A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN ITALIAN
BETTER LIVING BY DESIGN
THE PEOPLE
ECONOMICS & POLITICS: FIGHTING WORDS
ARTS
SPORT
Imagine you wake up tomorrow and discover you’re Italian. How would life be different, and what could you discover about Italy in just one day as a local? Read on…
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Sveglia! You’re woken not by an alarm but by the burble and clatter of the caffettiera, the ubiquitous stovetop espresso maker. You’re running late, so you bolt down your coffee scalding hot (an acquired Italian talent) and pause briefly to ensure your socks match before dashing out the door. Yet still you walk blocks out of your way to buy your morning paper from Eduardo, your favourite news vendor, and chat briefly about his new baby — you may be late, but at least you’re not rude.
On your way to work you scan the headlines: a rebuttal of the pope’s latest proclamation, yesterday’s football results and today’s match-fixing scandal, and an announcement of new EU regulations on cheese. Outrageous! The cheese regulations, that is; the rest is to be expected. At work, you’re buried in paperwork until noon, when it’s a relief to join friends for lunch and a glass of wine. Afterwards you toss back another scorching espresso at your favourite bar, and find out how your barista’s latest audition went — turns out you went to school with the sister of the director of the play, so you promise to put in a good word.
Back at work by 2pm, you multitask Italian-style, chatting with co-workers as you dash off work emails, text your schoolmate about the barista on your telefonino (mobile phone), and surreptitiously check l’Internet for employment listings — your work contract is due to expire soon. After a busy day like this, aperitivi are definitely in order, so at 6.30pm you head directly to the latest happy-hour hot spot. Your friends arrive, the decor is molto design, the vibe molto cool, and the DJ abbastanza hot, until suddenly it’s time for your English class — everyone’s learning it these days, if only for the slang.
By the time you finally get home, it’s already 9.30pm and dinner will have to be reheated. Peccato! (Shame!) You eat, absent-mindedly watching reality TV while recounting your day and complaining about cheese regulations to whoever’s home — no sense giving reheated pasta your undivided attention. While brushing your teeth, you discuss the future of Italian theatre and dream vacations in Anguilla, though without a raise, it’ll probably be Abruzzo again this year. Finally you make your way to bed and pull reading material at random out of your current bedside stack: art books, gialli (mysteries), a hard-hitting Mafia exposé or two, the odd classic, possibly a few fumetti (comics). You drift off wondering what tomorrow might hold… imagine if you woke up British or American. English would be easier, but how would you dress, and what would you be expected to eat? Terribile! You shrug off that nightmare, and settle into sleep. Buona notte.
From your day as an Italian, this much you know already: Italy is no place for an introvert. It’s not merely a matter of being polite — each social interaction adds meaning and genuine pleasure to daily routines. Conversation is far too important to be cut short by tardiness or a mouthful of toothpaste. All that chatter isn’t entirely idle, either: in Europe’s most ancient, entrenched bureaucracy, social networks are essential to get things done. Putting in a good word for your barista isn’t just a nice gesture, but an essential career boost. As a Ministry of Labour study recently revealed, most people in Italy still find employment through personal connections.
If you’re between the ages of 18 and 34, there’s a 60% chance that’s not a roommate in the kitchen making your morning coffee: it’s mum or dad. This is not because Italy is a nation of pampered mammoni (mama’s boys) and spoilt figlie di papá (daddy’s girls) — at least, not entirely. According to the time-honoured Italian social contract, you’d probably live with your parents until you start a career and a family of your own. Then after a suitable grace period for success and romance — a couple of years should do the trick — your parents might move in with you to look after your kids, and be looked after in turn.
Lately this contract has begun to break down. Official statistics reveal that most Italian women aged 29 to 34 now prefer careers and a home life without curfews or children. According to Italy’s most recent census, Italian women represent 65% of college graduates, are more likely than men to pursue higher education (53% to 45%), and twice as likely to land responsible positions in public service — though Italy still has fewer women in parliament than other Western European nations, and Italian men enjoy 80 more minutes of leisure time daily than Italian women.
