Word: barzini
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...family. A couple of drinks, a quiet dinner, brandy and cigars before the inn fire-and imperceptibly, from behind the urbanity and wit emerge the true facts of a marriage in shambles or of a mortal sickness. This is exactly the kind of book that Milanese Journalist Luigi Barzini has written to explain to the U.S. the delights and secret deficiencies of his countrymen's manners and morals...
Foreigners have always loved Italy, Barzini points out. Tourists by the thousands, and recently by the millions, have gone there each year, the Germans and Scandinavians looking for sun, the Americans and Russians eager to absorb culture, the artists and fake artists searching for refuge, the rich seeking laxly enforced tax laws and the poor seeking "a place where indigence looks like modest affluence by contrast with the surrounding poverty." Men come to Italy to pursue the young women, who, Barzini concedes, "are now more disturbingly beautiful than they have ever been," with "harmonious behinds like double mandolins"; foreign women...
Lies for Happiness. The trouble is that the Italians themselves are captivated by these qualities, Barzini suggests. "Watch an Italian mother fondle her baby. If she is alone, she is tender and solicitous like any other mother, in a matter-of-fact way. As soon as somebody enters the room, she will immediately act a tasteful impersonation of Mother Love. Her face will suddenly shine, tears of affection will fill her eyes, she will crush the infant to her breast, sing to him . . ." But even at its most innocent, the trait lends "a theatrical quality which enhances but slightly distorts...
Self-Swindlers. Unfortunately, the deceptions can sometimes be disastrous. In Italy, Barzini argues, "ordinary people must usually choose between the unrestrained expression of counterfeit emotions and the controlled expression of real ones." The inevitable result is automatic distrust of idealism, and a cynicism so widespread that "there is a large part of reality the realistic Italian never grasps...
...Casanova and the swindler Cagliostro who raised deception to a way of life and a high art; Machiavelli who made it a cardinal principle of statecraft; while Mussolini was by no means the first Italian leader to perish finally believing the deceptions he had himself created. At the start, Barzini thinks, Mussolini "watched him self playing the great role he was invent ing as gusto," he but went over the along, years he hamming at it began to with believe the stirring show and the lies and flattery, came to read his own news papers with pleasure, and mistook...