Volume 41, Number 14 · August 11, 1994
Italy: The Triumph of TV
By Adrian Lyttelton
Silvio Berlusconi has turned Italian politics inside out like a rubber glove. The old Italian politics of the First Republic, established in 1946, were based on the assumption that what was publicly visible, or audible, had no intrinsic significance. What mattered was what lay behind the speaker's words. Hence the peculiarly Italian discipline of dietrologia, or the science of 'what's behind it all.' The greatest master of the political techniques of oblique suggestion and implication was Giulio Andreotti, the Christian Democrat who dominated Italian politics for some thirty years; in a short, enigmatic phrase he could conjure up vast visions of power and secrecy, like a Piranesi dungeon. On a lower plane, the dense obscurity of more ordinary political discourse conveyed the correct impression that politics was a game for initiates.
Feature, 5133 words
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