The Italians (18 page)

This conservatism is not restricted to politics or the issues that often feature in political debate. Though with significant exceptions, Italians tend to be wary of embracing new technology. For people with a hot summer climate, for example, they remain extraordinarily reluctant to use air-conditioning. It has become relatively common in offices. But it is still remarkably little used in homes. When the temperatures soar into the high nineties, as they do every July, you can bet that on any given day you will sooner or later meet someone who tells you that he or she did not sleep a wink the night before because of the heat. In Rome at least, a high proportion of the taxi drivers stoutly refuse to turn on air-conditioning that is only a click of a switch away on their dashboards and become progressively grumpier as the day wears on.

Then there is the Italians’ reluctance to spend money on dishwashers. In 2005, white goods manufacturers commissioned an international study that found that, whereas they were installed in 70 percent of American homes and 40 percent of British ones, the equivalent figure for Italy was just 31 percent. Those figures are not especially surprising perhaps, since average incomes are lower in Italy than in Britain and much lower than in America. Altogether more remarkable are the answers given by those who did not have a dishwasher. Nearly a third said that they would accept one only if it was given as a gift. Almost one in five said they would send it back even if it was.

In both these cases, factors other than sheer conservatism may be at work. Many Italians explain their reluctance to use air-conditioning on grounds of health: by moving from an unnaturally cold environment into a naturally hot one, they risk cramps or worse. As any physical therapist will tell you, there is some truth in this. But the dangers can be mitigated by setting the thermostat to a temperature that is cool rather than icy. Another reason is no doubt the cost of the electricity needed to run air-conditioning at home and that of the extra fuel needed to power air-conditioning in cars. Italy has long had some of the highest electricity and fuel prices in Europe.

Financial considerations, though, do not help to explain other aspects of Italian technophobia. Italians were, for example, among the Europeans slowest to equip themselves with personal computers and to take advantage of the Internet. By the mid-2000s, according to a survey by the government statistics office Istat, more than half of Italian homes were without a computer. And only about a third were connected to the Web.
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The most common reason given was that computers were “useless” or “uninteresting.” A later survey found the median amount of time spent online by Italian Internet users actually fell between 2007 and 2008.
²
By the latter date, Italy lagged behind not only Spain but also Portugal in online access. It was even further behind France and Britain. Part of the explanation is that Italy has an elderly population. But what was true of households was also true of the government. Despite promises to the contrary by Silvio Berlusconi and his ministers, Italy’s spending on the digitalization of the public administration was among the lowest in the EU as a percentage of GDP—below that of Slovakia.
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Mistrust of the new is not confined to technology. In recent years, Italy has been strikingly resistant to contemporary art. The country that gave the world the Venice Biennale, futurism and Arte Povera did not open a national museum for contemporary art until May 2010. Italy produced one of the most internationally feted artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Maurizio Cattelan. Yet no one could say that he or any of his fellow painters or sculptors had found a place for themselves in the life of their country comparable with that of, say, the Young British Artists in the Britain of the 1990s or Andy Warhol in the America of the 1960s. Many of the galleries and institutions in Italy dedicated to contemporary art have struggled to prosper, or even survive. In 2012, the head of one such, Antonio Manfredi, the director of a museum near Naples, launched what he termed an “art war.” With the consent of the artists who had created them, he set light to a series of paintings in his collection in a desperate protest against official and public indifference.

Just as contemporary art is absent from the mainstream, so the culture of the past—and particularly that of the 1950s and 1960s—is present to a striking degree. Look on any newsstand and you will almost certainly find at least one DVD of a film starring either Totò
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or his fellow comic actor Alberto Sordi. Turn on the television in the afternoon (and sometimes even in the evening) and you are quite likely to run across one of their movies. Equally, you will not have to root around for long in a souvenir shop before you find a calendar, postcard or fridge magnet based on a still featuring one or the other of these actors. Bars the length and breadth of Italy are decorated with shots of Totò and Sordi in their most popular roles—Totò staring with restrained interest at his costar’s jutting bust
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and Sordi playing a provincial motorcycle cop. Now, both men were very funny actors whose films caught some of the essence of life in Italy. But I know of no other society in which quite so much attention is still being lavished on two dead performers whose best work was first shown decades ago.

One reason for this, I suspect, is that Totò and Sordi were at the height of their careers in the days of Italy’s economic miracle and that their genius forms part of the cocoon of nostalgia that surrounds that era of hope and prosperity. But another reason, which is not exclusive of the first, could be that the two actors brightened up the early years of a generation that clung to power and influence with extraordinary tenacity.

Silvio Berlusconi was still prime minister at the age of seventy-five. Mario Monti, who replaced Berlusconi in 2011, took over as head of government when he was sixty-eight. His cabinet, which was brought in as a new broom that would sweep clean and introduce wide-ranging reforms, had the highest average age of any in the European Union at the time. And after the election that followed the fall of Monti’s government, the new parliament reelected a president, Giorgio Napolitano, who was eighty-seven.

For truly untrammeled “gray power,” however, nothing compares with the universities. A study published as Monti and his ministers were settling in behind their highly polished desks found that the average age of Italy’s professors was sixty-three and that many were still clinging to their positions and the vast patronage they were afforded when they were well over seventy. Their average age was the highest anywhere in the industrialized world.

