Cultural Vulturism
The Teatro Rossetti, Trieste
The news is – or is supposed to be – that last year theater attendance in Italy surpassed that at sporting events. This is official stuff. The source is a semi-governmental entity called “Federculture” – a kind of agency that the State uses to lobby itself about cultural matters. That may sound a little odd, but you’re just going to have to take our word for it because this particular aspect of Italian public life is not quite today’s theme.
To get back to the question at hand, according to figures just released by Federculture, in 2006 Italians went to sporting events 12.7 million times and to an evening at the theater on 13.5 million occasions – a record…
This is absolutely, rock-bottom official. It is – or is supposed to be – as near as you can come to a truth. The newspapers are playing it with a straight face and government Ministers are expressing pleasure that “culture” here has overtaken mere sweaty sports in popularity.
It is of course not even remotely possible that all this has the furthest, most distant and most tenuous relation to the facts of the matter. No way. Not in a million, zillion years. Never. Not on your life, not on a bet. Zip.
Italy is sports mad. The whole country, to the degree that it can, goes to very large stadiums every Sunday to watch highly paid soccer stars kick one another and the ball around the field. Formula One racing, where spectatorship is based on watching cars drive by in a fast, but normally unchanging way – something that closely resembles sitting next to a freeway most of the day – brings in huge crowds. Caring how Ferrari is doing and being pleased when the red cars win is part of daily life. Even volley ball is a big draw, since it is something Italy is good at internationally.
The largest-selling daily newspaper in the country, the “Gazzetta dello Sport,” is about, well, sports. So is the second biggest-seller, the “Corriere dello Sport.”
High “cultura” in Italy, as in any other reasonable country, is something to take occasionally with a spoon and holding your nose, just every once in a while, to keep the germs of crassness away. A form of preventative medicine that tastes about as good as aspirin, but is far more expensive and usually requires a tie.
It might be worth remembering that, unlike sports, ballet and theater have no daily paper, no weekly paper, no significant monthly. The kind of people who give a shit are are exactly what you would expect – both of them.
So why, beyond the fact that it costs nothing and leaves a sensation of warmth – rather like peeing down your leg – is official Italy engaged in the odd exercise of claiming against all reason that everybody here actually prefers a nice evening with, say, Ibsen?
Well, one part has to do with those numbers we cited, which are, after all, “official.” It might be remembered though that there are some slight differences in how this data is collected. Let’s put it this way: soccer clubs pay taxes on every ticket they sell; theaters instead receive tax money based on their attendance. On the one hand, declaring high crowd figures costs hard cash; on the other, if you don’t reach and maintain big numbers, you don’t get financed.
The theater shown above, Trieste’s Teatro Rossetti, brags that only about 45 percent of its revenues – which total above nine million dollars annually – derive from government subsidies, while most similar places take 60 to 70 percent from the State. Still, keeping those 1,500 seats full must be something of a challenge in a city of just two hundred thousand inhabitants.
We don’t mean to suggest that people are perhaps cheating with their attendance figures, though certainly there would be a huge incentive to do so.
Instead, the main reason for this particularly farcical piece of news probably has to do with the fact that there is at present a “Center-Left” government in Italy.
The classic Left had – and has – a peculiar fixation with the kind of culture once practiced by rich people. The old Soviet government, at the same time it was slaughtering “wealthy” kulaks in the Ukraine, was always extremely generous with the Bolshoi Ballet. And you may remember “red” Chinese propaganda events with ten thousand children in a square earnestly sawing away at violins. Massed piano concertos… Those were the days.
Apparently, as the workers took power, they found that the best possible demonstration of social progress was the encouragement of the most abstract of all the entertainments of the former aristocratic establishment. And so: card games bad, chess good; the Twist bad, ballet good; “The Cherry Orchard” good, “Cats” bad, and so forth. This touched even sports, where fencing and figure skating were oddly favored over team disciplines like basketball – unless of course you were Cuban and had been watching the “wrong” TV stations on the sly. The more abstruse the divertissement the better. In the “peoples” republics, the actual popularity of some particular cultural phenomenon was a kind of kiss of death.
In many respects, Italy, which prefers to follow trends at a healthy distance, is now enjoying its first truly “socialist” government. These folks were briefly in office before, in the second half of the Nineties, but never really got a chance then to show what they were made of.
What they are “made of” is that an evening at the theater is much more socially uplifting than punching each other out on the bleachers of a soccer game. Fair enough. Since this happens to coincide as well with the official, if unstated, view of the Catholic Church – which appreciates these ancien régime entertainments because, with a bit of luck, the past may actually return – we are probably in for a lot of soirées in the near to mid-term future. Upper Italy is dusting off its “workers” black tie.