Top Quotes: “The Italians” — John Hooper
Geography
“Almost 1 in every 10 Italians lives on an island, physically detached from the rest of the nation. Sicily, the biggest island in the Mediterranean and with a population the size of Norway’s, is quite big enough to be a state by itself. The landscape of the island is as varied as that of many larger territories. Sandy beaches and rocky shorelines, precipitous citrus groves and undulating wheat fields are all in their different ways typically Sicilian. There’s an extensive plain outside in Catania in the east, as well as several mountain ranges, one of which has a peak rising to almost 6,500 feet. Even that, though, is dwarfed by Mt. Etna, Europe’s biggest active volcano, which is more than half as high again. Plans to link Sicily to the rest of the Italy by means of a bridge or tunnel go back to classical times. But even though the island is only 3 km from the mainland at the closest point, none of the plans has ever been realized — not least, in recent years, because of a fear that such a massive construction project could hand a bonanza to [mafias like] Sicily’s Cosa Nostra and the ‘Ndangheta of Calabria, the region on the other side of the Strait of Messina.”
“Naples was regarded as a kind of earthly paradise. Goethe, who visited the city in 1787 and seems to have seen nothing of the poverty that has always been endemic to Naples, described it as a place where ‘everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness.’ One wonders what he would make of the city and region today. Campania is Italy’s poorest region and in many respects its saddest. Most of its people live in the immense hinterlands of Naples and Salerno, often in perilously sited or poorly-built housing blocks — the visible manifestations of corruption and the capillary presence of the local mafia, the Camorra.
Lazio, north of Campania, is the land of the Latins, the ancient Latium. Much of it is flat, especially around Latina, which — despite its classical-sounding name — only came into existence under Benito Mussolini in the 30s when the surrounding mafias were drained.”
“Between the northern salients of Lombardy and Veneto is the composite region of Trentino-Alto Adige, which has a predominantly German-speaking north and a mainly Italian-speaking south. This Alpine territory was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was given to Italy as a reward for switching to the Allied side in WWI. Since 1972, Alto Adige (which its German-speaking inhabitants prefer to call South Tyrol) and Trentino have governed themselves more or less separately as autonomous provinces.
The region as a whole is one of five with a special constitutional status. The others are Sicily, Sardinia, and two more in the north. One, the Alpine Valle d’Aosta, has strong links with France. The other, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which borders Slovenia, divides roughly half and half into a mountainous north and a flatter south.”
History
“The territory eventually came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire — a reflection of their claim to a legitimacy that derived from the papacy, and through the papacy from God. Like the Papal States, the Holy Roman Empire would survive into the 19th century. At its greatest extent, it covered much of N. Italy, Sardinia, parts of E. France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Germany, some of W. Poland, modern-day Czechia, and most of today’s Slovenia.”
“The creation of this new empire didn’t just bring about conflict. It also led, in Italy as well as in Germany, to an abnormal degree of political fragmentation. Though a few of the Holy Roman emperors opted to rule from Rome, most spent their lives on the other side of the Alps. The popes, for their part, were often more concerned with ecclesiastical and theological matters than with the mundane details of civil administration. And in any case their military resources were limited: they relied on the protection of the Papal States to a large extent on moral authority and mercenary troops.
The result was a power vacuum in the N. half of Italy in which many towns and cities, particularly those that had once enjoyed a degree of autonomy under the original Roman Empire, started to govern themselves. Successive popes, keen to curb the power of the Holy Roman emperors, encouraged the spread of these miniature semidemocratic republics known as communes. When the communes began to be replaced by more personal and autocratic forms of government in the 14th century, Italy north of the Papal States became a patchwork of semi-independent principalities, duchies, marquisates, counties and tiny lordships dotted with the odd surviving republic. Wars between them were common.
The inhabitants of N. Italy in the late Middle Ages may’ve been divided and vulnerable. But for as long the communes survived, their citizens enjoyed a degree of control over their own affairs that was unthinkable in most of the rest of the Europe. They were also increasingly prosperous: a surge in economic growth began toward the end of the 11th century and lasted on and off until the start of the 14th, laying the material foundations for the Renaissance.
The most powerful of the republics in the north was Venice. But it was also the least typical. Venice’s lagoon-dwelling inhabitants — originally refugees from the German tribal invasions — had never been subject to the Holy Roman Empire. They had elected their first duke, or doge, back in the 8th century after cutting themselves loose from the Byzantine Empire. Enriched by trade with the East, especially after the start of the Crusades, the Venetian Republic grew to be an important naval power. By the end of the 15th century, the doges had an empire of their own that stretched all the way to Cyprus.
By casting a protective mantle over the rest of N & C Italy, the emperors not only encouraged the region to fracture internally, but cut it off from the south. In the thousand years that followed Charlemagne’s coronation, alliances were sometimes forged that involved this or that southern state. From time to time an emperor would lead his army into the Mezzogiorno. And for a while, the two halves of Italy were nominally reunited as part of the empire. But for the rest, the affairs of the north and south were separate, and they developed as quite different societies.
Sicily was gradually conquered by Muslim forces in the 9th century and remained an Islamic emirate until the end of the 11th.”
“The unity of the south under a succession of foreign rulers contrasted sharply with the fragmentation of the north. But after a series of catastrophes in the 14th century, notably the Black Death, economic activity there recovered and gradually reacquired momentum. It was during this period too that the first great Renaissance works of art and lit made their appearance in Siena and Florence.
Italians produced some of their greatest cultural achievements in precisely those periods in which they were in greatest peril. The prosperity and emerging cultural brilliance of the states that replaced or absorbed the communes masked the acute danger they were in.”
“Though it was far from obvious at the time, the 16th century marked the start of Italy’s economic decline relative to other parts of W. Europe. There was more than one cause, but probably the most important were the changes that were taking place in the pattern of world trade. The routes across the Atlantic had already begun to carry far more traffic and generate far greater wealth than those in the Mediterranean, while the Far East would soon replace the Near East as a source of imports for the increasingly wealthy nations of W. Europe.”
“The presence of Muslims over a period of centuries is often cited as an explanation for the traditionally low status of women in Sicily, and for the prevalence of so many dark-haired, dark-eyed beauties among the women of Puglia. Some Italians will tell you that, paradoxically, you’re more likely to encounter a blond-haired or redheaded person on Sicily than on the mainland, and that that has to do with more than a century of Norman rule.”
Language
“Several completely foreign languages are spoken within [Italy’s] frontiers. More than 3/4 of the population of Valle d’Aosta can speak either French or a Franco-Provencal patois. In the western districts of Piedmont, there are some 100,000 Occitan speakers. And in the Alto Adige/South Tyrol, in addition to German, which is spoken by almost 70% of the population — almost 350,000 people — there is Ladin, a language that is the mother tongue of some 20,000 Italians. Ladin is related to Friulian, which is spoken by far more people, around 300,000. Among the other languages to be found in Friuli-Venezia Giulia are Slovene, an archaic variant of Slovene known as Resian (considered by some experts to be a separate language), and various dialects of German.
Croatian has a toehold in Molise. And there are some 50 Albanian-speaking communities scattered across the southern mainland and Sicily. The Arebereshe, as they’re known, are descendants of refugees who fled from Ottoman rule, beginning in the 15th century. Integration has whittled down their numbers over the years, but estimates of the number of Albanian speakers in Italy range up to 100,000. Another 20,000 or so Italians are reckoned to speak a dialect of Greek called, appropriately enough, Griko. It lives on in a handful of villages in Puglia and Calabria, and even among some of the city dwellers of Reggio Calabria. Catalan is still spoken in and around the town of Alghero in NW Sardinia, where about 10,000 people regard it as their mother tongue.
Other countries also have substantial minorities who speak a foreign language. But what really sets Italy apart are the vast number of Italians who speak a dialect. Exactly where a dialect begins and a language ends is a matter for fine, and inevitably controversial, judgment. Sardinian is generally regarded as a separate language, its dissimilarity a product of the island’s separateness from the rest of Italy for much of its history. In fact, Italian has fewer words in common with Sardinian than it does with French. And the 2 languages look very different when written down. The overwhelming majority of Sardinians — about a million people — speak Sardinian, which has 3 dialects of its own.
Piedmontese and Sicilian, spoken by 1.6 million and 4.7 million Italians respectively, are also sufficiently distinct to be considered languages. Others would add Venetian, Lombard and Neapolitan. But then there’s an almost infinite variation in the way that Italians speak among themselves at home and with others from the same city or region. The dialect term for an object, creature, or activity in one place can be utterly different from the word used to mean the same thing just a few miles away. A coat hanger, for example, is known to some Italians as an ometto, to others as a stampella, and to yet others as an angioletto. But it can also be a gruccia, attaccapanni, croce, appendiabiti, cruccia, stanfella, crociera, or appendino.”
Politics
“In Italy, belonging to the armed forces doesn’t carry with it anything like the same cachet that it does in the UK or US.
For the vast majority of Italians, war is simply brutta (ugly, nasty) and discussion of it is to be avoided in polite company.
Of course, there’s plenty of violent behavior in Italian life — mafia killings, football hooliganism, and a high level of domestic violence. But physical aggression is often replaced by verbal abuse, and verbal insults seldom lead to physical aggression. Knowing this, Italians will often say to one another things that, in other societies, would cause punches to be thrown or knives to be drawn. I know from working in Italian offices that tempestuous rows break out quite often and that, initially, you think that those involved are one snapped nerve away from coming to blows. But they often end as abruptly as they break out, and the next day you see the participants holding a perfectly civilized exchange.”
“Long experience of power changing hands in ways they were unable to influence has made Italians intensely wary of nailing their colors to any one mast. Historically, principles, ideals, and commitment have proven dangerous. Those who survived were those who took care not to show their hand, who adroitly shifted position in time to be on the right side when the outcome of the latest power struggle became clear.”
“By the end of Italy’s 2008–12 legislature, well over 100 of the 630 deputies were in a parliamentary group different from the one to which they’d belonged at the outset. About half were independents. The rest had joined other parties.