But while one in 10 Italian women still lives with her parents by age 35, twice as many men do. This adds some sitcom-worthy awkwardness to the dating scene, as in the reality dating show La sposa perfetta (The Perfect Wife), where women competed for an eligible bachelor’s attention by performing domestic duties, and his mother chose the winner. After the show aired on the government-backed RAI channel, incensed Italian women threatened to withhold €200 of their taxes earmarked for public broadcasting, and the show was not renewed (Click here).
As desirable as living independently might be, it isn’t always an option in the midst of Italy’s current recession. Consider the skyrocketing rents and temptations of home cooking, and it’s no wonder the number of adult Italians living with their parents has grown in recent years — hence the mobile-phone chorus heard at evening rush hour in buses and trams across Italy: ‘Mamma, butta la pasta!’ (Mum, put the pasta in the water!).
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As an Italian, you actually did your co-workers a favour by being late to the office to give yourself a final once-over in the mirror. Unless you want your fellow employees to avert their gaze in dumbstruck horror, your socks had better match. The tram can wait as you fa la bella figura (cut a fine figure).
Italians have strong opinions about aesthetics and aren’t afraid to share them. A common refrain is Che brutta! (How hideous!), which may strike visitors as tactless. But consider it from an Italian point of view — everyone is rooting for you to look good, and who are you to disappoint? The shop assistant who tells you with brutal honesty that yellow is not your colour is doing a public service, and will consider it a personal triumph to see you outfitted in orange instead.
If it’s a gift, though, you must allow 10 minutes for the sales clerk to fa un bel pacchetto, wrapping your purchase with string and an artfully placed sticker. This is the epitome of la bella figura — the sales clerk wants you to look good by giving a good gift. When you do, everyone basks in the glow of la bella figura: you as the gracious gift-giver and the sales clerk as savvy gift consultant, not to mention the flushed and duly honoured recipient.
As a national obsession, la bella figura gives Italy its undeniable edge in design, cuisine, art and architecture. Though the country could get by on its striking good looks, Italy is ever mindful of delightful details. They are everywhere you look, and many places you don’t: the intricately carved cathedral spire only the bell-ringer could fully appreciate, the toy duck hidden inside your chocolate uova di pasqua (Easter egg), the absinthe-green silk lining inside a sober grey suit sleeve. Attention to such details earns you instant admiration in Italy — and an admission that sometimes, non-Italians do have style.
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Who are the people you’d encounter every day as an Italian? On average, about half your co-workers will be women — quite a change from 10 years ago, when women represented just a quarter of the workforce. But a growing proportion of the people you’ll meet are already retired. One out of five Italians is over 65, which explains the septuagenarians you’ll notice on parade with dogs and grandchildren in parks, affably arguing about politics in cafes, and ruthlessly dominating bocce tournaments.
You might also notice a striking absence of children. Italy’s birth rate is the lowest in Europe, at just under one child per woman. Dismayed by such incontrovertible evidence of contraception in an ostensibly Catholic culture, the pope recently called on Italian women to return to traditional roles as wives and mothers. The state is also concerned that a shrinking Italian workforce will mean fewer taxes to fund services for growing numbers of pensioners, and instituted an incentive of €1000 for any Italian woman to give birth. But neither Church nor State can cajole Italian women into motherhood, and Italy’s birth rate remains below replacement level.
But wait, you say: during your day as an Italian, you chatted with a news vendor named Eduardo about his baby. Right you are: like a growing percentage of Italy’s population, Eduardo is an immigrant. (His Spanish name would be spelled Edouardo in Italian.) Eduardo probably lives and works in a northern Italian city, like three-fifths of Italy’s immigrants. But as a Peruvian, Eduardo is not representative of Italy’s immigrants, the majority of whom are European — primarily Albanian, Ukrainian and especially Romanian (Click here).
Immigration is the newest development in the century-old debate over Italian identity. From the Industrial Revolution through the 1960s, cultural frictions focused on internal migrants from Italy’s largely rural southern ‘Mezzogiorno’ region (from Calabria to Abruzzo, plus Sicily), arriving in industrialised northern cities for factory jobs. Just as northern Italy was adjusting to these ‘foreign’ southerners, political and economic upheavals in the 1980s brought new arrivals from Central Europe, Latin America and North Africa, including Italy’s former colonies in Tunisia, Somalia and Ethiopia.
