“How the ‘True World’ finally became a fiction”
1.
The less credible a fiction is, the more it will be mistaken for fact. In a conspiracy theory’s democracy, the more far-removed we are from the credible, the more we will be believed.
In 11 April 1953, the corpse of a 21-year-old Roman woman, Wilma Montesi, was found on the shore of Torvaianica, around 30 kilometres from Rome. Wilma was the daughter of a carpenter of modest means, she was engaged to be married to a police officer, and – a detail that later became important – the autopsy showed that she was still a virgin. The police concluded that she died accidentally by drowning.
Soon enough journalists from various sensationalist papers began to weave a series of insinuations and speculations, without the slightest proof, and the investigation was reopened. This resulted in a sexual and political hurricane that shook Italy for over a year. I was a child at the time of the ‘Montesi case’ and I remember that at the time the adults spoke of nothing else.
Italy was then ruled by the Christian Democrats lead by Alcide De Gasperi, while the socialists and communists were the opposition. At the time Italy was a country moulded by Catholic sanctimony. Even divorce was illegal, abortion was of course unthinkable and film censors would cut scenes that featured kisses they considered to be too passionate… When in 1958 a young Armenian dancer began a strip-tease at a private party in a restaurant in Trastevere, central Rome, there was an uproar: the dancer was arrested, the owner of the restaurant fined, the film rolls confiscated and a flurry of front-page articles followed. Note that the dancer had only stripped down to that her black panties.
The memory of the Montesi case remained very much alive even many years later, especially among members of the political left. By the end of the 1960s, the consolidated version of the events was as follows:
“Wilma Montesi was a girl who began to hang out with a group of high-ranking individuals in a villa in Capocotta, an area of Torvaianica, in particular with the musician Piero Piccioni, then aged 32. Here parties and orgies involving alcohol and the use of drugs took place in which Wilma was apparently involved. One day she died unexpectedly, possibly due to drugs, and the libertines consigned her body to the waves of the sea of Ostia.
Piccioni was the son of the then Deputy Prime Minister Attilio Piccioni, who was considered the heir of Alcide De Gasperi. In a reversal of the biblical rule, the sins of the father were visited upon the children: Piccioni’s father had to resign, putting an end to his political career. The young Amintore Fanfani, a young christian-democrat leader, seized the opportunity to dispose of his elderly rival and take over the leadership of the Christian Democrats. De Gasperi died in August 1954. [The Christian Democrats went on to lead Italian governments until 1992!]
In that villa, political personalities and other celebrities – even a nephew of the pope of the time, Pius XII – indulged in bacchanalians with girls. Piccioni’s son and two other suspects, Polito and Montagna, were arrested. The left-wing opposition lashed out against the corrupt world of clerical power. The lawyer Giuseppe Sotgiu, a leading figure of the Communist party and defender of the journalist who had launched the trail of the ‘capocottari’ (the libertine people of the Capocotta estate), shined as the Grand Inquisitor of Italy. He passionately denounced the immoral customs of the Christian Democratic regime. The police were accused of covering up the responsibilities of these powerful people, the prefect of Rome was indicted and arrested for trying to bury the case to please the minister Piccioni.
Unfortunately, however, some journalists accidentally discovered that Sotgiu had accompanied his wife to a brothel in Rome, where she apparently had sex with young men while her husband enjoyed watching… This caused Sotgiu’s credibility as a moraliser to plummet. Then the whole affair subsided… To this day, the causes of Montesi’s death have not been clarified.”
Years later, moved by curiosity, I took the trouble of checking the facts, and I realised that the above account, like the whole affair, was the result of a collective delusion. We would see many similar cases later on in the Western world. The underlying theme of all these scandals is: ‘They [the people in power] have a secret life where they engage in orgies and various sexual perversions”. Rather than conspiracy theorists, I would speak here of debauchery theorists.
