Today's moment from history!
They hanged Mussolini upside down in a gas.station.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Just an appropriate lesson.
been there for 7 years by 1990. My contract was renewed every year. If I had been incompetent, they would have not renewed my contract after about 1984.
We were looking at the unification of Europe (economically) happening in 1992.
(BTW, what I am about to relate was happening to ALL the foreign (i.e., non-Italian) members of all the orchestras in Italy.)
We (foreigners and "extracommunitarie" (= people from outside the "
economic) community"
learned that The Community had decided that the more "evolved" working condition regarding tenure would be observed in 1992: that of France and Germany; which meant that: if someone -- anyone -- had worked in the orchestra and had served/worked the same as an Italian, who subsequently would have been be given tenure for this type/quality of work, then that person would also be given tenure.
Side bar: Italian theater unions were aligned to political affiliation. So when I began (for a year in Florence, then 7 years in Venice) the unions were: Christian Democrat, Socialist and Communist. Therefore, if one union decided to strike, it would halt the performance (because the members of the union covered a part of all sectors of the theater: orchestra, chorus, backstage, etc.) The other two unions who were not on strike would sign in (and get paid, but obviously wouldn't perform, because people were missing.)
Suddenly the fascists rose to prominence in 1990. Please remember that Italian fascism reemerged from the north-east, which includes the Veneto, and was/is called the Liga (or Lega) del norte.
One delightfully beautiful June day in 1990 I walked through the stage entrance of the theater and saw one of those exquisite large posters that it seems only Italians are capable of creating. Of course I read it. It said: The Orchestra of the Theater of La Fenice announces the following tenured positions offered to Italian nationals -- and it listed the position of EVERY non-Italian in the orchestra. Including mine. We foreigners learned from the non-Fascist Italians that the audition had been forced by the newly emerging Fascists. The Fascists wanted to stuff the orchestra full of Italians before 1992.
(Mind you: I won my auditions there against Italians. One for section player in 1983. The second for Assistant Principal in 1984, which I held until I left at the end of 1990.)
Surely you know that fascists are rather xenophobic. It was then that I learned that there were now FOUR unions in the theater.
The Fascist in my section (viola) said to me, "Oh, you could take out Italian citizenship."
Fine, but:
A-- if you won the audition that fall, you had to have Italian citizenship in hand within a month of winning in order to claim the position. Major Catch-22.
B-- do you know of any country that grants citizenship in a few months? (well. OK. Except maybe for the "Einstein" visa for the current Frau Drumpf.)
C-- I checked with the American Embassy in Rome. They told me that TECNICALLY the USA did not allow dual citizenship although at times, "decided on a case-by-case basis", SOMETIMES they allowed dual citizenship for reasons of work. But it was clearly a crap shoot and I could lose my US citizenship... and remember, those were the days when a US passport was golden.
I started taking out Italian citizenship that month, in case I decided to take the audition for the position I'd held for five years that October.
When I returned in the fall for my short contract (because my position would be auditioned in that time period) I renewed my Permesso di Soggiorno at the Questura di Venezia. A woman working across from the man I was talking to heard my name and she told me to come to her when I was finished and answer some questions about Italian citizenship. First she wanted to know about my grandparents (all of whom had struggled to leave Germany in the 1920s because of the economic difficulties. Speaking of it gave me a profound vertigo.)
She continued,"Why do you want Italian citizenship?" I answered (in my usual blatently honest gringa way), "Oh -- I want to be able to continue working here." The lady looked at me and said, sort of under her breath, "Oh, that will never fly --" (I thought I detected a sly wink...) "Oh," I said, "I want citizenship because as a performing artist I wish to remain in the cultural ---blah blah blah that is Italy."
She laughed and said, "That's more like it! That should work!"
I was planning on taking the audition, but between the conversation with the lady at the Questura (if you read Donna Leon, I'm personally convinced that the Signorina Elettra character is based on her) and the audition, I met an amazing Polish woman whose friends knew her as, "Ruda' (which I'm told means "red-head".) She was living in a town outside of Torino, her husband had had a job that had placed them in Amherst MA for a few years, so she had been working on a doctorate in French at Smith College; she was worldly beyond belief. I had just started learning astrology so I asked her for the birth dates of her and her family. Only the youngest daughter had been born in the US. I assumed ('cuz she was so cool!) that she wasn't a US citizen (...hey! It was the 90s!) and she stopped and laughed and said, "The day I became a US citizen was the proudest day of my life!" She never knew it until a few months ago, toward the end of her life, but that one statement made me give up the idea of the audition, and I returned to the United States when my contract was finished. My position was won by "un bel maschio Italiano" (in the words of the Fascist in my section), who left the post a few months later because he won a better place somewhere else.
By 1996 I was free-lancing in LA. My mother called me one afternoon, asking, "Are there any other opera houses in Venice besides La Fenice?" I told her that there was another, Malibran ... but: my mother couldn't care less about opera. I asked why she was asking. "The evening news said that the opera house in Venice burned to the ground."
Yes folks. La Fenice theater was burned to the ground by VENETIANS, who set something like seven fires in the attic of the theater (opening up places in the roof to ventilate the fire) that they were doing restorative work in and they knew they couldn't finish on time. If they were late, they would be charged for every day they were late. So the sound space in which Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Stravinsky, etc. had first heard their works, that had been commissioned by that theater, for that theater, had been destroyed. It was not destroyed by the foreigners who joyfully made music there. It was destroyed by incompetent Venetians.
So this is my story of me and the Fascists in the opera house in Venice. Italy may have been, "governed by the Socialist party and the Christian Democracy party in those years." But what was happening locally, and to me personally, was very different.
I remember reading an article in the NY Times (1991?) when i was back in NY about "Italy's New Fascism". Yeah, right, "new" my ass.
It was in April 1945....why would you see today and make that analogy?
Please explain...
