Italy: Tradition, Backwardness and Modernity

Abstract

To start with a banality, Italy is a contradictory country. The contradictions are compounded by the patronising sort of view that is often taken of Italy in Britain (and also elsewhere in Northern Europe and in the USA). The northern view of Italy has its roots in English and German romanticism and sees it as a country of deep and continuous cultural traditions, cultivated (cultivated people, cultivated landscape), slightly corrupt (sexually, politically); also as in some respects primitive, innocent, picturesque in its poverty. Within this view, or views, there are already contradictions, but what is consistent is the representation of Italy as non-modern, or pre-modern, a condition alleviated only by the existence of a few modern emblems such as Ferraris and Benetton. The continuing power of this vision of Italy as seductively pre-modern is attested by phenomena such as the otherwise unaccountable popularity, among cultured folk, of the film of A Room with a View — retro-Forster, retarded by three-quarters of a century.