The Italian Baby Myth

Anyone who has seen Titian’s sumptuous painting of The Worship of Venus might well think that it is the ultimate expression of the Italian love for children. We are so used to tender Italian Renaissance images of infants – their tiny, chubby hands grasping a maternal breast, their dimpled pearly limbs – that we tend to think that it has remained a constant. Visitors to Italy, charmed by the ease with which small children are accommodated and tolerated in restaurants tend to believe the same thing. Surely this is the best country in the world to have a child, or be one?

Until fairly recently, I tended to think the same way. Charmed by the way our baby daughter enjoyed a triumphal procession down the main street of Cortona, with people stopping every few yards to pinch her cheeks and exclaim at her beauty, we thought of abandoning frigid Britain and moving there. After all, I spent my own childhood in Italy, and my parents still live there. It is where I’ve set my new novel, the place I still think of as home. Wouldn’t it be lovely to give our children the same sense of paradise – of being greeted everywhere with enthusaism?

Of course, there were strange facts that kept surfacing in memory, chief of which the exceptionally low Italian birth rate. Where two, or even three children are the norm among English families, Italian couples tend to have just one. Or none. The only Italian woman I know with three children is married to an Englishman. She is pitied as a sort of deluded drudge for this by her countrymen. I myself, with only two, am often told what a big family I have. Unlike the Chinese, the Italians have not needed a law passed to force them to have one child. Despite the Pope’s refusal to countenance contraception, they are no longer philoprogenitive.

I wonder whether, in fact, they ever were, and whether it is not the British, with our unlimited capacity for self-castigation, who are the true child-lovers of Europe. Tim Parks, another Englishman married to an Italian, tells in Italian Neighbours of local astonishment at their struggles to get their children to go to sleep by eight o’clock. If you go to Italy on holiday, you’ll see dozens of children still being dragged around at midnight, or slumped in buggies. The reason for this isn’t that Italians adore their children so much they can’t bear to be parted from them: it’s that getting children to have the right amount of sleep is seriously hard work. If you see the white faces and shadowed eyes of Italian children, you might think twice about whether keeping them up until they fall asleep from utter exhaustion is an expression of genuine love and concern.

Then, there are the shops. There’s Benetton, which is colourful but expensive and shoddy, and Upim, cheaper and fussier. Children are dressed as dolls, not kids, because they aren’t expected to run about and get dirty as ours are. The imaginative playgrounds we take for granted will exist everywhere in our country are hard to find in Italy; you’re lucky to have one climbing frame and a couple of scabby old swings. Parks are virtually unheard-of. The Borghese Gardens in Rome, the Tivoli Gardens outside it, the Boboli Gardens in Florence are glories of Baroque landscaping, but not, really for children with their long gravelled paths and strictly boxed-in lawns.

This lack of sympathetic imagination – or perhaps parental choice - is reflected in their toys, almost all by one manufacturer, Chicco. Brightly coloured chunks of plastic with minimal educational or entertainment value, they pale beside those from Letterbox, Tridias or the Early Learning Centre. The only wooden toy I’ve ever seen in thirty-five years of living and visiting Italy is a Pinocchio doll. The children’s TV programmes are sickly US imports of dismal quality, and their books no better. Despite the great tenderness, wisdom and insight into a child’s inner world of Maria Montessori in nursery education, Italians remain stuck on the one story about a lonely old craftsman who longs for his wooden doll to come alive – a doll who yearns to become a real boy.

If you look at how Italians portray childhood to adults, it is as something as dark and embattled as anything early Ian McEwen dreamt up. (McEwen, interestingly, is the top British author to be translated into Italian.) Simone Vinci’s A Game We Play caused a sensation a couple of years ago in describing the way a group of adolescents, playing in a gang, escalated sex-games with two 10-year-old girls into murder. Niccolo Amaniti’s, I’m not Scared (Cannongate), tells of a 9 –year-old boy’s discovery of a kidnapped child. The best novel to have emerged from Italy for years, its depiction of the two children’s courage, humanity and courtesy is in stark contrast with the brutality and cruelty of the parents. Perhaps all cultures have a sense of their children living in peril, now. But few have sustained the myth of being exceptionally concerned and affectionate, while doing so little to celebrate and foster the qualities that once made Italy a powerhouse of what children most respond to: beauty, creativity, order and love.

Prospect May/June 2003