HARVEY SACHS
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circumstances required me to move elsewhere, I realized to my surprise
that I felt little regret about leaving. Was this a result of age and disillu–
sionment? Was the cause disgust with a country that had elected its
main media magnate, a man under indictment for fraud, as prime min–
ister, and the leader of the neo-fascist National Alliance as deputy prime
minister? Or was I simply glad not to have to observe the acceleration
of Italy's insertion into the global economy-a process that, for all its
material advantages to the upper and middle classes, inevitably com–
prises the gradual disintegration of the highly individualistic culture that
had attracted me to Italy in the first place?
I am still too close to the event to be able to answer my own ques–
tions. I'm no Frances Mayes or Peter Mayle, ready and willing to char–
acterize (caricature?) everything I see. I was not first attracted to a
Mediterranean country by its climate and cuisine, although I enjoy
both. I was interested in Italian history and culture as early as my mid–
teens-long before
1
set foot in Italy-and my first Italian residence was
not an ancient farmhouse on an expensive piece of property in the
warm, hilly Tuscan countryside but a cheap, box-like, postwar one–
bedroom apartment in a smoggy, drug-infested, working-class Milan
suburb. I spent three years observing La Scala's production system and
working on my first book; then, after a three-year hiatus in London, my
wife and [ purchased a modest apartment in a village in what used to be
an unfashionable part of Tuscany, where I lived for fifteen years. From
1997 to
2001,
my second wife and I lived in a rented house in the same
part of Tuscany. Both of my children were born nearby. But "my" Tus–
cany is now nearly as overrun with foreigners as the Chianti area. When
one sits in front of the cafes in my former village's piazza, one hears
almost as much English and German as Italian, since most of the for–
eigners who move to the area seek each other out and learn only enough
Italian to deal, ungrammatically, with daily shopping. (A by-product of
this state of affairs is the twenty-fold increase in property values in as
many years, with easily imaginable effects on local people whose
salaries have not even doubled during the same period.)
What is taking place is not an inevitable (let alone natural) evolution
of a culture.
It
is an invasion that spills no blood but is more deadly, in
the long run, than the military kind. As the first foreigner to move into
my village, I could be accused of having been a forerunner or at least an
omen of the invasion. But what I had in mind when [ moved there in
r98r-and what I think I accomplished-was to insert myself quietly
into the environment and way of life, master the subtleties of the lan–
guage, and contribute whatever I could to local life without pretending
