Society
A close-knit Italian community is not as nice as you think
Published 02 April 2001
The Odones come from Piedmont, the prosperous industrial area in northern Italy. Although my father worked in Rome, the family spent every holiday in Gamalero, the tiny village where our family house still stands. My brother and I spent all our summers with our great-aunts there. They were elderly widows and pillars of their community.
If only my aunts had lived to learn that their community - or at least ones like it - provided the model for the latest American blueprint for the perfect society. According to Robert Putnam, the guru now being hailed by No 10, the regions of northern Italy are rich in "social capital". If we could copy these good folk, according to Putnam's book Bowling Alone, we would have a strong fabric of social connections that in turn would make for a better democracy. People in these regions attend church and join the Boy Scouts, Rotary clubs and the bowling leagues: in this way, they learn to trust one another and to understand the web of mutual rights and responsibilities that links us all. A sense of "me" gives way to "us"; this in turn prompts us to engage in both the market and the democratic process.
Putnam is right that, in Italy, more people vote than in almost any other European nation - as many as 82 per cent in 1996, the last year recorded. There are countless tales of emigrant labourers who work in Switzerland or Germany but will fund their tickets to go back home and cast their votes, even at local elections.
At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, though, I should point out that there is a dark side to northern Italian communities. Let's start with the stats. If the family is the bedrock of society, and the template of connections between individuals, then Putnam's theory falls rather flat: the 1998 census finds that more than one in four Italians divorce. Given that the Catholic Church wields far greater influence in southern Italy, and that social mores are far more conservative at the bottom than at the top of the boot, it is not difficult to deduce that northern Italians constitute a great proportion of these divorces.
Equally ominous is the extraordinary popularity of the fascist Lega Nord, whose leader, Umberto Bossi, campaigns on a racist ticket that would stop the "invasion" by (mainly African) immigrants of his native shores.
Lega Nord's bigoted views, I must confess, find a ready audience in my beloved Piedmont. Here, terroni - a derogatory term for southern Italians, whom the wealthy northerners regard as parasites - often experience violence, discrimination and abuse. My own aunts, too pious to curse, would scream "Garibaldi!" as an imprecation: the red-shirted soldier who united Italy, north to south, was, in their eyes, beneath contempt.
In his book, Putnam stresses how knowing thy neighbour is crucial for crime-fighting - in the US, it has been shown to have an even greater impact than more cops on the beat, he claims. Certainly, in the cosy community of our village, everyone knew who you were and where you belonged on the social ladder. Equally, they knew everything you did. We didn't have lace curtains in Gamalero, but we did have shutters, and the farmer whose field stretched next to yours, the butcher who sold you the best cutlets, the pharmacist whose potions cured you, knew, just knew, what was going on behind those wooden slats.
There were churchgoers who would speculate about what unconfessed sin kept you from weekly communion; bocce team players (it's the Mediterranean version of bowling) who ran out of the village a young girl they'd branded a streetwalker (though the claim was never substantiated). They may have been big on the Boy Scouts, but when Salvatore moved there from Sicily, our aunts had to force him upon our playmates, who would otherwise have shunned him.
Community can be as claustrophobic as it is cosy, as vicious as it is virtuous. I love my Piedmontese village, Mr Putnam. But perfection it is not.
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