chapter two
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chapter two |
Italy’s geographical structure and historical divisions have produced a country of distinct regions, each with its own dialect, politics, and culture. For this reason one feature dominates Italian life—the family.
The importance of family in Italian life cannot be overestimated. Your family are the people you can trust, the people you work for, the people you do favors for or who do favors for you. The most extreme example of “family first” is probably the Sicilian Mafia, whose code of honor permits vendettas or revenge killings between families lasting generations and whose loyalty is based entirely on the family.
At an everyday level, the Italians love talking about families and regard the family as giving you roots and a stake in society. It is always useful to carry photos of your family with you (if you don’t have one, invent one!) to show around and discuss. It is one of the best ways of creating links with Italians.
Business in Italy is still dominated by family firms, with the sons or daughters of the founder frequently taking over and running the business. The Italians take family seriously and if they have known you since they were young, then you too are part of their family. When one foreign company ended its agency contract with its Italian distributor after years of unsuccessful performance, the distraught head of the Italian firm protested, “But I’ve known you since I was four! I sat on my father’s knee while he negotiated with you.” The implication was, “How could you do this to a member of your family?”
Italians are “feeling” people. They readily accept and exchange information, but ultimately decisions are made on gut feeling, with family and regional considerations also playing an important role. This means that the way they look at things tends to be particular and subjective. Rather than apply universal rules, an Italian will look at the details of each situation and decide each one on its (or your) merits. That is why, whatever the rule, there is always an exception if you can make a case for it.
This is not to say that facts have no place in Italian life, but they will always be considered in relation to the people concerned. This attitude may even bind people together who are poles apart politically. It is perfectly possible to have extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing views within the same family but this does not prevent communication. What characterizes Italian society, as American author Terri Morrison points out in Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands, is a strong capacity for social and cultural resilience and continuity.
Although Italy is not officially a Catholic country, the Catholic Church still has an important role in providing a structure to Italian life. Whether in opposition to it or in sympathy with it, the Church provides a focus for values and attitudes, and has shaped Italian culture. Religion is still a part of everyday life for large numbers of Italians.
The authority of the Catholic Church rests upon the apostolic succession—the belief that Christ ordained St. Peter, his successor on earth, who became the first Bishop of Rome. The Pope’s word, when spoken ex cathedra (from his throne), is considered to be God’s law.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the Catholic tradition in people’s daily lives, whether or not they are believers or are practicing Christians. Life in Italy is to a degree influenced by your belief in or opposition to the Catholic hierarchy. Catholicism is an autocratic, top-down religion, with a hierarchy of authority extending from the Pope, down through the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops to the local parish priest. This hierarchical approach is reflected in society in the authority of the father, the structure of Italian business, the artistic culture of the people, and the church bells summoning the faithful to mass.
On the other hand, the Italians are remarkably tolerant of moral lapses that the Catholic Church finds unacceptable. So petty crime, fraud, and sexual infidelity are, if not accepted, recognized as examples of human frailty and overlooked. After all, who has not sinned at some time? The important thing is to keep up appearances at all times and at all costs. This means that Italians can be astonishingly flexible and understanding in difficult situations. A foreign middleman once drew up a contract incorrectly. Afraid of being sued by both sides, he asked his Italian counterpart if it would be possible to draw up a new one. “No problem,” said the Italian. “Just give me the new contract, I’ll sign it and tear up the old one. After all, we all make mistakes.”
In Britain it’s humor, in France it’s ideas, in Germany it’s respectability, and in Italy it’s appearances that make the world go round. It’s true that in Italy how you dress and act speaks volumes about you and it’s important to dress and act correctly. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” goes the popular saying, and the Romans, like all Italians, set great store by making a bella figura.
In a country with so many fine fashion houses, and where individuals can seem very assertive, looking good and making the right impression is paramount. The Italians, especially women, spend a small fortune on clothes and place importance on the right designer labels. So a cyclist dresses like a champion and dress rivalry starts in nursery school.
Italians claim they can spot foreigners from a mile off not only by what they wear but by how they wear it—if you protest that this is a victory of style over substance, Italians will retort that their style is part of the substance. So cutting a bella figura is important for visitor and businessperson alike.