Ideological ambiguity has been a hallmark of Italian politics since the foundation of the republic in 1946. The Vatican-backed party Democrazia Christiana (DC), which dominated politics for much of the Cold War period, was almost impossible to categorize as right- or left-wing.”
“Italy has more law enforcement officers than any other country in the EU. The scope for overlap, rivalry, and confusion is considerable.
The same is true, and to a far greater extent, of the bureaucracy. According to a Confederazione Italiana Agricolotori farmers’ union study, the paperwork and time-consuming formalities rob the average Italian of about 20 days a year. It used to be the case that Italians had to renew their passports annually. Even now, they have to buy a stamp once a year to ensure the document remains valid.”
“Workmen arrived and painted blindingly white stripes at intervals across the road. From being the merest hint of a pedestrian crossing, it suddenly became the clearest in that part of Rome. But, it would seem, it was just too strident — too adamant — for someone in authority. A few weeks later, another team of workmen turned up and painted a thin layer of some murky substance over the stripes so that they became a comfortingly dim off-white.
A crossing that stated incontrovertibly — in black and white, no less — that pedestrians had an unconditional right to go, at that point, from one side of the road to the other would have come perilously close to affirming an objective truth, and the notion of objective truth is something that in Italy often causes unease.”
“Skepticism about ever being able to reach from conclusions is both reflected in, and encouraged by, the Italian language. The word verita means truth. But it also means ‘version.’ If a dispute arises, there will be my verita, your verita, and doubtless the various verita of others. Italian newspapers are full of headlines like ‘The Portofino Slaying: The Countess and the Latest Truth.’”
“As Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans began streaming into S. Europe, successive Italian governments reacted to public unease with stats to show that in the last month, or year, or whatever, so many thousand irregular immigrants had been caught and expelled. As the years went past, and the number of black and brown faces on the metro increased almost by the day, people began to suspect they were not being told the whole story. Yet it was only toward the end of the decade that it was explained to the public through the media what precisely had been meant by ‘expelled.’ Once identified, unauthorized immigrants were served with an expulsion order. Then they were let go. It mean that, if they were caught again, they could face jail. But otherwise they could either wait for an immigration amnesty of the sort that has been granted several times in Italy, or move on to another EU country where their status would be more ambiguous.
The underlying reality was that Italian politicians, like their peers in the rest of Europe, realized their country needed immigrants. Privately, they would admit it. Because of Italy’s ultralow birth rate, it had to take in people from outside if its economy as to grow and its welfare state — in particular its pension system — was to remain sustainable. But Italian politicians also knew that immigration, and particularly clandestine immigration, was a sensitive issue with the electorate. Paper ‘expulsions’ offered a delightful way out.”
Lying and Cheating
“Carlo Collodi, the author of Pinocchio, would no doubt be delighted to know how popular his character remains well over a century after he first appeared in print. But he might be dismayed to learn that the spirit of the tale is still very much alive in his native Italy. Cheating on school and university exams, for example, doesn’t attract anything like the same degree of condemnation that it does in most other societies. It’s euphemistically described as copiare, which also means ‘to copy.’”
The chairman of Fiat and Ferrari was for a time the president of the employers’ federation, Confindustria. Yet he proudly revealed during an encounter with students at the business-oriented Luiss University that ‘at school, I was the world champion at copiatura.’ Silvio Berlusconi made his earliest profits by writing essays for other students to hand in.”
“In lots of countries, you would find the equivalent of the biglettini, tiny crib sheets that are hidden somewhere on the examinee’s person. But in Italy there’s an item of clothing specially made for carrying them called a cartucciera: a cotton garment resembling a cartridge belt, worn around the wait under normal clothing. Crib sheets on every subject likely to arise in the exam can be put in its pockets and discreetly extracted according to need.
With the arrival of the internet, things have become even more sophisticated. Websites have been set up offering pens, watches, and even sweatshirts with hidden compartments for bigliettini. Electronic gadgets have also opened up new possibilities for the inventive and unscrupulous, especially smartphones. The educational authorities swiftly banned them, but the prohibition can be circumvented: the trick is to arrive with two and hand in one.”
“The wife who originally told police she was in the kitchen when she heard the screams now says she wasn’t in the house at all, while a friend has come forward to say she saw her in the supermarket. Meanwhile, Uncle Rosario, who’s testified that he was away in the regional capital that day, has been found never to have left his hometown, and his wife, who heard the telltale footsteps on the gravel path, has changed her story and now says there was only 1 person running away from the scene of the crime, and not 2.
‘They take us for idiots,’ said a judge in Aosta after just such a case had passed through his court. ‘It’s incredible how easily they lie in front of a judge…without the least attention paid to the plausibility of their stories.’ He estimated that the number of witnesses brought before him who told the truth was between 20–30%. ‘Lying amuses and pleases,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t bring social contempt.’
The problem of getting at the truth is also perhaps one reason for the prevalence of wiretapping in Italy. According to a 2003 study, the number of warrants issued annually in Italy — 76 per 100,000 inhabitants — was higher than in any of the other countries surveyed. The corresponding figure was 15 per 100k in Germany, 5 in France, 6 in England and Wales, and only 0.5 in the U.S.”
“Vodafone, which acquired a controlling stake in an Italian firm, Omnitel, in 2000, has since taken a 1/3 share of the market. There have been various reasons for its success. Its earliest ad campaign, built around a distinctive-looking model and actor, the part-Maori, Australian-born Megan Gale, made a huge impact. Since then, Vodafone has deployed a string of catchy slogans, shrewdly aimed at Italian sensibilities, to keep itself in the public eye. But I suspect that some modest part of its success is due to its having offered a unique service. It’s known as Alter Ego and enables customers to have 2 numbers on the same sim card. As the company explains, ‘You can pass from one to the other simply and quickly by using the menu and choosing to be contactable only one the active number or both.’ Perfect for cheating husbands or wives, and mightily useful for anyone, in fact, who wants to make him- or herself temporarily unavailable. Vodafone confirmed that Alter Ego was available only in Italy. It was, said a spokesman, a ‘local market initiative.’”
“The officers were behaving in a way Italians do instinctively when faced with something new or dramatic or out of the ordinary. Nothing — but nothing — is ascribed to chance. This is maybe the single biggest difference between the worldviews of N. & S. Europeans, especially Italians. The former tend to view the latter, condescendingly, as besotted with conspiracy theories. But the fact is that S. Europeans, particularly Italians, are conspiratorial. What’s more, they often talk in metaphors and communicate with symbols.”
Symbols and Visuals
“One reason Italians place so much emphasis on what’s visible is because they assume it’s a representation of something that’s not. And that’s only to be expected in a society were so much is communicated by symbols and gestures.
No people on earth express themselves as visually as the Italians. Hand gestures exist in every part of the world and some are international. But only the Italians can draw on such a vast range of hand signs, each linked to a precise meaning. Sometimes, if you can’t hear a conversation, you can get the overall gist just by watching.
There are gestures for hunger, agreement, dissent, wedlock, insistence, negation, voluptuousness, and complicity. There are different movements for communicating the drinking of water and wine. Hand signs can be read in place of entire sentences like ‘See you later’ or ‘Get to the point.’ I once did an inventory and had no difficulty reaching a count of 97.
The ‘gesticulation quotient’ varies considerably from person to person and situation to situation. By and large, the more intense the conversation, the more likely the participants are to use their hands. And, in general, the use of physical gestures diminishes as you go up the socioeconomic scale.”
“Historically, Italians have stood out in anything that has to do with what’s visible, be it the art of the Renaissance or modern car design. The areas in which they’ve excelled include painting, architecture, sculpture, cinema, and of course opera, which gives visual expression to music. As for fashion, they’ve been setting international trends since Shakespeare had York in Richard II cite
Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
Limps after in base imitation…
Frequently, appearance in Italy comes before more practical concerns. Elsewhere, for example, ads for computers and other tech gadgets concentrate mainly on specifications and performance: the gigabytes of RAM, the density of pixels on the display, the number of ports and so on. But ads intended to woo Italian consumers often have none of that. One, for laptops produced by Taiwanese Asus in 2010, showed the computer’s latest slimline notebook next to an array of filled champagne glasses. Alongside was a slogan ‘Tech in Style’ with the word ‘Style’ printed in a font so big it filled much of the page.
In many other countries, female police officers are made to cut their hair short because of the risk that long hair might be grabbed by an assailant. In Italy, that’s thought unacceptable. It’s quite normal to see lush tresses cascading out from beneath uniform caps. In the semi-militarized Carabinieri, there’s a rule that the hair must be gathered, but it doesn’t stop women members of the force from looking like a million bucks.
Some years ago, in the middle of winter, one of the papers ran an article on ow to cope with the fashion dilemmas posed by illness. The headline was: ‘Fever? I’m Dressing Sexily. From Lingerie to Scarves: How to Survive Influenz with Glamour.’ It presented a range of suggestions on how to prevent ‘self-respect vanishing at the first sneeze.’ Along with pretty pjs and brightly-colored socks (in place of ‘distinctly unseductive slippers), a hot water bottle was considered a ‘must.’ But — readers were earnestly advised — it would be ‘better to choose one with a designer label.’”
“It was Berlusconi’s hold on TV that counted more than anything.
Italians are unusually dependent on TV for their news and info. Even before the internet began to make inroads into circulations, less than 1 Italian in 10 bought a daily paper. And as recently as 2014, and despite the spread of the internet, an unusually extensive poll of voters found that more than half took their news predominantly or solely from TV.
While in opposition, Berlucsoni was able to count on the support of the 3 channels belonging to his Mediaset network. But when he was in government, he could also exert influence on the 3 belonging to the state-owned Rai. The effect of this videocracy, as it’s been termed, is impossible to demonstrate in any quantitative way. But it can be illustrated.
In 2010, for example, a poll was carried out to determine Italians’ perception of the economy. One of the multiple-choice questions asked when in recent years unemployment had been at its highest. In fact, it had been rising ever since Berlusconi’s government had come into office 2 years earlier. Yet the largest number of respondents gave their answer 2007 — the year before he returned to power. There was a similar misconception about the overall health of the economy. On average, those who took part in the survey vastly underestimated how much it had shrunk. It wasn’t until the following year that Italians began to realize how bad the situation was.
