"Imagine you have a girlfriend, and she is Italy." "You love her deeply, but she is in a coma." "She has been sick for a long, long time." "Good Italy, beautiful, full of promise, has been knocked out by Bad Italy, selfish, and cruel." "I've come here to find out why." "With a little help from an old friend," "Dante Alighieri, who has seen this all for me, 700 years ago." "Ah abject Italy, you inn of sorrows, you ship without a helmsman in harsh sees, no queen of provinces, but of bordellos!" "It all began in 2001, when I was editor of The Economist." "We looked at Italy, and we were shocked." "Corruption, private power, media domination." "A precious Capitalism was destroying something even more precious:" "Democracy." "On our cover, we were a trifle provocative about Silvio Berlusconi." "He sued us for libel, and said we were communists." "His proof:" "That I look 'like Lenin'." "We won the legal cases, He won two more elections." "Bill Emmott!" "So I set out to make sense of it." "I had the nasty feeling that Italy was an early warning of the West decline too." "I was surprised that Italians didn't seem to mind a foreigner speaking frankly." "Even when I was just saying the bleeding obvious." "Italy started to seduce me when I was a fairly innocent teenager." "I got there on my first ever trip abroad, in our version of The Magic Bus." "Here I am in Florence with my mates and a rather dodgy haircut." "But while we were awestruck by Venice's beauty, our van was emptied out by thieves." "Buona Italia, mala Italia." "It taught me a lot about girlfriends." "2011 was an incredible year:" "Tyrannies were falling down, borrowing costs were shooting up." "Europe's sovereign debt became the new bogeyman, endangering the Euro." "Yet the real story lies deeper, Europe has for years been crippling itself." "Now our lack of solidarity and our leaders' shortsightedness risk a collective suicide." "Taking central stage, Italy at least provided some comic relieve, thanks to the entertaining talents of Sivio Berlusconi." "But the play was about to reach a crescendo." "♪ Dicendo... dicendo cose dolce, amore, amore mio, mon amour. ♪" "The sun may be shinning in Italy's capital but the economic forecast is distinctly gloomy." "The trend is accelerating, not decelerating." "Italy's debt is about 2.6 trillion dollars, more than 5 times the debt of Greece." "Italy's PM Silvio Berlusconi has resigned." "News of his resignation brought his opponents out onto the street, to celebrate what they are calling 'a liberation'." "It looked like a salvation too, with new PM Mario Monti swapping bunga-bunga for fiscal bondage." "Yet salvation takes time, and repentance." "Italy had neither." "Truth, intelligence, courage, fine words." "But are the people who run Italy really listening?" "Here they are, the elite who over the past 20 years presided over Italy's decline." "They bear the responsibility for leaving my girlfriend in a coma, for what they have done, and especially, for what they've not done." "Fine offer, but when I tried to take it up, he claimed that I had misunderstood him." "Again." "Time in Italy often seems to stand still." "Sometimes it even takes you backwards." "Here in Orvieto the frescoes of Signorelli, one of the most beautiful depictions ever of the universe of judgment." "Here, after the Black Death 700 years ago, one of Italy's more spectacular cathedrals was built." "It symbolise the desire for moral rebirth, for thinking in new ways." "For Italy then was divided and fractured, corrupted and dispirited, just as it is today." "That was the Italy that angered Dante." "Europe's greatest poet united Italians for the first time in their own language." "Now, culture seems to be the only thing that keeps them together." "Signorelli's frescoes were a passionate call to face up to our sins, and repent." "That was Dante's call too." "I began to wonder what vices Dante would name today." "And what virtues." "So I went to my own, very personal journey, to find out." "Of course, it would send me straight to hell." "Dante:" "Here one must leave behind all hesitation, here every cowardice must meet his death." "Truth, so important, but so easily abused." "The loudest and simplest messages prevail." "Deeper truths are hard to explain, painful to accept." "So the easy way out is to avoid them." "This is so true in Italy." "Once Europe's more dynamic economy, it's 20 year decline... has been horrified, much worse than most people realise." "When we foreigners enter the corridors of Italian power, we are told we'll be baffled." "But the truth is easy to see, ant it's ugly." "20 years have passed since the huge corruption scandal cleaned hands, but political hands are now dirtier than ever." "It's so different from 150 years ago." "Then the heroes of Unification, Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini, were patriots, who devoted their lives to radical action and public service." "What would they think of today's politicians devoting their lives to timidity and self-service?" "Monti does have authority." "We called him Supermario when he was in Brussels for the way he took on Microsoft and other giants." "But with a short mandate even a superhero can't be enough, amid corrupted politics and fierce resistance to change." "20 years ago, Italy gave another professor a