The Italians (6 page)

History—and specifically the endlessly shifting boundaries of the states in what is now Italy—helps explain why the country even today is such a linguist’s playground. Several completely foreign languages are spoken within its frontiers. More than three-quarters of the population of the Valle d’Aosta can speak either French or a Franco-Provençal patois. In the western districts of Piedmont, there are some 100,000 Occitan speakers. And in the Alto Adige/Südtirol, in addition to German, which is spoken by about 70 percent of the population—almost 350,000 people—there is Ladin, a language that is the mother tongue of some 20,000 Italians. Ladin is related to Friulian, which is spoken by far more people, around 300,000. Among the other languages to be found in Friuli–Venezia Giulia are Slovene, an archaic variant of Slovene known as Resian (considered by some experts to be a separate language), and various dialects of German.

Croatian has a toehold in Molise. And there are some fifty Albanian-speaking communities scattered across the southern mainland and Sicily. The Arbëreshë, as they are known, are descendants of refugees who fled from Ottoman rule, beginning in the fifteenth century. Integration has whittled down their numbers over the years, but estimates of the number of Albanian speakers in Italy range up to a hundred thousand.
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Another twenty thousand or so Italians are reckoned to speak a dialect of Greek called, appropriately enough, Griko. It lives on in a handful of villages in Puglia and Calabria, and even among some of the city dwellers of Reggio Calabria. Catalan is still spoken in and around the town of Alghero in northwestern Sardinia, where about ten thousand people regard it as their mother tongue.

Other countries also have substantial minorities who speak a foreign language. But what really sets Italy apart are the vast numbers of Italians who speak a dialect. Exactly where a dialect begins and a language ends is a matter for fine, and inevitably controversial, judgment. Sardinian, or Sardu, is generally regarded as a separate language, its dissimilarity a product of the island’s separateness from the rest of Italy for much of its history. In fact, Italian has fewer words in common with Sardinian than it does with French. And the two languages look very different when written down. For example, the Italian proverb
Il sangue non è acqua
(the equivalent of “Blood is thicker than water”) in Sardu becomes
Su sambene no est abba
. The overwhelming majority of Sardinians—about a million people—speak Sardu, which has three dialects of its own.

Piedmontese and Sicilian, spoken by 1.6 million and 4.7 million Italians respectively, are also sufficiently distinct to be considered languages. Others would add Venetian, Lombard and Neapolitan. But then there is an almost infinite variation in the way that Italians speak among themselves at home and with others from the same city or region. The dialect term for an object, creature or activity in one place can be utterly different from the word used to mean the same thing just a few miles away. A coat hanger, for example, is known to some Italians as an
ometto,
to others as a
stampella
and to yet others as an
angioletto
. But it can also be a
gruccia,
attaccapanni,
croce,
appendiabiti,
cruccia,
stanfella,
crocetta,
crociera,
appendino
or
croce.
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While eager to stress the reasons why their city or region is unique, Italians tend to be less aware of their similarities. But the fact is that, while generating diversity, their history has also given them things in common. The knowledge that their forebears conquered the Roman Empire and gave the world the Renaissance engenders in Italians an inner self-confidence that is soon noticeable to anyone who lives among them and that can sometimes show up in a readiness—almost wholly lacking among their Spanish “cousins”—to be individualistic. The sociologist Giuseppe De Rita has argued that their past has endowed Italians, like many Greeks, with something rather more than just self-confidence: an  innate belief in their superiority.

“I’ve never thought Italians were racist in the classical sense of the term,” he once told an interviewer. “They are, on the other hand, convinced of being superior because of a superego linked to the history they have behind them. At all events, they feel themselves to be more intelligent, brighter and better.”
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I can imagine there are many Italians who would scoff at some of that. If you live in some benighted village in the wilds of Basilicata, or in a public housing project in one of the industrial wastelands of the Po Valley, I don’t suppose you think of yourself as heir to the traditions of Augustus and Leonardo. But the sense of pride that De Rita described can certainly be detected among the Tuscans, the Venetians, the Romans and many others. What he said about Italians believing themselves to be smarter—more
sveglio
(“awake” or “aware”), more
in gamba
(“bright”)—than others is unquestionably true.

