A Name on the Departures Board

Malpensa Airport, the gateway through which most foreign visitors first meet northern Italy, was formally renamed on Friday for Silvio Berlusconi, according to The Local Italy, in a ceremony that drew criticism from politicians at both local and national level. The airport is now, on paper, an advertisement for a man whose public life ended in scandal and whose private life furnished the international press with material for three decades. The world's wires noted the renaming in a paragraph. That brevity is itself the story.

Naming a public thing is a claim about what a country wishes to be remembered for. Airports are unusually literal about this: they are the first word a visitor reads and the last. To attach a name to one is to say, before any conversation begins, here is what we consider our legacy. Italy has no shortage of candidates for that honour — scientists, writers, engineers, the architects of its postwar recovery. Choosing instead a figure whose fame abroad rests largely on courtroom drama and television spectacle is a decision the country is entitled to make, but not one the world will read as neutral.

There is a particular irony in the setting. Malpensa is the airport of Milan, the city that gave the world a certain idea of Italian modernity: design, industry, fashion, the catwalks that the Guardian was covering this same week. That Milan has always been the least nostalgic part of the country, the one that looks forward. To name its principal airport after a man who embodied a very different Italy — one of spectacle, of the long 1980s, of promises and their aftermath — is to place the two Italys side by side on the departures board and let travellers choose which one they are arriving into.

Foreign coverage of Italy returns again and again to the same complaint: that the country cannot decide what it is. It is reported as a place of extraordinary cultural depth and chronic institutional drift, of great wealth and stalled wages, of a ruling class that recycles. The renaming will be filed by most foreign desks under colour rather than news. But colour accumulates into a portrait, and the portrait the world is painting this week shows a republic still arguing with its own recent past while its airports, its schools and its demography move on without it.

We take no position on the merits of the honour, which belongs to Italians to debate. We note only that a name on a terminal is read by millions who will never learn the arguments behind it. They will simply pass beneath it, collect their bags, and form their impression of the country. That is the quiet power of such gestures, and the reason they deserve more thought than a ceremony allows.