John Hooper's new book, The Italians (Viking, 2015) is a compelling and faithful portrait of the Belpaese. Hooper deconstructs a plethora of Italian paradoxes, presenting the country's best and worst aspects like only an objective observer could do - originally from the United Kingdom, Hooper works as a Foreign Correspondent for a variety of outlets, including The Guardian. But he is not a conventional expat or a naive reporter. His insights are illuminating: Italians are vividly described as both charming and unreliable, direct and insincere, idealistic and inherently corrupted. Italy's countless idiosyncrasies - at macro and micro levels - are fully explored but never exploited. As John Kampfner noted in his review for The Guardian, Hooper
[D]ivides his analysis of Italy into a useful set of subject headings – from the judicial system, to geography, to love, sex and the family, to religion. If there is a single unifying theme, it is suspicion. Italians, it seems, are reluctant to believe anyone, and certainly no home-grown institution.
We also learn that Italians are permanently stuck in the Past, or rather, that the past' "echoes and reverberations" define the present and constrain the future. Italy's often atavistic, anachronistic, and archaic culture is both charming (especially for the turists) and infuriating (for the citizens). Hooper adds his analyses with witty and funny remarks. For instance, we are told that Italians love to party but not to dance. They drink but rarely get drunk in public - in fact, there's no proper translation for "hangover". Italians deeply distrust their own institutions, yet swiftly and uncritically embrace the ethos and value systems of other countries (America comes to mind). Ultimately, Italians try as hard as "possible to improve on mundane reality, minimize what is dull, maximize what is agreeable, and generally file off the rough edges of existence". For an Italian, appearances are everything.
Well researched and elegantly written, The Italians is a brilliant instruction manual to the Belpaese. As a conversation starter, The Italians is as compelling as Hooper's previous book, The New Spaniards and on par with John Foot's splendid Milan After The Miracle. City, Culture, and Identity (2001), Modern Italy (2014) and my all time favorite Calcio: A History of Italian Football (2010) (as I mentioned before, the best way to learn about your own country is to see it from the eyes of an impartial, "external" observer).
Rather than writing a review, I thought it was more interesting to let The Italians speak for itself.
Below is a selection of my favorite quotes. Hooper's book offers a million more remarkable passages.
On the insularity of Italians
One in every ten Italians lives on an island, physically detached from the rest of the nation.
On Italy's geography
Mainland Italians too are separated from one another, but by rock more than water. Though seldom described as such, Italy is one of Europe’s most mountainous countries.
On the divide between Northern and Southern Italy (and beyond)
Campania is Italy’s poorest region and in many respects its saddest.
Once joined politically to Savoy on the other side of the Alps in what is now France, Piedmont is the gateway through which many ideas from France and beyond have filtered into the Italian consciousness.
Bologna is in Emilia-Romagna. Rome is in Lazio. They are both in central Italy. Yet it is clear to anyone who spends more than a few hours in both cities that they exist on quite different planes.
On Italy's creativity
Italians produced some of their greatest cultural achievements in precisely those periods in which they were in greatest peril.
On Italy's eclectic languistic palette
Other countries also have substantial minorities who speak a foreign language. But what really sets Italy apart are the vast numbers of Italians who speak a dialect. Exactly where a dialect begins and a language ends is a matter for fine, and inevitably controversial, judgment.
On Italians' innate sense of superiority
The sociologist Giuseppe De Rita has argued that their past has endowed Italians, like many Greeks, with something rather more than just self-confidence: an innate belief in their superiority.
On Italians' innate sense of inferiority
It accounts for a feeling of mixed resentment and vulnerability that coexists in the national psyche along with the pride.
So what do Italians do? Well, in the second verse [of the national anthem], they proclaim to the world that We were for centuries downtrodden, derided, because we are not a people, because we are divided.
[It] is still remarkable, I think, that any nation should retain as part of its anthem a verse that is so searingly candid about its own past humiliations, let alone one that declares that “we are not a people, because we are divided.”
On Italians' pacifism
Italy’s fractured, violent history also helps, I think, to explain a more generalized fatalism among the Italians, and a horror of war.
Belonging to the armed forces does not carry with it anything like the same cachet that it does in Britain or the United States.
For the vast majority of Italians, war—guerra—is simply brutta (ugly, nasty) and discussion of it is to be avoided in polite company.
