Xenophobe's Guide to the Italians

Nationalism & Identity

The Italians are not a race, but a collection of peoples. They tend to think of themselves and each other first and foremost as Romans, Milanese, Sicilians or Florentines, and secondly as Italians. There is little that really links Turin and Bari, or Naples and Trieste, except the autostrada, the rail network and the Catholic Church.

The regions of Italy are very different from one another and the deeply ingrained regionalism is quite understandable considering that Italy has only existed as a nation since 1861, before which the Italian peninsula consisted of several independent states. The unification process required a skilful exercise in geopolitical patchwork, and the leading politicians of the time were well aware of the difficulties ahead. They included Massimo D’Azeglio who said: ‘Italy has been made at last; now let us make the Italians.’ Were he alive today, he would still be working at it.

Every now and then the Italians do try and behave like a nation and make a big effort to be nationalistic, for example, when the Italian football team is doing well in the World Cup, or Ferrari has just won the Formula One World Championship twice in a row. But mostly the Italians feel like Italians when they are expatriates: in an ice-cream parlour in Melbourne, down a Belgian mineshaft, or at a soccer match in the United States.

This lack of confidence is in reality only skin-deep as all Italians know that, of course, they do everything ‘better’. Their strong national pride is usually hidden, but can surface on occasion. There was an outcry when it was noticed in a TV close-up before a football international that none of the Italian team (the jewel in the nation’s crown) was actually singing the national anthem; it turned out that they didn’t know the words. They were in disgrace and severely criticised until a sports journalist pointed out that few other Italians knew the words either. Since then the television channels have been doing their best to remedy the situation by playing the anthem more and, whenever possible, with subtitles.

On the positive side, the absence of overtly nationalistic feelings makes Italians wary of warmongering and jingoism. Knowing that most disputes can be resolved by a mixture of compromise, appeasement and bribes, Italians will do their best to avoid confrontation. In fact, any foreign power planning to invade Italy should consider making an offer before wasting soldiers’ lives. If the price is right, it is quite conceivable that the Italians might just agree to sell their country.

Identity is important to the Italians. Perhaps because they are slightly uncertain about their ‘Italian-ness’ and not exactly sure what their national identity actually entails, they are particularly attached to their roots. ‘Where do you come from?’ is an important question for Italians which requires a good answer. Unlike the Englishman or American, no Italian is ever at a loss when asked this question. He does not stutter, ‘I’m not really sure. Let me think. I live in London, but I was born in Hertfordshire, but my parents moved to Leeds, and I went to university in Bristol and then my first job was in Southampton…’

Italians know exactly where they come from, and will carry that place around with them for life, like a standard. The man from San Giorgio in Puglia who lives in Turin will maintain his links with San Giorgio all through his life. Even if he left the town 30 years ago, and only goes back once a year to see his second cousins, he will still have to help anyone else who comes from San Giorgio. Similarly, successful tycoons and politicians are supposed to look after their hometowns, investing money in them and finding work for their fellow townsfolk.

Stating where you come from is closely linked to the key Italian concept of campanilismo, which literally means ‘loyalty to your local bell-tower’, but really involves thinking that your village or town is the best in the world. Italians have always loved their hometowns and found it hard to be exiled from them.

Such civic pride, however, also implies great competition, and this is especially strong between neighbouring villages, towns, provinces and regions. The rivalry is often so fierce that Italians have little time left for much else, for they know that other human beings, and especially Italians from other families, villages, towns or regions, are sadly lacking in self-discipline, and cannot be trusted. How wonderful Italy would be without gli altri – ‘those other’ Italians.

The typical stereotype of the Italians is that of a noisy, passionate, scheming, Mediterranean people, whose brilliance and inventiveness are unfortunately marred by laziness and unreliability. Italians are known to live in a beautiful country full of art treasures. They are seen as a happy, fun-loving people, with a genius for design, food and fashion. They are known to be wonderful at singing and at cooking, and terrible at organising. Italian men have greased-back hair, nine-inch hips and are demon lovers. Italian women are incredibly attractive until they marry, whereupon they immediately become short, fat, overweight mammas.

Italo-Americans often imagine that Italy hasn’t changed since their great-grandparents left it at the turn of the century. When they finally come to Italy to find their roots and visit their cousins, they are surprised that not all families are poor, have ten children and live in one room which they share with a donkey and a mongrel; that not all the women wear black and work in the fields, nor do all the men wear hats and sit in bars all day long. They discover that Italy is, in fact, one of the world’s most advanced countries, where most families have at least two cars and live in houses that don’t just have running water and electricity, but plasma screen televisions, broadband Internet access, hightech cellphones and bidets with mixer taps and adjustable jets.

The Italians see themselves as passionate and charming and they like to act the part for the benefit of foreigners.

They know they are privileged, living in Italy, but they fight hard to keep at bay a nagging feeling of being the Cinderella of Europe. The reluctance of certain nations to embrace the European Union is bewildering for most Italians, who would be more than happy to contract out the running of their country to Brussels.

With unwitting masochism, Italians genuinely rather enjoy seeing their faults thrown back at them. It confirms their own deep-rooted feeling that gli altri Italiani are not quite up to the western world’s high standards of reliability. But no criticism is ever taken seriously enough to attempt remedial action.

In any case, foreigners seem to find the locals agreeable and entertaining, so it cannot be all bad.