Ever since 1994, Berlusconi and his media flunkies have succeeded in changing not only perceptions, but the meaning of words. The head of Mediaset began his political adventure with a massive handicap. Casting around for support, the only people he could find, apart from the Northern League, were the neo-Fascists, the pariahs of postwar Italian politics. When he first expressed support for them, most people were deeply shocked.
So, instead of acknowledging that he had put himself at the head of an alliance packed with far-right-wingers, Berlusconi began to refer to his followers and allies as ‘moderates.’ His coalition was of the ‘center-right.’ At first, people took it for the nonsense it was. But Berlusconi and his TV channels hammered at the terms relentlessly and gradually, over the years, they’ve become universally accepted.”
“Italians generally agree on the need to avoid losing face, they’re prepared, in the same way as Chinese or Japanese, to go to great lengths to ensure that others don’t do so. A CEO who has utterly mishandled the running of a firm won’t usually be openly berated at the annual general meeting and denounced in excoriating fashion in the financial media. It will be quietly agreed between all concerned that he’s not up to the job, at which point he’ll be got rid of in the most discreet manner possible and in a way that allows him to keep his dignity and reputation.
Dread of losing face is omnipresent in Italian society. It explains why there’s so few laundromats, and why the few that do exist are used mostly by poor immigrants and foreign students. It’s why Italians put on tanning lotion before they get to the beach or pool. It’s why town and city councils arrange for their best-looking cops to direct traffic in the main square. And why Italians above a certain social standing are reluctant to travel on public transit.
Saving face is also why Italians of both sexes will endure remarkable discomfort in the interest of keeping up appearances. Throughout the rest of the Mediterranean, from Spain to Israel, male workers cope with the summer heat by changing into short-sleeved shirts around June. But in Italy that would be to run the risk of being thought ‘vaguely obscene.’ So, even as the temperatures rise into the high 90s in late July, the sort of Italians who wear a suit or jacket and trousers to work remain stubbornly — and willingly — in shirts that allow them to shoot their cuffs.”
“In a cross section of 25 countries, Italy was second, behind Greece, for the number of plastic surgeons per 100,000 inhabitants and third, behind South Korea and Greece, for the number of procedures — surgical and nonsurgical — relative to the population. The number of cosmetic procedures carried out in Italy in 2010 was proportionately more than 30% higher than in the US. France, Spain and Germany all lagged behind Italy while the figure for Britain was barely a quarter of that for Italy.”
“It sometimes takes months or years, but sooner or later you notice something odd: that handicapped people in Italy are almost as rare as redheads on the streets and in the bars and restaurants. There are disabled mendicants in the bigger cities, for sure. But they’re almost always foreigners. And the same is true of the tourists you see being pushed around in wheelchairs.
So where are the Italians with evident physical deformities? Where are the blind and paraplegic? And where, among all these beautiful people, are the Italians who suffer from Down syndrome or cerebral palsy. The sad truth is that large numbers are at home and out of sight — kept there, in many cases, by their relatives’ feelings of shame, discomfort, and embarrassment, and, in other cases, by the lack of facilities for the handicapped in a society that seems never really to have made provision for them.
The invisibility of Italy’s disabled, like much else in society, may also owe something to the huge influence on society of the Catholic Church. Ideas that developed in medieval times, though long since discredited, continue to exercise a subtle influence. One was that deformity was a punishment from god.
Handicapped Italians aren’t the only invisible ones. My personal experience is that Italians are exceptionally reluctant to be seen when they’re seriously or terminally ill. It’s also noticeable how few women you see in Italy in the last months of pregnancy. This is paradoxical since pregnancy in Italy is wrapped in a fair amount of encouraging rhetoric. Women who are expecting a child are referred to as being ‘in sweet expectation’: a phrase that’s not just used by solicitous elderly relatives, but in, for example, airport announcements telling them they can go to the head of the queue.”
Life and Death
“Italian owners [are] noticeably more reluctant than, say, Britons or Americans to have their pets euthanized. They extend to animals, in other words, a belief that has immense weight in Italy: that life is so precious it must be prolonged and protected in all circumstances and to the very last.”
“No matter how conservative in other aspects an Italian politician may be, they’re likely to be as appalled as the most fervent radical by the sorts of executions that are common occurrences in the US. Occasionally the case of some unfortunate American on death row is given publicity, perhaps in a magazine article or TV documentary, and it becomes a national scandal in Italy. Sometimes the prisoner facing execution is an Italian American. Often there’s doubt over the condemned person’s guilt. But not always. After the case is brought to light, a barrage of letters and emails is loosed off at a doubtless bemused state governor and, as the days and hours tick away toward the moment of execution, growing pressure is brought to bear on politicians in Italy and Italy’s diplomats in DC to lobby for a reprieve. When, as usually happens, the campaign proves to be in vain, there’s a sense of national outrage. However disunited Italians may be in other respects, on this issue they think almost as one.
Why? The obvious answer is church teaching on the sanctity of life. But is it the right one? The Church’s ‘theology of life’ is a comparatively recent evolution in its thinking, which has served to ensure that its attitude to capital punishment is consistent with its doctrine on such matters as artificial birth control, in vitro and stem cell research. But the fact is that executions were commonplace in the old Papal States, and Vatican City didn’t get around to abolishing the death penalty until 1969–123 years after Michigan, the first US state to do so.
It could be argued that, since Italians have had such an overwhelming influence on the church, it’s their reverence and enthusiasm for life that has shaped the Vatican’s teaching and not the other way around. The first state in modern times to abolish the death penalty was an Italian one, Tuscany, in 1786. The day on which the death penalty was dropped from its penal code was declared a public holiday in Tuscany in 2000. The ruler of Tuscany at the time was an Austrian, but he was inspired to enact his reform by an Italian, Cesare Beccaria, who has a claim to have been the world’s first penologist. The short-lived Roman Republic was the next state to do away with executions, in 1849, and San Marino wasn’t far behind.
The view that life is infinitely precious goes hand in hand with Italians’ determination to live it to the full. As much as possible is done to improve on mundane reality, minimize what is dull, maximize what is agreeable and generally file off the rough edges of existence.”
“‘Rather than riches, I want tranquility,’ wrote the poet Ariosto. And for the most part his compatriots have taken the same view. Italians are certainly not lazy. Many work extremely hard, particularly in family businesses. But it’s rare for them to view work as anything but a necessary evil. A 2006 survey found that 2/3 of Italians would give up their work if they could be guaranteed the relatively modest sum of 5,000 euros / month. There seems to be none of the fretting that goes on in Anglo-Saxon societies about how to cope with a loss of identity. I have known plenty of Italians who’ve gone into retirement, and sometimes I’ve bumped into them in the street or when they’ve made a return visit to the offices where they worked. Not once have I heard any of them express anything but unmitigated delight at no longer having a job.
I’ve been a guest at 2 separate Italian newspapers and in neither was anything much done to make the experience of work more enjoyable. There seemed to be a generalized acceptance that this would be futile. Apart from maybe a round of drinks at Christmas, there were none of those events that in British and American offices are intended to boost corporate morale and forge team spirit. Nor, most strikingly, were there any rites of passage. When the time came for employees to retire, they simply disappeared. One day they were there at their desk. The next they were gone. There was no little party in the boss’ office to say, ‘Thanks and all the best for the future.’”
Cuisine
“Whatever their other commitments, children are expected to be at the table for dinner. It’s where the affairs of the day are discussed, problems addressed and complaints aired. When they grow up, those same children will be expected to be at their mother’s lunch table on Sunday. In the cities, you can set your watch by the traffic jams that build on Sundays before lunch, as families return to the home of the previous generation, usually stopping along the way to buy a cake or tart for the last course.
The role of the table in Italian life is relentlessly emphasized in ads of all kinds and even reflected in the grammar of the language. Il tavolo is the word for the physical object, whereas la tavola is untranslatable into English. Its connotations encompass the meal and its preparation, quality, consumption, and — most importantly — enjoyment. Il tavolo signifies an experience in which china and glass, knives and forks play only a very small and functional part. When, for example, Italians want to describe the joys of good eating and drinking, they talk of i placeri della tavola.”
“It wasn’t until quite recently that Italian cooking came to be recognized as something other than a poor second to French, even by the Italians themselves. Giuseppe Prezzolini was ahead of his time in 1954 when he asked, ‘What is the glory of Dante compared to spaghetti?’ For at least 15 years afterward, the more accepted view was that Italian gastronomy meant no more than cheap, rough wine in straw-colored flasks and mounds of pasta, all plonked down on checkered tablecloths.”
“Fast food has made only limited incursions into Italy. There are only about 450 branches of McDs, compared with 1,200+ in both France and Britain, which have similar populations. As for Starbucks, it’s never even ventured into Italy. It has branches in 60+ countries, including Germany, France, and Spain, where the local coffee is of high quality. Asked why, the CEO attributed the decision not to get involved to ‘the political and economic issues’ in Italy.”
“Pasta has long been a part of Italian cuisine, but only quite recently acquired the dominant, pervasive role it plays now. The oldest form is thought to be lasagna, which is known to have been cooked in ancient Rome, though not quite in the way it is today. Dried pasta seems to have been invented quite separately, in North Africa, as expedition food for desert caravans. It was probably brought to Sicily from the island’s Muslim conquerors.”
“Nor was tomato sauce added until comparatively recently. The tomato, which almost certainly reached Italy through Spain, had acquired its name — the pomo d’oro or ‘golden apple’ — at least as early as 1568. But it was treated by Italians — as indeed by many other people, including Americans — with immense suspicion, and entered Italian cuisine only very slowly. The first mention of tomatoes in a written recipe comes at the end of the 17th century. Over the next 100 years, tomatoes seem to have won a firm place in Neapolitan cooking. But right up until the end of the 19th century, it was more usual in C. Italy to use agresto, a concoction made of sour grapes, to give ‘bite’ to a dish.”