Historically, the use of brute force has seldom offered a solution to Italians. It perhaps explains why Italians came to place so much faith in intelligence, diplomacy and guile, for these were the qualities that consoled them, that allowed them—however fleetingly—to even the score with the foreigners who were, in effect, their colonial masters.
Historians reckon that, of the hundred thousand Italians who joined the resistance, thirty-five thousand lost their lives—a shockingly high casualty rate, proportionally well in excess of that in most of the Allied units that took part in the Italian campaign. The death rate among the partisans is a useful corrective to the view that Italians were reluctant to die for their country in the Second World War.
One way in which this shows up is in opposition to capital punishment. No matter how conservative in other aspects an Italian politician may be, he or she is likely to be as appalled as the most fervent radical by the sorts of executions that are common occurrences in the United States. However disunited Italians may be in other respects, on this issue they think almost as one. [...] The first state in modern times to abolish the death penalty was an Italian one, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in 1786.
On the dichotomy between furbi and fessi
As the journalist and wit Giuseppe Prezzolini first remarked back in the 1920s, the furbo coexists with—and preys on—another kind of Italian, one he dubbed the fesso. That is by no means a compliment either. It means “idiot.” Prezzolini explained that you are a fesso “if you pay the full-price rail ticket, don’t get into the theater free, don’t have an uncle who is a commendatore or a friend of the wife who is influential in the judiciary or education; if you are neither a Freemason nor a Jesuit; tell the taxman your real income [or] keep your word even at the cost of losing thereby.”
The distinction between the two tribes had little to do with intelligence, Prezzolini argued. It was just that the “fessi have principles,” whereas the “furbi only have aims.” The division he captured has held good to this day. Indeed, an entire history of modern Italy might be written in terms of the never-ending struggle between its fessi and furbi.
On Italy's cryptic legislative apparatus
“The Italian legislative corpus,” remarked the authors of a recent study, “has long represented a labyrinth even for the shrewdest legal practitioner because of its complexity and its sheer volume.” No one knows for certain how many laws there are.
If the law in Italy is complex, then the way in which it is enforced and implemented is, if anything, even more so.
Italy has more law enforcement officers than any other country in the European Union.
On Italy's monstrous, kafkaesque burocracy
Excessive bureaucracy is often a response to corruption, the idea being that it inhibits bribery and the trading of favors. [...] But whatever the original intent, the effect is often to facilitate corruption, rather than limit it:
As the saying has it, Ogni paese è una repubblica—“Every village is a republic.” But the complexity of Italy’s administrative and governmental arrangements often seems to reflect something else: a downright mistrust of simplicity.
Year after year, Italy has been slipping down the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index. By 2012, it had fallen to seventy-third place in a list of 185 countries—one place behind Romania and six places behind Azerbaijan. It was easier to enforce a contract in Togo than it was in Italy (partly because of the sluggishness of the courts) and harder to get electricity laid on than in India.
On Italy's mass surveillance culture
The problem of getting at the truth is also perhaps one reason for the prevalence of wiretapping in Italy. According to a study published by the Max Planck Institute in 2003, the number of warrants issued annually in Italy—76 per 100,000 inhabitants—was higher than in any of the other countries surveyed.
On Italians' disdain for semplicity
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.
Whatever the reason, a lack of belief in ascertainable truth, and even incontrovertible facts, can be detected in many aspects of Italian society from the media to the legal system and from politics to macroeconomics. In all sorts of areas, issues remain stubbornly disputable, no matter how much hard evidence is thrown at them.
On Italians' innate diffidence and skepticism
Skepticism about ever being able to reach firm conclusions is both reflected in, and encouraged by, the Italian language. The word verità means truth. But it also means “version.” If a dispute arises, there will be my verità, your verità and doubtless the various verità of others.
Time and again, important turning points in Italy’s modern history have been wrapped in a dense fog of discrepancy and contradiction as the various players aired their particular verità spruced up and, in some cases, pulled down.
It is tempting to speculate that the Italians’ abiding fascination with illusion also helps explain the unusually prominent role in their culture of masks. This is partly because Italians, like other Southern Europeans, are naturally theatrical.
[S]outhern Europeans, and particularly Italians, are conspiratorial. What is more, they often talk in metaphors and communicate with symbols.
This is also the rationale behind what is known as dietrologia (literally, “behind-ism”)—the peculiarly Italian art of divining the true motive for, or cause of, an event. The essence of dietrologia is that it dismisses the notion that anyone could act purely for reasons of moral conviction.
