The Italians (24 page)

In Italy, a man kills a woman—a partner, daughter, lover, sister or “ex”—on average once every two or three days, and probably at home because the family isn’t always and necessarily that magical place in which all is love. He kills her because he considers her his property, because he cannot imagine that a woman might belong to herself, to be free to live as she wants and even fall in love with another man. And we women, because we are ingenuous, often mistake all sorts of things for love. But love has damn all to do with violence and blows . . . A man who beats us up does not love us. Let us get that into our heads. Let us save it onto our hard disks . . . A man who beats us up is a shit. Always. And we must understand that straightaway, at the first slap, because then the second will come along, and then a third and a fourth. Love creates happiness and swells the heart. It does not break ribs and it does not leave bruises on the face.

Yet another sign of change—just as significant in its own way—has been a steady fall in the popularity of the Miss Italia contest. Time was when it was no exaggeration to say that this was one of the great national events of the year: a pageant celebrating the endless supply of beautiful girls to be found in Italy, televised for hours on end, night after night, for up to four days in a row on the flagship channel of Rai. There were few higher accolades than to be asked to join the panel of judges. Some of the most illustrious names in modern Italian culture—men like Giorgio de Chirico, Luchino Visconti and Marcello Mastroianni—agreed to duties that included scoring the curviness of the contestants’ behinds. As recently as 2001, Miss Italia was winning an audience share of 85 percent. But since then its popularity has sunk dramatically—to such an extent that in 2013 Rai announced it would no longer be televising the contest. It was taken over by the channel La7, where it notched up a share of less than 6 percent.

Sniffing a change in the air, even
Striscia la notizia,
the program that invented the
velina,
decided it was time for a less sexist approach. A couple of attractive young men
were brought into the program to flaunt their bare chests while two women did the presenting. But the result was a sharp fall in the show’s audience ratings, and the female
veline
were hurriedly reinstated.

Whatever else may have changed, the cult of the
mamma
in Italy has shown itself to be extraordinarily durable. The respect shown toward mothers—or rather, the lip service paid to motherhood—is well-nigh boundless. And the importance of having—and enjoying—children is impressed on women at all turns. It begins in church with the worship of Mary. Women’s elders, their peers, the advertisements they see in girls’ and women’s magazines and on television and radio all reinforce the message that there is no more important job in life than that of being a
mamma
. Since it is tantamount to blasphemy in most circles in Italy to assert that children are anything but an unmitigated blessing and delight, a childless woman is usually an object of pity.

One of the problems with all this is that it provides employers with the ideal justification for getting rid of workers who would otherwise have to be maintained through their unproductive maternity leave. Whatever the law may say, the practice of dismissing women who become pregnant is still all too common. The way in which some employers get around legislation that, as we have seen, dates back to the 1960s, is to tell a female job applicant that she will be hired only on the condition that she sign an undated letter of resignation. The employer then files it away to be retrieved and dated whenever it is required in the future. These appalling documents are known as
dimissioni in bianco.
Employers who force them on women risk a heavy fine. But the offense is almost impossible to prove and has survived, particularly in smaller firms.

Italian society otherwise appears to practice what it preaches. In the WEF’s surveys, the one category in which Italy has always excelled is that relating to maternity. The provision for maternity leave is among the most generous in the developed world. But once her maternity benefit expires, a young Italian
mamma
finds that the state offers her little help in balancing her role as a mother with her other duties at home and work (if, that is, she has kept her job;
dimissioni in bianco
apart, the social pressure on women to give up work after they have their first child is considerable). What the British call crèches and the Americans day care centers are in short supply. Free, publicly funded ones are even rarer. Less than one child in five below the age of three goes to an
asilo nido
(literally, “nest refuge”).

That said, the shortage of nurseries is a function of demand as well as supply. For one thing, the unusually low number of women who work in Italy means there are more mothers in a position to take care of their children during the day. Pollsters commissioned to carry out a survey for the Istat in 2011 found that other factors played a role. When they interviewed a cross section of mothers who did not put their children into nurseries, they discovered that more than a third preferred to leave them with relatives instead, while a similar proportion said they felt their son or daughter was too young to be entrusted to the care of strangers.

As children grow up, another factor emerges to keep their mothers tied to the home: the hours in secondary schools have not changed since the days in which almost all mothers were housewives. Lessons are squeezed into the morning on the assumption that children will then go home to a lunch cooked by
mamma
. In reality, that often nowadays means a sandwich left for them in the refrigerator.

Perhaps the most important factor of all, though, is that Italian husbands—like Spanish ones—have proved deeply reluctant to share the burden of looking after the house. According to official statistics dating from 2011, considerably fewer than half helped prepare meals and barely a quarter did the dishes. But the real no-go area for
l’uomo italiano
is apparently ironing. Whatever the reason—it remains intriguingly elusive—the proportion of men prepared to help with the ironing was one in a hundred.