“War and civil strife, often resulting in deprivation, have made a huge contribution to the richness of Italy’s gastronomic repertoire. The use of arugula in salads, a culinary fashion that spread to the Anglo-Saxon world only in the 90s, originated in the grubbing for edible weeds by Italians during and after WWII. ‘The techniques devised in times of famine to render edible even the smallest, most basic resource of the land — the ability to make bread out of wild berries and grape seed recounted in so many ancient and modern chronicles, or to concoct a soup with roots from the underbrush and herbs from the ditches — all clearly testify to the difficulties of people whose daily lives were constantly threatened by the outbreak of catastrophe,’ wrote Capatti and Montanari.”
“A calculation using TripAdvisor numbers shows that, in Rome, Japanese restaurants accounted for 1% of the total and all ethnic restaurants for less than 6%. In cosmopolitan Milan, the overall figure was 17%, and in Naples 7%.”
“Decades after the intro of the EU’s single market, Italian supermarkets remain virtually bereft of foreign produce. You’ll find some German beer, no doubt, and the odd packet of mass-produced French or Dutch cheese. But what else is there will have been confined to a tiny exotic foods section where foreigners can satisfy their outlandish tastes for things like bamboo shoots and corned beef.”
“Anyone who lives in Italy soon realizes that a fear of change and a craving for security form part of the warp and weft of Italian life.
Sooner or later people who come to live in Rome notice that just about every establishment in the capital that serves food, from the costliest expense-account restaurant to the humblest self-service, has gnocchi on its menu on Thursdays. And in most cases, they aren’t to be found there on any other day of the week. It’s one of those reassuring little rituals that are so characteristic of life in Italy. If you say that you don’t really fancy gnocchi and that you’d rather have pasta or rice that day, the server’s smile will often fade, to be replaced by a look of puzzlement. You’re being contrary. You’re going against the universally accepted order of things.”
Politics and Gray Power
“Italy has experienced only 2 periods of left-wing government since WWII — from 1996 to 2001 and from 2006–2008 — a total of just 7 years.
Berlusconi, who returned to office in 2001 and remained there for 8 of the next 10 years, bolstered the conservative alignment of the society. But if the center of gravity in Italian politics is to the right of that in many other European countries, it’s to some extent because Italian society as a whole remains conservative. That doesn’t, of course, mean there aren’t plenty of Italians with progressive or radical ideas. But opinion polls suggest that, on a wide range of issues, a high percentage of the population holds conservative attitudes. In the World Values Survey of 2005–2008, for example, respondents were asked if homosexuality was justifiable on a scale from 1 (‘never’) to 10 (‘always’). In Italy, the proportion of ‘never justifiable’ responses was 51%, far higher than in France (15%) or Spain (10%). In Britain the figure was 20% and in the US it was 33%. When the same question was asked with respect to abortion, Italians proved to be less tolerant than the citizens of any other Western European country: 39% thought it was ‘never justifiable,’ compared with only 17% in Spain and 14% in France.
This conservatism isn’t restricted to politics or the issues that often feature in political debate. Though with significant exceptions, Italians tend to be wary of embracing new tech. For people with a hot summer climate, for example, they remain extraordinarily reluctant to use AC. When the temps soar into the high 90s, as they do every July, you can bet that on any given day you’ll sooner or later meet someone who tells you that they didn’t sleep a wink the night before because of the heat. In Rome at least, a high proportion of the taxi drivers refuse to turn on AC and become progressively grumpier as the day wears on.”
“Financial considerations, though, don’t help to explain other aspects of Italian technophobia. Italians were, for example, among the Europeans slowest to equip themselves with PCs and to take advantage of the internet. By the mid-2000s, more than half of Italian homes were without a computer. The most common reason given was that computers were ‘useless’ or ‘uninteresting.’ A later survey found the median amount of time spent online by Italian internet users actually fell between 2007 and 2008. By the latter date, Italy lagged behind not only Spain but also Portugal in online access. It was even further behind France and Britain. Part of the explanation is that Italy has an elderly population. But what was true of households was also true of the government. Despite promises to the contrary by Berlusconi and his ministers, Italy’s spending on the digitalization of the public administration was among the lowest in the EU as a % of GDP — below that of Slovakia.
Mistrust of the new isn’t confined to tech. In recent years, Italy has been strikingly resistant to contemporary art. The country didn’t open a national contemporary art museum until 2010. Italy produced one of the most internationally feted artists of the late 20th and early 21st century in Maurizio Cattelan. Yet no one could say that he or any of his fellow painters or sculptors had found a place for themselves in the life of their country comparable with that of, say, Andy Warhol in 1960s America. Many of the galleries and institutions in Italy dedicated to contemporary art have struggled to survive. In 2012, the head of one launched what he termed an ‘art war.’ With the consent of the artists who’d created them, he set light to a series of paintings in his collection in a deliberate protest against official and public indifference.
Just as contemporary art is absent from the mainstream, so the culture of the past — and particularly of the 50s and 60s — is present to a striking degree. Look on any newsstand and you’ll almost certainly find at least 1 DVD of a film starring either Toto or his fellow comic actor Alberto Sordi. Turn on TV in the afternoon (and sometimes even in the evening) and you are quite likely to run across one of their movies. Equally, you won’t have to root around for long in a souvenir shop before you find a calendar, postcard, or fridge magnet based on a still featuring one or the other of these actors. Bars the length and breadth of Italy are decorated with shots of Toto and Sordi in their most popular roles. Now, both men were very funny actors whose films caught some of the essence of life in Italy. But I know of no other society in which quite so much attention is still being lavished on 2 dead performers whose best work was first shown decades ago.
One reason for this, I suspect, is that Toto and Sordi were at the height of their careers in the days of Italy’s economic miracle and that their genius forms part of the cocoon of nostalgia that surrounds that era of hope and prosperity. But another reason, which isn’t exclusive of the first, could be that the two actors brightened up the early years of a generation that clung to power and influence with extraordinary tenacity.
Silvio Berlusconi was still prime minister at 75. Marlo Monti, who replaced him in 2011, took over when he was 68. His cabinet, which was brought in as a new broom that would sweep clean and introduce wide-ranging reforms, had the highest average age of any in the EU at the time. And after the election that followed the fall of Monti’s government, the new parliament reelected a president, Giorgio Napolitano, who was 87.
For truly untrammeled ‘gray power,’ however, nothing compares with the universities. A study published as Monti was setting in found that the average age of Italy’s professors was 68 and that many were still clinging to their positions and the vast patronage they were afforded when they were well over 70. Their average age was the highest anywhere in the industralized world.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. It means that young Italians aren’t just imbibing the theories and attitudes of the previous generation, which is natural, but of the one before that, and in extreme cases even the one before that. The appointment of 2 younger prime ministers, Enrico Letta in 2013 and Matteo Renzi in 2014, has led to a rejuvenation at the highest levels of government. Renzi became Italy’s youngest-ever prime minister at 39. And he set about naming a cabinet that included a party colleague who was only 33 at the time. But it remained to be seen whether the process would extend to other areas of Italian life, and particularly higher ed. The role played by the elderly in the formation of Italy’s future elite continued to represent a formidable obstacle to innovation, modernization and the rethinking of established ideas.
This may have some link to the enthusiasm with which so many young Italians embrace the culture of their parents. Perhaps the most striking example of this is to be found in rock music: currently the ages of the most popular singers are 52, 56 and 60. Aging rock stars have kept going in other countries. But whereas Stones fans are in the main men and women of more or less their own generation, drawn to their concerts by memories of their youth, those of Italian stars like Vasco Rossi are still often in their 20s, if not younger.”
“The single most popular calling [is] that of state employee.
Until the years of weak growth punctuated by recession began to take their toil, Italians had some of the developed world’s highest rates of household savings, consistently double the rate in Britain and often several times the level in the US. The only comparable enthusiastic savers in a major Western economy were the Germans, who, perhaps not coincidentally, live in the middle of Europe and have a similar history of acute vulnerability to foreign invasion.”
“In 2008 [Italians] had 18 times as much invested in real estate as they did in securities of all kinds. In America the ratio was only 2:1. One reason for this is that families have clung on to properties in the countryside they left when they moved to cities in the years of the economic miracle. Another is that parents often buy flats or houses to give to their children when they marry and hold them off the market until they’re needed. In some cases Italians just buy property as an investment and don’t even bother to rent it out, believing that prices will inevitably go up and that the profit they make in the end will compensate them for any loss of income in the meantime.
All these factors have had the effect of boosting the number of empty dwellings. In 2011, there were almost 5 million empty units scattered across Italy — 17% of the total housing stock. In Britain the same year the figure was barely 3%. This huge and continuous withdrawing of real estate from the market has helped keep prices high and rising, thus confirming for Italians their belief that property is the best possible investment. But after more than a decade of economic stagnation, with some families needing urgently to raise cash, the housing market began to weaken and there was a risk that the apparently virtuous cycle just described could reverse.”
Religion
“Foreigners from more secular nations were perplexed by the reaction to a case taken by the European Court of Human Rights by one Solle Lautsi, an atheist and Italian of Finnish origin. She argued that the display of crucifixes in classrooms violated her right to give her children an education free of religious influence. Laws specify that every classroom in Italy must have a crucifix hanging on the wall. Ms. Lautsi’s suit was contested by the Italian government, whose reps argued that the crucifixes were symbols of national identity. The education minister summed up the government’s case when she said that the symbols ‘don’t mean adherence to Catholicism.’ When the court sided with Ms. Lautsi, there was outrage. A poll suggested that 84% of Italians were in favor of the crucifixes, which are also widely displayed in law courts, police stations and other public buildings. 2 years later, the court’s decision was overturned on appeal. More than a dozen other countries, including Poland and several Orthodox states, had by that time joined Italy in contesting it. The appeal court, known as the Grand Chamber, found no evidence that the display of the symbol on classroom walls ‘might have an influence on pupils.’
The frequently blurred distinction between Italy on the one hand and the Vatican and the Church on the other reflects a historical fact: that, until very recently, not only was Christianity Italy’s only religion, but Catholicism was for all intents and purposes the only way of practicing it.”
“Among the constitutional solutions proposed for a united Italy was an idea floated by Piedomontese priest Vincenzo Gioberti, who suggested that it should be a confederation with the pope as the head of state. That idea didn’t prosper, but — thanks, ironically, to the determination of an ardent Mason, Mazzini — Rome became the capital. That decision, more than any other perhaps, ensured the Church would have a huge influence on the new Italy.
