Ian Fisher has a good arti­cle about Italy in today’s New York Times. He writes of a national sense of malaise, or malessere, “a col­lec­tive funk—economic, polit­i­cal and social—summed up in a recent poll: Ital­ians, despite their claim to have mas­tered the art of living, say they are the least happy people in West­ern Europe.” I’m gen­er­ally skep­ti­cal of claims to national feel­ing, but what Fisher describes accords exactly with what I saw living in Bologna last year. Even though my time there spanned sev­eral hope­ful moments—the evic­tion of Silvio Berlus­coni from Palazzo Chigi, the arrest of Bernardo Proven­zano, Italy’s World Cup victory—the two words my Ital­ian friends and acquain­tances couldn’t seem to avoid in describ­ing their coun­try were cazzo and merda.

Fisher lines up the usual sus­pects for this national funk, includ­ing polit­i­cal stag­na­tion, orga­nized crime, and the move to an non­de­pre­cia­ble euro. But the single factor I heard blamed most often was Italy’s geron­toc­racy. (Remem­ber that I was talk­ing mostly to twenty- and thirty-​somethings.) The effects of that geron­toc­racy on the youth are cap­tured neatly in a single sta­tis­tic cited by Fisher: he writes that “70 per­cent of Ital­ians between 20 and 30 still live at home, con­demn­ing the young to an extended and under­pro­duc­tive adolescence,” and goes on to quote Mario Adi­nolfi, a 36-year-old blog­ger and “aspiring lawmaker”:

The gen­er­a­tional prob­lem is the Ital­ian problem…. In every coun­try young people hope. Here in Italy there is no hope any­more. Your mom keeps you home nice and softly, and you stay there and you don’t fight. And if you don’t fight, it is impos­si­ble to take power from anybody…. We don’t have a Google…. We can’t imag­ine in Italy that a 30-year-old opens a busi­ness in a garage.

Ital­ians want badly to believe that they are unique in their malaise, but the mood struck me as famil­iar. It’s the same feel­ing that sat­u­rates grad­u­ate pro­grams in the human­i­ties (and some social sci­ences) here in Amer­ica. Analo­gies like this are often dan­ger­ous to push too far, but here the two cases seem to line up fairly well: like Ital­ians, grad­u­ate stu­dents feel sig­nif­i­cantly poorer than their peers, they see little hope for relief in the future, and they have a creep­ing epig­o­nal feel­ing, as if they were left­overs in a world that wanted them only for their orna­men­tal func­tion (novels on Sun­days, Venice in June). What hits clos­est to home, how­ever, is the sense that one is stuck in an “extended and under­pro­duc­tive adolescence,” an ado­les­cence that only seems to end, if it ever does, some­where on the far side of tenure.

Ipocrita ital­iano, mio simile, fratello!