256
PARTISAN
REVIEW
sioned lie, if not both. Maybe the painter was sincerely trying to save hi s
soul. Maybe, like his allegorical lady, he believed that he wanted
to
extinguish his appetites, despite all the evidence
to
the contrary. Or
maybe he was making fun of the right-thinking Tuscan burghers who
were paying him
to
paint works that expressed the proper, publicly con–
doned ideals of a society that unofficially accepted just about every–
thing, including the doings of II Sodoma himself.
More than a piece of Catholic iconography, the "Allegory" seems to
me a symbol of the land in which it was produced. It's not that Italian
attitudes on these matters are more mendacious than corresponding
attitudes in other countries; it's the brazen smile on the face of Italian
mendacity that makes so many earnest foreigners angry with themselves
for loving Italy, for belonging to that hopelessly unrealistic bunch of
ortherners-the descendants of Winckelmann, Goethe, and even the
otherwise realistic Stendhal-who feel drawn toward the Italian version
of Mediterranean civilization and toward the set of virtues and vices
that it so unabashedly represents.
Unfortunately, nearly all non-native Italy-wa tchers, even the bright
and sophisticated ones, fall sooner or later into the trap of
quintessell–
tiafizing.
They proceed, either nonchalantly or with alarming ignorance,
from the specific to the general, and the results are predictably superfi–
cial. One of them sees a well-dressed businessman stop his shiny Mer–
cedes in the emergency lane on the Autostrada del Sole, get out, and
unconcernedly take a piss as hundreds of passersby look on, and trans–
forms him into The Modern Italian Man Who Has Maintained Hi s
Frank Mediterranean Attitude Toward The Body. Another writer's mag–
netic telephone card gets stuck in a pay phone in an Italian city, and–
conveniently forgetting that similar annoyances happen much more
often in London or Paris than in Rome or Milan-he decides that Part
Of Italy'S Charm Is That Nothing Works. I admit that the temptation
to
quintessentialize is great, above all because so many Italians love
to
speak about their country and their fellow-citizens in exaggeratedly
generic (and for the most part negative) terms, especially when they're
talking to foreigners.
It
makes good theater. And the foreigners tend to
soak up and expand on what they've been told.
One morning, for instance, in the mid-1990S, while I was shopping
for groceries in the Central Italian village in which I then lived, I was
harangued by two local guys who were forever explaining Italy to me.
First Enzo, the florist, stopped me and inveighed against Nazi skin–
heads, fascists, Berlusconi, and mafiosi, and added that he was ready to
go back into
fa macchia,
the bush, where he had fought as a young
