SANTA MARINELLA, Italy, May 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – So, being laid up for a few days, I have turned, as we all do these days, to YouTube for solace and have discovered this amazing and utterly delightful thing. This is the poperatic singing sensation Il Volo (“The Flight”), three teenage boys from Italy whose debut album has gone platinum in Italy. They are currently on a tour of the U.S. and seem to be taking the country by storm.
The video is of their smash appearance on American Idol, which was only one of their stops. At 1:40 seconds, Ignazio Boschetto hits a note, saunters past one of the Idol judges, Steve Tyler, and high fives him just before he goes on to steal the hearts of every girl in the audience. Just check out those dimples! And to do all that while singing such an old chestnut. O Sole Mio is the song we ex-pats in Rome will pay street musicians not to play while we’re eating lunch.
I have to agree with one of the commenters on YouTube who said, “I just want to pinch their cheeks, they are so adorable. And what voices! Love them, Love them, Love them! If I were 15 I’d be hysterical.” Yep.
But apart from the dimples, the thing I love about these boys, who are only 16, 16 and 17, is that they embody everything I love most about this country. The force that radiates off them is Italy distilled: their happiness, their casual confidence, their love of what they are doing, the smooth swagger that is endearing because of its accompanying cheerfulness and good nature. They’re a glass of cold prosecco with the breeze blowing off the Mediterranean while you sit with friends under the grape vines waiting for your antipasto.
Italy is really growing on me and I’d really love for it to last forever. In the region where I live, there have been people living, more or less the same way, for 3000 years and more. But I’m worried that all this is going to wink out of existence, that the promise of Italy, embodied by these three wonderful young fellows, is going to leave the world forever, unfulfilled.
Indeed, Italy is growing on me. Oh, of course, there are always the ten thousand ways in which the Italian thing drives all us Anglos nuts. The disorganization, the political corruption, the post-Imperial ennui. The total inability of Italians to get their collective act together to accomplish the simplest tasks. The Italians aren’t very good at a lot of things that we Northerners are good at. They do not excel at politics. They can’t seem to manage communications between levels of government. And don’t get me started on the postal service.
But just lately, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in Italian hospitals and I’ve discovered something important about them: Italians are good and kind. And being good and kind is a lot better than being organized and efficient. I have officially forgiven Italy for being the scatterbrain of nations.
Just recently, I spent a few days in hospital and had my friends there nearly all my waking hours. We all saw that there were official visiting hours posted on the doors to the ward, but no one paid the slightest attention to them. Absolutely no one.
I also had my cell phone and my laptop with my mobile internet stick for when I was by myself and needed to be distracted. I noticed that every single person in the place, patients, staff, nurses and doctors, all carried their cell phones with them. When I called my uncle in England, he asked what number he could call to reach me, and I said he could call my cell which was under my pillow. He was surprised and said that in English hospitals they don’t let patients have cell phones. No laptops either.
This would be unthinkable in an Italian hospital. How is a patient to keep in touch with her family and friends? How is she to arrange a time to get picked up to go home?
I recently read with horror the decision of a group of hospitals in Nova Scotia that has banned Tim Horton’s doughnuts. You can get the coffee, but not a Timbit to go with it. It’s unbelievable. Do they imagine that their hospital food is so good no one will want a little lift? Do they imagine that a cancer patient who is scared and needs a little cheering up will drop dead if given a honey glaze? I have a Canadian friend here who was so incensed by the news that he said he is willing to pay someone to go to those hospitals in Halifax and hand out free Timmies in the lobby. (Email me, I’ll get you the contacts.)
Again, this would be unthinkable in Italy. Italy, where being happy, being with family, keeping close to friends, having a little wine, watching pretty girls, enjoying simple things like a little sweet with your morning cappuccino, is what life is all about.
And Italians are well behaved. Unlike teens in England, no one is ever afraid of Italian youth. The kids you see in Rome on the train platform waiting for the night’s last train back to Santa Marinella, are loud and cheerful but never drunk … and they’re usually calling their mothers to tell them when they’ll be home. Italian men brazenly ogle women, but there is very little violent crime against women in Italy.
Teenagers, I’m guessing, are also pretty well behaved in other ways, especially compared to English young people. The out-of-wedlock pregnancy rate is quite low, probably because teens are so close to their families. Abortion levels are also low, and Italian doctors overwhelmingly refuse to do them.
Italians are noisy and argumentative – one doctor in the emergency room this week gave me a prescription for painkillers and then launched into a half-hour argument with me over the Church’s teaching on artificial reproduction. She then chastised me for not making more Italian friends and for not being more Italian myself: “Italians are so friendly! You should get out and have more fun. Don’t work so much.” By the end of it, I was thinking of asking her to adopt me.
Italians, I have learned, have one supremely endearing national quality: they like other people and want them to be happy. This has been something quite difficult for me, with my Northern, Anglo-Saxon sensibilities, to wrap my head around. The doctors, nurses and staff at the hospital want patients to feel better, so they let them have their cell phones and keep their friends around. My roommate last week was having some quite serious surgery and was having a hard time. It was nothing at all to get her mother a cot and have her stay over night; Maria needed her mum there and that was that.
The place, or perhaps more accurately, the people, really grow on you. And it gets easier as you go along to forgive them their national foibles.
But there’s one thing I can’t forgive, and that is Italy’s determination to put a stop to it all in two generations.
The Italians excel at something that most Northerners have almost collectively forgotten: how to live. They know how to keep their families together. They love children. They respect old people. They love their Church. But they don’t have children any more.
The Italian birth rate is still spiraling at 1.39 children born/woman and nothing and no one seems able to stop the trend. Italian women all deplore it, men shake their heads, but no one is willing to have a second child. The government in various places has tried bribing people to have more children, but the scheme is meeting with the same success it does in other places.
The reasons are complex and have a lot to do with Italy suddenly launching itself into the 21st century as one of the most successful economies in Europe. People are rich now, where their grandparents were land-based peasants. Cell phones and iPads, cars and new clothes, an apartment for each of the kids close to home, holidays abroad…the good life. But only for this generation.
Watching Italy commit generational suicide is giving me an idea what it must be like to watch someone you love slowly disappear from anorexia. I feel the same kind of frustration. Time is running out and soon, all this that I am coming to love will be gone. And no one knows what will replace it.
Italy, please don’t die! I’m just falling in love with you!