ROME LETTER/Paddy Agnew: If you come from my generation, it comes naturally to address film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci as "maestro" when you finally meet him. Even if he is now 64 years old and walks with the aid of a stick, he is still an iconic figure for those of us who recall the fuss generated by his epoch-making Last Tango In Paris.
The popular imagination, and indeed the popular press, were much taken with the steamy sex scenes in that film, involving Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider. What they missed, however, was the spiritual intensity of a film that was the work of a complex intellectual and a man who has always seemed like a fitting artistic descendant of another of Parma's famous sons, namely composer Giuseppe Verdi.
The son of a distinguished poet, Attilio Bertolucci, the young Bertolucci himself won a prize for his book of poems, In Search of Mystery, written at the age of 16. When his family moved to Rome in 1952, he discovered that one of the neighbours downstairs was a budding Italian novelist, destined to become another cinematic icon, namely Pier Paolo Pasolini. Not surprisingly some years later, Bertolucci dropped out of university in Rome to serve an artistic apprenticeship, working alongside Pasolini during the making of Accatone, Pasolini's first film.
On a few occasions over the years, and notwithstanding that I am not a cinema specialist, I have made tentative attempts to contact Bertolucci to interview him. Those attempts came to nothing, usually for the good reason that Bertolucci has not lived or worked in Italy for much of the last decade and more.
Films such as The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993) took Bertolucci off to China, North Africa and Tibet, always via the US of course, but far from Italy. Even his most recent film, The Dreamers (due for release in Dublin in the New Year) took him back to Paris and out of Italy.
This is no coincidence, as members of the foreign press corps discovered recently when in Rome. I asked Bertolucci how he felt about today's Italy, an Italy dominated by the imposing figure of TV mogul and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. "I don't feel good at all in Italy today. Frankly, I feel a sense of authentic horror at some of the self-aggrandising "externations" of Berlusconi".
Bertolucci was quick to point out, however, that he had found it difficult to live and work in Italy long before Silvio Berlusconi entered politics (in 1994). His sense of alienation from his homeland became especially heightened in the mid- and late-1980s, a period of "rampant socialism" under the leadership of Bettino Craxi, the man who died in self-imposed exile in Tunisia after being convicted of corruption.
When the "Tangentopoli" or "Bribesville" scandals surfaced so dramatically in 1992, seeming to sweep away an entire corrupt ruling class, he felt a terrific opportunity had presented itself for "things to change". Somewhat ruefully, he now concedes "that \ simply didn't happen".
Interestingly, as he looks back over recent Italian political history, he points the finger at the centre-left, now in opposition, more than at the bogey-Berlusconi figure. He recalled having dinner with two of the most senior members of the Democratic Left, former prime minister Massimo D'Alema and current mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, during the late 1990s when the centre-left was in government.
Bertolucci asked both men just how they intended to "look after culture". What were their plans for the state broadcaster, RAI? Did they see it as "a remarkable instrument for education" or were they more interested in winning the audience ratings battle with Mr Berlusconi's Mediaset commercial empire? Both men, he claims, made it clear their interest was the latter type of television to have an instrument that would compete with Mr Berlusconi come election time.
The result is that in today's Italy "popular culture is diminished, people have a much reduced vocabulary".
In some senses, those observations brought him back to his most recent film, The Dreamers, set in the heady days of Paris in May 1968.
"Today's youth is suffocated by the lack of a link into a real culture. If it was right to rebel then, it is right to rebel today. When people talk about politics today, they always say that 1968 [the student uprisings in France and Italy\] was simply a failure. Curiously, many of the people who say that were youthful protagonists then who have now moved into positions of power. For myself, I still think 1968 was one of the great revolutions of our time."