Book review: The Italians

Italy gave us the Roman empire and the Renaissance two of the most influential forces in European history. Has this legacy coloured Italians’ perception of themselves and their place in the world, wonders Marjorie Brennan.

The Italians

John Hooper

Allen Lane

Penguin, €29.50

ITALY is a country that influences life far beyond its borders, its tentacles reaching across the globe. It gave us the Renaissance, the greatest cultural transformation in the history of the western world.

It has produced artists such as Michelangelo and Da Vinci, explorers Columbus and Marco Polo, composers including Verdi and Puccini, writers Dante and Boccaccio, and more recently, the film-makers Fellini and Bertolucci, the beguiling beauty of Loren and Lollobrigida and footballing skills of Baggio and Maldini. And before all of that?

The Roman Empire was the world’s first superpower, shaping modern civilisation as we know it. In the introduction to his new book The Italians, John Hooper justifiably describes the Italian legacy as “mind-spinning” and asks what other people of comparable numbers can lay claim to such an extraordinary catalogue of achievements.

However, these achievements have been overshadowed somewhat in recent years, with corruption and political and economic upheaval casting an ugly shadow on ‘la bella figura’. References to Italy are more likely to call Berlusconi and bunga bunga to mind rather than Botticelli and beauty; The Sopranos are more likely to represent the criminal fraternity rather than the opera singers of La Scala.

Hooper, a distinguished foreign correspondent, attempts to tackle these stereotypes and shed light on this fascinating and contradictory nation.

He has form in this area, having given us a vivid and entertaining portrayal of another Latin race in his acclaimed book The Spaniards, published almost three decades ago.

There’s a superficial similarity between both countries, with fascism and Catholicism looming large in both back stories.

However, he gets off to a less than riveting start, with the first two chapters providing a brief geographical/historical overview of Italy. It’s all a bit pedestrian for a book with such a promising subject.

There are plenty of reputable histories of the peninsula which are worth exploring, and the quality of modern travel writing renders straight-forward geography lessons a little redundant. The book picks up when Hooper’s own experience comes into the frame.

He talks about receiving a letter from a British reader angry with an article by Hooper in which he referred to Italy as being ‘charming but corrupt and chaotic’.

“How on earth could I claim it was chaotic? he asked. He had come to live in Italy a few months before and found that, on the contrary, life in Italy was infinitely better organised than in Britain.

"Having just returned to Rome from a trip to Naples, I found this more than a little baffling. But then I looked at the address at the top of the letter. The writer was living in Bologna. His Italy and my Italy were worlds apart.”

Hooper goes on to note that conventionally, Italy is divided into three parts: north, south and central.

The centre is usually taken to encompass the territories of the old Papal State, with the addition of Tuscany: “It is a convenient division, for say, meterorologists. But it is of little help in understanding the nature of the country.

Bologna is in Emilia-Romagna. Rome is in Lazio. They are both in central Italy. Yet it is clear to anyone who spends more than a few hours in both cities that they exist on quite different planes.”

As Hooper explains, during the Cold War the Italian Communist Party had turned Bologna into a showcase for socialist government, and as a result, the city’s infrastructure and transport systems were far superior to those in the more disorderly — and dirty — south.

To a certain extent Hooper points up the problems he faces in writing the book here — clearly there’s a challenge in producing a single narrative when such diversity makes finding a clear theme very difficult.

There are also parallels to be found for the Irish reader: “Almost 14 centuries elapsed between the deposing of the last Roman emperor in the West and the Unification that followed the breaching of the Aurelian Wall near Porta Pia in 1870: 60 generations, more or less, of disunity, vulnerability to the whim of foreign rulers and the might of forest armies. Such things leave their mark on people.”

The difference between the Italians and the Irish, however, is that this country never enjoyed an empire which encompassed the known world. Hooper quotes a sociologist’s view of the Italian mindset, based in part on the grandeur that was Rome.

“They are . . . convinced of being superior because of a super-ego linked to the history behind them. At all events they feel themselves to be more intelligent, brighter and better.”

Hooper agrees but with certain reservations, pointing out that while the poor and vulnerable might not feel like the “heir to Augustus and Leonardo ... what he said about Italians believing themselves to be smarter — more sveglio (awake or aware), more in gamba (bright) — than others is unquestionably true.”

This is another complication in the book, the understandable reliance on sweeping generalisations.

Whether one could with any confidence say that Italians consider themselves smarter than other nations or not, breezy declarations of that sort run a real danger of drifting into stereotyping. Speaking of which, the crazy Italian driver is perhaps a more affectionately held stereotype.

There’s an interesting section on how the chaotic traffic situation in Rome compares to Madrid, for instance, with Hooper pointing out that by imposing heavy fines for double-parking and so forth, the Spanish authorities brought some semblance of order to their streets: the Italians, not so much.

What’s legal and what’s allowable, and the fact that the two aren’t synonymous in Italy is a rich area, well-mined by Hooper.

For instance, he points out: “The Italian way is to do first and to ask permission later, if at all. The principle has been applied to literally millions of home improvements and extensions that no local authority official would dream of approving, unless perhaps given a bustarella (literally, a little envelope), tightly packed with banknotes.

And not just that. It has been applied to the construction of entire houses, even entire neighbourhoods.” (Don’t all shout at once. Perhaps Hooper could consider The Irish as his next book.)

To an extent the book falls between two stools — not a meticulously researched academic survey, groaning with tables and statistics, nor does Hooper deploy any slick gimmicks on which to hang his narrative, which, given recent instances of that genre is a relief (Round Ireland With A Fridge, anyone?).

The book contains many illuminating insights, however, including the observation that the Italian language has 12 words for a coat hanger but none for a hangover.

As Hooper notes, despite their reputation as a nation of wine-lovers, Italians are, by and large, moderate drinkers.

He puts some of this down to the fact that in a society where it pays to keep your wits about you, it is seen as wise not to lose control; this is yet another contradiction, of course, between the Italian beloved of cliche and stereotype, governed by his passions, and the calculating Latin, keen for advantage and swift to exploit opportunities.

Attractive though those stereotypes may be, Hooper’s book does sterling work in reaching beyond them to expose the reality.

For instance, something which might be of interest to Irish readers, now witnessing the relentless march of Starbucks through the land, is that the giant coffee chain, which has branches in more than 60 countries outside the US, does not have a single branch in Italy.

Coffee, another addition to the long list of Italian accomplishments.

Anyone for another Americano?