The overarching thesis of The Italians is that Italy is the exception outside which lies the norm. To establish this negative national exceptionalism the author employs data (the World Values Survey is a guiding light) to identify and explain attitudes and behaviours, confirmed by a linguistically determined access to the national psyche. If the collected data reveals Italy to be ‘worryingly corrupt’, Italian corruption, we are informed, is unlike corruption elsewhere because it is an effect of wealth, rather than the result of poverty. While some of the identifiable causes might explain corruption anywhere, Italians are attitudinally disposed to tolerate what others would not, and the concept of furbizia encourages working around the system. Because corrozzione is limited to bribery, Italian law is more tolerant of a range of nefarious dealings. Moreover, because verità means both ‘truth’ and ‘version’, Italian disables its speakers from reaching conclusions, encourages relativism, perpetuates myths, and facilitates miscarriages of justice.

‘Italians seem to be a sort of recurring obsession, a presence that periodically intrudes into the English imaginary’

This method of tapping the national mentalité through its vocabulary may be suggestive, but it is dangerously tendentious. The apogee of Italian moral ambivalence is, for example, identified in the assertion that ‘Italians have no word for accountability’ (for the record, they do). The many ways of declaring love in Italian are parsed too coarsely: one may have feelings of both amore and voglio bene towards the same person without an ounce of either existential or actual contradiction. And precisely how unique, or exceptional, is mammismo? The Greeks (Thebans) had Jocasta; there is the Jewish mother; the Asian Tiger Mother; and Mammy.

Monument to Italian politician Agostino Depretis, piazza Vittorio Veneto, Stradella (photograph by Zeisterre, via Wikimedia Commons)

Hooper is at certain points inexplicably willing to abandon his data driven analysis in favour of the subjective impressions of lived experience. Perhaps this is because, in a study of what is most characteristically Italian – illusion, ambivalence, and guile – data is either absent or useless. As the various political and other scandals he surveys illustrate, in Italy, quintessentially, ‘what is visible is not necessarily real’. The word that identifies the relevant mindset is dietrologia – the belief that there is always something we are not being told behind what we are shown. Even the seemingly simple bravo is regarded as suspiciously coded. By contrast, with the equivalent ‘exactly’ (English) or ‘right’ (American), it is an example of the tendency to flatter rather than simply approve.

In trying to pin down the dangerously seductive life of Italy, Hooper frequently turns to reductive formulations. In ways reminiscent of some of the worst habits of Enlightenment anthropology, we are informed that Italians have ‘a downright distrust of simplicity’; ‘are naturally theatrical’; ‘are conspiratorial’; ‘will not obey law, yet will adhere … to conventions’. They even speak a language having nothing to do with philology and semantics, but which is pre-linguistically gestural, expressive, and emotive.

‘The overarching thesis of The Italians is that Italy is the exception outside which lies the norm’

In a tumultuous political atmosphere, foreign correspondence retains self-evident relevance. However, the adequacy of observation will always be tested in any encounter with the other. Some analysis in The Italians is based on poor, or badly analysed, data. The ‘spirit of Pinocchio’ is not an Italian mentalité. Better data, or better analysis, shows that Italians do not approve of cheating more than other comparable populaces. In other ways, the dichotomy between the ‘normal’ and the ‘Italian’ is similarly an artefact of the author’s method. Hooper therefore prefers Banfield on Italy (The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958) to Ljunge on societies in general because he makes Italy the exception.

Hooper provides numerous instances of sympathetic confirmation of his imported view of the peninsula’s ‘dense fog of discrepancy and contradiction’ from among Italians themselves. But one longs to hear a resistant voice enter the debate to spark a competing verità.