Et Tu, Garibaldi

"Henceforth, not only the prosperity of the Italians is in danger but their very freedom," fumed Bestselling Author (and Deputy) Luigi Barzini in the weekly L'Europeo last week. He was denouncing not a new law but an institution that has been tightening its hold on Italian life for centuries: the nation's cumbersome bureaucracy.

Today, 50 million Italians spend much of their lives filling out official forms. Permission in triplicate (as a minimum) is required for practically anything: installing electricity in one's house in Rome, 21 different applications; exporting textiles, 200. One Rome resident reported that getting auto license plates took him four months, 71 phone calls, 18 documents, six tax stamps, and visits to 13 different offices. To fight the current building slump, Parliament authorized $2 billion in public works last fall. Virtually none of the money has been spent because it is so difficult to get approval of specific projects.

Adopting the Habsburgs. Of course, many other nations suffer from crawling bureaucracy, but Italy's problem is on the scale of Michelangelo's David or the triumphal march in Aida. Barzini traces its origins back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when together with so many other of Italian society's "baroque" characteristics, it was imported by Italy's hated Spanish Habsburg rulers, and then adopted and glorified by the natives. Nowadays most Italians consider the archvillains to be the bureaucrats themselves. They have come to be known as i burosauri, a name derived from dinosauri, and they "work" from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., but many arrive late and then stay late in order to get overtime. More than 250,000 veterans of World War II and their families are still waiting to start collecting pensions. At the present rate, their applications will not all. be approved until 1987 since, as one study shows, it takes 15 days for i burosauri to send a letter from one floor to an other of a ministry.

Stopping the Funds. As late as 1954, the government was still reimbursing Sicilians for damage done to their ancestors' property during Garibaldi's historic 1860 campaign to unify Italy. Even Garibaldi has been kept waiting. Italy's Parliament in 1910 passed a law to erect his statue in Marsala, Sicily, but the technicalities took so long that inflation has made the original appropriation wildly inadequate. Having missed the 50th anniversary, Parliament decided in 1960 to try for the 100th. It passed a new law appropriating 90 million lire, but the design chosen required 200 million lire. The Ministry of Public Works approved the sum. The Court of Accounts said no, and for good measure annulled the 90 million-lire appropriation as well. Cleaning up the bureaucratic mess is the goal of the Department for the Reform of Public Administration, headed by Luigi Preti, known as "Luigi XIV" because the department has had 13 previous heads in 17 years. Preti admits he has not had much luck. "Whoever tries to reform finds himself up against a rubber wall," he sighs. "If it were a steel wall, you could take a cannon and knock it down. But the rubber wall--you hit it with your fist, then turn away, and the wall has returned to where it was."

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