Eurotalians

There's many people here claiming that living in Italy is the same as living in some other European country. Let us see:

Loneliness

Private Witt: Do you ever feel lonely?
First Sgt. Edward Welsh: Only around people.

From the movie The Thin Red Line, 1998

Nonna

This is not going to be something new I've got against Italy as maybe expected.

I've got only one grandmother by now. She is an loving, honest, generous and wise woman. But now she is in sorrow because life sucks. But it does not suck because of itself, since life is great, but because mankind is making it worse and worse.
She is 95 years old, she barely walks by herself, but she used to be very strong and healthy just a couple of years ago and now she is too proud, too afraid of realising that she's not strong anymore. Thus she doesn't want one of those caretakers that people may hire. She just wants my mom to be taking care of her.
This morning my mom found her sitting on a chair thinking in sorrow, in front of the switched off television, with a postcard in her hands. She had just received it from a relative of ours who's now on holiday in New York. They send postcards but they never pay a visit to an elder woman that they know is not well. Never. Most of them live nearby and have got plenty of time since they are retired. But they don't have time nor will to drive half an hour to visit her. Therefore they believe that sending a stupid postcard with “lots of love” makes it any better. As well as asking us how she is, when we happen to meet them at the countryhouse that they always have time to visit on Sundays to relax.
My dad told me that “it used to be better back in the days”. Nobody was left alone when become old or in pain.
There's a saying: life was better when it was worse. Probably false about welfare, it may be not about life.

Ti voglio bene Nonna. Ci vediamo domani.

Society

It's a mistery to me
we have a greed
with which we have agreed.

You think you have to want
more than you need
until you have it all you won't be free.

When you want more than you have
you think you need
and when you think more than you want
your thoughts begin to bleed.

I think I need to find a bigger place
'cos when you have more than you think
you need more space.

There's those thinking more or less less is more
but if less is more how you're keeping score?
Means for every point you make
your level drops
kinda like its starting from the top
you can't do that...

Society, you're a crazy breed
I hope you're not lonely without me

Society, crazy and deep
I hope you're not lonely without me.

Society, have mercy on me
I hope you're not angry if I disagree.

Society, crazy and deep
I hope you're not lonely without me.

by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam

Cazzeggio

The Italian slangy word “cazzeggio” means being up to no good. One may hang around alone or with company thinking to be having fun but being at “cazzeggio”. What's good? It's good when I talk with a friend about something interesting, or when I go out at night - but even by day - being willing to know someone, and things like these. To cut the long story short it's good when I do something useful to make me a better person. All the rest is “cazzeggio”. It is for example when I surf the web searching nothing just to be up to something, or when I walk the central street of my town with some other people looking around, again with no precise goal.
But the point is that everybody should know when they are at “cazzeggio” and where they are not. Because the “cazzeggio” is not a crime or something bad if you know that you're up to it, but it's an offense to oneself when one does nothing good thinking to be up to something or thinking that life is all about doing that, because all the rest is unknown.
Mostly, nightlife in Southern Europe and specially in Italy is thus “cazzeggio”, as well as it is in any posh or snobby environment, whether it is in US, Sweden, Japan or up on the Moon. Because when people go out to show off, endeavouring to appear better than the others and stand for instance in a club waiting to be stared at, it's no good. Going to a club or on holiday in close-up groups of acquaintances, making taugh to know strangers is no good as well. In Italy I've got something like 3 new friends in 3 years. Three. Because they were introduced in the group as friends of friends. In Sweden, where I used to hang out with lots of groups of open-minded and friendly people, I got to know hundreds of guys and gals and I've got rather many new friends I am still in touch with.
Social life in Italy is mostly – not only but mostly – cazzeggio. I removed the quotation marks because you know the word by now. Italians have got even a word for it... surprised?

Personality

I think people reflect the country they belong to. People from powerful countries that count something feel themselves secure and confident, they behave as their nation behaves so they know what they want and take it. People from Germany, Russia, US, England and France can be considered so. One can include among these countries also the ones that have been always considered models of civilization as the northern European countries. These people are used to doing everything they want without being judged, and if somebody judges them they don't care. There's neither social nor cultural restriction – while there obviously is and always has been in Italy – and it shows in everything they do.
This certainly has to do with the way girls behave generally. This is what among many other things happens in Italy: if a guy and a girl meet in a bar or a club and end up to bed together, either they do it hiding from people's sight – friends' included – or they are gonna be respectively a slut and a cool guy. Yes, the guy is cool and the girl is a slut. A girl that has a one-night stand even being single is a slut in Italy. A guy doing the same thing is obviously a cool guy, at least in other guys' opinion.
This is due to the fact that there's a huge problem of social disparity between men and women in Italy. I noticed that even more because I've been living two years in the home country of parity, where women have got the same rights of men, have taken at least a half of the seats in the Parliament, and behave exactly how they want and nobody is even going to think about judging them.
I'm going to give a couple of arguments about what I'm writing.
I was in a bar in my hometown some time ago with a group of friends – “la compagnia”, two girls and two guys besides me - and one of my friends noticed a guy she liked. Thus she approached him and started chatting with him and this surprised me a lot as I was not used to this in Italy. I have to mention that she's a rather beautiful and down-to-earth girl as there are few around. Her action has then been definitely disliked by my friends, who were staring at her as she was an alien and whispering each other “non si fa così”, it's not the way to do it. She is considered as a bitch among the group because she changed three boyfriends in three years and had random sex with four or five guys in one year. No comment, right?
I've been talking with an Italian girl who's now an exchange student in Stockholm. She told me that she observes the freedom that girls have in doing everything they want, for example dressing up with short dresses, miniskirts and sexy outfits without being seeked by guys nor called sluts. Or bringing a guy to their own rooms if they just feel like it. She told me she's done it as well there, but she would never do it back home because not even her close girlfriends would accept it. She claimed openly that she feels far more free in Stockholm than she does in Italy. She's not the only one.

