The Italians

by John Hooper

  Less well-off Italian males looking for sex outside marriage (and, as mentioned earlier, before marriage) turned to prostitutes. In 1958, however, a law sponsored by a Socialist, Lina Merlin, made it illegal to profit from prostitution and led to the closure of the many brothels that had existed up until that time. The result of that still controversial measure was to force prostitutes onto the streets, where the majority remain to this day. Some, it is true, work undisturbed from home. They traditionally advertised their services in newspapers, often beginning their ads with a string of capital A’s designed to ensure that they secured first place in the personal column. Nowadays, a growing number use the Internet. According to figures compiled by Corriere della Sera from a variety of sources and published in 2013, there were roughly forty-five thousand prostitutes active in Italy, of whom only eight thousand were Italians. Of the rest, well over half were walking the streets, more often than not protected—and exploited—by pimps, and less likely perhaps to be subject to the medical checkups they might get in a brothel.

  The effect of the so-called Legge Merlin has been to make prostitution in Italy even more sordid than in other societies and to increase the health risks for all concerned. But it may have made it less widespread. If the figure given just above is correct, then the total number of prostitutes in Italy is a fraction of that in Spain, where estimates begin at around two hundred thousand. That discrepancy is another reason for wondering whether the Italian male is as wayward as he is reputed to be.

  Perhaps the area in which the influence of the Church can be seen most clearly is contraception. The manufacture, sale and advertising of contraceptives were all at one time crimes in Italy, punishable by up to a year in prison. The prohibition was lifted in 1971, notwithstanding the publication only three years earlier of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Vatican’s opposition to artificial methods of birth control.

  As in other majority Catholic societies, the Vatican’s strictures are widely ignored. Contraceptives of all kinds can be bought in Italy, and in some cases the cost can be recovered from the state. Yet because the whole issue remains so sensitive, contraception is treated with a mixture of benign neglect and discreet omission. 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 ten European nations. Each was scored on a range of criteria that included the development of policies by the government, the availability of sex education 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 one of only three 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 price of condoms, which, according to a 2009 survey,7 cost almost double the global average. That may go some—albeit some very small—way to explaining why another study a few years later found that less than half of sexually active young Italian men in their late teens or early twenties took steps to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. The rest of the explanation would seem to consist of a mix of inexperience, irresponsibility and perhaps too a reluctance—whether conscious or unconscious—to use those artificial means of contraception that are so repugnant to the Catholic Church.

  At all events, a similar disinclination can be seen in the figures for female contraceptive use. Italian women are less likely to take the pill than those in other European countries, even though it remains the most widely used method. But in a survey conducted in 2006, the third most popular method was still coitus interruptus—and that was using the results of an online poll that gauged only the preferences of a relatively sophisticated cross section of the population that used the Internet.8

  All this would seem to point in the direction of a higher level of unwanted pregnancies that would lead in turn to a high abortion rate. Instead, it signals a mystery. One of the surveys mentioned earlier found that unplanned pregnancies were less common in Italy than in any of the thirty-six other countries surveyed.9 The abortion rate is also comparatively low.

  What we have, then, is a society in which a lot of young men are not taking precautions, but without the results you could reasonably expect. Something here does not 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 or university in your home city and not leaving your family home until your thirties does not exactly encourage an active sex life, let alone a promiscuous one.

  It is a peculiarity of the Italian language that it has two ways of saying “to love.” There is amare, but also volere bene. Not even Italians themselves can agree on the precise difference between them, and the way in which they are used can differ from one person to another. Very broadly speaking, volere bene denotes a less intimate, less erotic kind of affection (though when Italians want to say that they love, say, sailing or hunting they sometimes use amare). If you were to use volere bene in connection with your partner or spouse, people might think something had gone wrong with your relationship. Applied to friends or colleagues, volere bene can mean no more than “to be very fond of.” And it is the term normally—though not always—used when speaking to or about relatives. “Mamma,” goes a popular song from the 1940s revived by Luciano Pavarotti, “quanto ti voglio bene!” (“Mama, I love you so much!”).10

  The lyrics of that, and many other songs written in Italian, attest to what other Europeans tend to regard as a uniquely strong bond between Italian sons and their mothers. The final words of “Mamma” are: “Queste parole d’amore che ti sospira il mio cuore / forse non s’usano più / Mamma! / ma la canzone mia più bella sei tu! / Sei tu la vita / e per la vita non ti lascio mai più!” (“These words of love that my heart sighs / Are maybe not used these days / Mamma! / But my most beautiful song is you / You are life / And for the rest of my life I shall never leave you again.”)

