Beppe Severgnini - Italian Lessons : Fifty Things We Know About Life Now

Italy arouses in Americans a stunning mix of attraction and skepticism, envy and bafflement, moderate disapproval and incredible allure.

Is there an Italian way of dealing with life? Perhaps there is, and in Italy were familiar with it. But were not often willing to talk about it, as if we fear we might reveal a national secret. Thats my intention with this book: I want to share that secret with my English-speaking friends and show them the Italian way of doing things.

It may not be the worlds best wayis there any such thing as the worlds best way?but its an interesting way, one that involves adjustment and consolation, tolerance and fantasy. Over the past several decades, it has produced neither impeccable governments nor a roaring economy, if were honest. But it has displayed elasticity. And in complicated times, elasticity is a great thing. No Italian would be willing to admit what Im about to say without appending a litany of complaints and grievances, but the fact does remain: we live very nicely in Italy.

The pandemic has scarred the lives of us all in a violent and unpredictable fashion: in the United States, in Europe, and in every country around the world. It has furthermore coincided with other challenges: in the United States it hit at the tail end of Donald Trumps term in office, and in Great Britain it coincided with the implementation of Brexit. In many other countries it marked, isolated, and impoverished society. Each country has reacted in its own fashion. In the Italian reaction, we can discern, one might say, interesting aspects. Actually, useful ones.

Useful to a deeper understanding of who we are in what we used to call the Western world (does that still exist?), whats become of democracy, and how we face up to the great and sweeping changes in individuals and families, relations between parents and children, new gender relations. We Italians arent new: we have a long history stretching out behind us. Those centuries and millennia of experience dont make us better than anyone else, but perhaps they have given us a few clues that are useful to meeting the challenge of coexistence, keys to that mystery. In this book, I will try to share them with you, my Italy-loving friends. And together we can try to see which doors they can open.

At a time like this, are we happy to be Italians? I think we are. Because I love lists and I detest sermons, Ive tried to sum up my convictions in fifty reasons why; fifty reasons for being Italian. I feel certain that not everyone will agree or find these reasons persuasive. Im sure, in fact, that each of you will have reasons to cut or reasons to add. Im fine with that. It means thinking together, both writer and readers, in Italy and around the world. Thats any authors dream.

These fifty reasonsor lessons, if you preferare not a hasty simplification. They constitute the pillars that hold up our very existence, the foundation upon which we have built a significant past and can try to construct a better future. Those pillars have continued to weather storms, even withstanding the Covid-19 tornado, and they have saved us. They include a good national health system; well-tested family relations; functional social structures; the configuration of our cities; underlying generosity, empathy, imagination, and an absence of resignation: Italy has seen far too many things, over its centuries and millennia of history, to raise the white flag in the face of an epidemic. Even the care we lavish on our homes, which may sometimes seem obsessive, has become a welcome and salutary distraction. Our love of cookingand, why not? our love of winehas proved to be a blessing. Two good meals a day are a balm for both body and soul.

In all the years of my life and my profession as a journalist, Ive traveled the length and breadth of Italy. Ive gazed at my country, listened to it, smelled, touched, and tasted itall of Italy, not just the Lombardy where I was born and raised and still live: every region, every major city, every minor capital of every province, the seas and the mountains, the hills and the lakes, all the islands from my beloved Sardinia to the mysterious Sicily. Ive caught Italy doing things I didnt like, Ive lost my temper with it frequently, and now and then Ive quarreled with it openly. But Italy is my country; Ill never have another. I believe I know its shortcomings and finest qualities. And Im convinced that our finest qualities far outweigh our shortcomings.