From 1876 to 1976, Italy was a country of net emigration. With some 30 million Italian emigrants dispersed throughout Europe, the Americas and Australia, remittances from Italians abroad helped keep Italy’s economy afloat during economic crises after Independence and WWII. Today, people of Italian origin account for more than 40% of the population in Argentina and Uruguay, more than 10% in Brazil, more than 5% in Switzerland and the US, and more than 4% in Australia, Venezuela and Canada.
By comparison, immigrants account for just 6.3% of Italy’s own population today, though according to Caritas, the rate of immigration is growing faster in Italy than other European nations. Most Italians today choose to live and work within Italy, yet fewer are entering blue-collar agricultural and industrial fields — so without immigrant workers to fill the gaps, Italy would be sorely lacking in tomato sauce and shoes. As a visitor, you’ll glimpse immigrant workers in restaurant kitchens and hotels, in low-paid service jobs that keep Italy’s tourism economy afloat.
As a founding member of the European Union in 1993, Italy became subject to EU regulations on everything from immigration to cheese-making, raising concerns that Italian identity would be lost. Many feared immigration would dilute Italian culture, and promises of immigration crackdowns helped Silvio Berlusconi win elections in 1994 and 2008. Right-wing group Lega Nord introduced 2002 ‘security laws’ mandating detention and expulsion for immigrants suspected of crimes or lacking papers, raising Amnesty International’s concern for asylum-seekers and law-abiding immigrants.
However, Italy’s immigration policy also created an unlikely coalition among Catholics, leftists and capitalists. Catholic charities and leftist groups established centres across Italy to help immigrants acclimatise and seek citizenship. Supporters of this integrationist approach point out that ‘foreigners’ aren’t the source of all of Italy’s crime and terrorism — after all, the Camorra, Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) and other underground Italian organisations terrorised the country for decades. Meanwhile, free-market economists emphasise that more taxpayers mean more funds for Italian social services, and immigrants are statistically more likely to start small businesses needed for Italy’s economic recovery.
Although you read about the Church in the news headlines, you didn’t actually attend Mass on your day as an Italian. The Church remains highly influential in Italy, and La Famiglia Cristiana (The Christian Family) is Italy’s most popular weekly magazine. But you’ll notice that except for tourists, Italian churches are often empty: according to a 2007 Church study, only 15% of Italy’s population regularly attends Sunday mass.
As you’ll notice in Italian headlines, Church doctrine is often the subject of popular debate. An Umbrian teacher’s suspension for removing the crucifix from his public classroom in 2009 sparked arguments over Church symbols in public buildings, and fuelled ongoing debates over the appropriate division of Church and State in Italy. The pope’s latest book shot to the top of Italian bestseller lists in 2007, as did the anticlerical tract Perché non possiamo essere cristiani (e meno che mai cattolici) (Why we can’t be Christian (and even less, Catholics)) by mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi, who examines apparent contradictions in Church doctrine and posits an inverse relationship to the development of civil society.
If the Church hasn’t always been entirely consistent, neither have its critics. Many Italians who fiercely debate the Vatican’s right to interfere in policy decisions regarding divorce, abortion, civil unions and condom use to prevent AIDS have welcomed the pope’s foreign policy interventions and personal appeals to end war in the Middle East. The Vatican’s move to initiate dialogue with Muslim leaders has been widely credited with easing social tensions for Italy’s 1.2 million Muslims, and the Church’s many charitable organisations lauded for providing essential support to those in need where the State leaves off. While the Church remains top of mind for many Italians, Italy remains officially secular, and its citizens variously Muslim, Jewish, atheist, Catholic, agnostic and ambivalent.