This means that many problems in Italy are seen as less a matter of corruption or poor management than as poor presentation. Fare una brutta figura is to make a bad impression. To make a good impression, it is important to show off. People admire ricchezza (wealth) and bellezza (beauty). Putting on a good face to disguise a bad performance is admired. So much of Italy is a beautiful presentation, rather like a swan gliding across the surface of the water while its legs paddle furiously beneath.
Italy is traditionally noisy. Life is lived much more in public than in Britain or the USA, and private conversations can be easily overheard in the piazzas and streets. Added to this is the incessant roar of the cars and the hooting of the mopeds (motorini). The noise of conversation or shouted commands mingling with the sound of traffic takes some getting used to, but as English author Tobias Jones notes in The Dark Heart of Italy, “After a while, other countries begin to seem eerily quiet, even dull.”
A characteristic of Italy is the verbal jousting as people exchange lively opinions and even criticisms in earthy, uninhibited language. It feels as if reserve and reticence have fallen away and been replaced by vivacity and sensuousness, a quality that the English writer D. H. Lawrence termed “blood knowledge.”
Italy’s strong sense of hierarchy and formality, as Tobias Jones found, is reflected in the language. “Ciao,” the ubiquitous way of saying “Hi” and “Good-bye,” is derived from schiavo, meaning “slave.” If you go into a shop in Venice, the shopkeeper will say, “Comandi,” or “Command me.” To do all kinds of things in Italy you need to obtain permission, “chiedere il permesso,” either informally or by the grant of a permesso (permit), and a situation often needs to be sistemato (systematized, or sorted out). Tutto a posto, “everything in its place,” is not perhaps what you naturally expect to be an Italian ideal.
One aspect of hierarchy is the deference paid to Italy’s first families, il salotto buono, who run the country’s key industries and who have a huge influence on politics as well as business. Following the Italian penchant for nicknames, all have their pet public titles: Gianni Agnelli, the owner of Fiat, was known as l’Avvocato (the Lawyer), Carlo de Benedetti, media mogul and owner of Repubblica, is known as l’Ingegnere (the Engineer), and Silvio Berlusconi, former Prime Minister and owner of Mediaset, was known variously as il Cavaliere (the Cavalier) and Sua Emittenza (His Emittance, in an ironic combination of a Cardinal’s title, His Eminence, with the idea of a mass-media tycoon whose stations emit broadcasts).
The Italian way is top-down, authoritarian. As an Italian associate of an international legal firm explained, “The senior partner is God. He takes all the decisions. I am there to obey.” This sense of hierarchy emanates from Church and state and bureaucracy and influences both family and social life. It is made acceptable by garbo, and by a sense of responsibility for personal lives, and also by a tolerance of human foibles and mistakes.
This search for order is systematized in garbo, which can be translated as graciousness, courtesy, politeness, good manners. It describes the ability to calm or smooth over difficult situations, usually by the use of elaborate language.
Derived from the Arabic greeting, “Salaam Aleikum,” the salamelecco is the ability to use obsequious, even groveling language to obtain something from officials. To the Americans and the British, who are used to being more concise, this can be a challenge. By comparison, the Italians tend to see the British and the Americans as rather brutal and to-the-point. The expressive, courteous way of communicating in Italian means it can be very difficult to get to the point of a conversation; and it may also mean that the real issues are hidden or confused.
In Italian business and social life everything depends on relationships and who you know. (More on this in Chapter 8, Business Briefing.) At any level, the way to get things done is to be introduced by a common friend, associate, or acquaintance. This raccomandazione, or recommendation, is vital to both business and social life. It will not necessarily ensure acceptance—that will depend on your own personal qualities—but a raccomandazione will ensure that you make the initial contact and are treated with consideration.
The other side of the coin is that your Italian colleagues will expect regular contact, consideration, and participation from you. Friendship needs to be worked at—contacting someone only when you need support or have something to offer is simply not enough. Once you have an Italian friend or associate it is a lifelong family relationship, not just an arm’s-length cordial agreement. To be a friend of an Italian means being welcomed not just into their family but also into their community.
