by John Hooper
And if parents are happy living with their offspring, most children are happy to live with their mothers and fathers. Surveys consistently reflect good relations between teenagers and their parents. But perhaps the most striking finding emerged from a poll carried out among thirty-three- to thirty-seven-year-olds, which was published in 2005 under the telling title “Inizio dell’età adulta” (“The Start of Adult Life”).3 It found that, among these thirtysomethings, about 12 percent of the women and 17 percent of the men were still living with their parents. The rest had left home. When asked why, some said it was to get married or live with a partner; others cited work or study. But less than one in ten of the total said they had moved out because they wanted to be independent. Young Italians will often tell you with a slightly guilty air that it is pretty convenient having Mamma do the washing. And these days many parents will agree to let their son’s girlfriend or daughter’s boyfriend stay the night.
The main reason for Italy’s legions of bamboccioni, Manacorda and Moretti concluded, was that their parents were “bribing” them to stay at home. Increased parental incomes coincided with almost identical rises in the level of cohabitation, as the older generation passed on to the younger generation a share of the new wealth sufficient to keep them at home.
It hardly needs to be said that such an approach robs young Italians of a sense of responsibility for their own lives. The Italian language both reflects and reinforces this. The words for boy and girl—ragazzo and ragazza—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 ragazzi (and cease to be addressed in the familiar tu form) is ill-defined, but a fair guess would put it at around twenty-seven.
The equanimity (or enthusiasm) with which Italian parents contemplate the prospect of their children remaining at home raises the intriguing question of whether it is not another reason for Italy’s increasing tendency to gerontocracy. By keeping their children at home—and, in many cases, out of the labor market—parents are consciously or unconsciously reducing the natural pressure that would otherwise be exerted on their generation to move aside in favor of younger men and women.
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. Once they do get a job, moreover, young men and women who choose to remain at home have fewer reasons to push for a higher salary, and that in turn means they will have fewer reasons to take on greater responsibility and work longer hours. Crucially, too, they will be loath to accept a post elsewhere in the country. All this undermines Italy’s economic competitiveness.
But there is, I think, 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 children 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, whether they be dot-com start-ups, sandwich delivery businesses or garage bands.
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 are also the reason Italy is not 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 is 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 is an eruption of angry street violence, invariably featuring rioters from the centri sociali. But on the whole, young Italians just do not “do” rebellion. I remember a magazine photo caption that ran: “Sporca, ruvida anima rock” (“Dirty, rough rock soul”). It was next to the photograph of a young man in an impeccable jacket with a designer-frayed scarf around his neck.
The two academics cited earlier are not the only Italians in recent years to have questioned whether the strength of family affiliations always works to Italy’s benefit. Italy’s family businesses may have enabled the country to catch up to some of the more prosperous nations in Europe, but they also help to explain why the country has since fallen dramatically behind.*
Inheritance is not necessarily the best way to ensure dynamic management. And family firms have a poor record of investment in research and development, which is becoming increasingly vital for businesses in the twenty-first century. It is one thing to think up an elegant new design for shoes or sweaters. It is altogether another to develop an innovative new digital or electronic product. Small may once have been beautiful in industry. But that is no longer the case.
The most serious charge leveled at the Italian family, though, is of a quite different nature. And it has been around for much longer than doubts about the family’s impact on prosperity. In 1958, American sociologist Edward Banfield published a study of peasant farmers in the southern region of Basilicata. He titled it The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. And if that sounds pretty damning, then a lot of what was in the book was pretty damning too. Banfield argued that the villagers he studied were unable to progress because they were incapable of acting together for their common good. They were in the grip of what he termed “amoral familism”: their loyalty to their immediate family transcended any considerations of right and wrong. And since they assumed—correctly—that the members of other families would share their outlook, they preferred to undermine them rather than attempt to find a basis for mutually beneficial action. Loyalty to the family superseded loyalty to any wider grouping, be it the village, province, region or nation.
The correlation that Banfield proposed, between strong family ties and antisocial behavior, has since been challenged. In 2011, Danish academic Martin Ljunge published a study based on findings from more than eighty countries. It concluded that, on the contrary, strong loyalty to the family was more likely to be associated with civic virtues such as disapproval of corruption, tax dodging and benefit cheating.4
That may well be true generally. But I have to say that I have my doubts about its application in Italy. Anyone who has borne witness to the interaction of modern-day Italian families in a condominio (the tenants’ association that has to approve decisions affecting an entire apartment block or residential estate) will know what I mean. My wife and I once lived in Rome; we rented a flat in an old palazzo just beyond the ancient walls. Year in, year out, the owners of the various apartments would meet to discuss the deplorable state of the common parts, which appeared not to have seen a lick of paint since the 1940s. Year in, year out, they failed to agree and the issue would be postponed.
