BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Rejecting Government for a Darker Rule : GETTING THE BOOT: Italy’s Unfinished Revolution <i> by Matt Frei</i> ; Times Books $23, 288 pages

An ambitious title: BBC correspondent Matt Frei intends to explain Italy to his readers by dissecting the political corruption scandal of 1992--and using it as a departure point for a more general analysis of politics in a country that seems determined to defy organized government.

The beginnings of the scandal were deliciously mundane: Mario Chiesa, who ran the oldest retirement home in Milan, lived like a king on a small-time businessman’s salary. He made a fatal mistake, however: He failed to make sure that his ex-wife, whom he left for a younger woman, lived like a queen. She complained to the police that he had failed to make his alimony payments.

A cleaning contractor coincidentally complained that Signor Chiesa had demanded a 10% “commission” for a contract to clean the old people’s home. That was the beginning of the end. A rabid prosecutor sent the contractor back, wired and carrying a hidden camera. When the police arrived afterward, they found Chiesa flushing 100,000-lire notes down the toilet.

Had Chiesa been an isolated opportunist, the story might have ended there. But he was a member of the Socialist Party, a man with important friends and who expected some of them to rescue him from his embarrassing predicament. When they failed to come forward, he decided to save himself--and started naming names.

A year later the government was in a shambles and a new prime minister--businessman Silvio Berlusconi, for whom Frei exhibits particular disdain--was in place. The Old Guard had set up camp in a number of luxury hotels. There were casualties, men who in the early days of the scandal committed suicide while in prison, but for the most part it was the same old circus with a new cast of characters.

By the time Frei got around to writing his epilogue, that regime had ended, Italians had gotten tired of too many stories of corruption, and Frei had realized that favors--from a bribe down to a free lunch--are an integral part of Italian culture.

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What does it mean? According to Frei, that Benito Mussolini was right: “It is not impossible to rule the Italians,” Frei quotes him as saying, “it is unnecessary.” There are layers of bureaucracy, village by village, sometimes family by family, that defy any attempt to impose rule from above.

Were this merely the story of greed and more greed, Frei’s book would be the kind that is quoted at dinner parties; many of the anecdotes are irresistibly funny. But his extensive research turns up too many examples of a darker self-rule, based on superstition and fear.

This is not merely black comedy. This is also the story of a young couple who beat their infant daughter to death because they believed she was possessed by the devil who had inhabited their house for years. No one could reason with them about the normalcy of a child’s cry. No one intervened. They governed themselves, with tragic results.

The other problem is what you do once you collect all this great material. Frei suffers a bit from the too-much-stuff syndrome, and as a result the text is often redundant and disorganized, as though he cannot decide when to tell his stories and when to provide some analytical cement to hold them together.

His book, like the country it describes, is an unlikely amalgam of history, family melodrama, anarchy and exquisite culture. Frei got a lot of the Boot, but he didn’t quite get it: This is a collection of material, well-reported and often insightfully presented, but it is not as comprehensive or as authoritative as the reader, or author, might have liked.