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Your day as an Italian may not seem like la dolce vita, but it’s pretty ideal in today’s Italy. You had a job to go to (albeit a contract gig), took a decent pausa (midday break), and left work promptly at the end of the day. In industrial cities like Milan, la pausa is no longer the traditional two-to-three-hour rest, and longer working hours help explain the previously unthinkable 15kg of surgelati (frozen foods) consumed per capita each year (still well below the UK’s 45kg). In these days of double-digit unemployment and opportunities limited to contract or part-time work, times are as tough as microwaved beef.
The international financial market crisis is the latest harbinger of bad news for Italy’s economy. In the 2002 conversion from lire to the euro, prices were typically rounded up while salaries were rounded down, and Italy’s exports became less competitively priced in the global market. The past three years have brought governmental upheavals: bribery scandals implicating Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s cohorts helped Romano Prodi unseat Berlusconi, who then staged a comeback on a platform to end economic stagnation. Now that global downturn has diminished economic expectations, pundits speculate about whether Berlusconi will hang onto his hot seat for long.
Yet Italy remains strangely stable in its instability. Economists scratch their heads in wonder that a country that has witnessed the rise and fall of more than 50 governments since WWII keeps reinventing itself as a global contender. Pundits are confounded by the staying power of on-again, off-again Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose latest imbroglios involve compromising photos of a wild party at his private villa and an alleged affair with a teenager. Still, Italy’s proportional representation system allows popular dissatisfaction to be counted in losses at the polls, and occasional bold prosecutions of official corruption ensure some turnover of ideas at every level of government.
But perhaps the saving grace of Italian public policy is that Italians don’t always wait for changes to happen from the top down. Ordinary Italians keep the powers that be in check and on task with highly coordinated strikes, mass street protests, outspoken newspapers and scathing political commentary that permeates popular culture. Political discussion inevitably involves much rolling of eyes and throwing up of hands, but these should not be taken as signs of resignation — in Italy, it’s more of a fighting stance.
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Arriving late to work seems like an achievement in Italy, where temptations to play hooky abound: music venues hitting every sonic frequency from opera to punk rock; cinemas and theatres where you’ll laugh and sob into your popcorn; bookshops brimming with this small country’s preposterously outsized literary contributions; and museums, churches and palaces virtually wallpapered with priceless art. Roman ruins share city blocks with futuristic office buildings that seem poised for takeoff to Mars — for more on these, check out the special section on architecture.
Italy’s readers are thoroughly spoiled for choice, with gripping gialli (mysteries), ancient classics, magic-realist fables, epic romps through history and, for those romantic occasions, some highly suggestive poetry.
The most popular genre in Italy today dominates Italy’s bestseller list, especially Andrea Camilleri’s cranky but savvy Sicilian inspector Montalbano in such capers as Il ladro di merendine (The Snack Thief). Sunny Sicily is also the scene of the crime in Leonardo Sciascia’s Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl), where a visiting police inspector from Parma witnesses a killing only to be told in no uncertain terms that the murder didn’t happen, the Sicilian Mafia doesn’t exist, and he’d be better off in Parma. Umberto Eco brought intellectual weight to the genre with Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) and Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s Pendulum) — not to mention sheer bulk, at 600-plus pages of arcane detail and plot twists.
Roman epic poet Virgil (aka Vergilius) decided Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey deserved a sequel, and spent 11 years and 12 books tracking the outbound adventures and inner turmoil of Aeneas, from the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome — and died in 19 BC with just 60 lines to go in his Aeneid. As he himself observed: ‘Time flies’.
Legend has it that fellow Roman Ovid (Ovidius) was a failed lawyer who married his daughter, but there’s no question he told a ripping good tale. His Metamorphose chronicled civilisation from murky mythological beginnings to Julius Caesar, and his how-to seduction manual Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) inspired countless Casanovas. It also caused him no end of trouble: he was exiled for seducing the daughter of Emperor Augustus.
Any self-respecting Italian bookshelf also features one or more Roman rhetoricians. To fare la bella figura among academics, trot out a phrase from Cicero or Horace (Horatio), such as ‘Where there is life there is hope’ or ‘Whatever advice you give, be brief’.