Finally, not long before we left, rumors swept the building to the effect that an agreement in principle had been reached to repaint the hallway and the stairs. Some days later, I ran into the apartment owner, who had held out with greatest resolve. I asked him about the meeting of the condominio, which I knew had taken place the night before. Were the dismal, putty-colored common parts finally going to get a coat of paint?
“No!” he wailed. “They wanted”—and here he rolled his eyes to heaven in horrified recollection of his neighbors’ prodigality—“colors!”
Since Banfield’s day, other commentators have taken the opposite view to that of Ljunge, arguing that “amoral familism” is endemic not just to rural Basilicata, but to Italy as a whole, and has been for centuries. Family and clan loyalties were at the root of the clashes between rival factions that bloodied the streets of many I
talian cities in the Middle Ages. Attitudes identical to those described by Banfield can be found in the writings of the fifteenth century Florentine polymath Leon Battista Alberti, a renowned intellectual who is often cited as the archetype of a Renaissance man: the editors of a 1974 edition of his work I libri della famiglia remarked that it was impossible to find “in the entire body of Leon Battista’s work a ‘cluster’ of families that come together and manage to form a civitas, a society.”
It would be wrong, all the same, to assume that amoral familism has been an unvarying characteristic of Italian life. The southern countryside in the mid-twentieth century may have been reminiscent of the Tuscany of the fifteenth century, but modern-day Tuscany has precious little in common with the Mezzogiorno of four or five hundred years ago. Over the centuries, the farmers of central Italy developed a complex system of mutual assistance, providing help to one another at times of the year when they needed extra labor. They also cultivated a tradition known as the veglia, where entire families would visit one another on winter evenings to while away the hours, playing cards, telling stories and so on. The greater social consciousness of the people of Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia and the Marche may be a better explanation than papal rule* of why so many of them embraced Communism after the Second World War.
Nor in the Mezzogiorno was the story always one of unremitting mistrust. From time to time, sections of the peasantry formed common cause to challenge the enclosures by landowners of what had once been common land. In the late 1940s, tens of thousands of people banded together in Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata and Abruzzo to occupy estates in support of land reform.
Since then, countervailing forces have been at work. On the one hand, it can be argued that the scramble for a better, richer life triggered by Italy’s “economic miracle” promoted a renewed, more family-centered approach. On the other hand, industrialization and urbanization thrust Italians into trade unions and vastly broader networks of relationships than they had known in the villages or towns from which they had migrated. People whose only previous attachment had been to their immediate family joined sporting clubs, leisure groups and sometimes charitable associations. At the same time, the Catholic Church shifted the emphasis of its teaching further from an almost exclusive stress on the value of the family to encompass a recognition of the importance of society as a whole.
These forces remained finely balanced until the early 1990s and the arrival of Silvio Berlusconi. In a very real sense, he has been the paladin of a new brand of amoral familism. From the outset, his speeches—rich in allusions to the family—carried an implicit message: that his listeners had a right to advance their family’s interests while paying only limited heed to the needs of society.
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.
CHAPTER 13
People Who Don’t Dance
Fidarsi è bene, non fidarsi è meglio.
To trust is good; not to trust is better.
Italian proverb
Walk down any street in Italy, and what is it that makes the scene different? Obviously, there will be shop fronts and signposts that are specific to Italy. But another difference—even from what you see in other countries fringing the Mediterranean—will, in all probability, be the number of people wearing sunglasses. It is the middle of winter, but you can be sure that some of those walking down the street, peering into shop windows or sitting outside a bar will be wearing them.
Why?
For much of the year—it is true—the light in Italy is bright. And doctors will tell you that wearing dark glasses is advisable to protect against ultraviolet radiation. But the light in our hypothetical street is perfectly bearable. Some of those you can see—or, in truth, only half see—may be wearing sunglasses for cosmetic reasons: to hide the bags under their eyes caused by too late a night or perhaps too early a morning. In other cases, the dark glasses are simply a fashion accessory. But none of this fully explains why you tend to see so many more people shielding their eyes in Italy than in, for example, Spain, where the light is, if anything, even more dazzling in winter because of the higher altitude in much of the country. Could it be that some Italians like sunglasses for the same reason that poker players do? Could it be that they have more reason to want to see while remaining only half seen?
“Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi,” said Cicero: “The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter.” And certainly anyone who can hide the expression in his or her eyes is giving him- or herself an advantage in the delicate interactions that are the stuff of life in Italy.
Unsurprisingly, the world’s biggest manufacturer of dark glasses is Italian. Nothing, you might imagine, is more American than a pair of Ray-Bans. But, in fact, the brand is owned by a company started in 1961 in Agordo, a little town in the shadow of the Dolomites. Its founder, Leonardo Del Vecchio, spent much of his childhood in an orphanage. His company, Luxottica, which now has its headquarters in Milan, also owns Oakley and makes the sunglasses that bear the names of many of the world’s most celebrated fashion houses: Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, Prada, Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan.
The image of themselves that Italians are happiest to foster is that of a warm-blooded, warmhearted, smiling, laughing people, whistling their way through life in an attitude of carefree bonhomie. This is the Italy of the joking waiter who flirts outrageously with the women diners. It is the Italy often projected by Roberto Benigni, the quick-fire Tuscan comic whose movie about the Holocaust, La vita è bella, won him the 1999 Oscar for best actor. And it is real. One of the Italians’ most engaging characteristics is their optimism, backed by a determination to put their best foot forward in even the most daunting circumstances. It is an important, and delightful, part of what Italy is about.
But before deciding that that is what Italy is all about, foreigners would do well to learn about two almost untranslatable Italian words. One is garbo, which dictionaries translate as meaning either “grace” or “courtesy.” But that only hints at its connotations. Certainly, a man or woman with garbo is one who behaves elegantly. But it is also a quality essential to any kind of decision maker in Italy: it is the one needed to keep your options open without appearing to be indecisive, the quality required to impart unwelcome news in a way that is not too hurtful, but also the one needed to keep face as you imperceptibly shift your position.
The other quintessentially Italian noun is sprezzatura, which was coined by Baldassare Castiglione in Il cortegiano, a manual for early sixteenth-century courtiers. His book makes clear that life at court was no soft option. Renaissance courtiers were expected to speak eloquently, think clearly and have not just extensive learning but also the accomplishments of a warrior and athlete. Sprezzatura was the key to how all this should be presented to the world: with a studied insouciance, as if it had all come naturally, even if it was the result of long nights spent reading by candlelight and exhausting days spent practicing swordsmanship.
If we go back now to our hypothetical street and look around carefully, we can see the spiritual descendent of Castiglione’s courtiers, of those unnervingly composed young men you see whispering conspiratorially in one another’s ears in the corners of Renaissance masterpieces. He is there, sitting in that convertible outside the bar, staring at a hostile wor
ld through those ubiquitous shades. His hair seems to be tousled. But, in fact, it has been carefully teased that way: it is as much a product of artifice as his perfectly toning shoes and belt. Our modern-day courtier is probably waiting for a beautiful young woman who is as elegant as he. But it is more than possible that he is there for an appointment with someone who can fix an appalto—a contract—or perhaps tell him whom he needs to make a good impression on if he is to get onto the slate of candidates for the upcoming local election. His is a world of elegance and machination, but beyond his family and perhaps a handful of friends from school or university, it is probably one of isolation. It is the isolation that was so vividly brought to life by Marcello Mastroianni in the knowing, lonely characters who wander through some of the films of Federico Fellini. But it can also be seen in, for example, the cool gaze and absurdly precocious lounging pose of little Giovanni de’ Medici* as he stands at his mother’s side in a celebrated portrait by Agnolo Bronzino. It sends a message: even toddlers, if they come from de’ Medici stock, are possessed of daunting emotional self-control.
Perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of the Italians, and the one that most deceives others, is their apparent impulsiveness. Their animated facial expressions, their energetic hand movements and their seemingly emotional outbursts coexist with a deep, underlying caution and discretion. Their troubled history and guileful compatriots have taught Italians to be intensely wary.
One of the first things to strike any foreign correspondent arriving in Italy is the reluctance of ordinary people to supply their names, let alone other details like their profession, age or hometown. They may talk loudly into their mobile telephones about the most intimate details of their private life—their problems with their brother-in-law, even their medical examinations—but if you go up to them and ask them how they are going to vote, for example, they will often decline. Or they will tell you, but refuse to give you any details of their identity. I have found the same is true when Italians are asked to comment on an almost infinite range of issues, from what they had witnessed at the scene of an accident to who they thought might win Saturday’s match. Even when assured their remarks would not be published in Italy, they will often turn away with a wag of their upheld index finger, usually muttering a word imported from English: “Privacy.”