year to save her." "It didn't work." "What you can't do in a year is to really reform branches of your public apparatus, that require time to enter into your patterns, and constant and continuous pressure on them." "Otherwise bureaucracy will resist following the principle expressed in Neapolitan." "'A da passà a nottata' 'The night will be over'." "I'd be very happy if I could, with many others, contribute at avoiding the train derailing, but also, perhaps, changing the course of the track for the future, and try to have the country concentrate a bit more seriously," "on what should be the place of Italy in the world at large in 2020, 2030." "As they say in Italian, this is 'the last beach', I'ultima spiaggia." "For us, there's a multinational *** for this country, because what Monti is doing, and the way in which he's trying to sell the virtues of this country internationally, is the last attempt that we can make." "There is an opportunity to relaunch the country, but we have to be very honest." "It's almost the only chance that we have, probably the last one." "Otherwise, it will be decline, decline, decline." "To look better by 2030, Italy would need a cultural revolution, on the Right and the Left." "That means replacing media domination, lies, and patronage, with competition, truth and merit." "So when you have such a lesson of immorality, proposed as a public example of dealing with public affairs, you become popular." "In a sense he was a genius, an evil genius, but a genius." "Dante:" "There's he who, through abasement of another hopes for supremacy." "Is it true or false that Mr. Berlusconi was able, while Prime Minister, to criticise, or in effect, distort on many of his critics, trough his newspapers, or is that false?" "The newspaper is Il Giornale, Silvio Berlusconi is not the owner of Il Giornale." "And if his brother is the owner..." "no, is that easy, OK!" "One of the... the biggest problem of the last few years was this hyper-partisanship, hyper-polarisation of the society and of politics." "The strategy to adopt there, is that of imposing a mutual disarmament." "And to generate coalitions of the excluded, that could help us overcome the coalition, many times, of those resisting change, that is the coalitions of the incumbents." "Italy is a very fragmented economy, and a very fragmented country." "There is the traditional division between North and South, there is a division between gender," "and there is a division between generations." "So this divisions are pervasive in our society." "We are a country that likes gradualism." "But when gradualism is too slow, then it creates an exasperation." "The state has also played its part." "Its brutal response to protest has provoked distrust, and strengthen resistance." "With reforms blocked and divisions deepening, minds are even turning back to the violent era of 40 years ago." "Many believe that in those days of the Cold War, the State murdered its own citizens, sometimes supported by the West." "The bitterness lingers." "Dante:" "For now we near the stream of blood, where those that injured others violently boil." "What the Italian mafia does in Sicily, in Calabria, in Campania, is to enforce the control of the territory." "So they extort, they protect, they control access to markets." "However, once they make all this money in Italy, they have to reinvest them." "So what they have been doing abroad, mainly, is to reinvest the money they have gained in Italy." "So for instance they are present in this country, in the UK, they are present in Eastern Europe, they are present in North America, this is certainly an international problem, and it certainly requires international cooperation," "especially tracing the money that goes from one banking system to another." "They have a very flexible organisation structure that allows them to be present in many countries, in Germany of course, as you remember, there was major massacre in Duisburg, and that was extraordinary because it meant that the 'Ndrangheta was able to organise" "a massive *** operation in a foreign country, as part of *** originating in Calabria, but then playing out in the European stage." "I have the feeling that Italy allows these organisations to operate as state within the State." "In the mafia in the North of Italy is a *** interconnected with business, if there are several businesses to enter a given market, what the mafia is very good at doing, is to exclude some and promote others." "I think but perhaps the national scene of the Italian women, has been to be core perhaps, or not courageous enough." "Every woman in Italy, perhaps also myself, we are in a way afraid to loose approval, and not to be approved by men." "And approval for us is a lot, because this is the country of belle donne, bella figura, and you are really alone." "Sometimes we lack determination." "We were not strong enough to say Basta." "Not only women, because this is an insult to any human being." "I think the image of women in the media in the last 10-15 years has been simply devastating." "On average, women in Italy are paid a third as much as men, but we have to work twice as hard, and if you are not ugly, you are supposed to be dumb." "And if you want to become a mother, as most women want to, naturally, you have to think well about this, because