A Name on an Airport

Milan's Malpensa airport was formally renamed for Silvio Berlusconi in a ceremony on Friday, a decision The Local Italy reports was criticised by local and national politicians. The wire gives us the fact and the dissent and little else; we will not embellish it. But the renaming is the kind of story foreign readers notice precisely because it is small. An airport is a threshold, the first Italian word a visitor hears and the last they see. To put a contested name on that threshold is to make an argument about the country before anyone has set foot in it.

The foreign coverage of Italy has long carried a Berlusconi problem, and it is worth being honest about it. For two decades the international press found in him a story it could tell easily — scandal, spectacle, a nation apparently at ease with both. That framing was never the whole country, and Italians often said so. Now the state has fixed the name to infrastructure, and the outside reader will reasonably ask whether the country has settled the question or merely inscribed one side of it. The ceremony answers nothing; it records a preference.

There is a quieter point in the criticism reported by The Local. Naming public things after the recently dead is a habit of states that want to close an argument quickly. Italy has not closed this one. The politicians who objected are not necessarily right, but their objection is evidence that the memory is still live, and a live memory is harder to attach to a departures board. Airports outlast governments. Whoever next governs will find the name already there, and will have to decide whether to keep it.

We hold no brief for or against the honour. What interests us is what the foreign wires reveal about how Italy is seen when it performs its own memory: the world reads such gestures as clues to character, and files them accordingly. A country reported at one remove is always being summarised. A name on an airport is one more sentence in that summary, written by Italy but read, and judged, elsewhere.