
quando de l’Alpi schermo
pose fra noi et la tedesca rabbia;
ma ‘l desir cieco, e ‘ncontr’al suo ben fermo,
s’è poi tanto ingegnato,
ch’al corpo sano à procurato scabbia.
Nature provided well for our safety when she put the shield of the Alps between us and the Teutonic rage; but our blind desire, strong against our own good, has contrived to make this healthy body sick.
But my old and very good friend Renato Dal Piva, the villa’s manager, and I have also had some heavy heart-to-heart chats about what it’s like to live and work in Italy these days.
Yesterday, The New York Times reported that “Unemployment in Euro Zone Reaches a Record 12%” (in October 2012, the paper reported that “Unemployment in Euro Zone at Record High” [at 11.4 percent]).
Petrarch’s verses were composed in the mid-fourteenth century. They scan as though they, too, were written yesterday…
The closest hotel I could find (that we could afford) was the Hotel Iris.
It’s a great place to stay: very clean, with all the amenities, and good internet, very affordable for the quality of the room and service.
We were a bit nonplussed by the fact that every room has its own private elevator from the parking garage. A nice security feature but a bit extravagant (see below).
We were even more surprised tickled by the sexy image that greeted us in our room (above).
The lobby hosts a poster featuring an image (top) from a 1980s photo shoot by Helmut Newton at the Ca’ del Bosco estate, which lies just up the road.
We’ve already eaten at the Dispensa twice and are about to head there again (it’s that good… stay tuned for my posts next week).
And the hotel worked out great (they had a very nice camping cradle for Georgia P). Highly recommended for the value… And hey, a little spice never hurt, right? ;)
“Francesco Maiorca, 36, an actor, was hustling to catch a train for a job in Paris. He compared Italy to a country filled with millions of white sheep that somehow are duped into following a few black sheep, namely the politicians. He said he was embarrassed by the political situation and frustrated that Italians did not demand better of their leaders.”
If wicked greed should call you elsewhere,
be men, not maddened sheep, lest the Jew
there in your midst make mock of you.
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, 5, 79-81.
Yesterday’s NY Times coverage of the crisis in Italy brought to mind these lines from Dante’s Commedia.
This terzina was co-opted famously and erroneously by the fascists who used it as the motto of their propagandistic magazine, Difesa della Razza (Defense of the Race), a screed against “deviant” twentieth-century art in Europe.
Image via Luciano Zappella. Click the image for high-res version.
In fact, the Jew was viewed as a wise man among fools in Dante and Boccaccio (see this summary of tales in Boccaccio’s Decameron, “Tale of Abraham,” day 1, tale 2, the second tale in the narrative corpus).
Even today, many Italian intellectuals readily express their fascination with and admiration for Jewish culture and thought, a tradition that stretches back to Dante’s era.
Considering the parallels between Dante’s issues and the situation in Italy today — a crisis and clash among spiritual power brokers and failed temporal/secular governance — this tercet leapt into my mind when I read the Times at breakfast this morning.
The exit polls (here and here) that I’ve been watching show Berlusconi (center right) trailing Bersani (center left) by less than half of a point.
It’s been frightening to watch my Italian friends’ and colleagues’ reactions on Facebook, a mixture of horror and disgust.
The major news outlets are saying it’s too close to call. The only true winner is the maverick entertainer Beppe Grillo (who probably took votes away from Bersani).
Monti is the clear loser.
There’s still hope that we won’t awake tomorrow to discover that Berlusconi has once again been elected prime minister.
The only thing worse that I can imagine is Nebbiolo aged in barrique…
Above: Gamberoni in Castiglioncello, Tuscany, at Nonna Isola.
Few remember that the Gambero Rosso monthly magazine and publishing brand take its name from the “Osteria del Gambero Rosso” or the “Inn of the Red Lobster” in The Adventures of Pinocchio, which originally appeared in the Italian in the early 1880s.
Here’s a transcription of the scene in the book where the Cat and the Fox first take Pinocchio to eat there (from a 1904 English translation):
They walked and walked and walked until they arrived at the Red Lobster Inn, tired to death.
“Let us stop a little here,” said the Fox, “just long enough to get something to eat and rest ourselves. At midnight we can start again and to-morrow morning we shall arrive at the Field of Miracles.”
They entered the Inn and seated themselves at the table, but none of them were hungry. The poor Cat felt very much indisposed and could only thirty-five mullets with tomato sauce and four portions of tripe; and because the trip did not taste just right he called three times for butter and cheese to put on it.
The Fox would willingly have ordered something, but as the doctor had told him to diet, he had to be contented with a nice fresh rabbit dressed with the biglets of chicken. After the rabbit he ordered, as a finish to his meal, some partridges, some pheasants, some frogs, some lizards, and some bird of paradise eggs; and then he did not wish any more. He had such nausea for food, he said, that he could not eat another mouthful.
Pinocchio ate the least of all. He asked for a piece of meat and some bread, but he left everything on his plate. He could think of nothing but the Field of Miracles.
Gambero rosso is also a designation used by Italians for the common American crayfish, the “Gambero Rosso della Louisiana.” Its introduction to Italy in the mid-1800s led to a series of crayfish plagues in Europe.
Collodi was certainly aware of the crayfish calamity of his era and the very name — gambero rosso — surely instilled biblical fear in the minds of his readers.
In the light of this, the choice of gambero rosso for the title of a magazine devoted to Italian gastronomy may seem infelicitous to some.
Above: The Gambero Rosso brand has often been the center of controversy and its editors have often been accused (however informally) of conflict of interest. I’ve written about the brand on many occasions.
Tomorrow, I’ll get back to the business of posting about the wines we’ve been tasting and some of the interesting wine professionals I’ve had the chance to interview recently. Thanks for reading…
One of the highlights of my November trip to Italy was a lunchtime visit Giovanni and I made to the home of Maria Teresa Mascarello in the village of Barolo.
That’s the gardiniera (above) her cousin made her. It was topped with hard-boiled egg wedges and crumbled olive oil-cured tuna. The combination of textures was wonderful, one of the best things I ate on this trip.
The butcher who makes this cacciatora is di sinistra, noted Maria Teresa, on the left side of the political aisle. And that was one of the reasons it was so tasty.
In the U.S., we rarely discuss the ideology of people whose food we eat. In many homes in Italy, such gastronomic scrutiny is de rigueur.
Of course, Bartolo Mascarello aged vinegar was offered to guests to dress their lettuces.
Conversation was dominated by the center-left primary elections (which would take place the following day). Maria Teresa was one of the polling organizers.
But it soon turned to the sticky subject of Natural wine.
Maria Teresa expressed her frustration with the Natural wine movement, noting that she doesn’t consider her wine a Natural wine by any means.
The obsession with “zero sulfur,” she lamented, was misguided.
Maria Teresa’s partner David was geeked for us to taste a Barolo — the Luigi Oddero Rocche Rivera — that he’s keen on.
Traditional in style, this wine showed uncommon balance for a 2003. Its earth and tar prevailed over its fruit but its acidity delivered unexpected brilliance in the mouth. Gorgeous wine.
Click here to add a comment or query to my Italian Wine Terms Project.
The series of posts began with a post devoted to Italian winery designations. With your help, I hope to create a series of posts that will become a stand-alone glossary.
Posted by Do Bianchi 
