Italy’s Populists Rewrite a Comic Masterpiece
The prime minister has the toughest of jobs getting Five Star, the League and EU to agree on budget changes. The populist play-acting needs to stop.
If you want to understand what's going on in Italy, you need to brush up on Carlo Goldoni's comic classic "Servant of Two Masters."
Photographer: Imagno/Hulton ArchivePantomimes aren’t a Christmas tradition in Italy; they’re more of a British thing. But Rome’s government has nonetheless decided to put on a surreal piece of theater ahead of the festivities this year. The plot is a modern twist of “Servant of Two Masters,” a comic masterpiece by the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni.
In Goldoni’s play, the protagonist Truffaldino charges around Venice trying to satisfy the needs of two bosses. Rome’s modern version has Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte shuttling back and forth to Brussels in an attempt to satisfy the often conflicting demands of his two political masters: the Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio and the League’s Matteo Salvini.