At first, though, that seemed anything but likely. The seizure of Rome and the ejection of the pope from his home in the Quirinale Palace led to one of the longest sulks in history. Pius IX shut himself away in the Vatican and for almost 60 years he and his successors refused to have anything to do with the country that had stripped them of their earthly dominions. It wasn’t until Mussolini came to power that the papacy relented. But to achieve reconciliation, Italy’s Fascist dictator had to concede extensive privileges. The Lateran Pacts consisted of 2 documents. One created the Vatican City State and solved what had come to be known as the ‘Roman Question.’ The other, a so-called Concordat, governed relations between state and Church. It made Catholicism the state religion, made religion — or rather, the Catholic religion — a compulsory subject in schools, and turned the clergy into public employees whose salaries and pensions would henceforth be paid by the Italian taxpayer.”
“The lay association, Azione Cattolica Italiana, enjoyed a golden age of influence. By 1954, it was running more than 4,000 cinemas showing only films approved by the church.
The 50s were the heyday of Catholicism in modern Italy. The economy was booming. And though governments came and went with dizzying rapidity, there was always a Christian Democrat in charge. Already, though, the factors that would loosen the Church’s grip on society were present, if not yet identified as such. One was the movement of millions of Italians from the south to the north. Removed from under the attentive eyes of the village priest into alienating new environments, the workers who traveled north abandoned their observance if not their faith. Another factor was the same creeping secularization that was beginning to gather momentum in other parts of W. Europe. By the 60s, recruitment to the priesthood was falling rapidly.
In 1974, Italians voted decisively in favor of divorce and even more emphatically in 1981 against a bid to rescind the abortion law that had been introduced 3 years before. It was against this background that Socialist prime minister Bettino Crazi negotiated a revision of the relationship between Church and state. The new 1984 Concordat made Catholicism self-financing. Under the new system, which is still in force, taxpayers can ask for 0.8% of their taxes to go to the Catholic Church or to one of a range of other denominations or religions. It’s still public money, but at least atheists and Protestants can get their taxes diverted to a cause in which they believe.”
“Christian Democrats were unable to prevent the introduction of divorce and abortion, yet like-minded Catholic deputies and senators have succeeded in restricting in vitro fertilization and stem cell research and blocking altogether the granting of legal status to civil partnerships — a reform the Vatican fears could open the way to gay marriage.”
“In several respects, Italy is less Catholic than it once was. But it’s nevertheless more Catholic than other countries where the Church has traditionally been strong. The most recent edition of the World Values Survey found that 88% of Italians identified themselves as Catholic, compared with 80% of Spaniards. Proportionately, they were more observant too. In Italy, 31% of the total said they attended a religious service at least once a week. That may be low by contrast with the US, where the figure was 47%. But it was a lot higher than Spain, where it was a mere 22% — 1% lower than Britain.”
“The Catholic Church teaches about 7% of the country’s school students, a lower proportion than in many other European countries. But since the public educational system has been obliged to provide religious instruction, devout Italian parents have less incentive to pay for a specifically Catholic education.”
“Parents are free to have their children opt out of the religious studies classes provided in Italian schools (which, of course, deal only with Catholicism). Yet relatively few do so. In 2011–2012, the overall participation rate was 89%+, which is clearly far higher than the percentage of parents who are practicing Catholics. Unsurprisingly, the highest dropout rates were in the big cities of the north. Southern Italy returned the sort of figures you’d otherwise expect to see in a C. Asian referendum: the average participation rate was 98%.”
“There would seem to be a considerable gap between official Church teaching and its interpretation by the pope’s reps on the ground in Italy. In 2007, L’Espresso sent reporters to 24 churches around the country with instructions to confess to what the Vatican would doubtlessly consider sins. A journalist posing as a researcher who’d received an offer to work abroad on embryonic stem cells was told that ‘of course’ he should take the job. And when another claimed to have let a doctor switch off the respirator that kept his father alive, the response was ‘Don’t think any more about it.’ The only issue on which the confessors toed the Vatican’s line was abortion.”
Women
“Under Mussolini, women were banned from applying for senior posts in secondary ed, the proportion of women on the staff of public and private enterprises was capped at 10%, and if a company had fewer than 10 employees it couldn’t hire women at all.
After WWII, all that Musssolini had stood for became suspect, if not wholly unacceptable, and one of the ways in which the dictator’s erstwhile adversaries could undo his legacy was by improving the status of Italian women. In 1945, women were given the vote, just 1 year after France. But as the Christian Democrats gradually established ascendancy over the Communists, Catholic ideas on the role of women became steadily more influential. For Pius XII, who had been selected pope in 1939, ‘the traditional limitation of female activity to the family circle was fundamental to public health and morality.’ He explained that one reason the Church was ready to back workers seeking higher pay was so as to ‘redirect wives and mothers to their true vocations of tending the domestic hearth.’”
“Married Italian women have always kept their surnames, it’s true. But most of the words for jobs or professions that carry with them power and authority only exist in the masculine. A woman lawyer, who would be an abogada in Spain, for example, remains an avvoacto in Italy. The same is true of several other professions: there are no widely used feminine equivalents for notaio (‘notary’), ingegnere or architetto. One of the few exceptions is dottaressa, which is applied to female grads and is also used by women who become doctors. The term avvocatessa also exists, but most women lawyers eschew it, perhaps because they feel that the specifically female version has the same, arguably diminutive connotations as the English word ‘actress.’
The situation is a muddle. And nowhere is this truer than in politics. Until recently, the few women who made it into the cabinet were always known as ministri and were written and spoken about as such. On occasion, people would try to square the circle by referring to a female minister as a ministro. But since the arrival of a more numerous female contingent in government, the word ministra has begun to crop up. Even so, at the time of writing the Italian government’s own website continues to use ministro to describe those who head the foreign affairs, defense, economic development, and health ministries, even though all 5 are women.
Turn on TV and you’ll sooner or later find yourself watching a variety or quiz show in which women are used in ways that have been considered unacceptable in many other countries since the 70s. If there’s a female presenter, then she’ll almost certainly have big hair, glossy lipstick and an outfit that reveals more than it conceals. But in many cases the only women on the set will be so-called vallette, whose role is entirely decorative. At most, they’ll be required to do a few dance steps or hold up a placard that shows, say, the answer to a quiz question or the amount won by a contestant.”
“Each year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes its Global Gender Gap Report, which aims to assess women’s status in each country according to criteria including economic participation, political empowerment, educational attainment, and various health-related indicators. In recent years, Italy has bobbed up and down in the rankings, but its position as of 2013 was close to the mean: the WEF put it at 71st place, 26 places below France and, perhaps more surprisingly, 41 places below Spain. Women in Italy were reckoned to be getting a worse deal than those in Romania and 11 African states.
The area in which Italy scored worst was economic participation. Recent EU and OECD figures have put the number of women in employment at around half the total female population — the lowest proportion in any large EU state. Inevitably, that also means a much higher proportion of housewives. But since there are twice as many women as men who say they are keen to work but have given up looking for a job, it’s clear that many of the 5 million women who work only in the home do so reluctantly. A 2011 survey indicated that Italian housewives weren’t just reluctant but desperate: their level of dissatisfaction was significantly higher than in either Spain or France.
Unsurprisingly, very few women are to be found in Italy’s boardrooms. By 2013, they accounted for only about 8% of the directors of leading Italian firms — once again the lowest share in any big European country. In Spain the figure was 10%, in France 18%, and in the UK and US 17%.”
“Legislation introduced in 2011 made it compulsory for at least 1 in every 5 nominees put forward for a place on a board to be a woman.”
“As recently as 2001, Miss Italia was winning an audience share of 85%. But since then its popularity has sunk dramatically — to such an extent that in 2013 Rai [network] announced it would no longer be televising the contest.”
“Women’s elders, their peers, the ads they see in magazines and on TV and radio all reinforce the message that there’s no more important job in life than that of being a mamma. Since it’s tantamount to blasphemy in most circles in Italy to assert that children are anything but an unmitigated blessing and delight, a childless woman is usually an object of pity.
One of the problems with all this is that it provides employers with the ideal justification for getting rid of workers who would otherwise have to be maintained through their unproductive maternity leave. Whatever the law may say, the practice of dismissing women who become pregnant is still all too common The way in which some employers get around legislation that, as we’ve seen, dates back to the 1960s, is to tell a female job applicant that she’ll be hired only on the condition that she sign an undated letter of resignation. The employer then files it away to be retrieved and dated whenever it’s required in the future. These appalling documents are known as dimissiani in blanco. Employers who force them on women risk a heavy fine. But the offense is almost impossible to prove and has survived, particularly in smaller fines.
Italian society otherwise appears to practice what it preaches. In the WEF’s surveys, the one category in which Italy has always excelled is that relating to maternity. The provision for maternity leave is among the most generous in the developed world. But once her maternity benefit expires, a young Italian mamma finds that the state offers her little help in balancing her role as a mom with her other duties at home and work (if, that is, she’s kept her job, the social pressure on women to give up work after they’ve had their first child is considerable).”
Sexuality
“For boys in their late teens, [losing virginity] was a title of passage usually experienced with ‘older, nonvirginal women or prostitutes.’ By contrast, most of the women were either virgins when they married, which was usually in their early 20s.”
“Whereas in Nordic countries, roughly 4 of 5 women said they’d pleasured themselves, in Italy the proportion was under half.”
“Curmudgeonly Tobias Smollett, visiting Tuscany in the 1760s, described the custom among wealthy Florentine ladies of maintaining what we’d call today a boy toy. In those days he was called a cicisbeo. The relationship between them was known to — and accepted by — the women’s husband. Thgouh it was regarded as bad form for a cicisbeo to show any sign of affection to his mistress in public, he accompanied her everywhere.
In some cases the cicisbeo was a gay man whose role was restricted to that of an amusing companion. But in others he was the woman’s lover.”
