Issue #0

The Dark Heart Of Italy

Travels Through Time and Space Across Italy

Plot

In 1999 Tobias Jones emigrated to Italy, expecting to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors. Instead, he found a very different country: one besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia. The Dark Heart Italy is Jones account of his four-year voyage across the Italian peninsula. Jones writes not just about Italys art, climate and cuisine, but about the much livelier and stranger sides of the Bel Paese, the language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism. Why, he wonders, does parliament need a slaughter commission? Why do bombs still explode every time politics start getting serious? Why does everyone urge him to go home as soon as possible, saying that Italy is a brothel and that its football referees are cuckolds? Why do people warn him that Clean Hands only disguise Dirty Feet? Most of all, why does one man, Silvio Berlusconi - in the words of a famous song - appear to own everything from Padre Nostro (Our Father) to Cosa Nostra (the Mafia)? The Italy that emerges from Jones travels is a country scarred by civil wars and illustrious corpses, a country that is proudly visual rather than verbal, based on aesthetics rather than ethics; a country where crime is hardly ever followed by punishment; a place of incredible illusionism, where it is impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality, fact from fiction.