‘A man who has not been in Italy,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘is always conscious of an inferiority.’ With a 12-year-old daughter living there, I myself have avoided this fate. Yet, for all the trips back and forth to see her, I know little of the country, beyond noticing that the romance of Cinema Paradiso or the clowning of Roberto Benigni are, though one side of it, also highly misleading. There is a melancholy here, and a seriousness too. Recently I’ve been delving into books on Italy, to try to pierce my way beneath the surface.
Not that surfaces are trivial to the Italians – most writers agree they’re paramount. In The Dark Heart of Italy, mentioning the relative lack of readers there, Tobias Jones (long-term resident of Parma) points out that it’s a ‘visual rather literary culture’. This means ‘it’s often hard to find anything that is remotely ugly, be it a building or a painting or, especially, someone’s clothing,’ but can also lead to an unhealthy obsession with appearances. Jones goes on to quote the Italian proverb ‘Bisogna far buon viso a cattivo gioco’ (‘It’s necessary to disguise a bad game with a good face’) and concludes that Italy is a country ‘peerless in the art of illusionism’.
Italian writer Beppe Severgnini, in his book La Bella Figura, confirms this: ‘Italians prefer good looks to good answers.’ So much of Italian life, he explains, is a performance, which newcomers believe at their peril: ‘We have fun confusing anyone who is looking on. Don’t trust the quick smiles, bright eyes and elegance of many Italians… Or, rather, take it at face value if you want but don’t complain later.’
The important thing, he says, is to enjoy the perpetual pageant: couples quarrelling with a panoply of hand gestures who know full well they are ‘performing in public,’ family arguments in which each member seems to have their allotted, operatic role, or simply the conversations overheard on trains: ‘They are public exhibitions, with their own rituals, virtuoso touches, unexpected confidences.’
With this can go the ego of an actor and no one in Italy, Severgnini says, believes they’re a supporting character: ‘Everyone’s a star, no matter how modest the part.’ In his Italy for Beginners, the Hungarian-Jewish George Mikes says the same: an Italian man ‘knows that he is a male beauty: an athlete, a clever businessman… an ace racing driver; a brilliant conversationalist,’ and that his taste in food, architecture and clothes is impeccable. But for Mikes, Italian self-regard is no conceit: ‘It is hero worship. Everyone is his [own] worshipped hero.’
Anyone who has ever had an Italian friendship – particularly with a male of the species – will recognise the truth of these words. Mikes wrote them in 1968, following Italy’s post-war ‘economic miracle’ and at a time, perhaps, of unaccustomed national confidence. More recent writers such as John Hooper, in his book The Italians, stress the flipside of the spectacle: a universal paranoia – palpable, paralysing – about what’s going on backstage. For this, there could be many reasons: nepotism, organized crime, the broadcasting monopolies unlikely to give it to you straight, or simply a culture in which to be furbo (cunning) often garners more respect than simple decency. Hooper quotes the Italian proverb ‘Fidarsi è bene , non fidarsi è meglio,’ (‘To trust is good, not to trust is better’), and points out that in a World Values Survey, when asked whether they completely trusted their friends and acquaintances, less than 7 per cent of Italians said yes: ‘The lowest proportion in the world after Romania.’
For Hooper this explains the Italian habit of wearing sunglasses (it is better to see than be seen), the absence of a heavy drinking culture (who would risk getting blotto?) or the fact that, in high contrast to Spain, ‘you are less likely to see people break spontaneously into a dance in Italy than in any other Mediterranean country I know.’
There are 12 different words in Italian for coat-hanger, but none for the concept of ‘letting your hair down’
Underneath a florid individualism, Tobias Jones tells us, Italy can be rigidly hierarchical, cautious and conformist. Hooper echoes him: despite the Italians’ ‘animated facial expressions… energetic hand movements’ and ‘seemingly emotional outbursts,’ a long and bloody history and ‘guileful compatriots’ have taught Italians to be always on their guard. Nor is Italian justice, with its tortuously slow workings and juddering backlog of cases, much help. One reason the Italians love football so much, says Severgnini, is that ‘one way or another, the match will produce a result, in a country where almost everything is postponed.’
Each book, of course, has told me much, much more and the fun is in the detail. John Hooper can explain why there are 12 different words in Italian for coat-hanger, but none for the concept of ‘letting your hair down’. Tobias Jones writes of the linguistic groveling mandatory when dealing with officialdom, Mikes on the sick-making effect of so much history and art. On my next trip there, I’ll bear all this in mind, along with Beppe Severgnini’s cautionary words. Italy, he says, is ‘disconcerting even in its defects. Just as you are about to write the country off as shallow, it reveals unsuspected depths. And when you look into the depths, the surface becomes a mirror. Anything might be going on down there and you wouldn’t know about it.’
Comments