The Italians (27 page)

Cell phones have reassured any number of solicitous Italian
mamme
and, no doubt, frustrated any number of juvenile escapades, not to mention trysts. Far from allowing people to escape from the intimacy of family life, in Italy the mobile telephone has enabled the family to remain intimate even when its members are scattered over a wide area.
^*

I vividly recall an interview I once had with a prosecutor whose job was to oversee investigations into Italy’s most dangerous mafia, the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria. To get to see him, I had been frisked and then led through a maze of corridors, put into a lift, taken up an indeterminate number of floors, then marched down several flights of stairs and finally led down more passageways in what was clearly an attempt to obscure the location of the prosecutor’s office. Halfway through our discussion, his cell phone rang and he broke off.

“Pronto! Sì . . . Sì . . . Sì . . .”

Turning away from me, he cupped his hand over the lower half of his mobile and lowered his voice. I imagined that on the other end of the line was maybe a Carabinieri captain with a hot lead, or else a frightened man insisting on protection if he was to turn state’s evidence. The yeses turned to increasingly peremptory noes. I signaled that I would leave the room if he wanted. But it was too late. He exploded with:

“Yes! But not NOW,
Mamma!
”

The strength of the Italian family and its importance in Italian life would seem to be beyond question. More than anything, it has been the refuge in which Italians have traditionally found protection from the turbulence and vicissitudes of life on the peninsula and its adjoining islands. The family has become so fundamental a part of the national identity that it even affects Italian grammar. If you want to say “my book” or “my pen,” you say
il mio libro
or
la mia penna
. But when you refer to a member of your family, you drop the article before the possessive adjective, such that “my wife” is
mia moglie
and “my brother” is
mio fratello
. But as soon as you again step linguistically beyond the confines of the family, the article reappears—even in the case of close friends and lovers. Your best friend is
il mio
migliore amico
or
la mia migliore amica
and your fiancé or fiancée (or boyfriend or girlfriend) is
il mio fidanzato
or
la mia fidanzata.
^*

The family is praised and honored at every turn. No campaign speech is complete without an account of what the candidate intends to do for
la famiglia
. Media reports and official documents speak of
famiglie
in situations where, in English, one would use “households,” the subliminal message being that all households must consist of families. Prelates refer to
la famiglia
as something endorsed from on high, unchanging and untouchable.

But, like the commercials on Italian TV—many of which still depict large families gathered around a dining table, all expressing delight at whatever mass-produced or deep-frozen food the advertisers are trying to push—they are indulging in nostalgia. For while it is true that family loyalties in Italy do remain extremely strong (and may even be getting stronger), the traditional family is fast declining. A huge gap has opened up between what is said and what is done. In fact, the day may not be far off when the traditional Italian family will be a legend, albeit one in which many Italians will still want fervently to believe.

Let’s start by going back to the most recent World Values Survey. Respondents were asked about the importance of the family in their lives. Fully 93.3 percent of Italians answered “very important,” 4 percentage points more than in Spain and 7 percentage points more than in France. So far so unexceptional: the replies show Italians are more family-minded even than their Latin neighbors. But the proportion of Britons who gave the same answer was higher still, if only by 0.3 of a percentage point.

The family, it is true, affects every aspect of Italian life. As will be seen in later chapters, it has a huge impact on such disparate issues as the role of immigrants and the size of the government budget deficit. It influences crime and corruption. And for as long as Italians continue to believe in it so passionately, it will continue to have great importance.

But the family as an institution has undergone immense changes in recent decades. The most controversial was the introduction of divorce. Its approval, at a time when Italy was still comprehensively dominated by the Christian Democrats, owed much to the spread of feminist thinking following the student uprisings of 1968. Despite furious opposition from the Catholic Church, it was passed by both houses of parliament and became law at the end of 1970. The battle, however, did not stop there. Lay Catholic organizations collected the signatures needed for a referendum, which was finally held in 1974. The outcome was a ringing endorsement of the new law and a spectacular demonstration of the distinction that Italians draw between their attachment to Catholicism and their obedience to Church leaders. Of those who cast a ballot, 59 percent voted in favor of the legalization of divorce.

Paradoxically, this huge step toward the modernization of Italian society came at a time when other aspects of family law remained thoroughly antiquated. It was not until the following year that family law was given a comprehensive overhaul. The principle that husbands were the rulers of the household disappeared. Wives were given new freedoms. Children born outside of wedlock acquired the same rights as those born inside. Mothers were granted the same rights as fathers to decide on how their children should be brought up. Dowries were abolished. And the law was changed to ensure that women continued to own whatever property they had brought into the marriage—a reform of paramount importance now that they could leave it whenever they chose.

Though the introduction of divorce had been hailed (or deplored) as a turning point in Italian history, for many years its effects were limited. As late as 1995, the so-called crude divorce rate (the number per one thousand of the population) was the lowest in Europe after the former Yugoslav Republic, which at that time had other preoccupations. Since then, the rate has almost doubled, though it is still low by the standards of the rest of the European Union. Proportionately, more than twice as many Britons—and more than three times as many Americans—put a full stop to their marriages.

Just as there are more Italians leaving wedlock, there are fewer entering. As early as the late 1990s, the number of marriages each year was proportionately lower than in Britain, a country often criticized—not least by Britons—as insufficiently family-minded. By 2009, the rate of weddings per 1,000 of the population in Italy had shrunk from around 5 to 3.8. It had fallen in Britain too, but marriage continued to be significantly more popular there than in Italy.

