Peter Popham on Italy:
During my years of residence in Rome, it very slowly dawned on me that when, say, a plumber or a car mechanic or indeed a waiter greeted me with a particularly broad and oily sort of smile, it was generally the prelude to a ridiculous bill. Yet the smile was not fake, the mood of simpatia was not affected – he was genuinely delighted to take me to the cleaners. If I lacked the generosity of spirit to understand and appreciate my role in the improvement of his luck, that was my double misfortune.
You see this operating throughout Italian society. This is a country which, because of its enormous coastline – 4,500 miles of it – has been invaded over and over again, some 29 times in all. Until unification, it was under the boot of multiple foreign powers. Italians have been able to call their land their own only for a century and a half. And because the peninsula cannot be insulated – in the past decades, Albanians and Bosnians have poured across the Adriatic, and Lampedusa, entry point from North Africa, remains an open wound – the Italian response is to circle the wagons: to disarm the new arrivals with simpatia (if they are rich or powerful enough to merit it) but at the same time quietly to close ranks.
That is why the closed shop, a fading memory of the bad old days for people in Britain, is the way Italy still functions at every level. It's why there are no brown or black faces behind the counters in the post office or among the ranks of taxi drivers, why university heads have no embarrassment about giving tenured positions to their closest relatives, why in politics the same old party hacks are recycled year after year – and why so many young Italians of energy and talent flee abroad as soon as they can.
Many of them, of course, flee to Britain: land of the gruff and the grim, i quadrati ("the squares", in the sense of rigid as opposed to flexible), the people for whom food is just fuel and agreeability of character a sure sign of superficiality; the race who seem to carry a portable policeman around in their heads, the better to put people right and point out the rules; the people for whom queue-jumping is on a par with bestiality.
They will also discover, if they stick it out, that it is very difficult to get to know English people, even once you have penetrated their carapace of antipatia and squareness, and that even the most intelligent of us are, by continental standards, bizarrely anti-intellectual; as Orwell pointed out, "the English are not sufficiently interested in intellectual matters to be intolerant about them." Yet very often the Italian sticks around, and the reason he won't and can't go home is because British society works, after a fashion. Immigrants get jobs in the post office. Italians get picked as professors. Men and women in their thirties attain political power. Merit has a chance.
We are being sucked towards a melancholy conclusion: that la simpatia, for all its charm, is a disastrous principle by which to run a society, because far from being the wellspring of morality it is the trick by which morality is short-circuited, and that allows privilege and patronage to rule unchallenged. It's the cunning mask donned by a survival instinct nurtured through centuries of foreign domination, and it is one of the things which make it so hard for this nation to reverse its own corrosive and destructive and amoral tendencies.
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