  Small wonder that when non-Italians have covered this lovely ballad, they have either sung it in Italian—a language incomprehensible to the vast majority of their audiences—or in a translation with a very different slant. In the Italian version, an adult son is returning to his beloved mother and swearing never to leave her again. In the English adaptation,11 he is regretting the distance between them: “Oh Ma-ma / Until the day that we’re together once more / I live in these memories / Until the day that we’re together once more.” Tellingly perhaps, the song in its English version had greatest success when sung by a woman, the Italian American singer Connie Francis.*

  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. It is a fact sometimes put forward as evidence that the stereotype is correct and that a uniquely intimate—some would say unhealthy—relationship links a disproportionate number of Italian males to their mothers.

  But is mammismo an intrinsic and immutable aspect of the Italian national character? In 2005 the historian Marina D’Amelia published a book12 arguing that mammismo was what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger dubbed an “invented tradition,”13 similar to other legends conjured into existence for a specific political, social or other purpose, such as nation building. D’Amelia found that the term mammismo dated only from
1952. The journalist and novelist Corrado Alvaro first used it as the title of an essay in his collection Il nostro tempo e la speranza (“Hope and Our Times”). The way Italian mothers brought up their sons to believe that they had “a right to everything” was “at the origin of Italy’s traditional amorality, lack of civic education and political immaturity,” Alvaro argued.

  For D’Amelia, this was just a way of loading onto women the responsibility for the perceived defects that had led Italy into its adoption of Fascism and the disasters that befell it during the Second World War. But it is one thing to coin a term and another to invent the syndrome it describes. And as D’Amelia’s own book makes clear, examples of an unusually strong bond between sons and mothers can be found earlier in Italy’s history. One of the most celebrated is the relationship between the leading ideologist of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini, and his mother, Maria Drago.

  Mothers remain close to their sons in most, if not all, Mediterranean societies. Robbed of any real economic or political clout, women in Southern Europe (and North Africa) have traditionally sought to capitalize on the fact that they are nevertheless revered as mothers—and all the more so if they have given their husbands a son—by lavishing attention on their male offspring. Their sons have responded with a mother-worship that carries much the same subtext as son-adulation: that a mother’s best place is in the home with her children.

  Much is made of the exclamation Mamma mia! as evidence that mammismo has infiltrated even the Italian language. But Madre mía! Is heard almost as often in Spanish. And it would be hard to come up with a more forceful, overprotective parent than the stereotypical Jewish mother.

  Mammismo may be a unique word. But the difference between what it describes and what happens in other Mediterranean societies is one of degree rather than kind. That said, it would be rash to dismiss mammismo as no more than a myth. There is just too much evidence of it on all sides, even if that evidence is often more visible to foreigners and to Italians who have lived or worked abroad than it is to those who have never had firsthand experience of another society. Stories abound of wives who discover after their wedding that their mother-in-law is going to be living in an adjoining flat, of Italian men who habitually spend part of the weekend by themselves with their mothers, or of those who return to live with their mothers after the breakup of their marriage. For the author of another, less scholarly recent study, mammismo, far from being a legend, has become a “pandemic.”14

  In an interview for Psychology Today, Genoese psychotherapist Roberto Vincenzi disagreed with that conclusion.15 He thought the syndrome was less widespread than it once was. But he acknowledged that “one of the problems from which many of my patients—and their relatives—suffer” was one of husbands putting their mothers before their wives in their affections and priorities. “In a healthy family, a ‘generational barrier’ ought to exist between parents and children; that is to say, the recognition of the existence of two different sorts of love: the love that unites the parents [and] the love of the parents for the children and of the children for the parents. If, on the other hand, a parent loves a child with a love that is too strong and thereby prevents him from growing up, you get a breach of the generational barrier, which is a sure sign of pathology.”