The Italians are local people and devoted to their community. The piazza is the symbolic center of a town and the seat of civic pride. It is close to a similar concept, campanilismo (literally, affection for one’s own bell tower), or local patriotism. The Italians identify much more readily with their local area than with the rather amorphous state, which is often seen as an outside exploiter largely run by Southerners. Most Italians would like to live and work near where they were born. However, millions of Italians from Sicily and the South have emigrated to the northern part of the country, and overseas to Australia and the United States. But people don’t forget their local roots, their local cuisine, their local history, and dialect.
The writer Carlo Levi described Italy as thousands of countries, and many Italians live and work close to where they were born. Italian children live at home longer than in many other countries, and more relatives live in the same town or even under the same roof. The combination of provincialism and cosmopolitanism is one of the most attractive features of Italian life.
In conversation, therefore, it is important to value your associate’s or friend’s local community, food, wine and traditions. If you are presented with some local wine or grappa (brandy), you should express your appreciation; a visit to a favorite beauty spot or historic center is an honor, and to be given a book or souvenir of the local community is a gift to be treasured.
Though the Italians are not noticeably patriotic at the national level, they identify passionately with their local culture, region, town or city, and history. They will describe themselves as Venetians, Florentines, or Sicilians first, and as Italians afterward. One modern institution that embodies local pride is the football team.
The frustrations of the Italian bureaucratic system are another reason for the average Italian’s distrust of the state. According to Tobias Jones, Italy isn’t so much a religious country as a clerical one. The bureaucracy has enormous importance. He cites a recent study, which suggests that the average Italian spends two working weeks of every year in lines and form-filling. Bureaucracy in Italy is time-consuming, expensive, document-heavy, and slow. It has been nicknamed the lentocrazia, the “slowocracy.” This is partly due to Italy’s long legal history. Another reason is the politicization of the Italian civil service and the fact that jobs here can be rewards for political services. A civil-service post is often called a poltrona (literally, armchair), “a cushy number” that means a job for life. Although civil-service jobs are now awarded on merit rather than on contacts, getting as far as the selection board may require the help of a raccomandazione from an important family.
Bureaucracy looms so large in the lives of Italians that an entire profession is devoted to smoothing one’s way through the red tape. A faccendiere, or “fixer,” will get you the forms, show you how to fill them in, and stand in line on your behalf. Any Italian will tell you that although most problems can be managed, a little cunning goes a long way. It pays to be furbo.
A perennial Italian preoccupation is how to beat the system: that can only be done by noncompliance until the last moment, trying to find ways of getting around laws and edicts, and generally being furbo, or cunning. This is the exact opposite of people who stick by the rules or play it by the book, and can cause frustration and even anger in foreigners. For an Italian, ingenuità doesn’t mean being ingenuous but being gullible. Personal wrongdoing may be excused by comparison with the corruption that is evident at all levels of government, in the legal system, and even in the Church itself.
Being furbo means looking out for yourself and your family and friends, which helps to explain the Italians’ cavalier attitude to traffic lights, jaywalking, pedestrian crossings, no smoking signs, speed limits, and even the wearing of seatbelts in cars. (When Italy first made seatbelts compulsory, Naples developed a thriving trade in T-shirts with a seatbelt printed across them!) Only the rules for dining and dress seem to be rigidly observed.
The key values that can be said to distinguish Italians are their adherence to personal loyalty and friendship over any commitment to universal, state-instituted laws and regulations, and their strong commitment to the local community over and even against the state. As we have seen, Italians may be Italians to foreigners, but to other Italians they are Florentines, Venetians, Milanese, Romans, Neapolitans, or Sicilians. By upholding local customs, institutions, and traditions, they create the astonishingly rich and varied tapestry of Italian life that allows the foreigner to enjoy the distinctiveness of Venice and Rome, and to appreciate the artistic creations of both the Florentine and the Venetian schools of the Italian Renaissance, and so much more besides. The Italians themselves value their local culture and traditions, whether it be in food, wine, art and architecture, music, or drama.
Italy is above all a country of contrasts. That being said, many Italians recognize the need for change—from being an inward-looking, relationship-based society, based to a large extent on patronage and privilege, to a more egalitarian society allowing greater access to jobs and the reform of labor laws and taxation to allow this. However, what no Italian wishes to lose is the quality of life, the generosity and openness of local communities, in what is still in many respects, “il bel paese” (the beautiful country).
