Italy and Britain: where to look for a nation’s culture
Culture is an amorphous concept. On holidays abroad, it can shrink to what is different from home apart from not being at work, plus a few galleries, museums, and churches. Identity, no less amorphous, is its twin, sometimes ugly, sister.
Take northern Italy for example – the rolling countryside of Emilio-Romagna, carpeted with vineyards, Trebbia where in 218 BC Hannibal’s Carthaginians defeated a Roman army which retreated to today’s Piacenza. A walled city on the edge of Lombardy, once a medieval pilgrimage stop on the way to Rome, Piacenza today is a fairly typical largish, Italian town. Its piazzas are convenient places to observe cultural difference. All that is required is a shady seat, a cafè macchiato to blend in and a penchant for possibly odious comparisons.
Italian food, notable for its regional specialties and locally-sourced ingredients, is a striking and basic cultural difference. Out of the most unpretentious café in a backstreet comes a delicious meal at a modest price. The rich everywhere can eat good food, but in Italy so can most of the poor.
In Italy, 80 per cent of expenditure on food is for eating at home. The quick-service chains — such as McDonalds, Greggs, KFC, and Nando’s — control only 7 per cent of the Italian food service market, compared to 34 per cent in Britain. And probably correlated with this is a worrying difference in the percentage intake of ultra-processed food: 60 per cent in the UK against 10 per cent in Italy, which is admittedly the lowest figure in Europe. Even the many Italian pizza bars have generally fresher ingredients and thinner bases. It is no wonder that without managing an empire, Italian restaurants and food spread around the world.
We are all Europeans. How come there is such a difference? It probably has much to do with Britain’s early industrialisation and urbanisation changing the roles of women, plus the need to feed a large, poorly paid labour force. In the 19th century, mass produced fast-food came to serve both women in mills, too exhausted to cook, and men in heavy (labouring) jobs: in factories, mining and quarrying and on farms, docks and railways. The new railways allowed fish to be moved quickly from the coast to the cities and thus make fish and chips widely available. The first fish and chip shops appeared in the 1860s and by 1910 there were 25,000, down to below 10,000 today, serving the “national dish”. So important for morale were fish and chips that the dish was never rationed during the Second World War.
Then there’s the British cup of tea. It never managed to supplant beer, but we still drink 100 million cups a day in contrast to Italy’s 90 per cent coffee habit. Sugar — and tea was usually sweetened — was an important source of energy for the hard labour needed in an industrial society. Consumption shot up from 18lbs per person per year in 1800 to 90lbs in 1901, the highest in Europe, but fell to 44lbs on average today — the same as in Italy. But British consumption is skewed towards refined cane sugar, with little nutritional value, compared to Italy’s significant intake from fruit and vegetables, 30% of daily diet.
Sitting in a piazza, not in a poor part of town, so not watching a cross-section of Italian society, the male and the female gaze takes in the elegance of both men and women. Italians in the main look slender and dress to enhance the impression. The temperature is hovering around 30C but everyone, even the elderly, seems to be trying to look their best. Grandparents look groomed, some elegant, in well-chosen clothes. In Britain, during summer, except for the young, you could be forgiven for concluding most people had given up trying to look good. But how come?
Italy has many admired fashion designers, Armani, Gucci, Prada, Versace. And their clothes cost less in Italy but they aren’t cheap, even the imitations. But this doesn’t work as an explanation. I can only speculate what might. Can this difference in dress be connected to our British climate obliging us to spend more time indoors, away from any gaze except that of the immediate family? Or is it some hangover from Cromwell, Puritanism and a Protestant tradition?
Pre-Reformation, ordinary people absorbed the Gospel stories from sumptuous pictures on church walls and in stained glass windows. The Catholic counter-reformation was the proximate cause of a flourishing in art after the Council of Trent 1545-1563: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and the pious Flemish painter from Catholic Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens, stand out. All four artists clearly delighted in the female body clothed or unclothed, and most notably in religious contexts Tintoretto particularly captures the humanity of both his male and female subjects. The film directors Bertolucci and Fellini are in some ways their descendants in a different and secular, medium. The Puritans, our own Taliban, made sure Britain was denied this cultural experience. So perhaps visual religious culture got by osmosis into the Italian bloodstream and not ours.
Finally, as you sit in the piazza in the late afternoon shade, listening to lively conversations all around, hands providing the emphases and punctuation, you may compare and contrast with gloomy pubs in provincial towns in Britain. As a verbal culture, Italy seems to come somewhere between Ireland and the UK. Of course, we are all fighting a (possibly losing) battle with the smartphone.
Italy’s eating habits are changing, though. Milan-Bergamo airport has a large and popular McDonalds. The average weight of Italians may soon creep out of the top of the BMI index to join the UK beyond the safe zone. Obesity (above 30 on BMI scale) is increasing and for Italian men is only 5 per cent behind the UK’s score of 30 per cent of the male population.
“A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and soul of its people,” Mahatma Gandhi once said. Agreed. And perhaps just a little bit in their stomachs, in their clothes and in their conversation.
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