Xenophobe's Guide to the Italians

Culture

Italians have enormous respect for culture. They know the value of their national heritage and that it is one of the main sources of their country’s wealth.

Money is, and always has been, a driving force behind Italian creative art, but it is not the only one. Religion, a sense of beauty, and a gift for understanding the spirit of place are also important. Perhaps the most important of all is the Italian’s innate pride in making something beautiful – fatta a regola d’arte. Things don’t necessarily have to work well, they don’t necessarily have to last, but they have to look good. And if they are beautiful, the Italians will make the effort to make them work well and to make them last.

This is the link between a dress by Valentino, a car by Pininfarina, a glass gondola blown in a small workshop on one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon, a roadside madonna and child, and a plate of fresh pasta.

Italian prisoners of war on the Orkney Islands during World War II were given a Nissen hut to use as their chapel. They carefully decorated the inside, painting it with baroque trompe l’oeil and turning it into a work of art. Sixty years later, ex-prisoners regularly return to make sure their chapel is still beautiful.

Italian life is, and always has been, melodramatic, which helps explain the popularity of operas of the 19th century and soap operas of today. Plumbers can be heard singing well-known arias while they work, and cleaning ladies save their pennies for a ticket to dress up to the nines and attend La Scala. Karaoke enjoyed an incredible boom in Italy, giving ordinary Italians a wonderful opportunity to satisfy their narcissism by being ‘on show’. What could be more fun than singing your heart out in front of your friends and family?

If the Italians didn’t actually invent trash television, they have certainly developed it to a fine art. Even on the three national channels there is a lack of finesse that would be considered really slapdash anywhere else. Viewers are often treated to completely blank screens, and programmes regularly start several minutes later than scheduled. Newscasters are frequently caught reading items that have no relation to what is happening on the screen.

Italian viewing is mainly made up of films, cartoons and soap operas, which have been imported and dubbed. The dubbing can be appalling: in the love scene from A Fish called Wanda, even John Cleese’s utterances in Russian, which were supposed to excite Jamie Lee Curtis to a frenzy, were rendered into Italian.

On the other hand, the astonishing success of second-rate American soap operas in Italy is largely due to the real passion of the Italian versions, where the dubbing has served to cover up the poor quality of the original dialogue. The Italian version of The Bold and the Beautiful resulted in its little-known American stars achieving cult status in Italy and being better known than the members of the government.

Most home-grown productions are variety shows which cater for so-called ‘family viewing’ and as Italian children are usually still up and about at 10.30 p.m., they tend to go on interminably all evening, offering the same basic ingredients of quizzes, games and competitions interspersed with song and dance routines and advertisements. The first Italian Big Brother (Grande Fratello) was enormously successful, the third and fourth less so, as the novelty wore off. Other highly successful programmes include the various talk shows in which ordinary people air their personal problems, which are then discussed at length. The problems tend to focus on the national obsessions of love and betrayal, food and football, health and security; and the more heated the debate, the higher the audience ratings seem to rise.

The alternatives for family viewing are dubbed Walt Disney imports and wildlife documentaries. Despite being great Europeans, when it comes to light music the Italians prefer the home-grown variety. Not only does Italy not send a team to the Eurovision Song Contest, but the great majority of Italians have never even heard of it. They prefer their own Italian song contest, which is held in the city of San Remo on the Riviera every February. It lasts a whole week and draws huge television audiences.

Other programmes take their cue from Candid Camera and give viewers the chance to see unwitting participants reduced to tears and rage without knowing they are being watched by an audience of millions. In Complotto di Famiglia (Family Conspiracy) for instance, Maria accompanies her husband to an important business dinner for the first time. As the evening progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the glamorous hostess in a tight pink suit is paying too much attention to Maria’s husband. At a certain point she asks Maria to ‘lend her husband to her for a bit’. The husband seems to acquiesce. The ensuing scene is fraught with anguish and emotion, but the programme ends before viewers can see whether or not Maria and her husband manage to save their marriage.

Late-night viewing is for adults only, and ‘high quality’ films compete with sleazy strip shows where ‘housewives’ take their clothes off to win bonus prizes. Among the most successful programmes are the gameshow, Affari tuoi, the Italian version of Deal or No Deal and a programme called Striscia la notizia, which devotes half an hour each evening to investigating complaints made by callers, as well as showing and commenting on a cunningly edited collation of recently televised news and events adorned by two skimpily clad show girls whose miniscule outfits just manage to stay on during their dance routines. Presented in this way it combines titillation with a daily dose of the two things Italians enjoy most in life – debunking their politicians and laughing at others’ mistakes.

Italian newspapers are expensive and have a limited readership. Although the average daily circulation is reputed to be under 6.5 million and falling, the actual number of readers is difficult to calculate since many Italians read newspapers available in public places, in the library, the town square or the bar, while others buy more than one newspaper a day.

Most Italian newspapers are serious local papers with a national bent. Others are closely linked to political parties, like Il Giornale to Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and L’Unità to the Democratic Party of the Left. The daily newspaper with the widest circulation is the Corriere dello Sport which publishes nothing but sporting news, reflecting perhaps the real interest of the Italian public.

For gossip Italians buy glossy weekly magazines where they can read all they want about the world of Hollywood and the British or Monégasque royal families. Despite Italy being the birthplace of the paparazzi, there are few juicy stories about the love-lives and scandals of Italian politicians and people in high places, due to a long-standing tacit agreement between the powers-that-be and the press.

Italy has a fine literary heritage. Famous writers from the past include Dante Alighieri, Boccaccio and Ariosto, while amongst the recent and current are Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Umberto Eco and Dario Fo. Their works tend to be looked on as ‘great literature’ and, as such, are usually reserved for studying at school, or appreciating on special occasions.

For more general reading, on trains or in bed, the Italians enjoy racy, international, best-selling blockbusters such as Wilbur Smith, Danielle Steel and Dan Brown.

Some literary genres are colour-coded. Yellow is used for thrillers and detective stories, black for the cronaca nera or crime pages in newspapers and magazines, and pink for romantic novelettes. Italians are not great readers. The fault seems in part to lie with the educational system, but mostly with the ubiquitous television screen: it is hard to read a book and watch television at the same time, and in many houses the television set will be blaring all day and most of the night too.

Perhaps the most successful literary genre in the country which gave the world that much-loved children’s character, Pinocchio, is the comic. Italians adore book-length comics. They are often happiest of all reading the soft porn adventures of their imaginary heroes, like cowboy Tex Willer, sexy fashion victim Valentina, and the off-beat investigator of nightmares and inveterate womaniser, Dylan Dog.