Italy

Core values & worldview

If you want to understand an Italian, start with the family. For many Italians it is the first loyalty, the place you return to on Sundays and holidays, the network that finds you a job, looks after your children and cares for your parents when they are old. Young Italians leave the parental home at about 30 on average, among the latest in Europe, partly because of tradition and partly because of insecure jobs and expensive housing.^•

Outsiders joke about “mammoni”, mama’s boys; Italians are more likely to see it as closeness, and as a sensible response to a weak job market.

Your town, your region. Italy has been a single state only since 1861. Before that, for over a thousand years, it was a patchwork of city-republics, papal territories, kingdoms and duchies, often ruled by foreigners.^•

That is why local identity runs so deep. People are proud of their town’s bell tower, saint, dialect, dishes and football team, a feeling called campanilismo, and the gulf between North and South is the country’s most persistent argument.^•

Beauty and the good life. Living among so much art and history shapes how many Italians see the world. Appearances matter: making a bella figura, a good impression, through dress, manners and hospitality, is a social virtue, and making a brutta figura is embarrassing. Food is a serious subject, almost a moral one, tied to place, season and family.^•

Scepticism and resourcefulness. Many Italians trust their family and friends far more than the state, the courts or politicians, a pattern scholars have long debated, some tracing it to deep civic traditions and others to the failures of the state itself.^•

The flip side is creativity: an admired ability to improvise, find a way round obstacles and make the best of things.

Humanity and humour. Italians often value warmth, expressiveness and a certain irony about life and power. The Catholic culture of forgiveness, and a long experience of governments coming and going, can make people forgiving of human weakness and cynical about grand promises at the same time.^•

Daily life & customs

The day has a rhythm. Breakfast is often just an espresso or cappuccino and a pastry at the local bar, drunk standing at the counter. Lunch was traditionally the main meal; in many smaller towns shops still close in the early afternoon. In the evening comes the passeggiata, a stroll through the main street or piazza to see and be seen.

Meals follow an order (antipasto, primo of pasta or risotto, secondo of meat or fish, then fruit or dessert and coffee), though daily life is simpler than the full sequence. Rules matter to many Italians: cappuccino in the morning only, no cheese on seafood pasta, and recipes that differ from one valley to the next. Pellegrino Artusi’s 1891 cookbook first gathered regional dishes into something like a national cuisine, and historian Massimo Montanari argues that Italy had a shared food culture long before it had a shared state.^•

Language is layered. Standard Italian, based on Dante’s Tuscan, spread mostly in the twentieth century through schools, the army, migration and above all television. In 2015 the statistics office found that 45.9% of people mainly spoke Italian at home, 32.2% mixed Italian and dialect, and 14% mainly spoke dialect.^•

Sardinian, Friulian, German in South Tyrol and other minority languages are officially protected.

The calendar is Catholic and civic at once: Christmas and Easter with family, local patron saints’ feasts with processions and fireworks, Ferragosto on 15 August when the whole country seems to be at the beach, and the civic holidays of 25 April (Liberation) and 2 June (the Republic).^•

Wounds & sensitivities

Fascism and the war. Italy’s twenty years of Fascism, its racial laws of 1938, its colonial wars and its alliance with Hitler are uncomfortable history, and so is the civil war of 1943–45. The comfortable myth of “Italiani brava gente”, Italians as good people dragged into others’ crimes, has been challenged by historians but is still widespread.^•

About 8,500 Jews were deported from Italy and Italian-held territories, most to Auschwitz.^•

The Mafia stereotype. Italians are tired of being linked with the Mafia in films and jokes. Many lost judges, police officers, journalists and priests to it, and the murders of Falcone and Borsellino in 1992 are national traumas.^•

North and South. Slurs and stereotypes between northerners and southerners still sting. Southerners may resent being treated as lazy or backward; northerners may resent being cast as cold and greedy.^•

Emigration. Some 26 million Italians left between the 1870s and the 1970s, and families still feel the separation. Many young graduates continue to leave for Germany, Britain and beyond, a “brain drain” that worries many Italians.^•

Unsolved violence. Bombings such as Piazza Fontana (1969) and Bologna station (1980) took decades to investigate, with suspicions of state cover-ups. The Moro kidnapping of 1978 still haunts politics.^•

Modern attitudes

Family under pressure. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, about 1.2 children per woman, and one of the oldest populations. Many young Italians say they would like children but cannot afford them; the empty schools and villages of the interior are a constant worry.^•

