Beppe Severgnini once said about Italians:

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.

You don’t change, we don’t change, and Italy doesn’t change, but we all complain that we can’t go on like this. Our sun is setting in installments. It’s festive and flamboyant, but it’s still a sunset.

This for me is probably the closest I’ve heard to any Italian expressing the kind of cheerful armageddon attitude of this country. Italy is quite possibly going to hell in a hand basket, and while plenty of whingeing goes on, nothing ever seems to really progress.

Beppe Severgnini is a famous journalist and author who has written numerous books and columns on Italians and Italian life. It’s often dolce vita gone awry, as in his book “La bella figura: a field guide to the Italian mind”.

Italians are not very good at self-analysis or self-criticism, and debate on a national identity is strangely silent. So Severgnini is one of the few voices of Italianness, and tellingly is often more read by expat Italians than natives.

Beppe Severgnini has had gigs as a correspondent in London, was The Economist’s Italy correspondent and is famous for his forum, Italians, on the Corriere della Sera website. To read some of Severgnini’s work in both English and Italian, go to the Italians forum, or the Severgnini website.

Quote | From the New York Times

Photo | Flickr

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