You walk around Reggio Emilia and you think: this is paradise. Here, on a sun-dappled autumnal morning, was the paceless, impeccable life of a northern Italian provincial town. Well-dressed locals swarmed through ancient piazzas.

But it was an illusion of paradise. That morning, the locals were swarming to Reggio’s giant open-air clothes market where prices started at 50 cents. New shoes cost €6. While Italy sinks, people keep up appearances.

“Crisis” isn’t the word for Italy any more, says the British historian of Italy, John Foot. A “crisis” ends, whereas Italy just keeps declining, like almost no other developed country since 1945. Real incomes are now lower than 15 years ago. Over three visits to northern Italy this autumn, I’ve tried to understand how ceaseless decay changes the way a country lives.

Illustration by Luis Grañena of a young Italian man taking pizza from an older man
© Luis Grañena

The “lost generation” of young Italians suffers most. They sit chatting on the steps of Bologna Cathedral, reluctant to spend €1 on a perfect espresso in a café. Italy’s demographic pyramid functions as follows: the old have nice pensions, the middle-aged are unsackable and the young fight for temporary contracts. A common situation: a highly educated young Italian performs menial tasks for a less qualified older boss, often for free.

“It’s not like you can have life plans like having a baby or buying a house,” says Marianna Albini, a young writer. “If you have a contract for six months, you wonder if you should join the gym. What’s a career?” she laughs. But the new dispensation has upsides, she says. If you have no chance of a career, staying late in the office is pointless. Instead, younger Italians seek fulfilment outside work, in personal projects like blogs or evenings with friends, says Albini.

Another solution: forfeit the good Italian life and emigrate. A banker’s wife told me of a recent party for Milan’s elite where almost everybody seemed to have sent their children abroad. When even the elite flees, there’s a problem.

Many southern Italians are desperate. Transfers from the north have been slashed. But in northern families, hardship typically remains limited. Italian families have relatively little private debt. Many own their homes outright. Grandpa has his pension. Because few people are now having babies, families are dying out, which diminishes the need to save. So northern families slowly consume their wealth, and even the young get their share. Some 37-year-olds still live with their parents, in their childhood bedrooms, the generations clamped in a perverse unequal alliance. In one of Elena Ferrante’s novels, a woman wears her dead mother’s underwear, “much mended and with ancient elastic that showed here and there through the torn seams”. You wish this were only a metaphor.

Older Italians often dismiss young people as “big babies” who won’t grow up. The writer Giuliano da Empoli told me that in fact it’s the older generation – incarnated by Silvio Berlusconi – whose shortsighted teenage self-gratification created today’s mess. Younger Italians, says Da Empoli, need great maturity to navigate the mess.

Most young people don’t want much, says Gianni Riotta, a senior Italian journalist: just the simple Italian life of good food and drink, and a seaside holiday in summer. That’s the sogno italiano, or “Italian dream”, to borrow the slogan of a Reggio ice-cream parlour. Even an unambitious job for life used to buy you that. But young people cannot get jobs for life.

The consequence: hopelessness. In an extreme version of the western condition, many Italians seem to believe in nothing any more. Reggio Emilia, for instance, has segued from communism to indifference. Disincanto, “disenchantment”, is Da Empoli’s national diagnosis. In Tommaso Pellizzari’s latest novel, a new nihilistic leader exhorts Italians: “Ask not what your country can do for you. It can do nothing, nothing at all.” The historian Paul Ginsborg, grappling for positives in Italy’s past 20 years, says that at least democracy hasn’t collapsed.

 . . . 

Political passions are so exhausted that even Italy’s eternal right-versus-left domestic “cold war” has wound down. Not long ago, Berlusconi’s rants against “communists” still excited some rightists. Now, a hedge-fund manager so rightwing that he once supported South African apartheid confided to me that he’d voted for the centre-left prime minister Matteo Renzi.

Renzi, famously, is 39, which in gerontocratic Italy is almost like being 14. Instead of waiting his turn for ever, he enacted a fantasy of young Italians: elbow aside the geriatrics and take over. Now he just needs to save Italy.

The country has one last great asset: the Italian quality of life. “What is the hipster movement?” Erik Jones, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, asked me over another wonderful lunch. “Hipsters celebrate the excellence of everyday life. The Italians are the original hipsters in that respect.”

Increasingly, they are flogging Italian living to foreigners. Pellizzari took me to the vast Milanese branch of the food market Eataly. Here’s a plausible future: Italy as Eataly, a food hall with some museums attached, a staging-post for Asian tour groups. Italy can undoubtedly do better than that but nobody I spoke to could quite see how.

simon.kuper@ft.com, Twitter @KuperSimon

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