Craxi – Hammamet

Claudia Zecchin

Craxi – Hammamet Claudia Zecchin Restaurant Chez Achour Monsieur Le President on the walls. Vintage shots with Tunisia’s best-loved Italian, a true celebrity in Hammamet, President Craxi. I am in his favourite restaurant, perhaps my top one in all of Tunisia. It is an elegant Mediterranean patio where Monsieur used to come and dine with his family, nearby the Medina, because only here did they make Italian-style pasta, ‘as God commands’. The owner of the restaurant tells me that he used to bring his former militant friends here, or at least those who remained loyal to him. The restaurant is a real Casa Italia. Just last night I reached Hammamet late at night, to rest in a characteristic white house perfumed by jasmine in bloom. The owner of the accommodation welcomed me by turning on the television, saying that it also displays Rai 1, making a grin of sympathy when he learns that I am Italian. Then he immediately mentions the magic word: ‘Craxi’. As a matter of fact, the idea of the trip to Tunisia took shape one evening, about three years ago, when I went to the cinema to see the film Hammamet. The role of Craxi was played by a great Pierfrancesco Favino. His figure intrigued me, I was almost fascinated. I knew that according to those who had written the History of our country so far, he was a negative character, with dark hues, in the sea of contradictions and unsolved issues of the so-called First Republic of Italy. I wasn’t so much interested in who Bettino Craxi was, I was creeping in to see where one of the protagonists of our Republic had gone into hiding, until he was buried there. To do so, there is perhaps no more symbolic holiday than the Italian summer of Ferragosto. Just today, at the dusty Caffè Blackwood, I try to spot in the map where Villa Craxi is located Route El Fawara. Here in Hammamet they have even named an entire neighbourhood after him. In the meantime, I try to take a break from the daily Tunisian breakfast and finally soften up with some hot croissants, crepes and gaufrettes drenched in melted chocolate. On the side there is a very fat gentleman, really huge, he confabulates something on the phone in my language, in front of him he only has a croissant and an espresso, he is definitely Italian. I would like to ask him how to find the villa, but he looks shady. One of the three Italians I met during the whole trip to Tunisia, a fine prototype, no doubt about it. Taking the right road to Villa Craxi is a puzzle, I get stuck on a long dirt track lined with tall prickly pear trees. A Mediterranean dream. I ring the bell of a wonderful private mansion, after passing a long driveway lined with palm trees.

I have a word with the butler of a magnificent private villa: ‘No, Monsieur Craxi’s residence est là-bas!’ I am still out of the way, but we have a nice conversation, after many smiles he invites me for tea in the living room, typical impromptu Arab hospitality. A couple more tries..game over. But after all, what do I care to see where a political leader of the 1980s spent his fugitive days? I probably allowed myself to be influenced by the book written here by Bettino himself, ‘Paris-Hammamet’, published by the Craxi Foundation. With a dubious literary trick, Craxi tells his story by writing about a certain former Italian prime minister, Ghino (the name he used to sign his name in the journal L’Avanti during his young years), who lives in Paris in exile. Fearing for his life, Ghino contacts Karim, an Italian-Tunisian agent in Hammamet, to whom he is bound by an old and deep friendship. Karim and Ghino are caught up in an international conspiracy that crosses Mossad, CIA, Soviet secret services and clashes with an international organisation called koros. Whose aim is? Destabilise Europe and the Mediterranean, to ‘shape the world according to their financial and political needs, an ingenious criminality, flying high… it wants to sculpt peoples and nations as if they were rough marble’ […]. Craxi’s apologia emerges in many angles of the thriller, which I quote with a few excerpts: ‘The president Ghino (Craxi) is too cumbersome, now more than before… he has always annoyed those people… And not only because he has always shown himself to be pro-Arab…’. Koros is ‘a multinational organisation that also resorts to terrorist-eversive techniques. The direction is in the hands of an autonomous sector of financial lobbies from Wall Street and the City of London, which are able to bring about sudden collapses of any currency. They announce the ‘global’ market and the political-institutional ‘globalisation’ of the entire globe; they regard national identity and unity as obstacles to the market and behave as the leaders of a supranational state. […]’.