you might lose your job." "Things are so bad." "I've been reported that there are companies that when they hire you, they force you to sign a resignation letter without date so that if you get pregnant, you have to leave." "They call it the most terroristic method of contraception." "The access of women in the labour market in my country is simply pathetic." "But it is also totally divided." "It's a 60% again in the North, dropping down to 30% in the South." " The rate of occupation of women is by far the lowest not only of Europe, but is one of the lowest in the OCD countries." "And there's a problem of growth, but there's also a problem of culture." "The first priority, the only priority of women is to be a good mother." "And a good wife, a good lover, well, if she still have some energy, and if she has some time left, going out to work." "Women in Italy are the only effective and existing well-fare system." "If we have the same rate of occupation in women as in *** Europe, we can have a bigger growth of 11 point of GDP." "Nobody knows." "But then they resisted one." "So the only way, I think, is to work with the young generation in order to empower them, and to find the courage to say 'I don't like this, I don't accept." "I will not vote you'." "There are many horrors in Italy, but in the South, I found a shocking case of the failure to act, where something is clearly wrong:" "For 50 years jobs have been traded for human life." "ILVA told me that the experts report is full of errors." "They are fighting the plant's closure, or promising a clean-up." "But is to little, to late." "To hide the metal dust that stains the cemetery, the Council regularly repaints it in a tasteful pink." "It was the only visible sign the authorities gave a damn." "In the end, Bad Government is to blame for letting Bad Capitalism thrive." "Don't dismiss it as 'Just Italy, as usual', in the West, we've also allowed our own mafias to abuse the collective interest." "We all have our own bad capitalists and in my own London, especially, bad bankers." "It was from there that we emerged to see once more the stars." "Love is the seed in you of every virtue." "If they can fight back with such love and community spirit, thousands of smalled Italians could also rescue Italy, led by their most underused resource:" "Women." "Oh Lady, you in whom my hope gains strength." "'Se non or a, quando?" "', that wants a new kind of participation women in all aspects of society life, and their are against the image of women that has predominated in the past," "We are all the political parties, all the political opinion inside, it's a sort of a feeling of a nation, a new nation." "It's typically communist of me to ask whether capitalism can be good, but there has been so much confusion about what to get rid of, and what to keep." "Italy pioneered Capitalism 500 years ago, and used brilliantly 50 yeas ago." "But now it has crippled big business, good or bad." "This Canadian-Italian is a hero abroad, but in Italy, he is a villain." "We have seen the excess of financial engineering." "We have seen the fact that this engineering has its limits and that if it is unchecked it can actually devastate the industrial world." "So the new kind of capitalim that is coming is a healthier one, I hope." "People who engineered Free Market have a responsibility to keep it clean." "And that's a thing people are struggling with all the time." "But they can't find the guilty ones." "They're almost ethereal, somewhere else." "It's a system that worked and nobody owned." "There was street protesters." "This resistance that we are seeing across the world is the result of an over-understandable indignation to the functioning of the market, they just don't get it." "And I don't get it either." "And I mean it." "Your avarice afflicts the world, it tramples on the good, lifts up the wicked." "If your biceps are twice the size of your legs, you have an unbalanced organism that will continue to favour the strong part and eventually won't make us further away." "You know, we have dehumanised free markets, and so we need to fix it." "It all started immediately after Second World War, chocolate was so expensive, it was really high-end, nobody could afford it, a least in Italy." "We had a formula for chocolate which was rooted in the local community ***." "The vision was how can we make a new recipe which is poor with cocoa and rich with the nutritional values of ***." "My grandfather, he lived to find this formula." "He was completely obsessed by it." "He waked up my grandmother at midnight while she was sleeping, making her test it with spoons and 'how was it' and 'do you think...?" "', and finally he went out with Nutella which was born the same year I was born, 1964." "And I'm so happy now, so proud to say that every morning 110 million families start up their breakfast, start up their day being optimistic on life because at the end Nutella is the best psychiatrist there is worldwide." "The first consideration is we want to share the wealth we produce within our community, we feel part of the territory, we are stable citizens, shelved at, and because of these, I hope, higher ethics, we think that every enlightened capitalism" "is a redistributing capitalism." "Business, if well operated, has a huge contribution to society." "Delivering