The Italians (26 page)

A son tied to his mother’s apron strings is known in Italian as a
mammone.
Equivalent terms can be found in other languages. In English, he would be a “mama’s boy.” Like “mama’s boy,”
mammone
is not a term any man would take as a compliment. But Italian is possibly unique in having a word to describe the phenomenon of sons unduly dependent on their mothers:
mammismo
. It is a fact sometimes put forward as evidence that the stereotype is correct and that a uniquely intimate—some would say unhealthy—relationship links a disproportionate number of Italian males to their mothers.

But is
mammismo
an intrinsic and immutable aspect of the Italian national character? In 2005 the historian Marina D’Amelia published a book
¹²
arguing that
mammismo
was what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger dubbed an “invented tradition,”
¹³
similar to other legends conjured into existence for a specific political, social or other purpose, such as nation building. D’Amelia found that the term
mammismo
dated only from 1952. The journalist and novelist Corrado Alvaro first used it as the title of an essay in his collection
Il nostro tempo e la speranza
(“Hope and Our Times”)
.
The way Italian mothers brought up their sons to believe that they had “a right to everything” was “at the origin of Italy’s traditional amorality, lack of civic education and political immaturity,” Alvaro argued.

For D’Amelia, this was just a way of loading onto women the responsibility for the perceived defects that had led Italy into its adoption of Fascism and the disasters that befell it during the Second World War. But it is one thing to coin a term and another to invent the syndrome it describes. And as D’Amelia’s own book makes clear, examples of an unusually strong bond between sons and mothers can be found earlier in Italy’s history. One of the most celebrated is the relationship between the leading ideologist of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini, and his mother, Maria Drago.

Mothers remain close to their sons in most, if not all, Mediterranean societies. Robbed of any real economic or political clout, women in Southern Europe (and North Africa) have traditionally sought to capitalize on the fact that they are nevertheless revered as mothers—and all the more so if they have given their husbands a son—by lavishing attention on their male offspring. Their sons have responded with a mother-worship that carries much the same subtext as son-adulation: that a mother’s best place is in the home with her children.

Much is made of the exclamation
Mamma mia!
as evidence that
mammismo
has infiltrated even the Italian language. But
Madre mía!
Is heard almost as often in Spanish. And it would be hard to come up with a more forceful, overprotective parent than the stereotypical Jewish mother.

Mammismo
may be a unique word. But the difference between what it describes and what happens in other Mediterranean societies is one of degree rather than kind. That said, it would be rash to dismiss
mammismo
as no more than a myth. There is just too much evidence of it on all sides, even if that evidence is often more visible to foreigners and to Italians who have lived or worked abroad than it is to those who have never had firsthand experience of another society. Stories abound of wives who discover after their wedding that their mother-in-law is going to be living in an adjoining flat, of Italian men who habitually spend part of the weekend by themselves with their mothers, or of those who return to live with their mothers after the breakup of their marriage. For the author of another, less scholarly recent study,
mammismo,
far from being a legend, has become a “pandemic.”
¹⁴

In an interview for
Psychology Today,
Genoese psychotherapist Roberto Vincenzi disagreed with that conclusion.
¹⁵
He thought the syndrome was less widespread than it once was. But he acknowledged that “one of the problems from which many of my patients—and their relatives—suffer” was one of husbands putting their mothers before their wives in their affections and priorities. “In a healthy family, a ‘generational barrier’ ought to exist between parents and children; that is to say, the recognition of the existence of two different sorts of love: the love that unites the parents [and] the love of the parents for the children and of the children for the parents. If, on the other hand, a parent loves a child with a love that is too strong and thereby prevents him from growing up, you get a breach of the generational barrier, which is a sure sign of pathology.”

The British writer Tim Parks, who married an Italian and wrote a fascinating account of family life in Veneto,
¹⁶
observed that in the Anglo-Saxon world “complicity traditionally, or at least ideally, resides in the relationship between the parents. In Italy it is crucially shifted toward the relationship between mother and child.” Everyone knows that the Madonna has traditionally served as a model for Latin mothers. But what is less often noted is the similarity between the roles of the Latin father and that of her husband. As Parks remarks, “Joseph is merely a stand-in. God is the father, and that fellow’s most distinguishing trait has always been his absence.” Some of the most memorable passages in Parks’s book are the bittersweet ones in which he describes how his wife’s relationship with their children swiftly becomes of a quite different quality and substance to his own. It is impossible to read them without wondering whether they do not offer at least a partial explanation for the phenomenon referred to earlier, of the Italian husbands who detach themselves from the family as their children grow up and return much later to spend their old age with their wives.