At the same time, there is a consciousness that Italians have repeatedly been the victims of invasion and oppression—and, what is worse, by their fellow Europeans. It accounts for a feeling of mixed resentment and vulnerability that coexists in the national psyche along with the pride. Take the Italian national anthem, “Il Canto degli Italiani,” better known as “L’Inno di Mameli” after the writer of the lyrics.
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National anthems are mostly about boasting and threatening, about telling the rest of the world of the beauty and other supposed merits of your country and taking advantage of the opportunity to let other states know that yours is powerful and not to be trifled with. Americans proclaim theirs to be “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Britons call on God to save their queen:

Scatter her enemies,

And make them fall!

Confound their knavish tricks,

Confuse their politics

So what do Italians do? Well, in the second verse, they proclaim to the world that

Noi fummo da secoli

calpesti, derisi,

perchè non siam popolo,

perché siam divisi.

We were for centuries

downtrodden, derided,

because we are not a people,

because we are divided.

Now, it can be objected that “L’Inno di Mameli” is a creature of its time—that between 1847, when it was written, and the day in 1870 on which the Bersaglieri burst through the Aurelian Walls, twenty-three years were to elapse, and throughout that period Italians were still divided and downtrodden (though certainly not derided: the bravery of Italy’s nationalists, and that of Giuseppe Garibaldi in particular, was widely admired and praised in the rest of Europe). It is also the case that the words quoted above are rarely heard. In military parades and at international football matches, it is customary to sing only the first verse and the chorus.

But it is still remarkable, I think, that any nation should retain as part of its anthem a verse that is so searingly candid about its own past humiliations, let alone one that declares that “we
are
not a people, because we
are
divided.” All the more so since “L’Inno di Mameli” was not adopted immediately after unification. Italy was at first a monarchy, and for as long as it remained one the national anthem was the House of Savoy’s “Marcia Reale.” It was not until 1946 that the Italian Republic chose Mameli’s verses and not until 2005, in fact, that its status as national anthem was confirmed in law.

A people with a history like that of the Italians cannot but have a somewhat ambiguous view of foreigners. Whereas the British, the Spanish and the Turks have invariably come into contact with strangers in the role of conquerors and later governors, the reverse has been true of the Italians since the age of the Barbarian invasions. It helps, I think, to explain the instinctive protectionism that you encounter in Italy, but also a fatalistic acceptance of the idea that it is quite normal for crucial decisions on the future of the country to be taken by foreigners.

There is even a term—perhaps “euphemism” is a better word—for the non-Italian considerations that need to be taken into account when framing government or party policy.
They are referred to generically as the
vincolo esterno,
or “external constraint.” For Italy’s Christian Democrat–dominated governments during the Cold War, this was the view of any particular issue taken in the U.S. government and particularly the CIA. For their opponents in the Italian Communist Party it was the latest doctrine adopted by the Kremlin. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the principal
vincolo esterno
for Italian policy makers has been represented by the European Commission in Brussels and, since the adoption of the euro, by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. It is a nuisance, but it can also be a boon: Italian politicians, hemmed in on all sides by domestic pressures, often find that the only way they can impose necessary but unpopular measures is by justifying them to the electorate in terms of the
vincolo esterno.

The ambiguity toward foreigners is particularly acute in the case of German speakers who, as has been seen, have been the most persistent interferers in the affairs of the peninsula. It is only very recently that Italians have begun to pose the sorts of questions that have been asked in Britain for years about whether the European Union in general, and the euro in particular, holds the potential for establishing German hegemony over the rest of the continent. Yet the suspicion and resentment of Germany and Germans is there, and it can burst to the surface at unexpected moments (as when Silvio Berlusconi, who was then Italy’s prime minister, was addressing the European Parliament in 2003 and told a German Socialist who was provoking him that he reminded him of a Nazi concentration camp guard).