Italian authors find illumination even in Italy’s darkest hours. Set during the dark days of the Black Death in Florence, Boccaccio’s Decameron has a visceral gallows humour that foreshadows Chaucer, Shakespeare and William S Burroughs. Italy’s 19th-century struggle for unification parallels the story of star-crossed lovers in Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), and causes an identity crisis among Sicilian nobility in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard).
Wartime survival strategies are memorably chronicled in Elsa Morante’s La storia (History), and in Primo Levi’s harrowing autobiographical account of Auschwitz in Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man). World War II is the uninvited guest in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Giorgio Bassani’s heartbreaking tale of a crush on a girl whose aristocratic Jewish family attempts to disregard the rising tide of anti-Semitism, much as socialites graciously ignore a breach in manners.
Italy has always been its own sharpest critic, and several 20th-century Italian authors captured their own troubling circumstances with unflinching accuracy. Grazia Deledda’s Cosima is her fictionalised memoir of coming of age and into her own as a writer in rural Sardinia, despite family circumstances clouded by death, alcoholism and deceit. Deledda became one of the first women to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and set the tone for such bittersweet recollections of rural life as Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli). In the autobiographical epic, a dissident doctor is exiled under the Fascists to a malaria-afflicted southern Italian town (Click here) beyond the reach of medicine, missionaries, politicians, and all but the most forlorn hope.
Topics too excruciating to discuss or ignore — jealousy, divorce, parental failings — are addressed head-on by pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante in her brutally honest, bestselling The Days of Abandonment. But Italy’s most hush-hush subject is Naples’ Camorra crime syndicate, and the romantic whitewash usually applied to Mafioso machinations is stripped clean by Roberto Saviano’s sand-blasting prose in Gomorra (Click here). Though the book was listed as fiction in Italy, Saviano received death threats resulting in his relocation from Italy — and a bold 2008 public denunciation of the Camorra by six Italian Nobel laureates.
Italian fables aren’t much like Aesop’s: they don’t end in a simple moral, but instead show how wisdom often seems like madness, and vice versa. The most universally beloved Italian fabulist is Italo Calvino, whose titular character in Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees) takes to the treetops in a seemingly capricious act of rebellion that makes others rethink their own earthbound conventions. In Dino Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe), an ambitious officer posted to a mythical Italian border is besieged by boredom, thwarted expectations and disappearing youth while waiting for enemy hordes to materialise — a parable drawn from Buzzati’s own dead-end newspaper job.
Over the centuries, Niccolo Machiavelli’s Il principe (The Prince) has been referenced as a handy manual for budding autocrats, but also as a cautionary tale against unchecked ‘Machiavellian’ authority. Likewise 1934 Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello won Mussolini’s support to found a national theatre, only to be ostracised for staging an ambiguously critical fable about a changeling — that, and calling Il Duce ‘a top hat that could not stand upright by itself’.
Some literature scholars claim Shakespeare stole his best lines and plot points from earlier Italian playwrights and poets. Debatable though this may be, the Bard certainly has stiff competition from 13th-century Dante Alighieri as the world’s finest romancer. Dante broke with tradition in Divina commedia (The Divine Comedy) by using the familiar Italian, not the formal Latin, to describe travelling through the circles of hell in search of his beloved Beatrice. Petrarch (aka Francesco Petrarca) added wow to Italian woo with his eponymous sonnets, applying a strict structure of rhythm and rhyme to romance the idealised Laura. He might have tried chocolates instead: Laura never returned the sentiment.
If sonnets seem flowery to you, try 1975 Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale, who wrings poetry out of the creeping damp of everyday life, or Ungaretti, whose WWI poems hit home with a few searing syllables. His two-word poem seems an apt epitaph: M’illumino d’immenso (I illuminate myself with immensity). Poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini feature the same antiheroes as his films (Click here) — hustlers and prostitutes in postwar Italy, icons of a nation scraping by on its wits and looks. For the bawdiest poetry of all, head to an Italian osteria, where by night’s end cheap wine may inspire raunchy rhymes sung in dialect.
Italy is known for achievements in opera and classical music, but it’s also adapted international pop, punk and hip hop to local tastes. Jazz is another popular import that rings out in historic venues in Perugia during Umbria Jazz, Orvieto in Umbria Jazz Winter, Siena Jazz (www.sienajazz.it) and Vicenza Jazz (www.comune.vicenza.it).
