The Dark Heart of Italy, by Tobias Jones

Brian Morton looks for the roots of Italy's malaise in this affectionate, occasionally appalled investigation

The 12 December 1969 is a pivotal date in Italian history: 16 people died when a 7kg bomb exploded in a bank building on Milan's Piazza Fontana. The killings ushered in a decade of violence and reprisal that continued until the far bloodier bombing of Bologna station in August 1980. These were the "years of lead" that have hung round the neck of Italian politics ever since.

Four days after the Milan bombing, police were questioning a young anarchist railwayman who apparently admitted responsibility. Despite the presence of four policemen and seemingly unhampered by a severe ante-mortem injury to the head, the suspect managed to find an open window (obviously a mild December night in Milan) and jumped four storeys to his death.

There were immediate suspicions that he had been "suicided" following a violent interrogation. The policeman in charge sued Luigi Calabresi of the left-wing journal Lutta Continua for that insinuation. Three years later, Calabresi was shot dead outside his home. And so it continued.

The deaths of Giuseppe "Pino" Pinelli and Calabresi are pivotal events in Tobias Jones's searchingly personal journey through contemporary Italy. They establish a mood compounded of fear, reprisal, double bluff and the eternal principle of "nobody pays". Which means that everyone pays, except the guilty. The other key moment in the book is Jones's visit to the prison cell of the man charged with murdering Calabresi. Scarcely anyone in Italy, right or left, genuinely believes in the guilt of Adriano Sofri, who is set to die in custody, albeit at a slower pace than Pinelli.

The coroner in Pinelli's case delivered a verdict lent universal currency by Dario Fo in The Accidental Death of an Anarchist. It's Fo, rather than a whole library of heavy tomes on governance, who captures the character of modern Italy: its absurdism, its thinness of culture, its atavistic politics and weird, stoical amorality. This is a country where the dispossessed watch the antics of the hyper-rich with a strange detachment, and in Italy it is the hyper-rich, the Berlusconis and Agnellis, who rule.

The prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, controls industrial monopolies, owns football clubs and an entire media network which guarantees him uncontested broadcast of every public word he utters. Small wonder that Italians are puzzled over our "cash for questions" scandals.

Jones has lived in Parma since 1999 and, for all the bizarre contradictions, is clearly in love with the city and country. The Dark Heart of Italy moves thoughtfully and without hurry. He goes to Sicily, which we think of as an arid, violent place, birthplace of the Mafia. But Sicily also nurtured some of Italy's greatest writers: Vega, Lampedusa, Pirandello and Sciascia. He examines the undercurrents of Italian football (nobody pays, everyone pays), explores the strange cult of the stigmatic Padre Pio, and hovers between horror and delight at Italian television.

It is hard for outsiders to swallow, but a given for intelligent Italians, that the country which gave the world Giotto, Michelangelo and Leonardo, the most thoroughly visual culture in the West, now whiles away the age zapping listlessly from blandly sexy game show to astrology slot. Italy has more terrestrial channels than anywhere on the planet, and they are all relentlessly the same. Young Italians are astonished that we still flock to the country looking for "culture", and seem mildly discomfited that we don't perceive the darkness at the heart.

As Jones recognises, the paradox and bathos do not stop with Giotto versus television. The land itself is violent, riven by earthquakes, landslips and active volcanoes. Its politics is a curious compound of old Fascism and a secretive residue of Allied military presence. Insofar as the once-treasured domino theory applied to Europe, Italy was the double six.

The management of football clubs and the election and disposal of popes still run according to the same dark rules. The CIA, the Mafia, the Church and big business move in a danse macabre whose steps mystify the uninitiated. Jones, though, offers no theory of Italian politics and culture. He is an affectionate, occasionally appalled observer, an inside-outsider. He is unmistakably not a tourist.