It's all about comparisons

I believe I should't have left to Sweden in late 2006. That event has deeply changed my way of thinking and consequently my life. Nowadays I'm in the bad condition of wishing to move out from Italy and live abroad, possibly in some civil country where people live normally their lives. It's not that obvious as it sounds because it is anyway a kind of condemnation: starting living abroad is taugh, there's a lot of issues and problems to solve. You'll never be feeling home, for you're not home. People from that country are not going to accept you as a person of that country, nevertheless I know that I'd be feeling worse if I remain in my homecountry.
This is due to a lot of things. One might say that in Sweden everything works fine, social services have high standards, there's nearly no poor people and the working life is more relaxed and puts less pressure on life. But even though all these reasons are true and are part of the better things, the main question is about how people behave and live their lives in Italy, what counts in an individual in this country, how people perceive social rules, how people respect the community but mostly how relations between genders take place, how judgment conditionate people and should bother them but in fact does just partly.
First of all there's something to say about what people consider to be absolute truths. For instance, that the whole world is a village regarding human behaviors and rules. But it is not, definitely. Every country has boundaries beyond which people change, contitionated by the local media and beliefs, thus it happens that living in a country just next to yours is totally different in many things.
What's different in Italy than nordic countries as well as Germany, England, Ireland and so on? Many topics, but the one that matters the most to me but it should to almost everybody, is the way male and female people relationate. This is in my opinion a very important topic, it's into all the rest of a person's life. Italians may not perceive it as long as they never travel to some different place, because if you know just one, every place for you is just like it. And a brief holiday is not enough, living in a place for a longer time is relevant. Examples can explain things better. While female students studying abroad in Italy rarely complain about a scarcity of Italian men, their male counterparts lament the seeming absence of Italian women on the prowl. “Where are they hiding?” they may ask. They often go to pubs mainly packed of foreign students, nevetheless even if they did zone in on the “right” places, the Italian nightspots, they would only be able to admire these beautiful women from a distance. And not because they come from a different country, but because Italian women generally don’t go to bars to meet guys. They’re just out for a drink with good friends, often in a mixed boy-girl group that has been tight for ages, known in Italian as a “compagnia” or other expressions, and so they are impossible to approach. Not that they wouldn’t chat to a colleague or someone they’d been introduced to at a party the previous week, but meeting strangers for potential hook-ups, dates, and relationships is not on the agenda. It just doesn't happen, very few exceptions may be counted.
In Italy, there’s a “way” to do most things, a “come si fa” and a “come non si fa”, and meeting boys at bars falls neatly into the latter category. In Sweden, Germany, States, England and other developed coutries, a single girl dresses up, goes out with one or two girlfriends on a similar mission, scans the bar/club/lounge for someone she finds attractive, and then proceeds to smile at and make seductive eye-contact with said guy until he moseys on over and buys her a drink. The possibilities are then endless. In Italy, on the other hand, to meet each other, an Italian girl and an Italian guy need to be properly introduced by a mutual friend or acquaintance, they need to be “presentati”, presented to one another. Apparently, even a potential mate need be “raccomandato”, recommended. Once the proper introductions have been made, the possibilities should be endless for them as well. This difference in customs may not seem significant, but while foreigners complain about how hard it is to meet people in their respective countries, Italians have it that much harder. They have to wait to be introduced. They have to wait to be met.
It really drives me crazy when I say this to someone and I get as a reply that they knew that in Italy people are so opened, so amazing, so loving and very likely to meet people. This is partly true, but that word “partly” is in this case huge. In Italy girls are really taugh to cope with generally. They give loads of problems, they are never satisfied, more spoiled and got less personality than the most part of the girls in any other developed country. Rare exceptions excluded. They are just insecure, lack of self confidence and never dare to go for a guy. They are passive, men must take the first step, talk to them pretending not to be interested while if a guy starts talking to a girl out of a sudden he's obviously attracted. Therefore men have to come up with something impressive because otherwise they are going to sound as the average unisteresting guy. Women don't give men the opportunity to show how they are, because they deny attention from the start. A girl tend not to trust a stranger, so if you don't get introduced by a friend of hers, you'll probably not have a chance. Only those guys that hit on hundrends of girls sometimes succeed, according to the probability calculus.
In order to date a girl and possibly start a relationship, a guy must prove his reliability. There's steps to take. This happens basically, as said, because people in Italy don't trust other people. In Sweden, your presence and your potential attractiveness are enough to make a girl come and talk to you. A girl is attracted, she comes to you, or she does something to let you do something first. In many other countries it works more or less this way as well. More posts further on.