Travel:Beppe Severgnini is a star, one of Italy's bestselling authors. His fans form a web community, rallying to meet him on his foreign trips.
When he came to Dublin, 60 bright young professionals held a pizza evening in his honour: computer programmers, entrepreneurs, scientific researchers, financial wizards. He moved among them with the modest ease of a Daniel O'Donnell. Here is a man who knows his Italian readership.
Severgnini's celebrity derives partly from his column in the Corriere della Sera and his years on the Economist, that perfidious British publication which dared to lampoon Silvio Berlusconi at the height of his power. The other pillar of Severgnini's fame is a series of light, caustic books about his fellow countrymen and their interaction with other nationalities. La Bella Figura, based on La testa degli Italiani (2006), is skilfully translated by Giles Watson, who manages to capture Severgnini's trademark style: quirky, perky, mostly pretty sharp. The result is an informative and substantial book about contemporary Italy. Substantial because, underneath the layers of wit, Severgnini is erudition personified, Italy's answer to Clive James.
Much of the book is spent tweaking, twisting but also enacting well-established stereotypes. His countrymen love specious elegance, he claims, and his own prose provides a neat example as he speculates why phone companies hire lovely young female technophobes to perch on stools at airports, marketing cellphones:
Italians prefer good looks to good answers. We're prepared to give up a lot for the sake of beauty, even when it doesn't come in a miniskirt. "Never judge a book by its cover" sounds like an oversimplification in Italian. We judge books by their covers, politicians by their smiles, professionals by their offices, secretaries by their posture, table lamps by their design, cars by their styling and people by their title. It's no coincidence that one Italian in four is president of something.
The main conceit of La Bella Figura is that the author is guiding the reader through Italy, pointing out the behaviour of passers-by. It doesn't always work. Location and theme sometimes fail to gel, though when we get to Naples there's a fine convergence between his evocation of the crowded city and the existential problem of possessing one's very own unofficial parking space.Paradoxically, we travellers prefer guides from our own background. A genuine insider mightn't know what's of interest to us. An effective guide has to empathise, pose as our friend. Luigi Barzini famously pulled off this tactful trick in The Italians (1964).
Severgnini, too, does a pretty good job, but his pitch control is not always perfect, and there are times when we're swamped with detail, or left high and dry. The author is discussing the dangerous intimacy that can undermine business regulation, and remarks "That's why the Parmalat scandal came about". Sorry? Parmalat? What English reader would know of that egregious collapse in corporate governance? (An Economist reader, stupid.)
Writers on Italy always poke fun at the Italians, but Severgnini also chips away amusingly at foreigners. French food is notoriously inferior to Italian: 42 per cent of international interviewees "put la cucina italiana in first place, followed by Chinese cooking and French cuisine. Third place might not be good enough for our neighbours over the Alps but they should take it in a sporting spirit. Losing to the champions is no disgrace." And of whom can he be thinking when he compares drinking habits? "Italians like being merry but vomiting on the pavement is not considered the high point of Saturday evening, as it often is north of the Alps."
For all its entertaining boutades, La Bella Figura is bumpy in places, sagging for want of a sharper editorial scalpel to shape the relationship between an Italian author and his Anglo readership. The book is brilliant on the family, the barbershop, the TV (where women are "exhibited like poultry at the butcher's"), Berlusconi, the piazza, sexual tourism, "Vespal virgins", and the joys of small-town life. It is much weaker on Italian art, the pensione, the beach, immigration, the Mafia, the church. We learn with surprise that Pope John Paul II was liked by left-wingers as "a pope who was hard on capitalism while also approving abortion". Some mistake, surely?
The lasting impression of this trip to Italy is oddly, and correctly, one of underlying sadness. Behind all that beauty is a debilitating cynicism, a sense of decorated grimness. The sophisticated splendour of Italy, its love of appearances, that fine figure it cuts so neatly, is tellingly compared to the non-stop carnivals of 18th-century Venice, masking inexorable decline.
"Our sun is setting in instalments," the author concludes. "It's festive and flamboyant but it's still a sunset."
Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin teaches Italian at Trinity College Dublin. Under the pen name Cormac Millar, his most recent crime novel is The Grounds (Penguin)
La Bella Figura: An Insider's Guide to the Italian Mind By Beppe Severgnini Translated by Giles Watson Hodder & Stoughton, 269pp. £16.99