PONDERING THE UNWARRANTED STEREOTYPING 
OF ITALIAN PEOPLE
By Giorgio Iraci
Special to Italy Daily
Milan, Tuesday, October 29 2002 

Italians who like to read books in English are often dismayed by the disparaging tone that English and American writers adopt in regard to Italy, its people, habits, and even Italian as a language.

I am one of them. I prefer to read in the original, and do so whenever I can. English is a beautiful language, in both varieties used on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Its grammar and syntax are not as easy as described at first - and that's a first challenge.

Then, it has a rich, versatile, adaptable vocabulary in continuous evolution.
But the superciliousness, disdain, and show of superiority that too many writers, even good ones, display toward all things Italian come as unpleasant surprises.
According to these writers, Italian is not speech - it is "chattering," "gabbing," "garbling" "jabbering," or any other verb indicating an animal origin. Most of the time, these noises are described as "loud." 

My dictionary defines "to chatter" as 1. "to utter rapid short sounds suggestive of language but inarticulate and indistinct," "to utter animal sounds" and 2. to talk idly, incessantly or fast.

Consequently, not only the way of speaking is denigrated, but also its substance and purposefulness. Monkeys and parrots chatter from the branches of trees in the jungle, squirrels from those of the woods and forests in New England.

But not only Italian speech is denigrated: also our physical appearance and personality are often ridiculed in English-language writing. Some examples?

Several years ago, an American magazine carried a full-page ad for the Financial Times. It showed an elegant, WASPish-looking gentleman comfortably reading the paper while a small man with monkeyish facial features, thick black eyebrows joined together and a sleazy, subservient smirk, is cutting the reader's hair. Of course, the ad specified that the barber was Italian. Not only did he look like a monkey, but he was relegated to a servile task toward the other, a superior being who read the highbrow paper.

At the time, I wrote a letter of protest to the daily's editor-in-chief. He apologized in writing and the ad disappeared - only to reappear after a few years.

In the beginning of the 1960s novel "Goldfinger" of the James Bond series, author Ian Fleming portrays a restaurant owner in Florida as "an oily, bowing Italian, receiving his guests washing his hands."

The same writer defines Italy as "that nation of barbers and waiters." On another occasion, James Bond, traveling on an Italian train finds too little space for his legs and "curses the Italian railroad." Now, my son is seven feet tall, and I have never seen him uncomfortable on an Italian train from lack of space for his lower limbs.

Interestingly, this same writer reserved his admiration for Germany, undeniably a country that has caused others a good amount of misery, described as "the most gifted nation in the world."

Author Len Deighton in "Spy Sinker" describes the owner of another restaurant in London as a "formidable Italian matron welcoming the rich and famous while ruthlessly pruning from her clientele those of lesser appeal." The concept and the visual image of the fat Italian woman is quite widespread. Yet, I have never seen in Italy so many extreme degrees of obesity as I've seen in the United States. The
same matron, we learn, also likes "to take her customers in a bear hug and to scream endearments into their ear."

A letter-column editor of the "Dear Abby" variety in London's Sunday Times defines as "fetid Mediterranean latrines" the hygienic facilities found in southern European countries. Well, I've traveled to her country a few times, another son of mine has been working in its capital, and we never found the loos there to be anything to
write home about.

The same woman answers another letter saying that a man, when not wearing a tie, should never leave the second button of his shirt undone, "unless he wants to look like an Italian." 

Another writer, Louis De Bernières, has received rave reviews for a book, "Corelli's Mandolin," that has appealed very much to the romantic fantasies of matrons, spinsters and sob-sisters in his country, because of all its glutinous sentimentality and romance and for his "wit." 

It's unfortunate that these witticisms are applied on the background of one of the greatest tragedies of World War II, the massacre in cold blood (by the German Wehrmacht) of thousands of Italian soldiers and officers on the island of Cephallonia, off the western coast of Greece. It may be mentioned, here, that the massacre was also due, in part, to the cold-blooded callousness of a high-ranking British naval officer who reportedly recalled to port two Italian warships that had sailed to bring help to the besieged Italian garrison on that island and reprimanded their officers and
crews.

So the traditional, stereotyped image of Italians as worthless, spaghetti-eating individuals is perpetuated by Anglo-Saxon writers and spread amongst people in their countries, who then flock here as tourists with preconceived ideas.

I have found far more respect for Italy and Italians in the Japanese - of a fascinating culture and tradition, so far from the Western ones - than anywhere in English-speaking countries.

So, what is the real problem? Italy's political instability, its military unreliability? It's easy to forget that for years we could have been invaded at any moment; that we never quit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; that we don't have large resources in oil and minerals; that at no time has it ever come out that high-ranking Italian officers in the Allied commands were spilling secret military intelligence to the opponent, either during the Gulf War of 1991 or the following, more recent NATO air-campaign against Serbia.

The loudest cases of big-time pro-USSR espionage did not happen in Italy, but in other countries. But what do politics and military power have to do with our history, our culture, our language? So,where's the legitimacy of a seemingly everlasting and self-complacent beef?

In conclusion: Get off it. Every nation, every people have their pros and cons. Just remember where the Renaissance began, who started it, and who's still contributing to it. Don't forget that Antonio Meucci (1808-1889), an Italian immigrant in the United States is now recognized even by the United States, as the real inventor of the
telephone (no, it was not Alexander Graham Bell), and was cheated out of his invention.

Giorgio Iraci lives in Perugia. Comments to him may be addressed to
iragi@dada.it.
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