The Italians by John Hooper, review: 'fascinating and affectionate'

Christian House applauds a colourful study of Italian life that points to the insecurity at the heart of the nation

By Christian House 20 January 2015 • 9:00am

Fact meets fantasy: Rome, 2005, by Martin Parr Credit: Photo: Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Several years ago, I travelled to a crumbling suburb of Milan to interview the Italian novelist Niccolò Ammaniti. Milano Due, a mass of pockmarked, Ambre Solaire-coloured blocks, was developed by Silvio Berlusconi during the Seventies, and helped to fund his media empire and political campaigns. Like its creator, it had seen better days. During our conversation, Ammaniti expressed his pleasure at the prime minister’s downfall. Hardly surprising, were it not for the fact that Ammaniti’s publisher, Mondadori, is owned by Berlusconi.

That paradox, in which strident opinion clashes with self interest, lies at the heart of John Hooper’s The Italians. This is a country, maintains Hooper, that is unfamiliar with restraint. Having already skewered the culture and mores of the Spanish in The New Spaniards, the author has found in Italy a puzzle of incompatible pieces. What he discovers is that a lot of our preconceptions about the Italians – the corruption, crime and conflicted Catholicism – are accurate. As is their famous lust for life. But, like much in Italy, if you scratch the surface, other “verità” appear.

Hooper paints the Italians as fundamentally insecure. Their country has always been a grab-bag for raiders and invaders. The heavy hand of the Normans, Goths, Lombards, Byzantines, Bourbons and Habsburgs left them bruised. Yet the mid-19th-century Risorgimento, which joined together disparate city states, kingdoms and independent regions, created little in the way of unity. The industrial and wealthy north remains at odds with the Mezzogiorno, the down-at-heel heel, while, geographically, the country is divided by the Apennines.

Instead of harmony, what emerges from this portrait is a mania for facades and lip service. From the parliament to the bedroom, Italians are keeping up appearances. “In the Italian political debate,” says Hooper, “it is hard to distinguish the real problem, which is never talked about, from the fictitious problem, which is fought over ferociously.”

As a Rome-based correspondent for The Economist, Hooper is well-placed to interpret the country’s inherent corruption. Handing over the bustarella – the “little envelope” that greases the wheels – is as routine a part of doing business as filing your tax returns. The country’s justice system is partly to blame for this moral laxity. The courts are like a huge version of the infuriating Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. Known as “the misty port”, the prosecutor’s department eschews any notion of transparency. Cases are choked in red tape and undermined by a convoluted sequence of trials and appeals that often peter out.

This farce allows organised crime to flourish. Hooper details the machinations of the three key arms of the Mafia: the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Neapolitan Camorra and Calabrian ’Ndrangheta. Again the myths are forged in fact. Their brutality is recorded in gruesome detail. Yet, here, too, surprises arise. For a start, the Italians did not invent the Mafia: the Japanese Yakuza predates its Mediterranean counterparts by a century. Second, images of hot-headed dons and drive-by shootings belie a slick operation: there are an estimated 20,000 members of the Mafia and they reportedly create 10 per cent of the country’s GDP. “In Italy, the Mafia is a structural component of large areas of society, politics and the business world,” says Hooper. It is staggering to learn that a 2009 European Commission report revealed that Britain had eight times as much violent crime as Italy.

More contradictions emerge from the home and church. Italian society is gripped by “amoral familism” in which loyalty to family trumps all other concerns. Yet infidelity and sexual extortion are common (one poll showed that four out of five Italian women would at least consider trading erotic favours for career advancement). And in defiance of the powerful cult of the Italian mother, the birth rate has plummeted. A vast gulf has opened between the way the Vatican “would like the Italians to conduct their sex lives and the way they actually do”.

I was left wondering how the cultural community addresses this burlesque set-up. There is a powerful tradition of neorealism in Italy, traced from Vittorio De Sica’s classic 1948 film Bicycle Thieves to Ammaniti’s bestselling novel I'm Not Scared (a tale of kidnapping in poverty-ridden southern Italy), that deserves to be woven into the narrative of any survey of the country.

However, Hooper has written a fascinating, affectionate and well-researched study that delivers the tantalising flavour of a country as hot, cold, bitter and sweet as an affogato. Of the many anecdotes and incidents peppering its pages, few are more illuminating than the encounter between a German and Mussolini in Il Duce’s office overlooking Piazza Venezia in Rome. Wasn’t it difficult to govern the Italians, asked the perplexed German. “Not at all,” replied Mussolini, “it is simply pointless.”