REFLECTIONS ON ITALY
59
paratively, Italy perhaps hasn't produced much this century, but its very
presence (its people and its past alive in its people) has been a perpetual
resource to Europe's culture, to the French, English, Germans,-and
one great Irishman. And if Italy is to fall out of European civilization
now,-well then, Europe itself is really through.
3.
I was already prepared in part for such violent shifts in civilization
by my leaving Rome for the North of Italy about a month ago.
Entering Milan from Rome one enters the very climate of a differ–
ent civilization: with its rain, mist, changeability, a city of Europe-like
London, Paris, Copenhagen, Dublin, Berlin, cities of the macintosh and
umbrella; and the Milanese show quite strikingly their difference from
other Italians to the south. The summer just past was one of calamitous
drought for central and southern Italy: for almost five months no rain
fell in Rome and its vicinity. Under the hot, monotonous, perfectly
clear days, one felt the great calm, the slow tranquil beat of classical
civilization. The climate of Rome from May to September seems to
establish the rhythm of classical economy, the slow stationary economy
of chattel slavery,- a climate in which slaves must do the work, and
which made necessary the extraordinary planning by the elite of classical
civilization to protect its repose. (Example: the unbelievable elaborate–
ness of Adrian's villa near Tivoli, which the Emperor needed to protect
him agrunst the enervating Roman summer.) The civilization of the
toga and the laurel--of classic repose. With Milan one enters the Euro–
pean climate, the climate of modern historical capitalism (with all its
attendant dynamisms), where a certain amount of pushing energy is
required to keep one going.
At any rate, the Milanese exhibit a Biirgergeist such as I've never
seen in any other city. Stendahl himself observed this, but it has since
been developed and qualified by other influences. By the fact, among
others, that during recent decades Milan paid one quarter of all the
taxes of Italy! Feeling themselves thus rich and economically powerful in
comparison with the rest of Italy, the Milanese have naturally tended to
look down on the other Italians, to consider themselves more European.
A pride which also makes them rather oddly provincial-a provincialism
much like that of New York, which latter is fostered also by the great
gap between the city, the "Big Town," and the yokel hinterland, the
rest of America. In Milan this peculiar Biirgergeist has always taken the
direction of intensified political consciousness-now perhaps more than
at any time since the explosion of Bonaparte's entry in 1798.
Yet this political life of the city is puzzling, confused, harbors an
unexplained mystery. What happened
in
Milan during the first few weeks