“That Italians take a less than earnest view of marital infidelity was also the conclusion drawn by a psychology magazine from a lighthearted 2006 poll. The aim was to discover which vices and defects caused Italians to feel the most guilty. At the top of the list came gluttony and overspending. At the very bottom was sexual infidelity. It prompted fewer qualms than neglecting one’s physique.
Until recently, the figure of the mistress also featured more prominently in Italian culture than it did in those of many other countries. The fact that famous men had a second partner (sometimes even a second family) was often common knowledge, and when he died it wasn’t uncommon for journalists to seek a quote not just from the bereaved widow, but also from her rival in love.”
“In 2013 the International Planned Parenthood Federation published a survey that aimed to measure the ease with which young women could access forms of contraception in 10 European nations. Each was scored on a range of critera that included the development of policies by the government, the availability of sex ed and the provision of individualized counseling. Italy’s average score was barely half that of Spain and less than a third that of France. It was 1 of only 3 countries in which policies to promote sexual and reproductive health and rights were either given a low priority or were ‘practically absent from institutional agendas.’
Successive governments have done nothing, moreover, to bring down the high cost of condoms, which, according to a 2009 survey, cost almost double the global average.”
“What we have is a society in which a lot of young men aren’t taking precautions, but without the results you could reasonably expect. Something here doesn’t add up. To some extent, the circle can be squared by the rapidly increasing popularity in Italy of the morning after pill, but it may be that the frequency of sexual relations between young Italians who are not in stable relationships is still low and that promiscuity is rare. Another reason for believing this is that the opportunities for sex between young people are more limited. Italian parents today may not have the same conservative attitudes as their mothers and fathers. But going to college in your home city and not leaving your family home until your 30s doesn’t exactly encourage an active sex life, let alone a promiscuous one.”
“Even today attitudes toward gay people are relatively conservative. A recent survey found that 1/4 of the respondents believed that homosexuality was an illness. Only 60% thought it was acceptable for people to have a same-sex sexual relationship and half that number was of the opinion that ‘the best thing for a homosexual is not to tell others that [they are one].’ A lot of gay people, it would seem, follow that advice: the same survey suggested that only 1/4 of the gay people who lived with their families had come out to their parents.
By contrast, an overwhelming majority of respondents condemned discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. And almost 2/3 agreed that gay partnerships should have the same rights in law as married couples.
Recent years have seen several members of the LGBT community rise to prominence in national and regional politics. Intriguingly, all are from the South. Nichi Vendola, who was first elected to parliament in 1992, has never disguised the fact that he’s gay. It seems to have done nothing to hinder his career. He was elected governor of Puglia in 2005 and 4 years later he became the leader of the radical Left Ecology Freedom Party (SEL), which won 40+ seats in the national parliament in 2013. Rosario Crocetta was elected Italy’s first openly gay mayor — of the Sicilian city of Gela — in 2003, and has since gone on to become president of the island’s autonomous government. In 2006, entertainer and writer Vladimir Luxuria became the world’s second ever transgender national lawmaker. And 2 years later, in the election that saw Luxuria lose her seat, Paola Concia, from Abruzzo, a leading activist for lesbian rights, was elected to parliament.
Yet because of the influence exerted by the Vatican, parliament has made no progress toward outlawing the harassment of LGBT people or toward providing gay couples with even limited rights. Catholic lawmakers prevented homosexuals from being included among those covered by hate crime legislation introduced while the center-left was in office in the late 90s, and an attempt to provide a legal status for civil unions (involving both heterosexual and gay couples) was blocked in the same way during the center-left government of 06–08 — all in the name of the family.”
“Lay Catholic orgs collected the signatures needed for a referendum, which was finally held in 1974. The outcome was a ringing endorsement of the new law and a spectacular demonstration of the distinction that Italians draw between their attachment to Catholicism and their obedience to the Church’s leaders. Of those who cast a ballot, 59% voted in favor of the legalization of divorce.
Paradoxically, this huge step toward the modernization of Italian society came at a time when other aspects of family law remained thoroughly antiquated. It wasn’t until the following year that family law was given a comprehensive overhaul. The principle that husbands were the rulers of the household disappeared. Wives were given new freedoms. Children born outside of wedlock acquired the same right as those born inside. Mothers were granted the same rights as fathers to decide how their children shall be brought up. Dowries were abandoned. And the law was changed to ensure that women continued to own whatever property they’d brought into the marriage — a reform of paramount importance now that they could have it whenever they chose.
Though the intro of divorce had been hailed (or deplored) as a turning point in Italian history, for many years its effects were limited. As late as 1995, the crude divorce rate was the lowest in Europe after the former Yugoslav Republic, which at the time had other preoccupations. Since then, the rate has almost doubled, though it’s still low by the standards of the rest of the EU. Proportionately, more than twice as many Britons — and more than 3x as many Americans — put a full stop to their marriage.
Just as there are more Italians leaving wedlock, there are fewer entering. As early as the late 90s, the number of marriages each year was proportionately lower than in Britain, a country often criticized — not least by Britons — as insufficiently family-minded. By 2009, the rate of weddings per 1k of the population in Italy had shrunk from around 5 to 3.8. It had fallen in Britain too, but marriage continued to be significantly more popular there than in Italy.
Recent years have also seen a rapid growth in households that aren’t traditional families: single parents and their children, nonwidowed singles without children, same-sex unions, and so on. By the end of the 2000s, there were some 7 million of these non-traditional families, and they accounted for 20% of Italy’s households, even though households continued to be described as ‘family.’ An important reason for this veritable revolution in Italian life was a sharp rise in the number of men and women who intended to get married but had decided to live together. By the end of the decade, 38% of marriages took place after a period of cohabitation.
Even so, Italian law remains almost exclusively oriented toward the protection of rights and the enforcement of duties within a traditional family. Civil partners lack the most basic of entitlements. They have no right, for example, to be with their dying partner in the hospital. If the partner has been married, but isn’t divorced, as is often the case in Italy, the most they can receive is a fraction of the dead partner’s overall worth. Italian law stipulates that, when someone dies, a quarter of their property must go to the legitimate spouse, together with the home in which the spouse is living. Half the inheritance goes to the children, with only the remaining quarter available for bequest in a will.”
Family
“The short-lived government headed by Romano Prodi between 2006–08 ried to put civil partnerships on a legal footing. But it ran into fierce and ultimately successful opposition from the Catholic Church and was, more than any other, the issue that sealed the government’s fate.
The traditional family has been at the root of much of what Italy has achieved. Family-owned businesses were at the very heart of the country’s economic transformation in the 50s and 60s. Family members were prepared to work harder, longer and more conscientiously for one another than they would’ve ever have dreamed of working for a boss.
And that, of course, is how things have remained. Italy, its economy dominated by small businesses, is still the fortress of the family firm: a land of mom-and-pop stores and tiny workshops where Papa toils shoulder to shoulder with his sons while Mamma keeps the books. Or is it? Here again, if you paid attention to only what the politicians and prelates said, you’d think so. But the figures tell a different story. In 2007, a survey of 8 W. European countries found that the proportion of family businesses in Italy — 73% — was lower than in all but 2 other countries. The true citadel of family enterprise, where 91% of firms were family owned and managed, was Finland.”
“By 2005, 82% of Italian men 18–30 were still living with their parents. The equivalent US figure was 43% and in none of the 3 biggest European nations — France, UK, Germany — was it higher than 53%.
The rise in the number of stay-at-home kids is an important reason why the marriage rate has declined so steeply, despite the fact that young Italians can count on a degree of support from their parents that would be unthinkable in other societies. It’s, for example, common for the parents of newlyweds to get together to buy them their first home. According to a 2012 survey, 2/3 of Italian couples help their offspring in this way.”
“The words for boy and girl continue to be applied to those who, in other societies, would long since have qualified as ‘men’ and ‘women.’ The age at which Italians cease to be referred to as this is ill-defined, but a fair guess would put it at around 27.”
“The bamboccioni are young, but not hungry. Since they don’t have to find the rent for a flat or pay for their own meals, they also have fewer incentives for taking a job that’s not commensurate with their qualifications — or aspirations. Manacorda and Moretti concluded, in fact, that it wasn’t the high rate of youth underemployment that was breeding the bamboccioni, but rather the bomboccioini who were, in part at least, responsible for the high rate of youth unemployment. Once they do get a job, moreover, young people who choose to remain at home have fewer reasons to push for a higher salary, and that in turn means that they’ll have fewer reasons to take on greater responsibility and work longer hours. Crucially, too, they’ll be loath to accept a post elsewhere in the country All this undermines Italy’s economic competitiveness.
But there’s another, subtler way in which cohabitation between the generations holds the country back. The 2005 study concluded that the single most important advantage that the parents derived from having their kids at home was ‘the opportunity they have to get their children to conform to their precepts.’ Imbued with the ideas of a previous generation, bamboccioni are less likely to launch initiatives of their own.
The closeness between parents and children may help explain why there are so few sullen and resentful hoodies on the streets of Italian towns. But they’re also the reason Italy isn’t spawning other, more innovative youth movements. Punk, hip-hop, and goth all began elsewhere. When they surfaced in Italy, they did so as very pale reflections of the originals. Some young Italians — it’s true — find their way into the so-called centri sociali that often began as squats and that usually have a far-left-wing or far-right-wing ethos. Every so often, there’s an eruption of angry street violence, invariably featuring centri sociali rioters. But on the whole, young Italians just don’t ‘do’ rebellion.”
“Italy’s family businesses may have enabled the country to catch up to some of its more prosperous nations in Europe, but they also help to explain why the country has since fallen dramatically behind.
Inheritance isn’t necessarily the best way to ensure dynamic management. And family firms have a poor record of R&D investment, which is becomoing increasingly vital for businesses. It’s one thing to think up an elegant new design for shoes or sweaters. It’s altogether another to develop an innovative new digital or electronic product. Small may once have been beautiful in industry. But that’s no longer the case.”