On Italians' love of appearances
In Italy, what can be seen on the surface is constantly being scrutinized for clues as to what might lie below.
One reason Italians place such emphasis on what is visible is because they assume it is a representation of something that is not. And that is only to be expected in a society where so much is communicated by means of symbols and gestures.
[W]here are the Italians with evident physical deformities? Where are the blind and the 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.
On Italians' dependence on la bella figura
A lot of non-Italians have heard of bella figura. Far fewer understand what it really means. In the case of English speakers, this may be because neither of the words corresponds exactly with an English equivalent. [...] Fare una bella figura is to make a positive impression. [...] Dread of facendo una brutta figura—a losing face—is omnipresent in Italian society. It explains why there are so few laundromats, and why the few that do exist are used mostly by poor immigrants and foreign students. [...] It is why Italians put on tanning lotion before they get to the beach or pool. It is why town and city councils arrange for their best-looking cops to direct the traffic in the main square. And why Italians above a certain social standing are reluctant to travel on public transport.
The same need for the approval of others would seem to lie behind the boom in demand for plastic surgery. The number of cosmetic procedures carried out in Italy in 2010 was proportionately more than 30 percent higher than in the United States.
But the bella figura mentality also points to a deep-seated insecurity, oddly at variance with menefreghismo, that echoes Italians’ historic vulnerability and fragile sense of national identity. What is more, the corollary of all this reverence for whatever is bello is a tendency to despise, shun and hide whatever is brutto—or rather, anything judged to be so.
On Italians' obsession for gesticulation
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.
On Italy's videocracy
Italians are unusually dependent on TV for their news and information. Even before the Internet began to make inroads into circulations, less than one Italian in ten bought a daily newspaper. 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.
On Italians' food protectionism
Ethnic cuisines are still viewed by many Italians with deep mistrust, and to the extent that they exist ethnic restaurants cater largely to immigrants. [...] Decades after the introduction of the EU’s single market, Italian supermarkets remain virtually bereft of foreign produce.
I know several otherwise highly sophisticated Italians who flatly refuse to eat anything but Italian food.
On Italians' technophobia
Financial considerations, though, do not help to explain other aspects of Italian technophobia. Italians were, for example, among the Europeans slowest to equip themselves with personal computers and to take advantage of the Internet. The most common reason given was that computers were “useless” or “uninteresting.”
On Italy's disdain of contemporary art
Mistrust of the new is not confined to technology. In recent years, Italy has been strikingly resistant to contemporary art. The country that gave the world the Venice Biennale, futurism and Arte Povera did not open a national museum for contemporary art until May 2010. Italy produced one of the most internationally feted artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries 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, the Young British Artists in the Britain of the 1990s or Andy Warhol in the America of the 1960s. Many of the galleries and institutions in Italy dedicated to contemporary art have struggled to prosper, or even survive.
On Italians' addiction to gambling
Recent years have also seen the Italians shoot into the ranks of the world’s most enthusiastic gamblers—a clear sign of increased readiness to assume risk.
Spokespeople for the Italian gambling business claimed it had become Italy’s third-biggest industry.
The rapid growth in the social acceptance and official encouragement of gambling are symptomatic of an erosion of the power, though still considerable, of an institution that, down the troubled centuries, has been for Italians perhaps the greatest of all refuges and consolations: the Roman Catholic Church.
On the condition of Italian women
Historically, the condition of women in Italy has varied enormously from one part of the peninsula to another, over time and between social classes.
A highborn Venetian, Elena Cornaro Piscopia, is held to be the first woman ever to be given a PhD—by the University of Padua in 1678. The first woman to be offered an official teaching position in a European university was also an Italian: Laura Bassi, who became a professor at the University of Bologna in 1732 while still only twenty-one years of age.
The history of the women’s cause in Italy is similarly uneven, spells of rapid progress alternating with long periods of stagnation.
Looking at the Italy of today, it is hard to credit that this is the same country that once gave rise to such a pugnacious brand of feminism. The public debate on gender and language that took place years ago in other societies has scarcely begun in Italy.
Turn on the television and you will 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 1970s.
A survey carried out in 2011 indicated that Italian housewives were not just reluctant but desperate: their level of dissatisfaction was significantly higher than in either Spain or France.
In Italy, ever since the late 1970s, women have been pushing back the age at which they marry. They began limiting the number of their children even earlier. The birth rate has plunged from a peak of over twenty per one thousand in the mid-1960s to less than ten per thousand in the mid-1980s. Since then it has fallen away more gently, touching a low of nine per thousand for the first time in 2011.