In the age of the end of history, Craxi argues that the United States is illegitimately taking on the role of sole guarantor of the global order, at a time when bipolarism has turned to ashes. Under their umbrella, Germany was once again able to invade ‘with its economic-financial power Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Turkey, dangerously touching even the Asian territories of the former Soviet Union’. Craxi also insinuates that there is ‘direct responsibility of the Bonn government, at least for the initial phase of the tragedy, in the ethno-religious wars in the former Yugoslavia’. Finally, he closes with his political manifesto, portraying his ideology as ‘too patriotic’ and dangerously oriented towards a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, a sort of left-wing neo-Gaullism that wanted a Europe that tended to be friendly to the Arab world. Craxi’s alter ego, Ghino, regards Tunisia as his second homeland. ‘Tunisia. There is salvation. There, regeneration’. From the trenches of Hammamet, Ghino/Craxi would ‘carry on his discourse, shooting uncomfortable truths in different directions.’

And I, disinterested in ideology, disturbed but nevertheless intrigued by this neurotic political thesis, want to see the site of this ‘trench’. Instead, I cannot see his home. At sunset, I see only the appendix of what was the Craxi era, the final run, his tombstone, in a foreign land, at the Catholic cemetery just outside the Medina walls, facing the sea. The epitaph reads: ‘Here, on friendly soil, rests a great Italian. The family and the free Italian men and women express eternal gratitude to the Tunisian people’. On his tomb, on the other hand, is carved a white book, with the inscription ‘My freedom equals my life. B.C’. And reading this sentence, by a man, an Italian, in Hammamet, left me sad. The last years of the political leader were consumed in Hammamet under the aegis of Ben Ali, who never granted extradition. The ghosts of the misunderstandings of Italian politics still haunt this decadent city, but Hammamet is not just Craxi. The Hammamet International Cultural Centre is another neglected historical site. In the 1920s, Romanian millionaire George Sebastian built a luxurious white Tunisian-style villa in the middle of a lush garden overlooking the Mediterranean. It soon became a place of glittering parties and balls, of memorable encounters. Erwin Rommel even enjoyed its hammam when the villa became Axis headquarters during World War II. He lounged here only a few years before Winston Churchill, who wrote some of his memoirs there after the war.

Today, the villa is in a state of near-abandonment, housing here and there works of contemporary art by local artists. The fourteen-acre grounds also include an eco-museum, where citrus trees and olive groves are cultivated and exhibited according to a thematic itinerary that reveals local cultivation and irrigation techniques, along with the ancient traditions of local families. Hammamet is also sea, a long expanse of sandy beach, from the walls of the Medina to the marina at Yasmina, deafening and made ugly at night by kitschy clubs and hotels. The real charm of the city is its windy, muddy, yet still picturesque beach, a true African landscape, I think, when I see some camels striding along the shoreline. The smell of the sea also penetrates the tunnels of the Medina, where the noise becomes muffled and the silence poignant. The walls of the Kasbah overshadow the colour of the houses more than in other medinas, tinting the surface with a melancholic ochre, when one visits it at dusk, sipping a glass on the ramparts of the refined Barberousse wine bar. Hammamet is fascinating, it knows how to bring you back to the intimacy and simplicity of its seaside village streets, while still concealing the signs of a greater past, shattered in the decadence of the present. It is the antechamber to a more inedited, more enigmatic Tunisia. I realised this when I set off south again, stopping in Hergla, a fishing town in the Gulf of Hammamet. True, in Italy Hammamet is associated with Veratour, TUI, Alpitour, Craxi villages. But heading south, inland towards Sousse, Monastir, Sfax… the authentic Tunisian personality emerges, asking to be left in peace, in its history, in its identity, despite the oppressive economic and political crisis. Hergla Beach, with its white sand and calm, crystal-clear sea, invites this reflection, generating expectations for the next stages of my journey. On Hergla’s foreshore, I watch an old woman look out to the horizon, submerged and sitting in the middle of the sea in her plastic chair, and the families of Tunisians who always bathe on the shore, afraid to go where ‘you can’t touch’ the ground of the sea. As if they could never take flight, If only they would try to swim out to sea..