Faced with the difficulty of reconciling the three roles they are nowadays expected to play, women are forced to choose. The upshot in most cases is that they curb their interconnected roles as wives and mothers. A similar response can be read in the statistics for countries right across Southern Europe.

In Italy, ever since the late 1970s, women have been pushing back the age at which they marry. They began limiting the number of their children even earlier. Since then, other factors have come into play, notably the erosion of job security as more and more young people join the labor market on short-term contracts with no guarantee of permanent employment at the end. The birth rate has plunged from a peak of over twenty per one thousand in the mid-1960s to less than ten per thousand in the mid-1980s. Since then it has fallen away more gently, touching a low of nine per thousand for the first time in 2011.

There are few areas of society in which the contrast between rhetoric and reality is so blatant: on the one hand the glorification of the
mamma
and the worship of the Madonna, and on the other a society in which it is becoming almost as common to have just one child as it is to have several children and in which the mothers waiting at the gates of primary schools are often women in their forties. Behind the statistics is another yawning gulf: between the way the Church would like Italians to conduct their sex lives and the way they actually do.

CHAPTER 11

Lovers and Sons

Italians do it better.

Lettering on T-shirt worn by Madonna
^*
in the video of her 1986 song “Papa Don’t Preach”

Y
ou see them everywhere, often in the most improbable places. You see them painted on walls and chalked on sidewalks. You even see them occasionally marked out painstakingly in shells on beaches. They are particularly common at the gates of schools. Declarations of giddy, dizzyingly impassioned love, placed in such a way as to catch the attention of the object of desire as she (or, occasionally, he) goes about her daily life, are one of the more delightful aspects of the Italian landscape and a counterpoint to the prudent reserve that characterizes much of Italian life. Some of these
graffiti d’amore
are poetic (“You are the dream that begins the moment I wake”), others touching (“Anna, come back to me, I beg you”).

“Laura, I love you more than life,” declares another I saw recently. And, indeed, some suitors put their love before their lives in their attempts to demonstrate the intensity of their passion. I have glimpsed messages written in giant letters at who knows what risk to the writer on bridges spanning motorways. A few years ago, a town near Milan woke up to find that someone had scaled the scaffolding around a tower block under construction to hang on it a forty-square-meter banner with a giant red heart and the name of the woman he loved.

Al cuore non si comanda
runs an often-heard proverb: “You cannot govern your heart.” But traditionally, as in other Mediterranean and Catholic societies, matters of the heart have been very strictly controlled, and particularly insofar as they developed into matters of the body. In recent years, the grip of the Church and social tradition on the private and sexual lives of the young has loosened considerably. A recent study
¹
that looked at the median age at which Italians had their first sexual encounter found that among women it had fallen sharply, from twenty-two years old in the generation born at around the time of the First World War to eighteen and a half among those born in the 1980s. Among men, however, the figure had scarcely changed over the years, oscillating between seventeen and a half and eighteen and a half. As the author of the study noted, that was because in the generations born in the first half of the twentieth century the sexual initiation of men and women took place in very different ways. For boys in their late teens, it was a rite of passage usually experienced “with older, nonvirginal women or prostitutes.” By contrast, most of the women were either virgins when they married, which was usually in their early twenties, or they “had their first encounter with their future husband a short time before their wedding.”

Since the 1970s, there has been a revolution in the sexual habits of Southern Europe. According to the same study, only about one in ten Italian women born in the late 1960s was a virgin when she reached the altar. But the impact—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the legacy—of Catholic influence can still be read in the few reliable international comparisons in this area.

One of the more recent studies, commissioned by the Durex condom manufacturer, looked at the average age at which people of all ages in different countries said they had first had sex.
²
The figures showed a discernible pattern. The highest averages were predictably in countries in the developing world that have robust social taboos on premarital sex. Next came a group that included most, though not all, of the Mediterranean Catholic countries, including Italy, where the “mean age at first sex” was 19.4 years. That was fractionally lower than in Spain, but significantly higher than in the UK or the United States, where the figures were 18.3 and 18.4, respectively.

An even greater divergence can be seen in figures relating to female sexuality. The image of Italian womanhood projected to the outside world in movies and advertising is often that of a sultry, sensuous and, by implication, sexually voracious she-cat. Yet there is evidence to indicate that, on the contrary, Italian women are relatively inhibited. At a conference in Rome in 2010 figures were presented for the percentage of the adult population in various countries that acknowledged having masturbated at least once in their lives.
³
Among men, the levels were roughly the same in Southern Europe as they were in the north—in all cases, 90 percent or above. But among women there was a striking difference. Whereas in the Nordic countries roughly four out of five said they had pleasured themselves, in Italy the proportion was under half.