Catholic but independent-minded. Italians voted to keep divorce in 1974 and legal abortion in 1981. Same-sex civil unions became legal in 2016, though not marriage. The Church still has a public voice, and the pope is a familiar presence on Italian television, but many Italians treat Church teaching as advice rather than law.^•

A new country of immigration. About 5.4 million foreign citizens live in Italy, roughly 9% of residents, and many more immigrants have become Italians.^•

Migration across the Mediterranean is fiercely debated, between calls for tougher borders and a strong Catholic and civic tradition of rescue and welcome.^•

European, with frustrations. Italy was a founding member of the European Communities in 1957 and many Italians long saw Europe as a source of good government. Years of slow growth, austerity and disputes over migration have made many more sceptical, though few want to leave the EU or the euro.^•

Politics as spectacle and as distrust. Since Tangentopoli swept away the old parties in the 1990s, Italians have tried Berlusconi’s media politics, technocratic governments, protest movements and parties of the hard right and left. Many vote with their hearts and distrust whoever wins.^•

Not all Italians are the same

North, Centre and South. Milan and Turin feel close to Central Europe; Naples and Palermo to the Mediterranean. Incomes, accents, food and attitudes differ sharply, and each part of the country has its own stereotypes of the others.^•

Islands and borderlands. Sicilians and Sardinians have strong, distinct identities shaped by centuries of separate history. South Tyrol is mostly German-speaking; Valle d’Aosta has French speakers; Friuli and Trieste border the Slavic world.^•

Red and white. For much of the twentieth century, central regions such as Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany voted Communist, while the Catholic North-East and much of the South voted Christian Democrat. Those “red” and “white” subcultures still shape attitudes, memories of the war and local politics.^•

Generations. Older Italians remember the boom, the Church at the centre of village life and a world of large families. Younger Italians are more secular, more mobile, more likely to have studied or worked abroad and more likely to be insecurely employed.^•

The diaspora and new Italians. Around 16 million Americans report Italian ancestry, and Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Canada and Australia have large Italian-descended communities, often with a version of Italian culture that Italians find both moving and puzzling.^•

At home, a growing generation of children of immigrants, born and raised in Italy, are reshaping what it means to be Italian.

Meeting someone

Conversation starters

• Where they’re from, and what they eat there. Ask about their town or region and its dishes, and you will hear a passionate and detailed answer.^•
  • Italian Identity in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation — Massimo Montanari, Columbia University Press (2013)
• Food in general. Ask how they make a sauce, or where to eat; it is the safest and most rewarding topic in Italy.
• Football. Ask which team they support; it will tell you a lot about their city and their family.
• Art, cinema and travel. Italians are proud of their heritage and often happy to recommend a lesser-known town, church or festival.

Topics to approach carefully

• Mussolini and Fascism. People have family histories on both sides and very different views; avoid joking about it, and avoid assuming either nostalgia or outrage.^•
  • Italy's Divided Memory — John Foot, Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
• The Mafia. Don’t treat it as a joke or a cultural quirk. For many, especially Sicilians and Calabrians, it is a source of real pain.^•
  • Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia — John Dickie, Hodder & Stoughton (2004)
• North and South. Don’t repeat the stereotypes of either; let people tell you how they see it.^•
  • Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 — John Dickie, Macmillan (1999)
• The Church. Someone may be devout, anticlerical or both at once.
• “Italian” food abroad. Gentle teasing about pineapple pizza or spaghetti with meatballs is fine; dismissing Italian food rules as fussiness is not.

Common misconceptions

• “Italy has always been one country.” It was united only in 1861, and Rome became the capital in 1871. Regional identities are much older.^•
  • The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society and National Unification — Lucy Riall, Routledge (1994)
• “All Italians are Catholic churchgoers.” Most identify as Catholic, but many rarely attend Mass and make their own minds up on moral questions.^•
  • A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 — Paul Ginsborg, Penguin (1990)
• “Italy is the Mafia.” Organised crime is real, but most Italians have nothing to do with it, and Italy has some of the most experienced anti-mafia investigators in the world.^•
  • Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic — Alexander Stille, Pantheon (1995)
• “Italians are disorganised.” Italy is one of the largest manufacturing economies in Europe, famous for precision engineering, design and luxury goods; the chaos of its politics is not the whole story.^•
  • Italy — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• “Italian-American food is Italian food.” The diaspora created its own wonderful cuisine, but it is distinct from what people eat in Italy, which varies enormously by region.^•
  • Italian Identity in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation — Massimo Montanari, Columbia University Press (2013)
  • Italy's Many Diasporas — Donna R. Gabaccia, UCL Press (2000)