Italy’s fractured, violent history also helps, I think, to explain a more generalized fatalism among the Italians, and a horror of war. Other nations too abhor war, and usually the more recent their experience of conflict, the greater their abhorrence. But in some societies war is also associated with more positive concepts: heroism, adventure, glory and so on. In Britain, for example, bloodshed went hand in hand with imperial conquest, and though the idea of empire may no longer be exalted, Britons still look back with pride at the likes of Clive, Nelson and Gordon. In Serbia and other Balkan nations, fighting is linked to a past of courageous resistance to the Ottomans.

But in Italy, except among professional soldiers, such attitudes are largely confined to the neo-Fascist fringe. Belonging to the armed forces does not carry with it anything like the same cachet that it does in Britain or the United States.

I know from personal experience of having spent time in war zones that, on returning, people are often keen to hear about your experiences—not because of any morbid interest in death and violence, but because armed conflicts generate extraordinary situations, bizarre anecdotes and, undeniably, a great deal of excitement. I soon realized, however, that in this respect Italians were an exception. As soon as I or someone else brought up the fact that I had been reporting a war or some other kind of conflict, they would as often as not deftly terminate the conversation or equally deftly turn it to another, more socially acceptable subject. For the vast majority of Italians, war—
guerra
—is simply
brutta
(ugly, nasty) and discussion of it is to be avoided in polite company.

Of course, there is plenty of violent behavior in Italian life—mafia killings, football hooliganism and a high level of domestic violence against women. But physical aggression is often replaced by verbal abuse, and verbal insults seldom lead to physical aggression. Knowing this, Italians will often say to one another things that, in other societies, would cause punches to be thrown or knives to be drawn. I know from working in Italian offices that tempestuous rows break out quite often and that, initially, you think that those involved are one snapped nerve away from coming to blows. But they often end as abruptly as they break out, and the next day you see the participants holding a perfectly civilized exchange.

Politics echoes this. The violence of the language used routinely by Italian politicians is astounding. Take, for example, this from Clemente Mastella, who was the justice minister in Romano Prodi’s second government, from 2006 to 2008: “He is not a hero. He is merely moral deadwood.” Now, that sort of insult might be shouted across the House of Commons or hurled by a presidential candidate at his opponent. But here Mastella was referring to one of his fellow cabinet members, the then infrastructure minister Antonio Di Pietro. So you can imagine the kind of things that get said between political adversaries.

Historically, the use of brute force has seldom offered a solution to Italians. The legates, governors and viceroys who ruled so many of them for so much of their history were always capable of summoning up far more military might than ever the Italians could, and the same was true of the foreign states that meddled repeatedly in Italy’s affairs. It perhaps explains why Italians came to place so much faith in intelligence, diplomacy and guile, for these were the qualities that consoled them, that allowed them—however fleetingly—to even the score with the foreigners who were, in effect, their colonial masters.

There is probably no scene in an Italian movie better known to Italians than the one from
Totòtruffa ’62
in which the comedian Antonio De Curtis (“Totò”) sells the Trevi Fountain to an American.
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Many of the characters Totò played would qualify for that most Italian of adjectives,
furbo
. It covers a range of meanings that in English go from “smart” to “cunning” and from “crafty” to “sly.”
Fare il furbo
means to jump a queue. The command
Non fare il furbo
would translate roughly as “Don’t try to get clever with me.”
Furbo
is certainly not a compliment. But the connotations attached to
furbizia
are quite often positive ones. If an Italian tells you that you have just been
furbo
or
furba
in some way, then more often than not he or she will say so in a tone of mixed surprise and complicit approval.