Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (62 page)

Italian Fascism, which rose to power in 1922, used the accessible language of the culinary code to speak to the people. As we have seen, in order to intimidate them, Fascists told the Italians that the enemy ate five times a day (in fact, the British have four meals: breakfast, lunch, tea, and supper or dinner). Italians, always moderate and used to eating two or at most three times a day, were left to infer from the frequency of these meals just how powerful their enemy was. During the same period, the Fascists made dissidents drink castor oil, purportedly to strengthen internal discipline. With that, a sacred process of physiological and social life (the ingestion of food) was symbolically transformed into an execration, and digestion into torture.

The authorities, intoxicated by their own brute force, attacked the primary symbol of the Italian culinary code: pasta. The Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ideologue of the regime, took up a revolver and shot into a plate of spaghetti carbonara.

An actual campaign for the establishment of an avant-garde table, with theories and concrete proposals, only began on December 28, 1930, however, when Marinetti published the “Manifesto della cucina futurista” in the
Gazzetta del Popolo
of Turin, subsequently reprinted the following January in Umberto Notari's
Cucina italiana
(Italian cooking).

Publication of the policy statement had been anticipated on November 15, 1930, with an evening at the restaurant Penna d'Oca in Milan, a meeting place for the most
famous and successful Lombard journalists of that time. On that occasion the author from Alexandria, Egypt, had issued a resounding challenge to pasta, which was described in emphatic, scornful terms as “an absurd Italian gastronomic religion”: “In contrast to bread and rice, pasta is a food which is swallowed, not masticated. Such starchy food should mainly be digested in the mouth by the saliva but in this case the task of transformation is carried out by the pancreas and the liver. This leads to an interrupted equilibrium in these organs. From such disturbances derive lassitude, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity and neutralism. An invitation to chemistry . . .”
¹

By Andrei Bourtsev

Following the same impulse that led him to rail against gondolas and moonlight, Marinetti wrote:

 

It may be that a diet of cod, roast beef and steamed pudding is beneficial to the English, cold cuts and cheese to the Dutch and sauerkraut, smoked [salt] pork and sausage to the Germans; but pasta is not beneficial to the Italians. For example it is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental scepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm.
²

 

Rice was ultimately saved from the worldwide conflagration started by the Futurists: the national associations of rice producers were among the main supporters of the Fascist revolution.

 

What aroused the greatest interest in the Futurist manifesto, however, was the crusade against spaghetti, which was given ample and controversial coverage in the press.
La cucina italiana
started an opinion poll welcoming interventions by exponents of the culture and distinguished physicians of the time. Other viewpoints found a forum in the
Giornale della Domenica
of Rome, the
Gazzetta del Popolo
of Turin, the
Secolo XIX
of Genoa and even
The New York Times
and the
Chicago Tribune
, while some humorous newspapers like the
Guerin Meschino
and the
Marc' Aurelio
had a great time with cartoons and jokes . . . Not everyone was in agreement about banning “a dish which Italy could boast of throughout the world.” The poet Farfa, for example, described ravioli as “love letters in a romantic envelope,” while Futurists of Liguria, in the magazine
Oggi e Domani
(in the first issue of 1931), wrote a letter of entreaty to Marinetti to at least spare
trenette al pesto
in his antipasta crusade. The women of Aquila emerged from their usual apathy to sign a solemn petition in favor of pasta, and popular marches took place in Naples in defense of vermicelli, the dish loved by Pulcinella.
³

 

It should be said that most people never managed to fully accept the polemical statements of the Futurists. Judging by some of their rhymes, it seems that propaganda was one thing, but deep inside even the proponents of these dictums adored pasta. Photomontages appeared in many of the tabloids in which the father of Futurism was immortalized as busily gobbling down spaghetti. The caption of a humorous cartoon of the 1930s reads:

 

Marinetti says “Basta,
enough, a ban on pasta.”
Then we discover Marinetti
devouring spaghetti.

 

Behind the desire to subvert tradition and wean Italians from pasta (an impossible, suicidal plan) lay the brutal arrogance of power, as well as a certain political logic of the cult of personality associated with Mussolini. From a political-economic point of view, Italy stood to benefit if its population stopped preferring pasta over bread. The fact is that pasta is made exclusively with durum wheat, which is not produced in sufficient quantities in Italy and must therefore be imported from other countries, including America. Fascism, which had destroyed diplomatic relations with foreign countries and consequently cut off the importation of durum wheat for reasons of principle, reduced Italy to starvation. Even soft wheat began to be in short supply. Given the situation, the wheat that came in on American ships after 1945 became the main subject of the ideological debate among the political parties, in what had by then become the Cold War (see “
The Later Gifts from America
”).

In the language of the food code, Mussolini's personality does not sound very attractive. Il Duce, as befitting a dictator (Hitler and Stalin were exactly the same), did not have a big appetite. He ate negligently, drank three liters of milk per day, and munched on fruit in between. It is not surprising that he suffered from stomach problems all his life. His regime was described as “a dictatorship of ricotta.” And who coined this expression? The chief of Mussolini's police force himself, Guido Leto, who was dissatisfied with Il Duce's soft character, the weakness of the dictatorship, and, perhaps, its break with authentic Italian spirit: Italian food culture scorns sour dairy products such as fresh ricotta.

In many respects, the Fascist party inherited the ideas and aesthetics of the Futurists. The Futurists were interested in the industrialization of the country, while nature and the countryside were hugely alien to them. One of Italy's worthiest assets was deemed extraneous: the expanse of cultivated land (
ager
) along with all the people who live and work on it, contemplate it, dignify it, and enjoy it.

