Roman Daze. Brontè Dee Jackson
explains why Italy doesn’t feel like one country. The language, food, how people look and behave, and the types of housing differ significantly from one part of Italy to another. It is only just under 150 years that they have been referring to themselves as one country. It also explains the fierce identity that most Italians have with their place of birth. If they move locations they are still known as ‘the one from Abruzzo’, ‘the Southerner’ or ‘the Venetian’, even twenty years after they have been living in the new place.
There is also a wariness between northern and southern Italians, that at best borders on suspicion and at worst explodes as judgemental disdain. A few years ago a major political party ran on a campaign for the north to secede from the south. They got enough votes to be part of the government for many years. I once saw graffiti in Venice written in huge letters which ran the length of a wall that said ‘Southerners go home’. The word used for Southerners, however, was a derogative phrase, the equivalent of the Western word ‘nigger’.
After a concert one evening in Bologna in the north, friends of ours from the south were in the queue to get out of the car park. A woman backed her car out in front of them, only just missing them.
‘Watch where you are going, lady!’ my friend yelled out.
‘Oh shut up you Southern immigrant, what would you know?’ she replied, discerning his southern roots from his accent.
My friend, who is a large man from the south and a criminal court judge, was for the only time in his life short for words.
‘Come here and I’ll show you what a southern boy knows,’ he eventually managed to squeak out, on the road one hour out of Bologna.
The Southerners get their own back, though, by instinctively knowing that they have the better deal when it comes to day-to-day living in Italy. They have all the best beaches and the sunshine, which, along with the chronic unemployment, provokes a happy-go-lucky way of life that is much better for the soul. They have generous, forgiving hearts, these Southerners.
Romans, I must add at this point, are a race unto themselves. They don’t fit into the north/south divide because they are simply Roman. They have been there far longer than Italy itself, and in fact far longer than any other Italians. Italy grew up around them and they never let anyone forget that. They have nothing to prove, nothing to hide; they just are, and they are unapologetic about it.
When I first went to Bologna for a four-day weekend, I felt that something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it. By late Saturday afternoon I realised what it was. It was quiet. In the middle of a major city, it was quiet.
It wasn’t just the smaller population, it was the way they behaved. I couldn’t hear anyone’s conversation. When they spoke into their mobile phones on the street they were not speaking loud enough for everyone to hear, as a typical Roman would be. There was no mad gesticulating as the speaker tried to stop the other party thanking or congratulating them, or asking them for advice. There was no way of overhearing what that person was going to have for dinner or at what time they would be arriving somewhere and why.
And the traffic. It was circumspect and what I would call rational. That is, it went from A to B without any flourishes of Formula One-type demonstrations, no knee-touching-the-road turns by the motorini drivers and no horns!
‘Why is Bologna so different?’ I wondered out loud to my husband. ‘Why in Rome do people have the need to announce with symbols and loud sounds that they are there?’
‘Because they are Romans,’ my husband muttered, ‘because they are Romans.’
The Italians chose self-determination, a republic, and from that the mighty Italian State grew. And grew. And grew. And to run such a diverse State you needs rules, laws, documents, processes and people to check all these.
In Italy, bureaucracy reigns. Identity Cards, registering where you live with the local police station, signing up at the local council so you can be assigned a doctor, all these are requirements and seen as common sense by the average Italian. Most Italians are incredulous when I tell them that when I move house back home I don’t have to inform my government. Or that I can freely nip to the local bar for a coffee without carrying anything that would identify me and where I live.
Nothing in Italy can be done without a plethora of identity documents, which start at birth. Every Italian carries around with them an Identity Card with photo, a fiscal code card, a health card and a licence if they drive, as a minimum. Legally you can be stopped and asked for these by a dizzying array of police – financial police, army police, traffic police, local police – or public transport ticket inspectors who can fine or detain you if you don’t have them on you in the original form. And from infancy onwards your date of birth is that which is shown on your official document. You have to repeat it aloud, write it and show it a zillion times; your schooling is based around it, your pension calculated according to it, your medical records reflect it. In the end, you just give up and celebrate this official birth date when the bureaucratic machine that is the State of Italy tells you to celebrate it.
This is why my husband now has a two-day birthday that starts on December 29 and goes until December 30. The person who has a week between their two dates is also very keen on this idea, they tell me.
The other numbers that change due to convenience or, in this case, cultural tradition, are house numbers. When my husband and I rented apartment number 17 at number 20 Pennabilli Street, we were perplexed the first time we checked the letterboxes. All of our mail came with the number 17 crossed out and the number 16b written in pencil next to it. We checked the number outside our front door and the number on our lease; they both said we had rented apartment number 17. However, our letterbox said 16b, and underneath was written the number 17.
I was anxious to get this number correct, as we had given our new address to family and friends, and it was also the address for my business. Finally, we asked our neighbour. The answer, it seems, is based on the fact that the number 17 is an unlucky number for Romans. In order to avoid coming across it and having to associate with it daily, the postman and the administrator of our apartment block – the Italian State at work again; all apartment blocks must be administrated – changed the number of our apartment at the most local decision-making level. It seems they did not need to inform us.
Numbers can also change depending on the consequences of having those particular numbers. A friend of mine was applying for one of the many documents that you must have if you are a foreigner and intend to live in Italy. As per usual, one document lead to another. In order to have this particular document she needed to demonstrate that the bill for the emptying of rubbish by council rubbish trucks was in her name. In order to have the bill for the rubbish in her name she had to register herself at the local office for rubbish removal. It was explained to her that the bill would be calculated based on the size of her apartment and she was asked how many square metres it was. When she replied, the official was amazed; it seemed her apartment was rather large compared to all others in the vicinity, including those in the same building. He asked her several times if she was really, really sure that her apartment was that size.
In Rome it is quite easy to know how many square metres your apartment is, as they are bought, sold, rented and leased based on this number, which appears in the documentation. So my friend was quite sure how many square metres her apartment was.
Her annual bill was then calculated based on these measurements. My friend’s face fell. It was a huge sum of money for her. The official quietly asked whether she now thought her apartment was not quite as large as she had first imagined.
‘Yes,’ she humbly replied, ‘yes, I think you are right, it isn’t quite as big as I had first thought.’ He responded by slowly scrunching up the previous documentation and taking out a fresh sheet of paper to begin the calculation again.
Lastly, numbers can change without any explanation at all. And then change back again. When I first moved to Rome in the mid-1990s, I lived in a condemned apartment block that has since fallen down. My flatmate and I would wait until the very last moment to pay our phone bill. We were both struggling backpackers trying to eke out a living,