  The British writer Tim Parks, who married an Italian and wrote a fascinating account of family life in Veneto,16 observed that in the Anglo-Saxon world “complicity traditionally, or at least ideally, resides in the relationship between the parents. In Italy it is crucially shifted toward the relationship between mother and child.” Everyone knows that the Madonna has traditionally served as a model for Latin mothers. But what is less often noted is the similarity between the roles of the Latin father and that of her husband. As Parks remarks, “Joseph is merely a stand-in. God is the father, and that fellow’s most distinguishing trait has always been his absence.” Some of the most memorable passages in Parks’s book are the bittersweet ones in which he describes how his wife’s relationship with their children swiftly becomes of a quite different quality and substance to his own. It is impossible to read them without wondering whether they do not offer at least a partial explanation for the phenomenon referred to earlier, of the Italian husbands who detach themselves from the family as their children grow up and return much later to spend their old age with their wives.

  Among the many paradoxes of Italian life is that it has room for both mammismo and maschilismo—and, what is more, a high level of gender stereotyping. Pink, for example, continues to be regarded as an exclusively feminine color, not to be worn by boys or men unless they wish to be regarded as homosexuals. Some years ago, I returned from London with what I considered to be a rather elegant pale pink tie bought in Jermyn Street. The first time I wore it to the office, one of my female Italian colleagues swept past me in the corridor. “No Italian man would ever wear that tie,” she muttered. To this day, I do not know whether she was applauding my sartorial courage or deploring my cultural ignorance. At all events, I took the hint and did not wear it to work again.

  Silvio Berlusconi is far from being alone in using the word “pink” to characterize something that pertains to the female sex, in the way that he did when describing Zapatero’s cabinet.* Women also routinely use it: a statutory percentage of women created for the purposes of affirmative action, for example, is universally termed a quota rosa, or “pink proportion.” The “If Not Now, When?” demonstrations were advertised with a poster that had a pink background.

  One of the effects of rigid gender stereotyping, I suspect, is the enthusiasm in Italy—as in Spain—for transvestite and transsexual prostitutes, whose defiance of gender division offers a kind of escape. It was estimated in the late 1990s that more than one in every twenty prostitutes in Italy was either a transvestite or, more commonly, a transsexual.17 It is a moot point whether the men who frequent them are deceiving themselves as to their own sexual orientation.

  Homosexual acts between consenting adults have been legal throughout Italy since the entry into force of the first postunification penal code in 1890.* Yet until recently the taboo on homosexual sex was very strong indeed. Even today attitudes toward gay people are relatively conservative. A recent Istat survey found that a quarter of the respondents believed that homosexuality was an illness.18 Only 60 percent thought it was acceptable for people to have a sexual relationship with a member of the same sex, and half that number was of the opinion that “the best thing for a homosexual is not to tell others that he or she is one.” A lot of gay people, it would seem, follow that advice: the same survey suggested that only a quarter 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 two-thirds agreed that gay partnerships should have the same rights in law as married couples.

  Recent years have seen several members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community rise to prominence in national and regional politics. Intriguingly, all are from the Mezzogiorno. Nichi Vendola, who was first elected to parliament in 1992, has never disguised the fact that he is gay. It seems to have done nothing to hinder his career. He was elected governor of Puglia in 2005 and four years later he became the leader of the radical Left Ecology Freedom Party (Sinistra Ecologia Libertà, or SEL), which won more than forty seats in the national parliament in the 2013 election. 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, the entertainer and writer Vladimir Luxuria became the world’s second ever transgender national lawmaker.* And two 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 lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender 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 1990s, and an attempt to provide a legal status for civil unions (involving both heterosexual and homosexual couples) was blocked in the same way during the center-left government of 2006–2008*—all in the name of that most sacred of Italian sacred cows, the family.

  CHAPTER 12

  Family Matters

  La famiglia è la patria del cuore.

  The family is the homeland of the heart.

  Giuseppe Mazzini

  I described earlier how Italians, in general, have been slow to embrace certain new technologies. But there is an important exception. In one respect they were, to use the jargon of the trade, “early adapters.” When mobile telephones started to become affordable (and usable) with the introduction of the digital GSM standard in the early 1990s, Italians leaped at the chance to buy them. Even though the service providers in Italy balked at offering easy payment options for the handsets, forcing customers to buy them outright, cell phones were soon more widely owned than in either Britain or the United States. By the end of the decade, Italy had proportionately more mobile users than any other country in the European Union.