La Bella Figura by Beppe Severgnini

★★★★☆ (4/5)

A selection of my favorite passages

• Being Italian is a full-time job. We never forget who we are, and we have fun confusing anyone who is looking on.
• Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It’s alluring, but complicated. In Italia, you can go round and round in circles for years.
• It’s the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or the course of ten minutes. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis.
• Authority has been making Italians uneasy for centuries, so we have developed an arsenal of countermeasures, from flattery to indifference, familiarity, complicity, apparent hostility, and feigned admiration.
• We judge books by their covers, politicians by their smiles, professionals by their offices, secretaries by their posture, table lamps by their design, cars by their styling, and people by their title. It’s no coincidence that one Italian in four is president of something.
• we like nice gestures so much we prefer them to good behavior. Gestures gratify, but behaving takes an effort. Still, the sum of ten good deeds does not make a person good, just as ten sins do not necessarily add up to a sinner. Theologians distinguish between actum and habitus: a single incident is not as serious as a “habit,” or “practice.”
• We think it’s an insult to our intelligence to comply with a regulation. Obedience is boring. We want to think about it. We want to decide whether a particular law applies to our specific case. In that place, at that time.
• people know what to choose and what to avoid. If they choose the wrong starter, it’s because they want to be able to complain later. In its own way that, too, is a touch of sophistication.
• If we want to save the Italian way of eating, we have to focus on pride and distrust, qualities we have in abundance.
• Take Samuel Johnson, for example. He said, “A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.”
• People want to look inside a table lamp, touch a suitcase, listen to an explanation, sniff a carpet, or sneak an olive and talk about the flavor. That’s one reason why e-commerce hasn’t taken off in Italy. There are some things you can’t do on the Web. Italians are sensitive, curious, and diffident. We don’t even like goods in sealed packages. We wonder what the cellophane is trying to hide from us.
• If we had Scottish weather in Italy, there would have been several revolutions. Instead, we lodged the occasional protest, made a lot of promises, and talked.
• The family is a bank. Loans for first homes almost invariably come from parents. There are no formalities, no interest, and quite often no obligation to repay the capital.
• The Italian family is an employment agency. One Italian in three admits to finding a job through relatives.
• The Italian family is a market where nothing is sold, lots of stuff is given away, and everything is haggled over.
• The family is an infirmary. It’s the place where flu-blighted Italian males crawl for shelter, glowering like wounded animals.
• The “strange multitude of little things necessary” that consoled Robinson Crusoe can also be found in an Italian bedroom. It’s the same blend of found and brought objects, with the same striving for self-sufficiency.
• An apartment, noted the French writer Julien Green in the 1960s, is a forest with clearings, quiet rooms, then “zones of horror” and “crossroads of fear.”
• As you know, social sensuality is nonexistent in the U.S. Over there, modesty is the official norm and pornography is an industry, but little light is shed on the vast space in between.
• Stations disclose an interesting Italy. There is a stratification of habits and memories that the Italian railway company has decided not to disturb. Efficiency has suffered, but the atmosphere has benefited enormously.
• Do you know why members of Parliament never agree but “register a substantial identity of opinion”? Or why it never rains on the weather forecast but “some precipitation is foreseen following an intensification of cloud cover”? It’s because verbal complexity is a form of protection (“ I was misunderstood”), a decoration (“ See how well educated I am?”), and a declaration of belonging (“ I am a member of the caste of doctors, weather forecasters, or lawyers, and I’m sorry but that’s how we talk”).
• When an Italian laugh arrives, it comes from the belly. A British laugh descends from the brain. An American guffaw comes from the heart and emerges from the mouth. A German laugh starts in the belly and stays there.
• We have learned to appreciate Italy’s national genius in an export format, particularly when it coincides with an event, a special occasion, or a moment we will be able to talk about.
• Television in Italy is as exotic as an airport, as unruly as a city street, as hypnotic as a hotel, as perturbing as a store, as ever-changing as a restaurant, as noisy as a train, as deceiving as the countryside, as instructive as a piazza, and as ubiquitous as churches. But if the churches are emptying, television holds on to its faithful. Fifty years ago, people talked about the television of the people. Nowadays, we are the people of the television.
• He understood that millions of Italians dream of doing a bit of sinning, repenting sincerely, and then starting all over again. “Guys,” he said, “I’ve got just what you’re looking for.”
• until now Italy has avoided certain social divides, despite our limits and lazinesses. We don’t have endemic alcoholism, or epidemics of teenage pregnancies. There are no sports for the poor and sports for the rich, or working-class schools and middle-class schools. Italy is an unruly nation, but uniform in its unruliness.
• That’s Italy’s signature shape, the profile of old scooters, young breasts, bread on the table, and the classic Lancia Appia automobile.
• computer shopping robs us of the tactile pleasures of choosing and purchasing. Physical perceptions are also part of the Catholic liturgy, in which the senses support the spirit. In fact, you could say that e-commerce is a Protestant invention— sensible, but unsatisfying.
• The social piazza is appreciated by residents, who look to it for routine and reassurance. Out-of-towners also use it as a point of reference. Look how people sit in an Italian piazza: on benches, steps, bicycles, motorbikes, walls, railings, curbstones, and chairs in cafés. We watch life drift by from these theater boxes. Every generation renews its subscription, after first swearing it won’t.
