Like so many Britons who chased the dream and woke up in Italy I have contemplated writing a book about the Italians. I even thought of what to call it: Those Italians.The title was prompted by what an Albanian port official told the media during some international crisis in response to the news that the entire cargo of an Italian aid ship had disappeared one night in the Albanian port of Durres. ‘Yes it is incredible,’ the official conceded, ‘but — my friends — there is always something funny going on with those Italians.’ An Albanian, of all people!
But such books are a poisoned chalice. The theme demands that you capture the spirit of the place and its people and yet avoid stereotype and cliché. But how do you say anything interesting about the Italians that has not been said so many times before?
If I had not bottled out, my instinct would have been to rattle the cage big time because — here we go — the Italians are a pathologically paranoid people. If a British or American newspaper writes something negative about them, for example, it is front-page news in Italy. It never happens the other way round.
No article I have written anywhere caused as much furore and reader reaction as one a few years ago for the Italian press which attacked a sacred cow: Italian restaurants. I pointed out a simple truth — that Italian restaurant food these days is monotonous and bad. As a result, the Italians simply wanted me out of their country.
The only other article to cause a similar stir was when I pointed out another simple truth: actually, the Allies liberated Italy in the second world war and the partisans were a military irrelevance.
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