goods, services, giving work, running properly businesses, what effect this has on society is immense." "Actually family controlled businesses are better run than none and this probably is *** on one hand to more conservatism in the balance sheet, they tend to have less usage of leverage, and in a decade which saw a lot of abuse and financial creativity" "that has been a plus." "Western capitalism needs some revolutionary ideas if it is to regain our trust." "I vote for the old ones, that formed the greatest Italy's family firms, passion, innovation, social responsibility." "Such wonderful, old fashioned family values of commitment and long term perspective, could surely serve us better than a new fashioned greed." "The relation that we have with the workers is one of a very deep social contract." "That is based on meritocracy, that is based on transparency, ethical commitment, fairness of the behaviours, those are the values that will come alive not just today, but tomorrow and will inspire us a very long perspective in the long term." "Of the 4.1 billion that we are reported as operating profit in 2011, not a single Euro came from this country." "Not one." "And we have, all combined, more than 260.000 people worlwide, roughly 80.000 in this country." "I can not tell the 180.000 people who are not, that their role in life is to subsidise, an inefficient, uncompetitive, suboptimal setup, I can't." "FIAT's past was bright, and Italian success story, based on design and innovation." "But now is a symbolic case of bad industrial relations, and the decline of mass-manufacturing in Italy." "Unbelievably, Britain now makes more cars than Italy, based on foreign investment, but also quality." "Its Italian national talents should be well suited to the new world, which demands innovation and creativity, if only they would slaughter their own sacred cows." "We are the aggregation of a variety of global experiences, all of which have found their home here, because FIAT is here." "And we are making this available to every part of the FIAT world, whether be it Italian or otherwise." "So to call it purely Italian is a bit of a stretch." "Having said this, our DNA is." "Italians are very, very good, as saying... we are capable of doing things that nobody else can see." "And that's a unique skill." "There are very few countries in the world, very few people, that can actually design the way Italians do that." "We need to get stronger, or things will do that." "That's crucial." "Italy is again a reliable partner of this European challenge, and that's what makes me proud." "Yes, there is the culture, the heritage, the beauty of this country, which is potentially the nicest country worldwide, but I think the new era is based on worldwide competitiveness and that is an European challenge, is not an Italian challenge." "He's right, it's an European issue." "Let's remember what made us great." "Our freedom to look at things in new ways, just as Dante did." "In North-West Italy lives another revolutionary who knew thinking about food is provocative and traditional." "But also very modern." "The worldwide movement Carlo Petrini has built, is passionate, creative, and deliciously Italian." "If I go to Edinburgh and the farmers' market in Edinburgh," "I don't find farmers, in effect, like old-fashioned food stuff?" "Peasantry selling vegetables which are super-fresh and super-delicious." "And they don't find that, and especially at a reasonable price." "And so I think actually some kind of aspects of this antique agricultural system which does still exist here has led to the preservation of the old food culture and so I think is a wonderfully rich food culture." "I think it does have a lot to offer." "My optimistic side always says that something of value can come from crisis." "But I'm also not a believer in the automatic recurrence of the past." "The future is always built." "I am optimistic about Italy, and remain optimistic." "I see change as opportunity for improvement, and this is very much what's underway." "It's all hopeless I'm often told, "nothing changes", they say, "but at least we have our culture"." "That I can agree." "You can see in the resurrection of Turin," "FIAT's home city, that 20 years ago was dying, that change can be achieved in Italy." "And it shows that culture is not merely part of Italy's past, it's an asset for its future." "La Mole Antonelliana is the symbol of the city, and we decided to have here the National Museum of Cinema." "My perception is this is a metaphor of the change of Torino, memory, culture, creation of jobs, image, identity, and so on." "I believe that words like innovation, creativity, fantasy, imagination, are all words that belong to our cultural inheritance." "This isn't just a romantic, poetic fight, that we are bringing on, we've actually created a new model, for the city, for the state, for the citizens." "To occupy something means to take care of something, and actually in this case, means to take care of what is ours." "Because we are performing this place as a common." "This is the time to build our future." "Now." "Not tomorrow." "Consider well the seat that gave you birth, you were not nate to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge." "Follow worth and knowledge." "That's what Buona Italia does, when