Ranucci and Lavitola’s comedy "La commedia alle vongole" is our industry

With these ingredients – a plate of spaghetti with clams, a survey and an investigative journalist – we ought to spare a thought of sympathy for the hapless foreign correspondent in the Bel Paese, our own country. Yes indeed, that very patient and now fatalistic man who has spent the best years of his life grappling with our subjunctive tenses, our political factions and our legal caveats, and who now – in Hamburg, Boston or Osaka – must report on a story in which, in order, the discussion centres on (a) shucked clams, (b) an election poll paid for in instalments, then (c) a wheeler-dealer from Monteverde already in Berlusconi’s inner circle, (d) a famous journalist destined for Palazzo Chigi who thinks he is Napoleon or, in moments of rare sincerity, Renato Rascel’s impersonation of Bonaparte, and, finally, (e) a bomb set off outside his house to protect him. In Hamburg, Boston or Osaka, they’d put it down to a line fault. But this is how the Bel Paese works, thank goodness. Sooner or later, we ought to recognise that the ‘picturesque’ is not a national weakness but a specialisation, the only one in which we retain an unassailable competitive advantage. From the day Valter Lavitola’s name first came up in the investigation – that is, over the past forty-five days – some 1,500 news articles have been written, with peaks of a hundred articles a day – or rather, 1,501, counting this one – whilst there has been barely a brief mention of diesel, which is about to hit the 3-euro-per-litre mark. Television has got by with fifty or sixty hours, counting the news programmes that open with the story and the 24-hour news channels that rehash it from dawn till dusk. To give you an idea, the entire "Ring of the Nibelung" lasts fifteen hours and requires a theatre, an orchestra, four consecutive evenings and a fair amount of physical stamina from the audience. We, for a ‘love bomb’ set off in front of a gate in Pomezia, produced five times that amount, with two pundits and a live link from a pavement. Over the same period, the war in Ukraine took up roughly thirty hours of television coverage – which is more or less the same amount of time we devoted to Lavitola’s interrogation alone. After all, it’s obvious why it turned out this way. Trump, who threatens and then calls off a decisive bombing raid on Iran every week, is no laughing matter. Ukraine, bleeding itself dry in the fight against Russia, is no laughing matter at all. The Chinese car overtaking the European one is a humiliation without a punchline – the sort of thing you’d expect from solid-state batteries.

The story of Ranucci and Lavitola – Totò and Peppino, as it were – has everything it needs: the close friend, the seafood restaurant, the Israeli secret service invoked in the same way as the evil eye, and above all a motive that no screenwriter would have dared to use – namely, affection. A nation always chooses the news that resembles itself, and we recognised ourselves in it immediately. Our greatest actors have all been comedians: Totò, De Sica, Sordi, Tognazzi, Manfredi, Troisi; and even the few who had a flair for tragedy had to make their mark through comedy to be truly loved. The highest form of our national genius is not tragedy, but comedy. Petronius Arbiter, our illustrious ancestor, already said as much. It must be a family trait.

Comedy is our immune system. It has fended off invaders, ideologies, constitutional reforms and five-year plans with the same indolent efficiency with which the body rejects a transplant. The immune system that saves you from totalitarianism also saves you from road maintenance and from any idea that lasts longer than a television season. That is the price, and it is a price we pay willingly, in convenient instalments. We have no industrial policy, but we do have an opinion on garlic. We do not know where we will get our gas from in two winters’ time, but we know with notarial precision who spoke to whom at the Cefalù restaurant. This is how we will survive it all, even deindustrialisation and the invasion of Chinese electric cars, which will soon be travelling as a monopoly along our potholed roads, producing – instead of the rumble of the Fiat 500 – that standardised silence in which the sound of two Italians arguing over clams will finally be heard distinctly, clearly, and forever. Only to find ourselves paying – hush, hush – 3 euros a litre for diesel.