The Italians

by John Hooper

  “Good stuff, this,” said the assistant as he wrapped it up. “Italian.”

  I know several otherwise highly sophisticated Italians who flatly refuse to eat anything but Italian food. One who does eat foreign fare went on a touring holiday of France some years ago. He is what the French would call a bon vivant. I know for a fact he does not hold back on his spending when it comes to food and drink. When he returned, I asked him how it had gone.

  “Fine,” he said. He had driven up to Normandy, down through Paris to Brittany, then across the country to Lyon, from where he had followed the Rhône down to Provence. “Very enjoyable,” he added. “You can’t eat well, but . . .”

  On another occasion, my wife and I were invited to a dinner party given by a Frenchwoman living in Rome. The guests were all in their thirties or forties. Several of their friends came from the art world. They were as apparently sophisticated and cosmopolitan a group of people as you could assemble in the Italian capital. The woman next to me was the curator of a state-owned collection. When the first course arrived—a delicious concoction involving beans, tomatoes and onions—her jaw dropped.

  “But where’s the pasta?”

  Our hostess explained that, in France, it was not customary to serve pasta, but that there would be plenty of carbohydrate available during the rest of the meal in the form of bread and potatoes. The curator was not reassured. She barely touched her first course, picked at the second and spent the rest of the evening looking miserable and, of course, rather hungry.

  It is this sort of stubborn adherence to tradition that has helped to preserve the integrity and identity of Italian cuisine. But in many other areas of life its effects have been profoundly negative—and nowhere more so than in the economy.

  CHAPTER 8

  Gnocchi on Thursdays

  E debbasi considerare come non è cosa più difficile a trattare, né più dubia a riuscire, né più pericolosa a maneggiare, che farsi capo ad introdurre nuovi ordini. Perché lo introduttore ha per nimici tutti quelli che delli ordini vecchi fanno bene, et ha tepidi defensori tutti quelli che delli ordini nuovi farebbono bene.

  And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

  Niccolò Machiavelli

  Foreign correspondents sooner or later learn to distinguish between bomb explosions and backfiring exhausts, between gunfire and firecrackers. And what I’d heard on that morning in Rome was unquestionably the flat crack of pistol shots. But it was on one of those glorious spring days when it is hard to believe that anything evil could be happening in the world, much less at the end of the street where you live. For a few seconds, I refused to believe the evidence of my own ears. Then came the shouts and a confused hubbub.

  Shortly after eight a.m. on May 20, 1999, Massimo D’Antona, a professor who lectured on employment law at universities in Rome and Naples, was on his way to work when he was gunned down by members of the reborn Red Brigades. The killer fired at least nine bullets into the fifty-one-year-old academic, including a coup de grace to the heart. D’Antona’s crime in the eyes of the New Red Brigades was to have drafted legislation for Italy’s then center-left government intended to introduce greater mobility into the Italian labor market by making it easier for employers to both hire and fire.

  His place was later taken by another university teacher, Marco Biagi. In 2001 Biagi became an adviser to the incoming center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi. The following year, he too was shot dead on the street by the New Red Brigades.

  The assassinations of D’Antona and Biagi highlighted in the bloodiest way the dangers that face anyone—of right or left—who tries to bring about radical change in Italy. It can be argued that reforming employment legislation is a special case: it directly affects the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, and it is a natural cause for far-left activists and the terrorists who from time to time lurk in the shadows beyond them. But labor markets have been liberalized in other countries without people losing their lives, and 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 tavola calda, has gnocchi (dumplings, usually made of flour or potato, or both) on its menu on Thursdays. And in most cases, they are not to be found there on any other day of the week. It is one of those reassuring little rituals that are so characteristic of life in Italy: every Thursday you go for lunch and the server tells you with a beaming smile that conveys both pride and satisfaction, “Oggi abbiamo gnocchi al ragù”—or al pesto or alla sorrentina or however they’ve decided to cook them that day. If you then say that you don’t really fancy gnocchi and that you’d rather have pasta or rice that day, the smile will often fade, to be replaced by a look of puzzlement. You are being contrary. You are going against the universally accepted order of things.