The suggestion that Montesi’s death was somehow related to the villa in Capocotta came from some sleaze sheets in search of a scoop, and, incredibly, they were taken seriously. There is no evidence that poor Wilma, who from the photos seemed to have been a decent straight-laced and somewhat sad-looking girl, had anything to do with that villa; after all, she was a virgin. Some of the ‘testimonies’ collected later were clearly the product of morbid liars and mythomaniacs who no investigating judge in his right mind would ever take seriously. In fact, little by little, the case subsided completely. In 1957, Piccioni and the two other defendants were absolved of all charges and declared innocent, whereas the journalist who had caused the entire ruckus was convicted of libel. Piccioni went on to pursue a brilliant career as a musician. In his 2015 book La verginità e il potere. Il caso Montesi e le nuove indagini (‘Virginity and Power. The Montesi Case and the New Investigations’, Sovera 2015), the criminologist Pasquale Ragone collected all the documents that proved how Wilma’s death had nothing to do with the world of the Christian Democrat potentates.
The truth is that beneath the blanket of a prudish and reactionary ‘petty Italy’ dominated by the Christian Democrats, a lava of unconfessable sexual fantasies was bubbling.
The logic of how so-called ‘factoids’ are created can be illustrated with the following example:
‘An inhabitant of a small rural village commits a crime in Rome. It is discovered that the murderer’s father was a friend, as a young man, of the current mayor of that particular village. Hence: the mayor of that village is implicated in the Rome murder’.
An argument, of course, on which the sworn enemies of the mayor of the village will tend to jump on. This perverse logic is much more common than we think, I would even say that it permeates most of our political ‘logic’, even on far more serious issues. And it also pervades those whose cultural level should preclude them from using such arguments. We can always find the ‘facts’ to confirm what we want to be confirmed.
In any case, an aura of debauchery has continued to surround the Capocotta seashore: for decades it has been the nudist area of the Torvaianica’s extensive beach and a favourite gay hangout.
2.
In Italy, in the course of the 1950s the media occasionally suggested that certain important people had taken part in ‘pink balls’ (heterosexual orgies with girls) or ‘green balls’ (homosexual orgies with male boys). Later, new political sex scandals would fascinate the masses of the entire planet. The most famous from the early 1960s involved John Profumo, Minister of War in the British Conservative government headed by Harold Macmillan. This aristocrat had had a brief affair in 1961 with a 19-year-old adventuress, Christine Keeler, incredibly beautiful, remarkably dumb and who went from bed to bed with members of high society. The problem was that Christine had also had an affair with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché in England who was under surveillance by British Intelligence. It was immediately assumed that the country’s security had been put at risk – although I find it quite unlikely that Profumo would reveal military secrets to an uncultivated girl, which she would then go and spill to the Soviet captain! But the factual basis, however slender, was there, unlike in the Montesi case, which was a figment of the wildest imagination.
An enquiry was held in 1963, from which the mores and licences of the English nobility and political world emerged. Stephen Ward, an osteopath who had connected Christine with her lovers, committed suicide for the shame of being seen as a pimp. The case began to fill the front pages all over the world. Not only was Profumo forced to resign as minister, but Macmillan’s entire conservative government then resigned in 1963 and the Labour Party won the general election of the following year.
The case fascinated the world. The essayist Barbara Ward recalls that in 1963 her husband had gone on a long tour on behalf of the UN to countries in Asia and Africa. On his return, she asked him: “What do the people in those countries striving to develop talk about?” Her husband’s reply: ‘Christine Keeler’.
Reduced to its true dimensions, this is a rather banal story: a teaser has several lovers, among them a minister and a foreign attaché. But even here the facts are pumped up by an extraordinary mythopoetic force. A factual molehill is inflated into a media mountain. What inflates the molehill is the salacious halo of the factoid.
I could go on with a long series of events of the kind the philosopher Bruno Latour would call faitiches, factishes, a portmanteau word of ‘facts’ and ‘fetishes’. Here it will be enough to recall the clamour caused in 1998 by the Monica Lewinsky case, which led almost to the impeachment of President Clinton. As most will recall, Monica was a young intern at the White House who had – allegedly – performed fellatio on the then president. In the autumn of 1998, I was in the United States: practically every TV network talked non-stop about the ‘case’. The whole of America had entered a voyeuristic bubble. I too had a similar experience to Ward’s husband at the time. I later took a trip to Mexico, where I spent some time with some very humble people: they too only talked to me about ‘Monica’s tongue’.