Culture
“One of the most common mistakes made by foreigners who arrive in Italy, convinced they’re among carefree, genial Latins, is to go around saying ‘Ciao’ to everyone. But ciao is the equivalent of ‘hi’ in English, and while in America you might be able to say ‘hi’ to someone you don’t know well, in Italy you don’t. Ciao broadly corresponds to the familiar tu. But if you would normally use the formal Lei, then the appropriate greeting will be Boungiorno or Buonasera, depending on the time of day. In some parts of Italy, you also hear Buon pomeriggio (there are significant local variations in the time at which you switch from buongiorno to buonasera; it’s one of the many telltale signs by which Italians can detect outsiders). Sometime in between ciao and the more formal greetings is salve, which can be used when you’re not quite sure whether you’re on tu or lei terms with the other person.”
“Italians, like everyone else in the world, have some friendships that are so close as to be as intimate as, if not more intimate than, relationships with the family. But if the findings of the World Values Survey are to be believed, this is exceptional. One question respondents were asked concerned how much they trusted people they know personally. In the UK, the number who answered ‘completely’ or ‘a little’ was fully 97%. In the US, it was 94%. In Spain, it dropped to 86%. But in Italy it didn’t even reach 69%. What’s more, the number who said they trusted completely their friends and acquaintances was less than 7% — the lowest proportion in the world after Romania. Perhaps that remarkable finding offers a way of resolving the clash of views over ‘amoral familism’: that the cause of the anti-social attitudes isn’t an unusual degree of family loyalty, but rather an exceptional level of distrust that may have little or nothing to do with the family.”
“Italy is perhaps the only country in the Mediterranean that doesn’t have a distinctive dance form.
There are some regional folk dances. But they’re mostly stiff, disciplined exercises, not unlike Scottish Highland dancing or square dancing.”
“Release has seldom seemed to be in demand. Italians are by and large very moderate drinkers. Look over at the table where a group — perhaps an extended family — is enjoying dinner. It’s quite likely there will be no more than 1 bottle of wine for every 4 adults and by the end of the meal, it’s a fair bet that some will be a quarter or more full. The Italian language has no word for ‘hangover.’ And in no other country I know do so many people refuse your offer to pour some wine in their glass, usually with a polite ‘No, thank you. I don’t drink.’
Italians will often say that this is because they don’t need to drink in order to relax. But relaxing is one thing and losing control, even to a modest degree, is something else. In a society where it pays to keep your wits about you, people are understandably reluctant to take that extra step.
Drugs are quite another matter. Surprisingly little is said or written about it in the media, but the consumption of narcotics in Italy is high. 2 recent surveys indicated that the percentage of adults who had used cannabis in some form in the previous year was the highest or 2nd highest in the EU (and significantly higher than in Spain, which has a long history of cannabis use because of its proximity to Morocco). The consumption of synthetic narcotics was less widespread. But acknowledged cocaine use in Italy was well above the European average (though not as widespread as in Spain).”
“I have a friend who lives on one of the Italian islands. She needed a table. She’d seen just what she wanted in another part of the island. But there was a furniture shop in her immediate vicinity, and it was owned by someone she’d known since she was a child but who wasn’t in any sense a friend. To buy the table anywhere else, however, would be seen not as the legitimate choice of a consumer but as a gross betrayal. She and her partner were his customers. He would probably never speak to them again if they went elsewhere. So they ended up buying the table at the shop on the other side of the island and then carrying it between them all the way back to their home on a circuitous route so that neither the table nor a delivery van of the rival shop would be seen by the man who regarded himself as their furniture supplier.
Anyone who’s lived in Italy will no doubt be able to recount similar anecdotes. If you go regularly to a shop, bar or restaurant, you risk arousing possessive instincts (and particularly if you’ve accepted — and there’s really no way you can refuse — a discount). This has been a special problem for me because of the nature of my work. I travel frequently and on my return I’ve often been greeted in regular haunts with an ever so slightly sardonic ‘Welcome back.’ If I explain apologetically that I had to go abroad, then everything will be fine. But if I [don’t explain], there’s a danger that my coffee will be served with just a tad less care.”
“The spirit of the guilds lives on today in Italy’s still formidable trade unions and in the professional bodies, membership of which is essential for anyone who seeks to practice. There are 30+ of these, and they regulate access to a much wider range of professions than in other EU countries. There are bodies for notaries and architects, but also for social workers and employment consultants. There’s a body for nurses, but also one for radiological technicians and another for ski instructors.
The professional bodies are part of a vast web of restrictive practices. One of the most ludicrous examples to surface in recent years was that of the Venetian street artists. It turned out that their licenses were inherited. So even if someone had no talent for drawing or painting, he could occupy a spot that would otherwise have gone to someone with real artistic talent.”
“The overall rates for most crimes are much lower than in other European countries of the same size. 2009 figures suggest that, for example, there were less than half as many robberies as in France and only 1/8 as much violent crime as in Britain.”
The Mafia
“The Yakuza gangs probably predate Italy’s oldest mafia, the Camorra, which operates in Napoli and the surrounding region, by about 100 years.”
“Italy has 3 main criminal syndicates: the Camorra, Cosa Nostra in Sicilia, which was the first org to be designated with the term Mafia, and the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta. There’s also, on a much lesser scale, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia.”
“The impact of Italy’s mafias on the life of the country is formidable. There are 100+ gangs of the Camorra alone. Figures for the number of mafia affiliates are probably not reliable, but most estimates put the total at well over $20k. Around 160,000 retailers hand over protection money. In areas traditionally associated with the mafia, the level of extortion is thought to range from 70% of shops in Sicily down to 30% in Puglia. More surprisingly, an estimated 1 in 1 of the retail outlets in Lazio, the region that includes Rome, pays protection money, as does around 1 in every 20 in Lombardy and Piedmont.”
“The earliest mafiosi are thought to have been toughs hired to protect the land and interests of an emergent class of tenant farmers. But the early, rural mafiosi soon learned they could play a useful role.
Like the rest of Italy, Sicily at the time had a judicial system that was slow and frequently corrupt. What’s more, the mistrust was at least as bad as on the mainland and probably worse. Which is where the mafioisi came in. They could guarantee a contract with the implicit threat of violence. If a farmer who’d promised to sell his neighbor a horse delivered a mule instead, the [mafia] would pay the farmer a visit of a kind he’d never forget.”
“The simplest explanation is that organized crime flourished in the south, where the young state was weak and family and clan allegiances even stronger than in the rest of the country. But there’s another way of looking at what happened, which is to see organized crime as, in part, a reaction to unification. The ideologues of the Risorgimento were mostly northerners and it was northerners — particularly the Piedmontese — who carried unification through to completion. Thereafter, the Piedmontese dominated both the government and the armed forces that were sent to deal with the brigandage that plagued the south. At the same time, Napoli lost its role as capital and became a provincial city on the way to nowhere else except Sicily and North Africa. To many in the south, it must have seemed more like colonization than unification.”
Corruption
“By 2001, Italy had climbed the political corruption ranking to occupy 29th place — six places behind France. But then it plunged. By 2012, Italy had fallen to 72nd place, 50 places behind France. Countries ranking higher included Lesotho and Georgia. Italy was only 3 places ahead of Bulgaria and 6 places behind Romania, which was deeply ironic since Romania, like Bulgaria, was being kept out of the EU’s Schengen area largely because of concerns about the extent of corruption there.”
“Corruption holds back the economy and keeps Italians poorer than they need be — a point overlooked by those Italians who shrug at the mention of a graft. A country in which the cost of bribes is routinely added to public contracts is one that’s going to have to raise that much extra in the form of taxes. That in turn reduces disposable incomes, lowers consumption, cuts demand and thus limits growth. Corruption deters competition, making the economy less productive and efficient.”
“Some of the vehicles being gunned around the square were so-called macchinette, microcars with 50cc engines that you can drive in Italy as soon as you turn 14 (or even if you’ve lost your license because of reckless or drunk driving). Macchinette can easily be adjusted to go well over their legal maximum speed of 45 km / hour and have about twice as many accidents as ordinary cars.”
“Only when a law happens to lie close to the blurred frontier that separates it from being a convention is there a good chance it’ll be respected. In 2005, for example, the authorities decided to slap a ban on smoking in public places. No one thought the Italians would pay it the slightest notice. But in the months leading up to the intro of the ban the idea got around that it was a pretty sensible measure and might even do something to improve people’s health. When it came into effect in 2006, from one day to the next people stopped smoking in restaurants, bars, and other establishments on the banned list. By some semimiraculous process, a law had turned into a convention and everyone was ready to respect it.”
Criminal Justice
“To outsiders, the Italian system of criminal justice can often seem as if it were set up with no other purpose than to make sure people are let off.
Once indicted (and that sometimes requires a lengthy pretrial hearing), defendants get a trial and then an automatic right to 2 appeals — the first in a local court on the mertis of the case and the second in the supreme court, on the legal basis of the conviction or acquittal (because the prosecution too is entitled to appeal). It’s only after this entire 3-stage process has been exhausted that a defendant is considered ‘definitively convicted.’ On average, it takes 8+ years. In a sixth of cases, it takes 15+. And throughout the period from initial to final conviction, unless the defendant is alleged to belong to a mafia or has been accused of a very serious offense like murder or rape, they will usually remain at liberty.
Prison sentences, when they’re eventually confirmed, are comparatively lenient. A 2004 study found that the average sentence for murder was less than 12.5 years, even though the minimum laid down in the penal code was 21. For the embezzlement of public funds, the average sentence was a year and 4 months — less than half the ostensible minimum of 3 years.
If the convicted criminal has reached the age of 70 during the many years of waiting for a definitive sentence, it’s highly unlikely they’ll actually go to jail. The same is true of many younger defendants whose offenses have been quashed in the meantime by a statute of limitations or by 1 of several instruments that the authorities deploy from time to time to create space in the prisons.”
“Modern Italian parents, particularly moms, are generally extremely indulgent. Every foreigner who’s lived in Italy has a favorite story of a child allowed to run amok. My own stems from a dinner at a restaurant with a piano, which a 5-year-old girl decided to play. Unfortunately, she had no idea how to do so. Throughout the meal, I and about 30 other customers had to listen to intermittent bursts of noise as she returned to the piano to slam her fists up and down on the keyboard. Neither of her parents made a move to stop her. But then nor did any of the staff. Unsurprisingly, people grow up feeling it’s their right to enjoy the maximum possible freedom. And, for the most part, they’ve prepared to concede the same right to others.”