  What is remarkable about this tradition is that, first of all, it exists nowhere but in Rome and, secondly, that no Roman (or at least no Roman I have ever met) knows why it exists. There is a Roman saying, “Giovedì, gnocchi; venerdì, pesce; sabato, trippa” (“Thursday, gnocchi; Friday, fish; Saturday, tripe”), which suggests that the ritual has its origins in the Roman Catholic dietary injunction against eating meat on Fridays. It would have made sense to eat something filling on the days before and after the one on which you were limited to fish and vegetables. But I doubt if today’s Romans, many of whom in any case ignore the ban on meat, take that into consideration. Nevertheless, and almost to a man and woman, every Thursday they can be seen tucking into gnocchi. Because eating gnocchi on Thursdays is what you do.

  Various explanations have been put forward to explain the Italians’ love of the familiar and their mistrust of the new. It has been argued that the sense of trepidation that pervades life in Italy had something to do with the fact that the country is so prone to natural disasters. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, landslides, mudslides and floods are all relatively common occurrences. Malaria was endemic in many parts of the peninsula until the twentieth century. And the inhabitants of Naples and Catania live today, as they have always done, with the knowledge that their lives could suddenly be changed forever (or even snuffed out) by an eruption of Vesuvius or Etna. Since the Second World War, there has been a fatal earthquake in Italy, on average, every six or seven years. The most deadly, which struck the area between Campania and Basilicata in 1980, took the lives of 2,570 people. Landslides and mudslides are even more common and quite often they too are fatal. The worst in recent times took place at Sarno, south of Naples, in 1998: 161 people died as torrents of mud and rock swept through the town and surrounding villages following days of heavy rain.

  Because of their peculiar geological characters, Rome, Naples and some other cities are also prone to so-called voragini: sinkholes that open up in the earth without warning. Local newspaper supplements quite often show photographs of cars, or even buses, balanced precariously on the edge of a voragine. Sometimes the picture will be of a miserable-looking family next to a giant hole that has appeared overnight in their living room.

  Life in Italy is certainly unpredictable. But, historically, it has been human intervention rather than “acts of God” that has made it such a dangerous place in which to live. And I suspect that Italians’ instinctive distaste for radical change stems in large part from their long experience of violence and oppression. Whether it came in the form of an invasion by a foreign army, a raid by Muslim pirates and slavers, or the overthrow of a local potentate, sudden
breaks with the past have rarely been for the better.

  Mussolini and his Blackshirts reinforced that lesson. For once in their history, Italians embraced and endorsed an abrupt change, and in the end it led them to disaster. Since the Second World War, change has mostly taken place after careful orchestration or lengthy discussion, and in a way that is usually gradual—and often ineffective. As in Germany, the experience of dictatorship produced a backlash against decisiveness. Their country having been brought to its knees by the concentration of power in the hands of one man, Italians—like Germans—made a conscious decision that, in the future, power would be spread as widely and evenly as possible.

  The Germans opted for geographical diffusion, creating powerful regional governments and decentralizing the institutions of the state so that the ministries were in one city, the supreme court in another, and the police headquarters and the central bank were in a third and fourth. The Italians, on the other hand, gradually adopted a system that came to be known as lottizzazione, a term also used for the division of land into plots. Areas of influence were divided up between the five parties that had access to a place in government and later the system was extended to include even the Communists.

  The dispersion of power in this way proved to be innately conservative because it created an almost infinite web of checks and balances that served to block drastic reform. At the same time, the long hegemony of the Christian Democrats, who perhaps inevitably became more reactionary in office, made for Conservatism with a big C as well as conservatism with a small one. The Christian Democrats, backed by the Roman Catholic Church, created a society that was inherently wary of change, whether political or otherwise.

