by John Hooper
Perhaps the most remarkable example of caginess occurred one evening after I had been rung by a colleague in London. The paper was putting together a table showing the prices of similar items in various European capitals. One of them was a McDonald’s Big Mac. I asked my assistant to call the nearest branch in Rome.
“Who wants to know?” came the reply.
My assistant said it was for a British newspaper.
“In that case, I can say nothing.”
My assistant said she did not need a comment, let alone a name. And she pointed out that, if she were to walk down the street and go into McDonald’s, she would be able to see the price of a Big Mac on display above the counter. All she wanted was for the person at the other end of the phone to repeat the figure that was presumably emblazoned on an illuminated sign just above her head. No dice. In the end, my assistant had to leave the office and walk a quarter of a mile through Rome to find out something that could not have been more fully in the public domain.
But then reticence about providing information can even extend to the media, whose entire reason for existence—you might think—is to provide information. The news you get on television may be biased, but, like the news on the radio, it is normally communicated in a clear and comprehensible manner. Italian magazines and to an even greater extent Italian newspapers often need to be decoded rather than read. This is particularly true of political reporting. All too frequently the impression you are left with in these cases is that the reporter has been indiscreet enough to lift a corner of the veil covering the story so that you have been let in on some, but certainly not all, of the secrets to which only he or she is privy.
To be fair to my Italian fellow journalists, much of this is done to protect sources. In other instances circumlocution is employed—usually on orders from above—as a way of not upsetting the politicians concerned. It hardly needs to be said that the politician with the most intimidating media power has long been Silvio Berlusconi. While he was in power the Italian media often got around the problem by reprinting criticism that had appeared in foreign publications and that they were loath to air in quite such bald terms.
“For centuries, we used to call in foreign armies to fight our battles for us,” one of Berlusconi’s ministers remarked to me at a dinner. “Now we invoke foreign correspondents instead.”
Fear, wrote Luigi Barzini in his classic study of his own people, has taught Italians “to go through life as wary as experienced scouts through the forest, looking ahead and behind, right and left, listening to the smallest murmurs, feeling the ground ahead for concealed traps.”
Pinocchio is not just a moral parable about the perils of lying. It is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of innocence. When the puppet runs into the Fox and the Cat, they persuade him to take his gold coins to the Field of Miracles and plant them in the ground. The money, they assure him, will soon grow a tree laden with cash. What happens next scarcely needs to be spelled out.
One of the most common mistakes made by foreigners who arrive in Italy, convinced they are 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 do not know well, in Italy you do not. Ciao broadly corresponds to the familiar tu. But if you would normally use the formal Lei, then the appropriate greeting will be “Buongiorno” (“Good morning”) or “Buonasera” (“Good afternoon/evening”), depending on the time of day. In some parts of Italy, you also hear “Buon pomeriggio” for “Good afternoon” (and there are also significant local variations in the time at which you switch from buongiorno to buonasera; it is one of the many telltale signs by which Italians can detect outsiders). Somewhere in between “Ciao” and the more formal greetings is “Salve,” which can be used when you are not quite sure whether you are on tu or Lei terms with the other person. Use ciao too freely and you will sooner or later be brought up sharp with a salve or even an icy buongiorno or buonasera. Used in this way, they are the linguistic equivalents of cold water. They say: “You are overstepping the mark. I am not your friend. So don’t treat me as if I were one.”
Other cultures, of course, have their way of marking social boundaries. In Europe, there is tu and vous, du and Sie, tú and Usted. But Italy, like Germany, is also keen on placing additional signposts along those boundaries in the form of titles.
These are not just for use on business cards. An ingegnere, avvocato or architetto will expect to be addressed as such by all and sundry. But the same is also true of a ragioniere (accountant) or a geometra,* even though a university degree is not required for entry into either of those professions. Anyone who does have a degree qualifies to be addressed as Dottore—a term that is used scrupulously for journalists, medical doctors and, more surprisingly perhaps, senior police officers.
If you are not a graduate, and neither a ragioniere nor a geometra, you can always aspire to one day being addressed as Presidente. Vast numbers of Italians preside over something, be it a multinational or the local tennis club, and they all revel in the title of Presidente and the pleasure of being addressed as such.
So, if you think of yourself as belonging to the professional classes, chair the parent-teacher association or at least make a habit of wearing a tie and collar, you will start to feel slightly offended if, after the first few visits, the staff at your local bar continues to address you as merely Signore or Signora (even if those two terms originally meant “Lord” and “Lady”). Once firmly established as a dottore or dottoressa, you will be in a position for the next big leap. Every so often, when the need arises for you to be flattered, you may be elevated temporarily to the rank of professore or professoressa.