she is at her best." "Now she needs to stop neglecting her culture, and fight back against Mala Italia." "A mesmerising history that has shown extraordinary rises from near death to renaissance, and back again." "My beautiful girlfriend is in a coma, and it's terrible to watch." "Everyone knows she is, but no one does anything about it." "Who are those people defeated by their pain?" "This miserable way is taken by those who lived without disgrace and without praise." "They now co-mingle with the coward angels." "The company of those who are not rebels nor faithful to their god, but stood apart." "The presence of the Vatican Court in Italy is, in my opinion, the main cause of Italian moral weakness." "It has been quite easy for millions of Italians to be sinners, to disregard their civil duties, to disregard their moral obligations, and to feel perfectly confident, that they can obtain eternal salvation thanks to the confession." " The keywords are the words of Machiavelli, he says: "Because of the Catholic Church,"" ""we Italians, have become senza religione, e cattivi, without religion and wicked."" "If you are morally weak, it's very easy to impose a moral domination on you, if you are morally weak, you cannot be free." "Just consider the Risorgimento, who was the main morally...?" "Mazzini, *** you are *** that Mazzini had a deep religiosity, inspired by protestant currents," "Jansenism, the same is true for Cavour, the same is true for Garibaldi." "They were all critical of the catholic attitude of making deals with those who have power." "The principal Italian fault is that they don't have the sense of the state." "They had a state very big, the Ancient Rome territory, then it collapsed, and for 2000 years the country was invaded and governed by foreigners," "so for the Italians in general the State was the enemy, they were 'the other', not the representative of the Italian community." "Moreover, they had inside of the country another state:" "The Church." "It is the only country in which there is a fundamental political problem which is Church vs. State." "The real problem is not the brain-drain in the sense of the exit of good people, actually it's great, because you have scientist, and doctors, and researchers, who learn everywhere in the world, wherever they can in their field." "The problem is the return ticket." "You shall leave everything you love most dearly, this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first, your are to know the bitter taste of others bread." "How salted it is." "And know how a harder path it is for one who goes descending and descending others' steps." " Hello." "Your cappuccino sir." " Oh, thank you." "You sound Italian." " Si, I'm Italian." " How long have you been in London?" " Almost one year." " Great!" " Enjoy your coffee sir." " Thank you." " Bye bye." "The way I feel about Italy after 9 years of living abroad is quite painful." "I left Italy 17 years ago, and everything that happened to my life in the last 17 years as a woman, as an entrepreneur, as a mother, could never have happened in Italy." "Living in London, it's incredible to see all those bright Italian arriving to live here, because they can't do what they want to do in Italy." "What country is it that is our home country, and doesn't give us the opportunity to grow there." "I was studying at the University, and I just spent like 2 years after my degree waiting for something to happen." "Nobody is giving you the opportunity to try, and that makes me feel, of course, very, very angry, and very sad, because I would love to come back, but I can't see anything." "I can't stand that decadence, that slowliness, that sleep, that constant sleep of people, just waiting for something to happen." "If you do anything in, I don't know, England or the US, then people say: "Aaah, waaah!", but if you do something good in Italy, nobody cares." "That's the best that can happen to you:" "They don't care, you know, or they actively try to stop you." "I have so many friends around, and everyone feels lonely, and "why I can't come back to Rome or Italy, Milan, where I come form?"" "and I would just suggest: "Just go!" ", and let's come back and let's try to make it work" because it's a shame." "As a mother of two young children, I want to be able to take them back to Italy, and show them that Italy is a country where they can live." "They are half Italian, so they belong there." "Maybe one day they will want to go back to Italy." "Maybe my children will be part of the renaissance of Italy." "Maybe they will be the one that will go back, and start a new phase for Italy." "Italy is not a story of the Euro, of debt, or even of crime." "It's a story of extraordinary potential being wasted, and the international failure to do anything about it." "Italy must wake up, or else become an impoverished tourist park." "All of us Westerners face decline too." "We've also been letting the immorality of the few, damage the many, and in our own Dantean ignavia." "We too need the courage to say "Basta!", or we'll commit the worst of sins, betray our own children." " So, you're Italian?" " Yes." " What do you think about Italy?" "Oh, what a nice idea!" " How I've loved to talk to you!" " Bye!" " Bye!" "If the present world has gone astray, in you is the cause, in you is to be sought."