• The idea that Italians are ungovernable has always appealed to those who don’t want to govern us. The myth that Italy is past redemption suits a lot of people. It saves them the bother of redeeming us. Remember that the inevitability of lawlessness is a falsehood.
• In the rest of Europe, people tend to stand in straight lines. Here we favor more artistic configurations, such as waves, parabolas, herringbone patterns, hordes, groups, and clusters. Our choreography complicates waiting, but brightens our lives.
• The Finns own proportionately more cell phones than we do. They’d be very happy to use them all the time, but they don’t know who to call. We Italians know only too well.
• The second reason we do not like to talk about money is that we are afraid someone might be listening. We fear fate, which should not be tempted. We fear others, who should not be provoked. And we fear the tax authorities, especially when we declare ridiculously low incomes. So, when we talk about money, the same golden rule holds true: speak softly, deal in cash, and err on the side of caution.
• We Italians like to decide when the general rule is applicable to our specific case. The same is true for taxes. We are our own tax authorities, and almost always magnanimously decide not to collect.
• your status in the company is proportionate to your ability to avoid meetings.
• The nation that, according to journalist Leo Longanesi, wanted to rebel against authority with a permit from the police has grown up but not changed. Few want to take all-or-nothing risks.
• For more than half a century, one lira was a theoretical concept. To amount to anything, the lira had to be in a group, like sardines or schoolgirls. The monetary unit we do miss is a nice round number, the million.
• Outside schools, bars, and restaurants, the sidewalk is the appointed venue for intalliamento, the practice of hanging out while you decide what to do, reflect on life, nibble a snack, and observe the world. This form of hanging out is a fascinating Italian habit. Many foreigners mistake it for indecision, but it’s actually a preliminary. It’s the anticipation of pleasure, and demands a certain skill.
• I’m talking about the Potential Driver, who has found a parking space— improbable, improvised, or just plain impermissible— and has no intention of giving it up.
• This sort of abstruse lucubration is exclusively Italian. People think like that in Milan, too, but in Naples the reasoning has an esoteric dimension. Though I don’t believe it, there’s an urban legend that says when the pedestrian lines fade away they aren’t repainted: they might encourage someone’s suicidal presumption that you can step off the sidewalk without looking. Where there aren’t any lines, things are left up to the sharpness of the pedestrian’s eye and the generosity of the motorist’s heart.
• Comments on Prague are equally interesting. It’s a city that Italians go wild over, even if no one can explain why. What comes out is a mixed salad of romance and literature in which Kafka is the tomato but no one knows the names of the greens.
• If an Englishman’s home is his castle, an Italian’s garden is his Eden, a place of privilege and temptation. There are no serpents, but there are neighbors.
• In a small town, we don’t just want a congenial barber and a well-stocked newsstand. We want professionally made coffee and a proper pizza. We want a couple of streets to stroll down, an avenue to jog along, a pool to swim in, and a cinema for a bit of entertainment. We want a functioning courthouse, a reassuring hospital, a consoling church, and an unintimidating cemetery We want a new university and an old theater house. We want soccer fields, and city councilors we can pester in the bar. We want to see the mountains beyond the grade crossing when the weather’s good and the air is clear. We want footsteps on cobbled streets in the night, yellow lights to tinge the mist, and bell towers we can recognize from a distance. We want doctors and lawyers who can translate abstract concepts into our dialect— my father can— and people with a kind word and a smile for everyone.
• We Italians continue to argue over the fascism we had, the communism we nearly had, the terrorism we tasted, and the corruption we tolerated. Our digestive process is extremely slow, and induces chronic headaches.
• In millions of Italians, there exists— sorry, there resists— an astonishing acceptance of obscurity from authority of any kind, be it political, judicial, administrative, medical, or academic.
• But Italy is disconcerting even in its defects. Just as you are about to write the country off as shallow, it reveals unsuspected depths. And when you look into the depths, the surface becomes a mirror.
• In fact, school is a perfect thumbnail sketch of the way we are. It is an example of brilliant imperfection, with peaks of excellence and abysses of inefficiency.
• Ours is a bonsai nationalism born in school corridors like this one. It shuffles between the desks, steps shyly through the schoolbooks, slides through the identical class registers, and emerges in a party dressed up as an ordeal, the maturità. From then on, our patriotism survives on private means and memories.
• Italians are a moral people, but our morality, like our law, has to be tailored to fit. We have an à la carte approach. Everyone selects what he or she wants, according to conscience and convenience. Religion is still fundamental, but the menu is long, and the dishes varied.
• Pleasures compensate for oppression, and help to bear it.
• Our sun is setting in installments. It’s festive and flamboyant, but it’s still a sunset. Many non-Italians are surprised that such a dazzling nation should seem so tired and cynical.
• Italy’s good qualities are the inimitable product of centuries of history. Its failings are the annoying consequence of civic idleness. That’s why you added that Italy is the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or the course of ten minutes.
• You explained, and we agreed, that intelligence is overused to the point of exasperation in Italy. You don’t just want to decide “what kind of red” a stoplight is. If it lasts a second or two longer than expected, people think it’s out of order and go through it anyway.