Hi. This is a blog about Italy and writing. So if you’re interested in Italy and things Italian and/or you’re interested in writing, stop by often.
They are my interests because I live in Italy and love it and because I’m a writer and a fanatical reader. So Italy fascinates me and so does anything related to books and writing.
The two topics, however, have surprisingly little to do with each other because the nasty secret about Italy, dear reader is (lean closer here because I have to whisper this) Italy writing su… er, is very bad. That is a harsh statement, I know, and not too elegant as a literary judgment, but it is God’s truth, I swear.
When Italy was King of the World—from, say, the 13th century to the 16th century—it produced sublime writing. Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli…names that will live as long as humans read. But afterwards…
Take the novel, at which, unfortunately, Italians are notoriously inept. In the 19th century, which produced Dickens, Hardy, Scott, Stevenson, Twain, Dumas, Hugo, Verne, Gogol, Tolstoy, Italy produced one novel which every Italian is forced to read and that is I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). It is hard to find words to describe how utterly awful it is. Pious and long-winded and turgid and unspeakably boring, it is a primer for all other novels to come. It is on school curricula because there’s nothing else, otherwise it would have long since sunk into well-deserved obscurity.
The 1930s, which saw Somerset Maughm, Evelyn Waugh, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, produced its Italian masterpiece in Alberto Moravia’s La Noia (Boredom) and never was a title more apt. It too was shoved down our throats in Italian schools and I read it the way you take castor oil—gingerly, a few sips at a time, because it is so repellent. Not even sharp writing to compensate for the story of (yes, you guessed it) a bourgeois man’s boredom. Just unrelieved tedium, as far as the eye can read.
There are too many examples to continue. The obverse is true, too. Good writing goes completely undetected. For example, Giovanni Tomasi di Lampedusa’s brilliant Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) went unpublished in his lifetime, having been turned down by Einaudi and Mondadori (presumably for being too readable).
This blog will probably come back to this theme often, because it’s a bit of a sore point with me. I’m a compulsive reader and I’ve tried to read Italian novels thousands of times but rarely succeeded in choking my way through even a few.
I’d feel guilty about saying this if it weren’t for the undeniable fact that though Italian writing is some of the worst on the planet, more or less everything else about the country is world-class. How can you feel sorry for the bad writing when the food and architecture and food and cities and design and fashion and food (did I mention the food) are so sublime? Half of all the art works produced by humankind are in Italy. Throw a rock and you’ll hit either a superbly well-dressed person or a work of art. It’s truly hard to find a bad meal here, in restaurants and in private homes. The wine is the best in the world. Italians excel at urban living, at village living and at country living. Nothing but the finest, everywhere.
So shed no tears for Italian writing because the Italians live quite well without it. Maybe good writing and the habit of reading is something that belongs to pale peoples living in cold climes with crappy food.
More anon…