Among the many paradoxes of Italian life is that it has room for both
mammismo
and
maschilismo
—and, what is more, a high level of gender stereotyping. Pink, for example, continues to be regarded as an exclusively feminine color, not to be worn by boys or men unless they wish to be regarded as homosexuals. Some years ago, I returned from London with what I considered to be a rather elegant pale pink tie bought in Jermyn Street. The first time I wore it to the office, one of my female Italian colleagues swept past me in the corridor. “No Italian man would
ever
wear that tie,” she muttered. To this day, I do not know whether she was applauding my sartorial courage or deploring my cultural ignorance. At all events, I took the hint and did not wear it to work again.

Silvio Berlusconi is far from being alone in using the word “pink” to characterize something that pertains to the female sex, in the way that he did when describing Zapatero’s cabinet.
^*
Women also routinely use it: a statutory percentage of women created for the purposes of affirmative action, for example, is universally termed a
quota rosa,
or “pink proportion.” The “If Not Now, When?” demonstrations were advertised with a poster that had a pink background.

One of the effects of rigid gender stereotyping, I suspect, is the enthusiasm in Italy—as in Spain—for transvestite and transsexual prostitutes, whose defiance of gender division offers a kind of escape. It was estimated in the late 1990s that more than one in every twenty prostitutes in Italy was either a transvestite or, more commonly, a transsexual.
¹⁷
It is a moot point whether the men who frequent them are deceiving themselves as to their own sexual orientation.

Homosexual acts between consenting adults have been legal throughout Italy since the entry into force of the first postunification penal code in 1890.
^*
Yet until recently the taboo on homosexual sex was very strong indeed. Even today attitudes toward gay people are relatively conservative. A recent Istat survey found that a quarter of the respondents believed that homosexuality was an illness.
¹⁸
Only 60 percent thought it was acceptable for people to have a sexual relationship with a member of the same sex, and half that number was of the opinion that “the best thing for a homosexual is not to tell others that he or she is one.” A lot of gay people, it would seem, follow that advice: the same survey suggested that only a quarter of the gay people who lived with their families had come out to their parents.

By contrast, an overwhelming majority of respondents condemned discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. And almost two-thirds agreed that gay partnerships should have the same rights in law as married couples.

Recent years have seen several members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community rise to prominence in national and regional politics. Intriguingly, all are from the Mezzogiorno. Nichi Vendola, who was first elected to parliament in 1992, has never disguised the fact that he is gay. It seems to have done nothing to hinder his career. He was elected governor of Puglia in 2005 and four years later he became the leader of the radical Left Ecology Freedom Party (Sinistra Ecologia Libertà, or SEL), which won more than forty seats in the national parliament in the 2013 election. Rosario Crocetta was elected Italy’s first openly gay mayor—of the Sicilian city of Gela—in 2003, and has since gone on to become president of the island’s autonomous government. In 2006, the entertainer and writer Vladimir Luxuria became the world’s second ever transgender national lawmaker.
^*
And two years later, in the election that saw Luxuria lose her seat, Paola Concia, from Abruzzo, a leading activist for lesbian rights, was elected to parliament.

Yet because of the influence exerted by the Vatican, parliament has made no progress toward outlawing the harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people or toward providing gay couples with even limited rights. Catholic lawmakers prevented homosexuals from being included among those covered by hate crime legislation introduced while the center-left was in office in the late 1990s, and an attempt to provide a legal status for civil unions (involving both heterosexual and homosexual couples) was blocked in the same way during the center-left government of 2006–2008
^*
—all in the name of that most sacred of Italian sacred cows, the family.

CHAPTER 12

Family Matters

La famiglia è la patria del cuore.

The family is the homeland of the heart.

Giuseppe Mazzini

I
described earlier how Italians, in general, have been slow to embrace certain new technologies. But there is an important exception. In one respect they were, to use the jargon of the trade, “early adapters.” When mobile telephones started to become affordable (and usable) with the introduction of the digital GSM standard in the early 1990s, Italians leaped at the chance to buy them. Even though the service providers in Italy balked at offering easy payment options for the handsets, forcing customers to buy them outright, cell phones were soon more widely owned than in either Britain or the United States. By the end of the decade, Italy had proportionately more mobile users than any other country in the European Union.

You could not walk down a street or travel on a bus without someone roaring
“Pronto!”
into one of those early, bulky handsets. But what was particularly interesting was what came next. As often as not, it was
“Ma dove sei?”
(“But where are you?”), which seemed odd. The whole point of mobile telephones was that you could speak from anywhere to anywhere, so why would a caller care where the other person was? I did not hear people in other countries asking this question.

It was the first hint at the main reason why, in a country otherwise deeply suspicious of technological innovation, cell phones were spreading at such an extraordinary rate: many Italians were using them to keep in contact with (and keep tabs on) the members of their family. According to an Istat study published in 2006, more than three-quarters had bought their mobile telephone because of “family demands.” On the list of other possible reasons, “work” came fifth.