Then we had the bunga-bunga parties attributed to Berlusconi. In 2010, when Berlusconi was still Prime Minister, it was rumoured that during lustful evening gatherings in his villas, with the participation of attractive, often underage girls, he practised bunga bunga… something the former Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi is said to have taught him. No one ever found out what bunga-bunga actually meant, and here we can observe the power of the signifier: bunga-bunga was an enigmatic container that anyone could fill with their wildest sexual fantasies.
3.
Let us return to the 1950s. Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli perceived the mythopoetic power of the Montesi case and transposed the delusion into their film La Dolce Vita (1960). The final part of the film shows us an orgy, which Fellini had wanted to film in a villa in Torvaianica itself, but was ultimately filmed in one a little further north of Rome, in Fregene. It was as if the creators of the film were saying to the audience: ‘You’ve been fantasising about high society orgies for years. Now we’re going to show you one!”. The film’s protagonist, Marcello, is a tabloid hack for a sleaze magazine of the sort that created the Montesi case. Later, in the 1960s, I witnessed some ‘orgies’ myself: they were more or less imitations of the one seen in La Dolce Vita, since, as we all know, life imitates art. ‘Having an orgy’, ‘a group romp’, became a trait of the alternative youth culture of the late 1960s.
The final part of the La Dolce Vita does not in fact reconstruct an orgy as it would have been practised at the time, it invents an orgy so that people could finally imagine one, and possibly imitate it.
And yet nothing exceptional happens at the party in La Dolce Vita. A girl does a strip tease, but doesn’t complete it, just like the Armenian dancer at the Rome party. We catch sight of a young man dancing naked, and then alcohol, music and dancing. Drugs did not really circulate at the time. A party like that would seem restrained today even compared to an end-of-year party organised by Catholic students. It is more of a project for an orgy that never actually materializes. But what fascinated audiences at the time was precisely the orgiastic mood of the whole thing. And where is the heart of the orgy, that which really cannot be shown?
After the orgy, the bon vivants, at dawn, as if attracted by a magnetic force, walk towards the beach. Here they see a stranded sea monster, a devil ray, which seems to be looking at them. Some have read the scene as an allusion to Wilma’s body found on the shore of Torvaianica. But why does the scene strike us as if it had a profound meaning?
The creators of the film were probably inspired by the final part of Buñuel and Dalí’s legendary film L’âge d’Or (1930). Here we watch the aristocratic libertines from Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom coming out of a castle one by one, having presumably consummated a long series of sadistic orgies. The last is the duke de Blangis who resembles Jesus Christ, and who turns out to be a serial killer of women: in the final scene, their scalps adorn a cross. Here too, at the end, we find a femicide, as we would call it today, just like in the Montesi affair. Similarly, in La Dolce Vita a drunken woman is brutalised at length by the protagonist.
In the orgies millions of Italians had imagined, and to which the Montesi story had given a hallucinatory consistency, something unspeakable, but ultimately also unimaginable, had to take place. The belief is that they indulge in pleasures that are not only forbidden but … indescribable. Divine… Hence the allusion to something sacred, the invisible black hole around which the orgy itself revolves. Indeed, the fantasy was nurtured that the Torvaianica orgies were attended by a nephew of the Pope… a metonymy of the Pope in person, who in turn… signifies vicar of God. As in Buñuel’s film, the supreme reveller is not Satan but… Jesus Christ. The sacred orgies of the bacchants, during which a young woman eventually dies, find their reincarnation in mass media gossip. Even in a secular film like La Dolce Vita, the post-orgy finale emanates an equivocal odour of mystical enjoyment. There is a sea monster, evoking Hieronymus Bosch-like torments and delights. Then, in the final scene of the film, a slim girl who inspires a profound sense of purity says something to Marcello, but the sound of the sea makes her words unperceivable: like a voiceless angel, she tries in vain to call Marcello towards something we will never know.
Just as we will never know what bunga bunga was, an empty, enigmatic signifier that sums up the full mystery of power. The mystery of boundless freedom, of unbridled pleasure, of impenetrable complicity, which nevertheless leaves as a residue a dead female body, the scalp of immense privileges.