Ten Walks That Explain... Italy
Part 1 on a detour from explaining the Netherlands.
Actual writing on “Orange sky, rising water” (aka Ten Walks That Explain the Netherlands) is well underway, and the usual mixture of fluidity and treacle. But as I plough on with that I thought I’d use this Substack to write about the Ten Walks That Explain Italy. I had that idea when we were living just outside Fiesole, Tuscany, and I was busy mapping it all out when Geert Wilders did his electoral thing and I dropped a note to my publisher about the Netherlands. I hope to get back to the Italy one once the Dutch are fully explained to an expectant world, but in the meantime…
Ten Walks That Explain Italy: walk 1, Sardinia.
Don’t try to contact anybody in authority in August; they’ll be in Sardinia. Doctors, lawyers, that person you’ve been trying to track down in the damn council office for months, just so they can say yes or say no and give you twenty seconds of their time to sign a piece of paper; they’ll be in Sardinia. Why? Well there is sun, food, company, natural beauty in abundance, there is family. This is what is important, and certainly more important than that appointment that you are fretting about. This is a walk about that, about Italian priorities.
My wife has always told me that there is a baseline to life in Italy, and as long as the sun is in the sky and the tomatoes are ripe, other challenges can wait. She is correct, but I believe it goes even further than she argues. In Italy a lack of urgency is often accompanied by its intemperate twin impatience (not to mention the embarrassing half-brother, panic). There is a constant desire to live in the moment, to refuse to have the spell broken, to sweep the inconveniences under the carpet and focus on the best that life has to offer. But then the spell is broken by reality and exasperation that the challenge is even greater thanks to initial lack of urgency.
This means that Italian priorities are more than something to glory in; they are the excuse for short-termism, something to hide behind and try to fend off the intrusion of reality. That’s why the first walk looks at what is important to Italy, what makes it so universally loved around the world, if not universally respected. It also looks at how it structures life, school, work and holidays, and makes the challenges that Italy faces even more difficult to deal with. But when will it be time to panic?
Unlike the other walks this one is not rich with historical way-markers or geographical features that explain deeper forces that shape the centuries. Yes, Sardinia is an island in the western half of the Mediterranean, and that simple fact has played a big part in what has happened here and continues to happen here. But much of that history can wait and we can start the book by breathing the herb-scented air, squinting at the reflection of the sun in the water, and enjoying natural beauty.
The Costa Smerelda is famous for a good reason, and its calling card is the tourists arrested trying to smuggle out a handful of sand from its beaches. The walk itself is gorgeous, across headlands and along blisteringly white and pink beaches, the turquoise waters hypnotising you and demanding that you break off the walk and plunge in. This is the Sardinia that all Italy longs to escape to in August, turned up to 11. It is a fabulous walk.
And an interesting one. This particular part of Sardinia, especially in peak summer months, is beyond the pocket of most Italians. Recent years have not been kind to their bank accounts. While other countries may worry about slow-downs and a couple of quarters going negative, in Italy incomes were lower in 2023 than they were two decades earlier. At one point in the early 2000s it had the third worst growth rate in the entire world, only beating Haiti and Zimbabwe. It is still considered the eurozone’s weak link, cursed with a deadly combination of sclerotic growth and large debts; but unlike with Greece, if Italy blows up so does Europe. For many Italians this underlying economic malaise translates into precarious employment, crumbling services and uncertain futures. But at least the tomatoes are delicious.
On the Costa Smerelda you might not notice the economic headwinds. If you scan those famous turquoise coves you might see a cabal of oligarchical superyachts, floating above the Italian and world economies without ever getting their toes wet. There may be some hiccups, given Covid and then the regrettable geopolitical lack of Russian cash, but demand is such that where one set of the hyper rich shuffles off, another set of the super-rich shuffles seamlessly in. Italy’s absolute best, packaged for the world.
Scratch beneath the superyachts and there are glimpses of the compromises between what Italians have been brought up to expect, and the realities of life in the 21st century. We can talk about the divide between men and women, relations with Brussels and Berlin, the disconnect between geographic mobility and intergenerational mobility, and the insider-outsider economy.