On mammoni and bamboccioni
A son tied to his mother’s apron strings is known in Italian as a mammone. Equivalent terms can be found in other languages. In English, he would be a “mama’s boy.” Like “mama’s boy,” mammone is not a term any man would take as a compliment. But Italian is possibly unique in having a word to describe the phenomenon of sons unduly dependent on their mothers: mammismo.
By 2005, 82 percent of Italian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty were still living with their parents. The equivalent figure for the United States was 43 percent and in none of the three biggest European nations—France, Britain and Germany—was it higher than 53 percent.
The bamboccioni are young, but not hungry. Since they do not have to find the rent for a flat or pay for their own meals, they also have fewer incentives for taking a job that is not commensurate with their qualifications—or aspirations. Manacorda and Moretti concluded, in fact, that it was not the high rate of youth unemployment that was breeding the bamboccioni, but rather the bamboccioni who were, in part at least, responsible for the high rate of youth unemployment.
On Italians' menefreghismo
As the Italian family declines, there is a risk that amoral familism will dissolve into simple egocentricity, broadening and strengthening what Italians call menefreghismo (from me ne frego, or “I don’t give a damn”). Menefreghismo is the bartender who pushes your coffee across to you as he looks the other way, the cashier who stares through you as she takes your money. It is also the driver who bears down on you as you step onto a pedestrian crossing at such a speed he would run you over if you did not pull back in time. By itself, menefreghismo is usually little more than irritating. But, mixed in with furbizia, it forms a distinctly toxic blend that helps explain a phenomenon that influences much else in Italian life: a high level of mistrust.
Why Italians are more similar to the Japanese than to the French or the Spanish
When foreigners look around for a country with which to compare Italy, they usually light on Spain, or maybe France or Portugal, where the cultures are actually very different. No one ever mentions Japan. Yet it has often struck me that il piacere di stare insieme is one of several things that link the Italians to the Japanese. Both put a high value on the appearance of things. The Japanese, like the Italians, have a recent history of wielding an economic power that far exceeded their influence on the world stage. Both have traditionally had a high level of savings. Both have a tendency to form anticompetitive, cartel-like structures and partly for that reason have engendered seemingly indestructible
Italy's lost war against corruption
In Italy, the legal sanctions against corruption are much weaker, and in some cases manifestly inadequate.
[A]ccording to the latest estimates of Italy’s national audit court, corruption costs Italy enough to meet the entire cost of the interest payments on its vast public debts.
[There is a] widespread resistance in Italian culture to the notion of accepting responsibility for one’s actions.
In 2012 there was a backlog of 3.4 million criminal cases and 5.5 million civil ones.
On Italy's lack of diversity
Italians, who as a nation tend to be quite self-absorbed and not particularly interested in what happens outside their frontiers, seem largely unaware of the considerable diversity—and disunity—to be found in other European countries.
Because they take it for granted, Italians seldom notice that they are all—or almost all—brought up within a Catholic culture.
On Itay's pernicious, inherent racism
[To] anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, it is clear that racism in Italy does exist. It is especially prevalent in two areas: among the supporters of the Northern League and in and around football stadiums. What you notice more in Italy than outright racism is gross insensitivity.
“In Britain, I have certainly encountered racism,” said a young African who worked with me in Rome. “But there the racists know they are racists, and so do you. Here, people will say the most offensive things to me, but without in any way meaning to be racist. It is disconcerting—they just don’t know you should not say those kinds of things to a black woman. I often don’t know how to react.”
Though at the time foreigners accounted for about 8 percent of the population, they were producing more than 12 percent of Italy’s GDP.
On Italians' widespread unhappiness
[I]t may come as a surprise to discover that a lot of evidence suggests that the Italians themselves are unhappy.
Italians certainly [have] one good reason for feeling miserable: they were becoming poorer. The decade in which Silvio Berlusconi dominated Italy’s public life was disastrous for the economy.
Bureaucracy [is] getting worse, not better. One study concluded that the time spent by Italians queuing for public services had increased over the ten years to 2012. In post offices, the average waiting time had increased by 39 percent.
Between 2003 and 2014, the number of Italians who emigrated more than doubled. In the last of those years, more than half were men and women under the age of thirty-five.
All quotes by John Hooper, 2015.
LINK: The Italians
LINK: John Hooper