It goes without saying that people who really do lecture college students expect to be addressed in the appropriate fashion. After the French decided to do away with the term mademoiselle, which, like “Miss,” had become a term you might use to choke off a rather too insistent young saleswoman, there was a debate in Italy about whether to ditch signorina too. La Repubblica commissioned an article on the subject from an unmarried female academic.
“Signora or Signorina?” it began. “I don’t know. It depends. At times, it’s just a matter of context, even though, in general, I really don’t like being addressed in that way. For my friends, I’m simply Michela. For other people, I’d always like to be just Professoressa Marzano.”
The educational world holds more than one trap for the unwary. Professore and professoressa do not just denote a professor in the sense that that term is understood in the English-speaking world. University lecturers also qualify. So too do secondary or high school teachers. Primary or grade school teachers are referred as maestro or maestra. But they are not addressed as such, except by their pupils, who call them Signor maestro or Signora maestra. Used as a form of address, Maestro (I cannot recall a Maestra in this sense) is for distinguished musicians, especially conductors, and, to a lesser extent, other renowned figures in the arts.
At the very top of the honorific pyramid rests the virtually unattainable title of Commendatore. Formally, it is used for Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and some other dynastic and pontifical orders.
Part of the importance that Italians attach to titles is, I think, because of the need to assess the standing of the person in question and thus how much leverage he or she could exercise. Nowhere was this truer than among the Romans, who for centuries depended for their well-being on calibrating with pinpoint accuracy the exact status—and clout—of the various dignitaries at, or accredited to, the papal court.
After the death of Pope John Paul II, the Guardian sent its religious affairs correspondent to share the huge workload of reporting the funeral and the election of the pope’s successor. One morning in a taxi to the Vatican, I realized that my colleague would need to get into Corriere della Sera, where the Guardian had it
s bureau. So, using my cell phone, I telephoned Milan, where Corriere has its main office, to get the number of the security officers who guard the entrance to the Rome office, and then called them to authorize them to let in my colleague. As I hung up, I noticed the taxi driver was studying me attentively, and admiringly, in the rearview mirror.
“Dunque,” he said. “Lei è un qualcuno.” (“So, then—you’re a somebody!”)
When it comes to pigeonholing strangers, foreigners present a particular difficulty. Their accents hold no clues, and the Romans have learned that, even if they dress a bit scruffily, it does not necessarily mean they are impoverished or unimportant. In the bar where I used to have breakfast when I first lived in Italy as a correspondent, they began by addressing me as Signore. But after they saw that I owned suits and ties, I was upped to Dottore. Then they began to ask seemingly innocent questions that might yield a clue as to why I had come to live in a part of Rome where my wife and I were pretty much the only foreigners. I took a mischievous pleasure in giving noncommittal answers. There was a faculty of Sapienza University nearby, so one day the bartender tried out Professore. But I told them I was no sort of academic. The resulting disappointed frustration was written all over his face. Summer turned to winter, and one morning I was out walking the dog—an intimidating-looking Staffordshire bull terrier—when the rain started bucketing down and I dodged into the bar for a warming cappuccino. I had on a long raincoat with a military look.
“A domani,” said the owner as he took my money.
“No,” I said. “I won’t be in tomorrow. I’ll be in Naples.”
“Not at this conference on organized crime?”
The whole of Italy was aware that a big international gathering had been arranged.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m going.”
“So,” said the bar owner as he clicked his heels and gave me a jocular salute. “Till next time, Comandante.”
They had finally solved the mystery. From that moment on in the quartiere I was il carabiniere inglese, perhaps attached to the British embassy or seconded to i servizi.* In any case, clearly someone to be wary of.
Another use for formal titles is that they keep people at arm’s length. A “Buongiorno, Ragionere” uttered with just the right mix of respect and condescension is enough to make sure the accountant in question doesn’t start asking you in a familiar way about your connections or—horror of horrors—your finances.
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 within the family. But if the findings of that mine of social information, the World Values Survey, are to be believed, this is exceptional. One of the questions that respondents were asked concerned how much they trusted people they knew personally. In the UK, the number who answered either “completely” or “a little” was fully 97 percent. In the United States, it was 94 percent. In Spain, it dropped to 86 percent. But in Italy it did not even reach 69 percent. What is more, the number who said they trusted completely their friends and acquaintances was less than 7 percent—the lowest proportion in the world after Romania. Perhaps that remarkable finding offers a way of resolving the clash of views over “amoral familism” mentioned in the last chapter: that the cause of the antisocial attitudes that Banfield identified is not an unusual degree of family loyalty, but rather an exceptional level of distrust that may have little or nothing to do with the family.