On the face of it there’s a lot to envy. There’s work, and once your feet are under the table you’re set for life in a permanent job and a decent enough pension scheme. Your working day is often broken up by a two or three hour lunch, subsidised and with wine, in a local restaurant. Your return home is fairly late, especially if you have had a little aperitivo with friends in town, but the Italian model provides for this in the shape of a wife at home (the story is very different from the female perspective), or a helpful nonna to fill in the gaps and fuss over her grandchildren.
Holidays are generous, but school children are likely to be off for a full three months in the summer, so they will often disappear to stay with grandparents or head off to the coast with their mother. The father traditionally joins at weekends. Summers are long and full of beach bars and flirting and sweets and discos. Some kids will go on residential summer camps, frequently affiliated to institutions such as employers or trade unions. Others will knock about with little to do but discover kissing, fall off mopeds, and forget what they’ve been taught in school.
This model is under pressure. As people have moved to big cities for work they’re less likely to be able to call on a handy nonna to shoulder some of the childcare. The labour market is not particularly female friendly or family friendly. Women in particular – and young people in general – struggle to turn temporary jobs into permanent ones (a big deal in such a stratified labour market). A friend of ours had to leave a permanent job because they insisted that she took her long lunchtime break and then stayed at work until 8pm, making childcare near-impossible. Most workers cannot cope with dropping everything for three months of school holiday, and many kids are left to the care of indulgent grandparents, video games and indolence for weeks on end. Meanwhile, getting that start in life often comes down to contacts rather than merit, and many talented Italians follow in the footsteps of previous generations and seek opportunities abroad.
As with many aspects of Italian life the education system is also stuck in a model that defies modernisation or improvement. Rote-learning and hierarchy triumphs over instilling a lifelong love of learning. One Finnish family that tried to set up home in Sicily with their children created waves when they wrote a letter to their local newspaper explaining why they were giving up and heading to Spain: poor facilities in schools, lack of time or space outside, weak discipline, low standards for teachers. Compounding what the family experienced was that familiar North/South divide, with 50% of children in Sicily, Calabria and Sardinia having poor literacy and 60% poor numeracy. Italy’s university system is also falling behind: just 29% of 25 to 34 year olds have a degree, the second lowest level in the EU. In Greece, in contrast, the figure is 45%, and in Spain it is 51%.[i] Almost 40% of the working age population has a low level of education, compared to an EU average of 25%.[ii] To be sure, you have to be good to get through an Italian university, but either way the country’s education and employment system is clearly failing to produce the Italians that a 21st century economy needs.
That all presumes that a 21st century economy that needs highly skilled workers is a possibility in Italy; that figure of 20 years of stagnating incomes suggests otherwise. This is an economy controlled by special interests and connections. For one telling example witness the beaches that you pass, neatly parcelled up into privately-owned clubs. The European Union has demanded that the beach club system is reformed, with its opaque licensing and restrictions on public access to the coast. Naturally this is opposed, roundly attacked as an assault on the Italians’ much-loved way of life.
So as you wander around the glorious headlands with the smell of Sardinian herbs on the breeze, think about that way of life, the belle paese that so many outsiders are seduced by when on holiday. And then think about how it can be funded. An attachment to a way of life can be a wonderful thing, but – without the means to pay for it – questions must be asked.
The walk itself is from Cannigione, looping around the jutting headlands, ending up in the glistening marina at Porto Cervo. It will make you wonder if you have your own life’s priorities right, stuck on a ring-road traffic jam in the pouring rain while others are enjoying this. There will be some history to go with the beauty and economics. Sardinia was inevitably part of the Roman Empire for many centuries, before falling under the spheres of influence of the Vandals and Byzantines. The Genoese treated the population terribly. The Aragonese then established firm control in the late middle ages and it pottered on as the Kingdom of Sardinia before the 19th century ructions that sucked it into the new Kingdom of Italy. Through all this is has been a land of brigands and blood feuds, of sheep and impenetrable mountains. It has always been a bit of a backwater; a rocky, beautiful, herb-scented backwater that is home to a remarkably old population, but a backwater nevertheless. Is that also Italy’s fate?
[i]https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/EDAT_LFSE_03__custom_6083838/bookmark/table?lang=en&bookmarkId=4942b3af-a41a-4c31-b179-361c544e500f
[ii] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/edat_lfs_9903/default/table?lang=en
So much of Italy’s present condition mirrors that of India, especially in the last few decades!