  Portugal and Spain had even more reactionary governments. But they were dictatorships that forced their attitudes on the rest of the population and prompted a progressive, popular backlash. Italy, on the other hand, never saw anything comparable to Portugal’s Carnation Revolution or the transition from dictatorship to democracy that took place in Spain. Left-wing movements created and supported by young Italians undoubtedly posed a drastic—and sometimes violent—challenge to the established order after 1968. But they were outlived by the Christian Democrats with the result that, when the postwar order eventually crumbled in the early 1990s, it was replaced not by left-wing reformers—let alone revolutionaries—but by a new right led by Silvio Berlusconi. Italy has experienced only two periods of left-wing government since the Second World War. One lasted from 1996 to 2001, the other from 2006 to 2008—a total of just seven years.

  Berlusconi, who returned to office in 2001 and remained there for eight of the next ten 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 is to some extent because Italian society as a whole remains conservative. That does not, of course, mean there are not 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 carried out between 2005 and 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 percent, far higher than in France (15 percent) or Spain (10 percent). In Britain the figure was 20 percent and in the United States it was 33 percent. 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 percent thought it was “never justifiable,” compared with only 17 percent in Spain and 14 percent in France.

  This conservatism is not restricted to politics or the issues that often feature in political debate. Though with significant exceptions, Italians tend to be wary of embracing new technology. For people with a hot summer climate, for example, they remain extraordinarily reluctant to use air-conditioning. It has become relatively common in offices. But it is still remarkably little used in homes. When the temperatures soar into the high nineties, as they do every July, you can bet that on any given day you will sooner or later meet someone who tells you that he or she did not sleep a wink the night before because of the heat. In Rome at least, a high proportion of the taxi drivers stoutly refuse to turn on air-conditioning that is only a click of a switch away on their dashboards and become progressively grumpier as the day wears on.

  Then there is the Italians’ reluctance to spend money on dishwashers. In 2005, white goods manufacturers commissioned an international study that found that, whereas they were installed in 70 percent of American homes and 40 percent of British ones, the equivalent figure for Italy was just 31 percent. Those figures are not especially surprising perhaps, since average incomes are lower in Italy than in Britain and much lower than in America. Altogether more remarkable are the answers given by those who did not have a dishwasher. Nearly a third said that they would accept one only if it was given as a gift. Almost one in five said they would send it back even if it was.

  In both these cases, factors other than sheer conservatism may be at work. Many Italians explain their reluctance to use air-conditioning on grounds of health: by moving from an unnaturally cold environment into a naturally hot one, they risk cramps or worse. As any physical therapist will tell you, there is some truth in this. But the dangers can be mitigated by setting the thermostat to a temperature that is cool rather than icy. Another reason is no doubt the cost of the electricity needed to run air-conditioning at home and that of the extra fuel needed to power air-conditioning in cars. Italy has long had some of the highest electricity and fuel prices in Europe.

  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. By the mid-2000s, according to a survey by the government statistics office Istat, more than half of Italian homes were without a computer. And only about a third were connected to the Web.1 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 2008.2 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 Silvio Berlusconi and his ministers, Italy’s spending on the digitalization of the public administration was among the lowest in the EU as a percentage of GDP—below that of Slovakia.*

  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. In 2012, the head of one such, Antonio Manfredi, the director of a museum near Naples, launched what he termed an “art war.” With the consent of the artists who had created them, he set light to a series of paintings in his collection in a desperate protest against official and public indifference.

  Just as contemporary art is absent from the mainstream, so the culture of the past—and particularly that of the 1950s and 1960s—is present to a striking degree. Look on any newsstand and you will almost certainly find at least one DVD of a film starring either Totò* or his fellow comic actor Alberto
Sordi. Turn on the television in the afternoon (and sometimes even in the evening) and you are quite likely to run across one of their movies. Equally, you will not 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 Totò and Sordi in their most popular roles—Totò staring with restrained interest at his costar’s jutting bust* and Sordi playing a provincial motorcycle cop. 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 two dead performers whose best work was first shown decades ago.

  One reason for this, I suspect, is that Totò 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 is not 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 the age of seventy-five. Mario Monti, who replaced Berlusconi in 2011, took over as head of government when he was sixty-eight. 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 European Union 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 eighty-seven.