Widespread mistrust is all of a piece with the absence of a term in Italian that would equate to “let your hair down.” Lasciarsi andare (“to let oneself go”) lacks the distinctly positive connotations of the English phrase. But then you are less likely to see people break spontaneously into a dance in Italy than in any other Mediterranean country I know.
I have been in North African hotels at the end of Ramadan when local diners leaped to their feet and swirled into movement for the sheer joy of being alive. I have been in a restaurant on the Bosphorus in Istanbul when, after emptying a bottle of wine and each downing a shot of raki, a couple got to their feet, with the woman holding up her arms and gyrating her hips in a display that combined elation with eroticism. In Greece, people need little encouragement to join arms in a dance that can soon become frenetic. In Spain, it is not at all uncommon to see a group of young revelers leave a bar on a Saturday night (or rather a Sunday morning) and break into palmas—that mesmeric, rapid clapping on and off the beat—that soon has one of the women gracefully twirling her hands and spinning her body in the joyous, flamenco-inspired style known as sevillanas. But in all the years I have spent in Italy I have never seen anything similar. The young go to clubs and discos like the young everywhere. But Italy is perhaps the only country in the Mediterranean that does not have a characteristic dance form.
There are some regional folk dances. But they are mostly stiff, disciplined exercises, not unlike Scottish Highland dancing or square dancing. There are traditional Piedmontese dances that involve swords. The Sardinian ballu tundu has elaborate rules concerning who may hold whose hand, and how. The only dance that can be compared to the ecstatic physical expressions of joy to be found elsewhere in the Mediterranean is perhaps the tarantella from Puglia (though it is danced elsewhere in the south). But it is worth noting that the tarantella, like some parts of the flamenco canon, traditionally served a quite different purpose: not as an expression of happiness but as a refuge from misery. The dancers spun themselves into a trancelike state that allowed them to escape from the unrelenting poverty and systematic oppression of their lives in the rural south.
Elsewhere, 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 one bottle of wine for every four adults and by the end of the meal, it is 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 “Grazie. No. Sono astemio.” (“No, thank you. I don’t drink.”)
Italians will often say that this is because they do not need to drink in order to relax, and I think there is a lot of truth in that. 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 quite understandably reluctant to take that extra step.
In 2008, the latest year for which the OECD had comparable figures at the time of writing, Italians over the age of fifteen drank an average of just over eight liters of pure alcohol per capita. This was unsurprisingly lower than consumption in Germany and the United Kingdom (just under ten and eleven liters, respectively). But it was also much less than in Spain and Portugal, where the figures in both cases were between eleven and twelve liters.
I have only once seen a genuinely drunken Italian. And only once have I been with an Italian who drank rather more than was good for him at dinner. In both cases, it was in the northeast of the country, and that is where the statistics indicate that alcohol consumption is highest. It is also where penetrating winds blow up the Adriatic, through the lanes of Venice and across the dank, flat expanses of Veneto. Beyond Venice and Veneto lie the Alps, where a shot of grappa never goes amiss in winter.
Elsewhere, the emphasis, especially at parties, is less on the drink than the food, which is invariably delicious. One of the first Italians I met after arriving in Rome had been brought up in Britain. When she left school, her parents decided that she should get back in touch with her roots by going to university in Italy. It was not long before she was invited to a student party where she realized to her dismay that the only drinks on offer were nonalcoholic ones. Her experience dates back several years. Since then, young Italians have become more relaxed about alcohol. But drunkenness is still rare.
/> 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. Two recent surveys indicated that the percentage of adults who had used cannabis in some form in the previous twelve months was the highest or second 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).
In 2005, however, doubts were raised about official and other estimates of cocaine consumption when a research institute took a different approach to the issue. Instead of getting pollsters to question people, the institute took samples from the river Po. What its researchers were looking for was a substance known as benzoylecgonine, the main urinary by-product of cocaine. The amounts detected suggested that consumption in the north of Italy was almost three times the officially estimated national average.
The following year a satirical-cum-investigative TV show tried out a quite different methodology. Reporters from Le Iene (“The Hyenas”) tricked fifty politicians into taking drug tests. Four were found to have used cocaine in the previous day and a half. But they were never identified, and the report was never shown. The reason? Privacy.