Recent years have also seen a rapid growth in households that are not traditional families: single parents and their children, nonwidowed singles without children, same-sex unions and so on. By the end of the 2000s, there were some seven million of these nontraditional families, and they accounted for 20 percent of Italy’s households, even though households continued to be described as
famiglie
. An important reason for this veritable revolution in Italian life was a sharp rise in the number of men and women who intended to get married but had decided to live together first. By the end of the decade, 38 percent of marriages took place after a period of cohabitation.

Even so, Italian law remains almost exclusively oriented toward the protection of rights and the enforcement of duties within a traditional family. Civil partners lack the most basic of entitlements. They have no right, for example, to be with their dying partner in the hospital. If the partner has been married, but is not divorced, as is often the case in Italy, the most he or she can receive is a fraction of the dead partner’s overall worth. Italian law stipulates that, when a man or woman dies, a quarter of his or her property must go to the legitimate spouse, together with the home in which the spouse is living. Half the inheritance goes to the children, with only the remaining quarter available for bequest in a will.
^*

The short-lived government headed by Romano Prodi between 2006 and 2008 tried to put civil partnerships on a legal footing. But it ran into fierce and ultimately successful opposition from the Catholic Church and was, more than any other, the issue that sealed the government’s fate.
^*

The traditional family has been at the root of much of what Italy has achieved. Family-owned businesses were at the very heart of the country’s economic transformation in the 1950s and 1960s. Brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters were prepared to work harder, longer and more conscientiously for one another than they would ever have dreamed of working for a boss.

And that, of course, is how things have remained. Italy, its economy dominated by small businesses, is still the fortress of the family firm: a land of mom-and-pop stores and tiny workshops where
Papà
toils shoulder to shoulder with his sons while
Mamma
keeps the books. Or is it? Here again, if you paid attention only to what the politicians and prelates said, you would think so. But the figures tell a different story. In 2007, the international nonprofit organization Family Business Network surveyed eight Western European countries. What its researchers found was that the proportion of family businesses in Italy—73 percent of the total—was lower than in all but two other countries. The true citadel of family enterprise, where 91 percent of firms were family owned and managed, was Finland.

Italy did stand out in two other respects, though. First of all, a high proportion of family business owners—the second-highest percentage after Spain—said they had no intention of transferring the ownership of their companies in the future. Among those Italians who said that they were contemplating a transfer, a high proportion—the highest, along with Germany, in the countries surveyed—said they envisioned their company going to a member of their family. Not coincidentally perhaps, Italy was also the country with the highest percentage of bigger family firms (those with annual turnovers of more than €2 million). In other words, Italians appeared to be exceptionally keen to keep things in the family, and a large number of those who succeeded in expanding their businesses managed to do so without losing control to either banks or outside shareholders.

Many of Italy’s biggest corporations, in fact, including several that are quoted on the stock exchange, remain family businesses at heart. The Agnelli family still has the biggest shareholding in FCA, the automotive group, which emerged from Fiat’s takeover of Chrysler in 2009. Ferrero, the makers of Nutella, is a private firm owned by Michele Ferrero, the son of the founder and the father of the CEO. Luxottica, which crafts most of the world’s designer sunglasses, is still run by its founder, Leonardo Del Vecchio, and steps have been taken to ensure that control passes to his six children on his death. Silvio Berlusconi’s business empire will likewise continue to be a family affair: his daughter by his first marriage runs the holding company, Fininvest, while her brother is the deputy chairman of Berlusconi’s television group, Mediaset. Italmobiliare is a fiefdom of the Pesenti family. And so on, and so on. Most of the great Italian fashion empires also grew up around families: the Benettons, the Ferragamos, the Guccis, the Versaces, the Fendis, the Missonis . . .

Because the nuclear family has been so central to Italian society, its decline has potentially limitless effects. Yet they are rarely discussed. Few politicians or commentators, for example, have an appetite for confronting the fact that the contribution of Italy’s biggest provider of welfare services is starting to shrink at a time when Italian governments, like those in the rest of Southern Europe, are being forced to slash their health and social services budgets to balance the public accounts.

One of the reasons Italian health authorities have so far had to pay for fewer hospital nurses than in other countries is because of a universal assumption that inpatients will be cared for by their relatives. Until now, moreover, Italian governments have had to spend far less than others on homes for the elderly. Originally, that was because aged parents continued living in, or very near, the same house as their children, grandchildren and, in some cases, great-grandchildren. But as that system has broken down, particularly in the cities, another was devised—one that allowed the elderly to remain at home and that at the same time removed a burden from the state. You can see it in action on most crowded urban streets: somewhere amid the passersby there will often be a white-haired man or woman leaning on the arm of a Filipino or Latin American or Eastern European as he or she shuffles along on an undemanding walk around the block. The immigrant is a
badante,
or carer, hired by the family so that the women, who have traditionally cared for the elderly in Italy, can get on with their careers. What would have happened if millions of immigrants had not poured into Italy just as the old way of doing things was becoming untenable is a question seldom asked in public, and studiously avoided by the right-wing parties, whose middle-class voters are the ones with big enough disposable incomes to pay for a
badante.

One of the Italian family’s most important contributions is one that is hard to pin down with facts and figures. It has, I think, made for a generally less alienated society than those to be found in many European countries. Italy may be plagued by organized-crime syndicates (which, to some extent, reflect a family ethic), but most of its inner cities are relatively safe places, and, as will be seen later, the level of violent crime is much—but
much
—lower than in other, comparable nations.