The Italians (28 page)

Go to the railway station in any big Italian city and you will no doubt find a runaway or two preparing to bed down for the night amid the usual assortment of tramps, alcoholics and drug addicts. But their numbers are considerably fewer than in, say, London or New York.

The problem, if there is one, is not of runaway sons and daughters, but of stay-at-home children who are still in the family home long after their counterparts in the rest of the world have struck out on their own. In this respect, the family is becoming stronger, not weaker. The phenomenon began to make itself apparent in Italy and other Southern European countries as far back as the late 1980s. By 2005, 82 percent of Italian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty were still living with their parents. The equivalent figure for the United States was 43 percent and in none of the three biggest European nations—France, Britain and Germany—was it higher than 53 percent.

The rise in the number of stay-at-home kids is an important reason the marriage rate has declined so steeply, despite the fact that young Italians can count on a degree of support from their parents that would be unthinkable in many other societies. It is, for example, common for the parents of newlyweds to get together to buy them their first home. According to a survey published in 2012, two-thirds of Italian couples help their offspring in this way.

That means their children do not have to save up to get the deposit for their mortgage, nor do they have to make painful sacrifices to meet the repayments while wondering all along, as do so many British and American newlyweds, how on earth they will get together the money to start a family of their own. For a lot of middle-class couples in Britain, the uphill road is even steeper because they feel they are duty-bound to send their children to private schools. In Italy, as in most other continental European countries, the norm is for children of all classes to attend the local public school, so only parents with a desire to have their children brought up in a particular religion or according to a particular philosophy opt for private education.

As for babysitting, that too will probably be taken care of. If the grandparents have bought the young parents’ house, it is a euro to a
centesimo
they will have bought one just around the corner from where they live. That way Granddad and Grandma—
Nonno
and
Nonna
—are conveniently on hand to look after the young ones while
Mamma
and
Papà
slip off to the movies or enjoy a night out with friends. In many cases, the grandparents’ role goes further: 30 percent provide day care for at least one grandchild.
¹
In this respect too, the strength of family bonds is removing a burden from the government.

Though often referred to in the media by the pejorative term
bamboccioni,
Italy’s stay-at-home offspring enjoy a remarkable degree of public tolerance. When the late Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the finance minister in the Prodi government of 2006–2008 who popularized the word, dared to suggest that parents should kick them out of their homes, he ran into a firestorm of national indignation. The conventional wisdom in Italy is that they stay at home only because of the country’s skewed labor market. The financial uncertainty generated by the spread of short-term contracts has made it all but impossible for young people to make their way on their own. Children, it is felt, have no option but to stay at home and their parents have no choice but to put up with them.

There is unquestionably some truth in these arguments. But in 2005 two Italian researchers, Marco Manacorda and Enrico Moretti, published a study that challenged popular wisdom on the subject.
²
For a start, older Italians were not for the most part making any great sacrifice by agreeing to live together under the same roof as their offspring. “Italian parents report that they are happier when living with their adult children,” the two academics wrote in a summary of their findings. “This is the opposite of what happens in Britain and the United States.”

And if parents are happy living with their offspring, most children are happy to live with their mothers and fathers. Surveys consistently reflect good relations between teenagers and their parents. But perhaps the most striking finding emerged from a poll carried out among thirty-three- to thirty-seven-year-olds, which was published in 2005 under the telling title “Inizio dell’età adulta”
(“The Start of Adult Life”).
³
It found that, among these thirtysomethings, about 12 percent of the women and 17 percent of the men were still living with their parents. The rest had left home. When asked why, some said it was to get married or live with a partner; others cited work or study. But less than one in ten of the total said they had moved out because they wanted to be independent. Young Italians will often tell you with a slightly guilty air that it is pretty convenient having
Mamma
do the washing. And these days many parents will agree to let their son’s girlfriend or daughter’s boyfriend stay the night.

The main reason for Italy’s legions of
bamboccioni,
Manacorda and Moretti concluded, was that their parents were “bribing” them to stay at home. Increased parental incomes coincided with almost identical rises in the level of cohabitation, as the older generation passed on to the younger generation a share of the new wealth sufficient to keep them at home.

It hardly needs to be said that such an approach robs young Italians of a sense of responsibility for their own lives. The Italian language both reflects and reinforces this. The words for boy and girl—
ragazzo
and
ragazza
—continue to be applied to those who, in other societies, would long since have qualified as “men” and “women.” The age at which Italians cease to be referred to as
ragazzi
(and cease to be addressed in the familiar
tu
form) is ill-defined, but a fair guess would put it at around twenty-seven.

The equanimity (or enthusiasm) with which Italian parents contemplate the prospect of their children remaining at home raises the intriguing question of whether it is not another reason for Italy’s increasing tendency to gerontocracy. By keeping their children at home—and, in many cases, out of the labor market—parents are consciously or unconsciously reducing the natural pressure that would otherwise be exerted on their generation to move aside in favor of younger men and women.

The
bamboccioni
are young, but not hungry. Since they do not have to find the rent for a flat or pay for their own meals, they also have fewer incentives for taking a job that is not commensurate with their qualifications—or aspirations. Manacorda and Moretti concluded, in fact, that it was not the high rate of youth unemployment that was breeding the
bamboccioni,
but rather the
bamboccioni
who were, in part at least, responsible for the high rate of youth unemployment. Once they do get a job, moreover, young men and women who choose to remain at home have fewer reasons to push for a higher salary, and that in turn means they will have fewer reasons to take on greater responsibility and work longer hours. Crucially, too, they will be loath to accept a post elsewhere in the country. All this undermines Italy’s economic competitiveness.