The importance of this cannot be overstated. It means that young Italians are not just imbibing the theories and attitudes of the previous generation, which is natural, but of the one before that, and in extreme cases even the one before that. The appointment of two younger prime ministers, Enrico Letta in 2013 and Matteo Renzi in 2014, has led to a rejuvenation at the highest levels of government. Renzi became Italy’s youngest ever prime minister at the age of just thirty-nine. And he set about naming a cabinet that included a party colleague who was only thirty-three at the time of her appointment. But it remained to be seen whether the process would extend to other areas of Italian life, and particularly higher education. The role played by the elderly in the formation of Italy’s future elite continued to represent a formidable obstacle to innovation, modernization and the rethinking of established ideas.

This may have some link to the enthusiasm with which so many young Italians embrace the culture of their parents. Perhaps the most striking example of this is to be found in the area of rock music: currently the ages of three of the most popular singers are fifty-two, fifty-six and sixty. Aging rock stars have kept going in other countries—the Rolling Stones, for instance. But whereas Stones fans are in the main men and women of more or less their own generation, drawn to their concerts by memories of their youth, those of Italian stars like Vasco Rossi are often still in their twenties, if not their teens.

The importance in contemporary Italy of older people and their ideas may be light-years away from the images radiated through the media, of careering sports cars and models stalking down Milan catwalks in the outrageously over-the-top outfits of designers like Donatella Versace and Roberto Cavalli. But then so is a high level of risk aversion.

Traditionally, the dream of Italian parents has been to fix up their sons (and, later, daughters) with a nice, safe, undemanding job, preferably in the public administration, from which it was virtually impossible to be sacked. The verb used for “fix up” in this sense was
sistemare,
which was the same word used to mean “marry off.” By the early 2000s, there was evidence to suggest that the children were no longer content to be herded in this way into a job that lacked excitement, challenges and—in many cases—prospects. In 2001, the international employment agency Adecco carried out an extensive survey of Italian workers and found that the most favored career choice was self-employment. Entering the public administration was barely more popular than becoming a road sweeper or a factory worker. Ten years later, however, when the firm commissioned another poll after a period of prolonged economic stagnation, the picture had changed radically: the single most popular calling was that of state employee.

Until the years of weak growth punctuated by recession began to take their toll, Italians had one of the developed world’s highest rates of household savings. It was consistently double or more the rate in Britain and often several times the level in the United States. The only comparably enthusiastic savers in a major Western economy were the Germans, who, perhaps not coincidentally, live in the middle of Europe and have a similar history of acute vulnerability to foreign invasion.

Where Italians put their savings was also telling. Traditionally, they have preferred the safety of bonds to the potentially higher returns and risks associated with shares. For a long time this was put down to the favorable risk-return ratio on Italian government bonds. Because of the ever present danger of devaluation before Italy entered the euro, the state had to offer high rates of interest to attract foreign investors. But for Italians, who were largely insulated from the effects of devaluation—their lire would continue to be worth the same in Italy—the high yields on government bonds made them a bargain. Even more attractive to the members of Italy’s huge middle class was the short-dated, zero-coupon bond known as a BOT (Buono Ordinario del Tesoro). BOTs do not offer interest payments: the return comes in the form of a final repayment higher than the cost of the bond. But the difference between the final repayment and the cost price nevertheless reflects prevailing interest rates. The millions of Italians who tucked them away in their portfolios came to be known humorously as the “BOT people.”

Even after Italy adopted the euro and interest rates fell sharply, the preference for less volatile, fixed-interest securities remained. Ten years later, bonds accounted for a fifth of all household financial assets. In the United States, the proportion was less than a tenth, and in Britain it was under 2 percent.
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Italians’ appetite for financial assets of all kinds pales in comparison with their investment in land and houses. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in 2008 they had eighteen times as much invested in real estate as they did in securities of all kinds. In America the ratio was only two to one. One reason for this is that families have clung on to properties in the countryside they left when they moved to the cities in the years of the economic miracle. Another is that parents often buy flats or houses to give to their children when they marry and hold them off the market until they are needed. In some cases Italians just buy property as an investment and do not even bother to rent it out, believing that prices will inevitably go up and that the profit they make in the end will compensate them for any loss of income in the meantime.

All these factors have had the effect of boosting the number of empty dwellings. In 2011, there were almost five million empty units scattered across Italy—17 percent of the total housing stock. In Britain the same year the figure was barely 3 percent. This huge and continuous withdrawing of real estate from the market has helped to keep prices high and rising, thus confirming for Italians their belief that property is the best possible investment. But after more than a decade of economic stagnation, with some families urgently needing to raise cash, the housing market began to weaken and there was a risk that the apparently virtuous circle just described could reverse.

Just as risk aversion is characteristic of Italians’ approach to investment, it can also be discerned in their approach to football. Wary prudence has long been the hallmark of Italian soccer. The traditional form of play began to develop in the 1930s, when the then national coach, Vittorio Pozzo, led Italy to two successive World Cup wins, in 1934 and 1938. His strategy leaned heavily on a robust—and at times ruthless—defense. But it was not until after the Second World War that Italian coaches embraced the style of play that was to typify Italian football for decades:
catenaccio
. The word itself means “bolt” or “padlock,” an appropriate term for the deployment of a virtually impenetrable defense, the aim of which was to prevent losing at all costs.
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Though Italian teams are still capable of playing boring, highly defensive football,
catenaccio
as such has faded from the scene and in recent years the way in which soccer is played in Italy has become more adventurous.

That is not the only sign that Italians may be casting aside their customary caution. At the election that preceded Enrico Letta’s appointment as prime minister in 2013, most of the established parties put forward younger candidates. But the election also saw the eruption into parliament of the Five-Star Movement (M5S), led by the comedian Beppe Grillo. The average age of its deputies and senators was the same as that of Letta’s youngest minister. Overall, the average age of Italy’s lawmakers dropped from fifty-six in the previous parliament to forty-eight.