Because of the massive emigration from Italy at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, there are extensive Italian communities in the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Australia. There are about 20 million Americans with Italian surnames. But Italo-Americans, Italo-Argentinians and so on are only likely to be regarded as ‘Italians’, rather than as Americans or Argentinians, if they are rich and successful. So Rudolph Giuliani, Frank Sinatra, Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola and Sylvester Stallone are all considered to be Italian, and not American. Some famous Italians, who changed their names to achieve success in the New World, such as actress Anne Bancroft, born Anna Maria Italiano in New York in 1931, and crime novelist Ed McBain, born Salvatore Lombino in 1926 also in New York, have only been welcomed back into the fold on their decease.

Being embraced so warmly can sometimes have its drawbacks – successful paternity suits are still being brought in the Naples courts against the Italo-Argentinian, Diego Maradona, years after he returned home to Argentina.

Italians love foreigners, especially rich foreigners. The Austrians, Swiss and especially Germans have always enjoyed Italy’s climate, culture, beaches and lifestyle. Italy is their playground. Ever since the days of the Roman Empire, Goths have been heading across the Alps to let off steam. The Italians have tolerated them for centuries and are quite happy to go on doing so, as long as the six million who now come to Italy every year spend lots of money and return north again.

The French are considered arrogant and disproportionately proud of themselves. They are seen to look down on their transalpine neighbours, which peeves the Italians no end. But the really unforgivable French sin is to have captured the world market with their inferior wine, which no sane Italian would buy.

The relationship between the English and the Italians is more complex and perhaps more an attraction of opposites. The English like the violent smells, noises, colours, passions and chaos of Italy, while the Italians are fascinated by the order and cosiness of the English.

Italians know that everything works much better abroad. But they also know that, in real terms, foreigners are less well-off than they are, because they don’t live in a beautiful country with plentiful sunshine, they dress badly, and they eat and drink badly, all of which perhaps explains why foreigners have always had their eye on Italy.

Being a curious people, the Italians are fascinated by foreigners and their barbaric ways of life. They love reading and hearing about other nations and going abroad on holiday as this serves to confirm what they already know, that they come from the best place in the world, certainly in terms of the important things in life like sunshine, drink, food and football. Deep down, the Italians believe that, although other countries might be more powerful and better organised than Italy, in reality the rest of the world behaves the same way they do and is just as corrupt as they are, only sometimes the others are smarter at not being caught.

Foreign immigration is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Italy. Traditionally, the word ‘immigrant’ has been used by Italians for Italians from other parts of Italy who have moved to their area. But since the late 1980s more and more people have made their homes in Italy, especially from Albania, Eastern Europe, Senegal, Nigeria, Latin America, Asia and the Maghreb countries.

It is estimated that at least three million entered the country in the last ten years, with the same number predicted to arrive in the next ten. A large number of them manage to find seasonal jobs in the countryside, picking tomatoes and grapes, others settle in the industrial cities in the

north of the country where they do the manual work that no longer attracts young Italians. Many Italian factory owners know that they would probably have to close down without the immigrants. These days most home helps and old age carers in Italy are foreigners, and some of the immigrant communities have achieved surprising economic success, starting up small businesses even in areas where the locals have traditionally ruled the roost: there are now Egyptian owned and run pizzerias and Chinese leather factories. The immigrants are also responsible for the rise in Italy’s population, despite the indigenous population’s declining birthrate.

The Italian attitude towards the peoples of southern Europe and northern Africa is a mixture of solidarity and disdain. They like their colour and are fascinated by their strange habits, and they especially like the fact that the immigrants do work that they might otherwise have to do. They agree with the sentiment expressed in the Oscar-winning Italian film Mediterraneo, that all the people around this sea compose una faccia, una razza (one face, one race). Yet they resist being associated with poor immigrants, like the Albanians or North Africans who offer to clean the windows of their car at traffic lights, for fear that their glamorous image might get tarnished.

The Italians often simplify their internal differences by means of a straightforward North–South divide.

The Northern Italian views the Southerner as a corrupt, half-Arab peasant who tolerates the mafia and lives off the income generated by the hard-working North. The Southern Italian views the Northerner as a semi-literate, half-Austrian or half-French unwashed peasant who, by accident of birth, dwells in the richest part of the country and lives off the income generated by the Southerners who work for him in his factories or on his land.

While both these pictures are exaggerated, enough Italians believe in them for the Northern League (a political party promoting a federalism that is not far from separatism) to be a serious force in Italian politics.

The difference in diet, habits and language between the two areas is sufficient to continually fuel these views. The Southern Italian diet is based on pasta and olive oil, whereas the Northern Italian one is based on maize, rice and butter. And the language variations can be so great that L’amore Molesto, an Italian film made in the South of Italy, was actually dubbed for the North Italian market.

There is a real danger of Northerners blaming everything they think is wrong in Italy, or that they don’t like in the Italian character, on Southerners. So, for example, they see the corruption that riddles Italian politics and government as a ‘southern disease’, carefully ignoring the fact that the heart of Italy’s greatest corruption and graft scandal, tangentopoli, was the great northern Italian city of Milan.

The extremists of the Northern League and the Southerners who drive around in cars with the Confederate flag on them only exacerbate the problem: both conveniently forget that if all the Southerners went home, South Italy would be without the economic support of the Northerners, and North Italy would be without hairdressers.

Italy is a country of contradictions. It is the country of the Catholic Church, but also of the mafia. It is the most pro-European country in Europe, but one of the worst at implementing E.U. directives. It has some of the world’s most advanced engineering, but some of its most antiquated plumbing. It is a country of enormous wealth and of extreme poverty.

As an American ambassador put it when he was returning home after completing his stint at Rome, ‘Italy is a very poor country with a lot of very rich people living in it.’ This opinion appears to be backed by statistics which state that Lombardy is among the richest regions in the European Union. But Italians like to think they are poor and that the citizens of all northern European countries are much richer than they are, but just better at hiding their wealth.