“It’s likely that, at the time of unification, less than 1 Italian in 10 could speak the literary tongue based on the dialect of Tuscany that was adopted as the official language. Even the new state’s first monarch, Vittorio Emanuele, had difficulty speaking it. Over the years that followed, compulsory military service did much to spread a working knowledge of standard Italian, as did the movement of millions of Italians who left their homes in the south to travel to the north during the ‘economic miracle’ years and therefore, when internal migration resumed in the late 60s; it’s been calculated that by 1972 more than 9 million people had moved from 1 region to another. One of the consequences was marriages between men and women from different parts of the country, and in a family, in which, say, the wife was from Puglia and the husband from Piedmont, the common language was highly likely to be Italian.
Even so, by the early 80s less than 30% of the population spoke only, or predominantly, the national language. Since then the figure has risen steadily, largely because of TV. A 2007 study found that it had reached 46%. And there were striking differences according to age that suggested that the proportion of habitual Italian speakers was almost certain to continue rising; among people under 24, it was almost 60%.
Every so often, there’s a reminder of how many Italians still converse in dialect. Not long ago, the judges chose a Miss Italia who came from rural Calabria. In her first encounter with the media after her victory, she demonstrated all too clearly that her Italian left much to be desired. But the amused and slightly disparaging way in which were mistakes were reported made an important point: that the use of dialect is regarded in most parts of Italy today was a sign of lack of education, something to be slightly embarrassed about.”
Immigration
“People who in other countries would be considered foreigners even sit in the Italian parliament. Nationality under Italian law is determined mainly by what’s known as ‘right of blood descent’ and not ‘right of soil.’ Having just 1 Italian parent makes you an Italian and qualifies you to pass on your citizenship to the next generation. But since your Italian parent may also owe their nationality to a single Italian parent, you can have only 1 genuinely Italian grandparent and still be an Italian (even if you’ve never set foot in Italy and don’t speak a word of the language). The government keeps a register of overseas Italians. There are well over 4 million people on it, and if they fulfill the age requirements for Italian elected reps, they can run in Italian elections for a seat in the Senate or the Chamber of Deputies. There are 4 overseas constituencies: one each for Europe, S. America, C. & N. America, and the rest of the world.”
“The idea that Italianness is something you inherit rather than something you acquire because of where you grow up has inevitably complicated the task of integrating the immigrants who began to arrive in Italy in the early 80s. The application of ‘right of blood’ also means that tens of thousands of second-generation immigrants, who are far more culturally Italian than many of the ‘overseas Italians,’ grow up in a kind of limbo. Since, for example, they don’t have Italian passports, they often can’t join their classmates on trips abroad in Europe because they need a visa and that’s often impossible to obtain in the required time. To acquire citizenship, they have to make an application before their 19th birthday. If they fail to do so, they lose the right forever.
There had always been a sprinkling of foreigners. But in the censuses taken between 1871 and the outbreak of WWII they accounted for barely 1/4 of 1% of the population.”
“In 1994, [Italy] was largely white. According to the census carried out 3 years earlier, resident and nonresident foreigners accounted for just 1.1% of the total population.
Within a year or so, though, the square nearest to our flat had become a meeting place for women from Cape Verde who were much in demand as cleaners and nannies. And when the next census was held, the proportion of foreigners was found to have doubled. Since then, the figure has soared. By 2014, it was reckoned that nearly 8% of the population had been born in another country.
By far the largest community was made up of Romanians. But since their country had joined the EU 7 years earlier, they could no longer be classified as extracommunitari. The next-biggest groups were, in order, from Morocco, Albania, China, Ukraine, and the Philippines. What’s striking about that list is that not 1 sub-Saharan African country is on it. Yet the images that Italians and others have come to associate with the migration in Italy are those of people, mostly of African origin, crowded into rickety boats that have set off from the other side of the Mediterranean. One explanation for this is that a high percentage of Africans soon move on to other countries further north. The majority of the immigrants who stay in Italy come in by other means. Some cross a land border into the EU and then take advantage of the open borders within the Schengen area to make their way to Italy. Others arrive on a tourist or business visa, and then overstay.
They unquestionably come in response to a demand for labor. But the overwhelming majority arrived on Italian soil in a way that was either unauthorized or illegal. (In 2009 Berlusconi’s government made entering Italy without proper documentation an offense, but irregular immigration has since been decriminalized.) That makes it easier for those native Italians who resent the newcomers to find reason for criticizing their presence. The OCED has estimated that for every 20 legal immigrants in Italy, there could be as many as 3 illegal ones.”
“When Cecile Kyenge, a naturalized Italian born in the DRC, became her country’s first black minister in 2013, she had to put up with a barrage of insults from members of the Northern League. Roberto Calderoli, deputy speaker of the Senate, said that she reminded him of an orangutan. Long before that, it was common for black soccer players on visiting — and sometimes even home — teams to be greeted with banana throwing and outbreaks of monkey noises from the terrace where the ultras hung out. But the footballing authorities have cracked down with growing severity on fan racism, and the brilliant if erratic performance on the field of Italy’s first black striker, Mario Balotelli, has done much to draw the sting of race hate in Italian soccer.
What you notice more in Italy than outright racism is gross insensitivity.”
“Since citizenship depends primarily on ancestry, it’s much more difficult for them to take the next step and become Italian. In practice, it’s almost possible for first-gen immigrants to acquire citizenship unless they marry an Italian. Their children must wait until they’re 18 to apply.
Another doubt stems from the absence of any widespread reckoning with Italy’s colonial past. It’s not that this is a divisive issue; it could almost be said that it’s not an issue of any kind. Until very recently, it was as if the Italians had never had anything to do with Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia or Libya. The question of whether the plight of the Horn of Africa might have something to do with its conquest and exploitation by Italians in the 19th and 20th centuries was never raised in the media. And according to a recent study, in the 60 years from 1945 to 2005 only 1 film was produced and 1 novel published about Italy’s colonial past.
The reluctance to face up to the colonial past may now be changing, if only very slowly. Since the mid-2000s, several Italian novelists have shown an interest in the period, as have members of a first generation of immigrant authors.”
“In 2007, the particularly savage murder of an Italian woman on the outskirts of Rome sparked an explosion of anger. Police arrested an immigrant Romani man and the then center-left government — already under pressure from the right to do something about growing numbers of informal encampments in and around the main cities — panicked. It rushed out a decree that enabled the authorities to deport from Italy any EU citizens held to be a threat to security. More than 6,000 people were subsequently evicted from Rome.
The Berlusconi government, which came into office the following year, took matters a big step further by declaring ‘a state of emergency in response to the encampments of the nomad community in Campania, Lazio and Lombardy.’ 2 more regions, Piedmont and Veneto, were added later.
In the capital, the authorities used what the media termed the ‘Roma emergency’ to enforce the closure of all unauthorized encampments and move their occupants to fenced, Roma-only camps away from residential areas. As several human rights orgs have complained, this isn’t only discrimination on grounds of race, but it makes it virtually impossible for the Roma to find and keep regular jobs that would allow them to integrate with the rest of Italian society. In 2013, the Court of Cassation ruled that the law that had imposed a state of emergency was indeed discriminatory and overturned it.”
“A Bank of Italy study found that the effect of immigration has been to push Italians into more qualified work, increasing their earnings.
This isn’t the only area in which Italians have a skewed perception of immigrants and immigration. In 2012, a think tank commissioned a poll in which people were asked, among other things, to estimate the number of foreigners in their midst. The average response was between 1–2 million, which was less than half the real figure. Respondents also overestimated the number of illegal immigrants and grossly underestimated the contribution made by immigrants to the national output. Though at the time foreigners accounted for 8% of the population, they were producing more than 12% of Italy’s GDP.”
Conclusion
“2002 and 2004 surveys of the 15 countries then making up the EU suggested that Italy was the unhappiest of them all. Judged by the broader criterion of ‘life satisfaction,’ it was 4th from the bottom. Subsequent attempts to gauge life satisfaction in 2007 and 2011 produced similar results: Italy scored lower than any of the other EU-15 countries in the first survey and was third from last in the second (though several of the states, mostly ex-Communist, that joined the union after 2004 produced even lower ratings).”
“The problems weren’t all of Berlusconi’s making. Like other S. European countries, Italy has adopted the euro without fully appreciating that it meant competing on a level playing field with the other members of the single currency zone, including Germany. In the past, Italy had been able to restore its competitiveness and keep its exports booming by means of devaluation. After it joined the eurozone, that was no longer possible. Unlike Spain and Portugal, moreover, Italy was saddled with an extraordinarly high level of public debt. For the most part, this was the result of the Italians having given themselves a modern welfare state without building an economy strong enough to afford one. But it was also the price of a fair amount of waste and corruption.
The economy was thus in pretty bad shape when it was hit by the shock waves from the ’09 euro crisis. As unemployment climbed, bankruptcies mounted and Italy’s elderly ruling class showed no sign of surrendering power, the reaction of many of the brightest young people was to flee. Between 2003–2014, the number of Italians who emigrated more than doubled. In the last of those years, more than half were under age 35. Whereas back in the 50s and 60s the Italians who left for other parts of Europe were mostly unskilled or semiskilled, the most recent wave of emigration has been made up largely of grads seeking opportunities in the labor markets of Britain, America, Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.
Italy’s most renowned corporate troubleshooter, Guido Rossi, once said that his country’s worst maladies were ‘the rejection of rules and an aversion to change.’ It’s hard to disagree. But these aren’t necessarily immutable characteristics. In recent years, for example, Italians have been coerced into being more respectful of the rules of the road. In 2003, Berlusconi’s then transport minister introduced a system whereby drivers are allotted a certain number of points that are deducted if they’re caught breaking the law; if they lose enough points, they lose their license too. This and other measures have succeeded in bringing about a drastic reduction in road deaths. By 2012, the number of fatalities had almost halved. There are also reasons for cautious optimism about Italians’ willingness to change. While this book was being written, a 39-year-old prime minister was appointed, and he selected a cabinet in which half the ministers were women.”
