Getting the boot Book

Welcome to the founding congress of the Love Party, held at a Rome discotheque in February 1992. Brainchild of three prominent women in the Italian political and cultural establishment, the Love-Party was just one of the protest parties springing up in the wake of the massive corruption scandal called "Tangentopoli" (Italian for "Bribesville"), which had landed a third of the national parliament and thousands of businessmen in jail. So what if the party's leaders - honorary president La Cicciolina ("the Little Bunny Rabbit"), general secretary Moana Pozzi, and Barbarella, secretary for propaganda and external relations - were all porno stars? The Italian crisis overwhelmed petty concerns. As Moana Pozzi put it: "The rigid structure of party politics that prevailed in this country for four decades has been shattered by corruption and by the end of communism. The danger is that this so-called revolution of ours will fizzle out in a coitus interruptus." Absurd? Of course. A keen assessment of the dangers facing Italy as it sought to shrug off a thousand-year tradition of ingrained political corruption? Absolutely. And the Love Party congress is only one of the places Matt Frei will take you as he plumbs Italy's recent past and collective psyche to discover how Tangentopoli came to be built. In Getting the Boot Frei tells the full story, and along the way he discovers what makes the Italians Italian. Not since Luigi Barzini's classic The Italians has a writer so successfully captured and recounted the ineffable qualities that make Italy and her people what they are.

It has been estimated that, at one time, almost one-sixth of Italy's economy could be attributed to graft. In 1992, when the money stopped flowing, and the system finally collapsed, Frei was there to cover every wrinkle of this event for the BBC. Here he describes what happened when the Italians finally decided to pull the plug.