Like other regimes committed to industrialization, Fascism also began to destroy the structure of traditional family life, liberating men and in particular women from the bonds of domestic slavery:

 

Thanks to the achievements of the modern food industry (canned, frozen, and prepared foods), the time spent in the kitchen, the results, the very standard established by plan in accordance with models of political discourse, could be beaten, burned, overdone in the preparation of foods and meals as well . . . The housewife was no longer cooking for her
husband, son, lover, whatever, but for the State, since those at the table were citizens first, and individuals second.

 

That is how the eminent Italian Russianist Gian Piero Piretto describes a similar transformation of daily life in the Soviet Union.
⁴
This transformation of society, in many cases, offered single individuals a further chance for emancipation (fortunately), but in many cases (unfortunately) it alienates the person from simple common sense.

Totalitarian powers tend to suppress even the weakest sex drive. This tendency is once again reflected in the language of the culinary code (see “
Eros
”). In Soviet Russia, suspecting someone of frequenting restaurants meant suggesting that the person had turned to a dissolute life. If the protagonist of a Soviet film went to a restaurant, the building manager immediately suspected he was “secretly seeing a lover.” And in Ernst Lubitsch's film
Ninotchka
, an intelligent farce that pokes fun at the Soviet Union's revolutionary austerity, the heroine, played by Greta Garbo, begins to doubt the foundations of Socialism, and at the same time discovers the joys of eroticism after tasting a delicious soup in a charming French restaurant. The film's subtle irony lies in the fact that this scene takes place in a proletarian trattoria. But it is the moment of pleasure in consuming food that in itself conveys a liberated, antitotalitarian note.

Dictatorial regimes create cookbooks approved by censors, intended not for housewives, but for collective food services. The ingredients are measured by the bucketful, and the illustrations display impressive images of gigantic metal mixing machines and alembics. This is why Fascists dwelled on pasta, which is the symbol of a homey meal, easy to prepare for the family, but impossible to cook decently in bulk. Fascist propaganda demanded that people reduce their consumption of pasta and increase that of bread. To obtain the desired quantities of soft wheat (that is, wheat unsuitable for pasta, but suitable for bread), Mussolini proclaimed a new state program. According to this program, agrarian collectives were to be formed (whose model strongly resembled the Soviet
kolchoz
).

Italians were offered a grand objective: the battle over wheat. Championing the ideals of virility, autocracy, and nationalism, Il Duce had himself photographed—hairy naked chest and all—in farmyards in Littoria or Sabaudia (the names of the agricultural-industrial towns founded by him in newly reclaimed lands). In so doing he set a public example for the threshers, identifying himself with their difficult labor. Specially assigned men recorded the quantities of wheat threshed by Il Duce and news of his undertaking reached the newspapers. Meanwhile, high duties were imposed on wheat imports. The
Agricultural Ministry declared its goal of transforming Italy into a self-sufficient country in the production of wheat.

It is telling that the Italian villages did not profoundly assimilate either the Fascist ideology or its aesthetic. The new way of life had to be modeled on virgin land, which was obtained by reclaiming the marshes. When virgin lands could not be plowed because they were marshy, they were drained. The foremost objective of the regime became the development of reclamation at the state level. Mussolini had the unhealthy, malaria-infested Paludi Pontine, south of Rome, eliminated. He also undertook colossal efforts in Sardinia. Here, evidently, the native population was not considered loyal enough to be entrusted with the project of the century, so entire villages from the Veneto—which over the centuries had gathered a lot of experience in draining and restoring wetlands—were transferred to western Sardinia.

Not far from the marvelous city of Alghero in Sardinia, you can still visit one of Mussolini's collectives, Fertilia (an auspicious name). These places were irresistibly described by William Black.
⁵
Currently, as I had the opportunity to observe in September 2007, these sites are no longer surrounded by undulating fields of wheat or populated by dashing young Fascist countrywomen crowned with garlands of its golden ears. But in the past the
kolchoz
of this area were an oleographic illustration of the Fascist primer. Fertilia was built in an architectural style typical of totalitarianism that Black humorously describes as “a curious hybrid of St. Trinian's and a Tyrolean mental asylum.”
⁶
Nowadays, I observed, it is quite deserted, though the center of Fertilia is still made up, as it was seventy years ago, by the massive former Casa del Fascio (the local public headquarters of the Fascist party) and two column formations with associated structures. The streets are symmetrically aligned, whereas in most Italian cities, harmony is born from asymmetry. In Fascist projects, instead, geometry reigns, strict linearity: standard houses, with enough room for families planned by the regime, seven children each; communal storehouses for the harvest. In Fertilia growers had to hand over every last ear of wheat to the agricultural colony, and the harvest was then sold by the authorities. A nearby town, outwardly identical, was called Mussolinia; after the fall of Fascism, it was renamed Arborea. As an experiment, the regime was less rigid in Mussolinia than in Fertilia, and the majority of the harvest was left to the families. As a result, there were granaries attached to the houses in Mussolinia.

The Fascist regime prescribed breeding cows for milk and butter (it was the dictatorship of ricotta, after all). But in regions where breeding was limited to flocks of sheep (for example, in Sardinia), raising cattle never caught on. Wheat did not produce good harvests everywhere, because it cannot grow under just any climatic conditions. In some
areas, vegetable gardens were even planted with wheat, as required by the state, and as a result tomatoes began to be in short supply. One must admit that it took the full genius of a dictator to produce a tomato shortage in Italy! The consequences of this shortage were most unfortunate for cooking: How could one make pasta sauce?