The art form originated here, and fischi (mocking whistles) still possess a mysterious power to blast singers right off stage. In December 2006, a substitute in street clothes had to step in for Sicilian-French star tenor Roberto Alagna when his off-night aria met with vocal disapproval at Milan’s legendary La Scala. Best not to get them started about musicals and ‘rock opera’, eh?
The word ‘diva’ was invented for legendary sopranos like Parma’s Renata Tebaldi and Italy’s adopted Greek icon Maria Callas, whose rivalry peaked when Time quoted Callas saying that comparing her voice to Tebaldi’s was like comparing ‘champagne and Coca-Cola’. Both were fixtures at La Scala, along with the wildly popular Italian tenor to which others are still compared, Enrico Caruso. Tenor Luciano Pavarotti (1935—2007) also remains beloved for attracting broader public attention to opera, while bestselling blind tenor Andrea Bocelli became a controversial crossover sensation with what critics claim are overproduced arias sung with a strained upper register.
Salvatore Licitra is poised to become Italian opera’s next big tenor, having stepped in for Pavarotti on his final show at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2002. Friuli-born soprano Fiorenze Cedolins is enjoying wide-ranging success, performing a requiem for the late Pope John Paul II, recording Tosca arias with Andrea Bocelli, and scoring encores in Puccini’s La Bohème at the Arena di Verona Festival.
Italy’s classical contributions can be heard at music venues around the globe, including Vivaldi’s ubiquitous Four Seasons, played on prized Stradivarius violins from Cremona. Within Italy, there’s an ongoing revival of ‘early music’ from the medieval through Renaissance and baroque periods. Ensembles in Venice, Naples, Milan and Rome play historically accurate arrangements on period instruments like recorders and harpsichords, creating surprisingly funky Renaissance dance tunes and groovy late-medieval polyphonic vocals.
Many early music compositions can be heard today in the same venues where they would have been heard hundreds of years ago: Gregorian chants sung by monks at the frescoed St Francis of Assisi; choral music in Pisa’s High Renaissance Duomo during the annual Anima Mundi festival; and Venetian party music at Carnavale. Classical-music buffs also plan trips around Florence’s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and enjoy international orchestras year-round in Ravello (www.ravelloarts.org).
Most of the music you’ll hear booming out of Italian taxis and cafes to inspire sidewalk singalongs is Italian musica leggera (light music). This term covers homegrown rock, jazz, folk and hip-hop talents, as well as perpetrators of perniciously catchy dance tunes and pop ballads. The San Remo Music Festival (televised on RAI 1) annually honours Italy’s best songs and mercifully weeds out the worst early on, unlike the wildly popular Italian version of X Factor.
While Rome is a Bermuda Triangle for rockers with drug habits — Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain and sundry Smashing Pumpkins overdosed there — Milan is out to prove punk’s not dead with the annual indie-fest Rock in Idro and the city’s crossover rap-punk sensation Articolo 31. On the south side, Neapolitan hip-hop acts like 99 Posse, La Famiglia and Bisca mix Italian sounds over heavy beats and Neapolitan dialect, while Puglia artists like Sud Sound System remix Jamaican dancehall and Italy’s hyperactive tarantella folk music into a new genre: ‘tarantamuffin’. In the singer-songwriter category, scratchy-voiced troubadour Vinicio Capossela sounds like the long-lost Italian cousin of Tom Waits, and the late Fabrizio de André was Italy’s answer to Bob Dylan, with thoughtful lyrics in a musing monotone.
Entertainment has been not a privilege but a right in Italy ever since Rome promised citizens ‘bread and circus’ (food and entertainment). Travelling Commedia dell’Arte troupes spread the antics of Pulcinella (aka Punch of Punch and Judy fame) and friends across Italy starting in the Renaissance, but after WWII left Italy’s finest venues in ruins, the future of Italian performing arts was uncertain.
