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FOREIGN POLICY: Your book, The Caste, is an impressive work of investigative journalism: You uncovered corruption, inefficiency, and dirty secrets everywhere from the Italian Senate’s restaurant halls to local administrations in remote villages. What motivated you to embark on such a massive enterprise?
Gian Antonio Stella: It was a civic duty. We did it because someone needed to do it. We didn’t in the least expect that the book would turn out [to be] such a success.
Sergio Rizzo: It was born out of a journalistic intuition. Mr. Stella and I noticed that in last year’s state budget bill, there was an item that grows bigger every year and never shrinks. I’m talking about the so-called “expenses for constitutional organs.” We started from there, inquiring into the costs of each branch of the state. This inquiry turned first into a journalistic investigation published in the daily Corriere della Sera [newspaper] and then into our book. We expected that the book would [sell] 30,000 copies in the first edition; it seemed an optimistic but cautious forecast, in line with the kind of book we were about to publish. Then, in four months, we reached 760,000 copies and 18 reprints. But this isn’t just about sales figures; what’s most important is what came out of it. Normally, such essays lie on the desk of the person who bought them. In this case, though, families are buying our book. You could say that at least 2 million people must have read it.
FP: What is your favorite anecdote in the book?
GS: What made me laugh the most is that there is one barber for every 36 senators, which is absolutely absurd. And these barbers can receive up to ($190,000) per year, which is $36,000 more than the salary of [the] Lord Chamberlain in the British monarchy. It’s something that makes you laugh, but at the same time makes you want to cry, much like the rest of the book. What I find most outrageous is that there is a law in Italy according to which if you give money to a political party you can benefit from tax breaks of up to 51 times more than if you would have given the money to research against cancer.
FP: What were your main sources?
SR: But for a few exceptions, it all came from data available to the public. Yesterday, for example, I went to the Camera (the lower house), which publishes these [tables] that tell you how much money Mr. X or Y received and from whom. For example, on July 30, the Democratic Socialist Party received more than $142,000 from an organization called Progetto Novanta. Any idea who this is? It’s run by Sergio Scarpellini [an entrepreneur whom The Caste reveals to have rented palaces around Rome to the Senate and lower house at sky-high prices in exchange for financial contributions to various political parties and individual politicians]. It is still going on. But this is just to show you that we didn’t need to do difficult research—everything was already published in public documents. In the balance sheets of the Senate, the lower house, the presidency … everything is out there. But because we put the pieces together and made it so easy to read … that was what created a popular uproar. You put the single facts and anecdotes together and you get a monstrous picture.
FP: The Caste appears at a time when newspaper headlines are full of tirades against political parties and politicians in general. In early September, famous Italian political satirist Beppe Grillo—Italy’s Michael Moore—rallied 50,000 people in Bologna to protest against politicians and corruption at all levels. What’s going on? Are these signs of change, or futile expressions of frustration with no concrete political outcomes?
GS: To those who say that this popular reaction “isn’t constructive,” I respond with an Italian saying: “From what pulpit comes the preaching”? Those who say our critique of the system is not constructive are the same people who let Italy’s presidential palace become four times more expensive than Buckingham Palace; they are the ones who made it possible for everyone to write the budget as they please, so that it is impossible in Italy to compare any two (public) balance sheets; they are the same people who let politics become so expensive that, while German citizens pay a maximum of $142 million per year for public funding of political parties, Italians pay $426 million. It’s easy to accuse the citizens of giving in to demagogy, but where do populist reactions originate? From a rigorous denunciation of the failures of the system, such as our book, or from those who pay a stenographer $361,000 a year, that is, $28,000 more than the president of the republic himself? Who is stirring populism?
