For a few years before coming to Italy, I lived in Paris and I cannot tell you the life-enhancing difference I felt as I crossed the frontier from France into Italy in my metallic burgundy Honda Prelude.
On arrival at the Italian motorway toll that stifling summer of 1998, I discovered I had no money and that the sun had melted my bank card which I had left on the dashboard. The charming young woman on the toll-gate simply gave me a form to fill in and waved me through with a smile. Isn’t this how we should run the world?
I remember once being stopped by two Italian police patrol cars in the dead of night when well over the limit. Instead of them breathalysing me, we started to have a discussion about the Mussolini biography I had written. ‘Mussolini was a very misunderstood man,’ I assured the Italian police. ‘Hitler gave him such a bad press.’ ‘Molto bravo, Farrell. Just write the truth about Il Duce, OK?’ the maresciallo said as he sent me on my way.
The French, on the other hand, take a sadistic pleasure in denying people a conversation, let alone a solution. I remember Paris only for the cold indifference of Parisians to others, and their inability to smile.
In preferring the Italians to the French I am not alone. The great French novelist Stendhal detested his fellow countrymen but adored Italians, and spent much of his adult life in Italy trying to explain why. With the exception of Napoleon, in whose army he had served and whom he idolised, Stendhal felt that his fellow countrymen were bigoted, frigid, artificial, insincere, arrogant, money-grubbing, cynical and vulgar.
The French ‘never sin out of love or hate’, he wrote, but only for personal gain.
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