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!