But there is, I think, another, subtler way in which cohabitation between the generations holds the country back. The 2005 study concluded that the single most important advantage that the parents derived from having their children at home was “the opportunity they have to get their children to conform to their precepts.” Imbued with the ideas of a previous generation,
bamboccioni
are less likely to launch initiatives of their own, whether they be dot-com start-ups, sandwich delivery businesses or garage bands.

The closeness between parents and children may help explain why there are so few sullen and resentful hoodies on the streets of Italian towns. But they are also the reason Italy is not spawning other, more innovative youth movements. Punk, hip-hop and goth all began elsewhere. When they surfaced in Italy, they did so as very pale reflections of the originals. Some young Italians—it is true—find their way into the so-called
centri sociali
that often began as squats and that usually have a far-left-wing or far-right-wing ethos. Every so often, there is an eruption of angry street violence, invariably featuring rioters from the
centri sociali.
But on the whole, young Italians just do not “do” rebellion. I remember a magazine photo caption that ran:
“Sporca, ruvida anima rock”
(“Dirty, rough rock soul”). It was next to the photograph of a young man in an impeccable jacket with a designer-frayed scarf around his neck.

The two academics cited earlier are not the only Italians in recent years to have questioned whether the strength of family affiliations always works to Italy’s benefit. Italy’s family businesses may have enabled the country to catch up to some of the more prosperous nations in Europe, but they also help to explain why the country has since fallen dramatically behind.
^*

Inheritance is not necessarily the best way to ensure dynamic management. And family firms have a poor record of investment in research and development, which is becoming increasingly vital for businesses in the twenty-first century. It is one thing to think up an elegant new design for shoes or sweaters. It is altogether another to develop an innovative new digital or electronic product. Small may once have been beautiful in industry. But that is no longer the case.

The most serious charge leveled at the Italian family, though, is of a quite different nature. And it has been around for much longer than doubts about the family’s impact on prosperity. In 1958, American sociologist Edward Banfield published a study of peasant farmers in the southern region of Basilicata. He titled it
The Moral Basis of a Backward Society
. And if that sounds pretty damning, then a lot of what was in the book was pretty damning too. Banfield argued that the villagers he studied were unable to progress because they were incapable of acting together for their common good. They were in the grip of what he termed “amoral familism”: their loyalty to their immediate family transcended any considerations of right and wrong. And since they assumed—correctly—that the members of other families would share their outlook, they preferred to undermine them rather than attempt to find a basis for mutually beneficial action. Loyalty to the family superseded loyalty to any wider grouping, be it the village, province, region or nation.

The correlation that Banfield proposed, between strong family ties and antisocial behavior, has since been challenged. In 2011, Danish academic Martin Ljunge published a study based on findings from more than eighty countries. It concluded that, on the contrary, strong loyalty to the family was more likely to be associated with civic virtues such as disapproval of corruption, tax dodging and benefit cheating.
⁴

That may well be true generally. But I have to say that I have my doubts about its application in Italy. Anyone who has borne witness to the interaction of modern-day Italian families in a
condominio
(the tenants’ association that has to approve decisions affecting an entire apartment block or residential estate) will know what I mean. My wife and I once lived in Rome; we rented a flat in an old palazzo just beyond the ancient walls. Year in, year out, the owners of the various apartments would meet to discuss the deplorable state of the common parts, which appeared not to have seen a lick of paint since the 1940s. Year in, year out, they failed to agree and the issue would be postponed.

Finally, not long before we left, rumors swept the building to the effect that an agreement in principle had been reached to repaint the hallway and the stairs. Some days later, I ran into the apartment owner, who had held out with greatest resolve. I asked him about the meeting of the
condominio,
which I knew had taken place the night before. Were the dismal, putty-colored common parts finally going to get a coat of paint?

“No!” he wailed. “They wanted”—and here he rolled his eyes to heaven in horrified recollection of his neighbors’ prodigality—
“colors!”

Since Banfield’s day, other commentators have taken the opposite view to that of Ljunge, arguing that “amoral familism” is endemic not just to rural Basilicata, but to Italy as a whole, and has been for centuries. Family and clan loyalties were at the root of the clashes between rival factions that bloodied the streets of many Italian cities in the Middle Ages. Attitudes identical to those described by Banfield can be found in the writings of the fifteenth century Florentine polymath Leon Battista Alberti, a renowned intellectual who is often cited as the archetype of a Renaissance man: the editors of a 1974 edition of his work
I libri della famiglia
remarked that it was impossible to find “in the entire body of Leon Battista’s work a ‘cluster’ of families that come together and manage to form a
civitas,
a society.”

It would be wrong, all the same, to assume that amoral familism has been an unvarying characteristic of Italian life. The southern countryside in the mid-twentieth century may have been reminiscent of the Tuscany of the fifteenth century, but modern-day Tuscany has precious little in common with the Mezzogiorno of four or five hundred years ago. Over the centuries, the farmers of central Italy developed a complex system of mutual assistance, providing help to one another at times of the year when they needed extra labor. They also cultivated a tradition known as the
veglia,
where entire families would visit one another on winter evenings to while away the hours, playing cards, telling stories and so on. The greater social consciousness of the people of Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia and the Marche may be a better explanation than papal rule
^*
of why so many of them embraced Communism after the Second World War.