Instead of staging a grand comeback, Milan decided to start small in 1947 with the Piccolo Teatro (Little Theatre), featuring low ticket prices and risk-taking productions. The Piccolo staged Dario Fo’s 1971 triumph Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist) and in 2006 overcame controversy to stage Fo’s latest work, L’anomalia bicefala (The Two-Headed Anomaly), a satire about Berlusconi and his wife. The Piccolo proved too popular for its size, leading to other less piccolo Piccolo Teatros. Among the independent venues springing up in the 1970s was Rome’s landmark all-women Teatro della Maddalena, staging daring works like Dacia Maraini’s Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente (Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her Client).
Today Bologna, Naples, Milan and Rome boast the most vibrant theatre and dance scenes, though the Spoleto Festival and other summertime extravaganzas bring performing arts to smaller venues nationwide. Ballet in Italy dates from the Renaissance and can be seen nationwide, and several Italian opera companies incorporate corps de ballet into performances. Other dances range from folkloric forms like the tarantella to competitive B-boying (break dancing).
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Scandals continue to rock the world of football cycling, and water sports, and as you may have read in the papers, Italy is no exception. But let’s be honest, sports fans: once the action starts, all eyes and some very good bets are on Italy.
Any bar or pizzeria with a TV is a good spot to catch the action among fellow sports fans, and even the smallest Italian hamlet has a football pitch, and many have arenas.
Even Italy’s most hardcore calcio (football) fans admit certain shortcomings in Italy’s game. Yes, Italians do play a bombastically offensive game, and Italy’s best players frequently trade teams and nations for the right price. Yes, match-fixing ‘Calciopoli’ scandals resulted in revoked championship titles and temporary demotion of Serie A (top-tier national) teams, including the mighty Juventus. Italy defender Marco Materazzi possibly did whisper something highly impolite about the womenfolk of Zinedine Zidane’s family, causing the French midfielder to lose his legendary cool and the 2006 World Cup final to Italy.
Yet when Italian footballers are in top form, no one in the stands can be bothered disputing footballers’ salaries, egos or word choice. When the ball ricochets off the post and slips fatefully through the goalie’s hands, roughly half the stadium is cursing someone’s mother, while the other half is ecstatically shouting Gooooooooooooooool! Hooliganism is less popular in Italy than more intimate victory celebrations — hospitals in northern Italy reported a baby boom nine months after Italy won the 2006 World Cup.
Poor sports often complain that Italy’s champion cyclists have all the advantages, and they’re not wrong. Many cyclists covet signature celeste-hued Bianchis the way drivers dream of red Ferraris, and Bianchi’s limited-edition Reparto Corse racing bicycles are still produced in bleeding-edge R&D labs in Bergamo. Then there’s the training terrain: Italy’s rugged mountain and coastal byways are some of the world’s toughest and most scenic cycling routes, providing motivation for beginners and challenges for Olympians like Paolo Bettini.
Italian champions also have style, often sporting the Giro d’Italia’s prized maglia rosa, or pink shirt, for fastest overall time, and the coveted maglia verde, or green shirt, for fastest hill climbs. In 2008, for the first time in more than a decade, a non-Italian was greeted as the overall winner of Giro d’Italia in Milan. Yet Alberto Contador and other members of the Spanish team couldn’t shake the taint of Operación Puerto blood-doping scandals, although most were cleared of wrongdoing by the Union Cycliste Internationale. Meanwhile, Italian 2006 Giro champion Ivan Basso and 2009 stage winner Michele Scarpo admitted to involvement in the doping scandals, and were suspended for two seasons.
In a peninsula brimming with lakes, you might expect to find a few good swimmers — but Italy has more than its share. Italy’s men’s and women’s water polo teams are consistently ranked among the top five worldwide; Italy’s divers have been competing at Olympian standards since Klaus Dibiasi took home his first of three gold medals in 1968; and Italian women swimmers keep breaking world records, especially Federica Pelligrini in freestyle swimming. Free divers have been known to plummet to depths of 250m without oxygen in Lignano, and Gianluca Genoni set a new world record in 2008 in Mantova by remaining underwater without oxygen for 18 minutes and three seconds.