Farewell to la dolce vita

Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

This is a story about frustration in one of the sweetest and richest countries in the world - a land with perfect climate, perfect food and wine, and a laid-back approach to success that makes it all the sweeter.

Italy still looks the part of an envied land: la figura (the look of things) has always been an Italian obsession, whether it is the cut of a suit or the placement of palazzi around a piazza. When the buttery sun cuts through the fountains of Piazza de Ferrari by the grand facade of the Carlo Felice Opera House in the centre of Genoa, the people sipping drinks under the cafe sunshades cannot help but look blessed.

Don't fall for the image. Italians may still look more stylish than their neighbours, but in many important areas of everyday life, Italy is trailing badly behind its competitors.

The OECD has lambasted its meagre levels of economic growth. The European Commission has thrown its hands up in despair at a ballooning budget deficit, which is in danger of wrecking the euro. And for ordinary Italians, the suave swagger through life epitomised by Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini's La Dolce Vita has become a distant pipedream.

For the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, the notion that Italy is in any sort of trouble is a pernicious lie. "We Italians enjoy a situation of comfort and joy that derives from the fact that we were born and live in the most beautiful country in the world," he said recently. "It is also one of the richest countries in the world.

"We have the greatest per capita ownership of cars and houses and the largest number of mobile phones." Not only that, but Italians knew how to make good use of them. "As they are playboys, our lads send at least 10 SMS messages to their girlfriends every day!"

But for one of those putative playboys in the centre of Genoa, life is a nightmare and the only possibility of awaking lies in leaving the country. At 41, he may have left it too late.

Gianni Maselli lives with his mother on the outskirts of Genoa, and has never had a job. He flunked out of Genoa University three-quarters of the way through a law course, and decided to go for a career in communications. Intelligent and articulate, a self-taught whiz at multi-media, for many years he has been banging his head against the brick wall of Genoa's municipal institutions.

He says, that in Italy, ability and motivation count for nothing. "Work is not considered as an abstract thing. That's why it is so hard to get people to recognise quality, competence, professionalism. Because the first thing people look for is if one belongs to a group: a political party, a civil organisation of some kind, anything, but one must belong to a group."

Italy wasn't always like this. Carlo Geneletti, a sociologist in the northern town of Bergamo, says: "There was a moment in the 1960s when there was a great opening, when many, many posts became available. Many people came to the cities from the countryside, many people studied, which they had not done before; they found rewarding jobs. The economic growth was so explosive that you needed to have those people. But that stopped, and it's been over for quite some time."

Maselli has spent time in Britain and the United States and he knows those societies work differently.

"This stupid thing, work, in Italy becomes a matter of enormous complexity and difficulty. There is no social mobility; people are terrified of being fired because then they know they won't find another job, because they know what they had to go through to get a job in the first place."

Carlo Geneletti has experienced the same phenomenon: retiring from his job in technical co-operation with the United Nations, he moved back to his home town hoping to find an outlet for his experience in voluntary work. But there have been few takers.

During his 30 years with the UN, Geneletti worked in "40 or 50" countries, mostly in Africa, first as a researcher then on technical projects. With northern Italy's exploding population of immigrants, he had a strong expectation that his experience would be tapped. It didn't happen.

Doors that opened to him closed again when he gave, "in the most respectful way", his criticisms. Other doors never opened. After 34 years away, he was forced to recognise that Italy was now a foreign country, to which he had no desire to adapt.

"I found that I don't really fit in this culture anymore. It's very hierarchical. If you are the boss, even of a very small organisation, you are the Boss with a capital B; you get respect from the people working for you, and above all you get loyalty. And that means not criticising the way you handle the job, not criticising what you do. You cannot criticise, you're not supposed to do it.

"Everyone belongs to a group, a section, something, and it is through those that you advance your career or make a point in the wider world. If you are a nobody, you could be a Nobel Prize-winner and you could go nowhere ... "

With the heyday of rapid growth a fading memory, Italy under Berlusconi has staggered to a halt. Economic growth, already anaemic, is this year predicted to be about 0.6 per cent.

With lira devaluation - the tool that kept Italy's shoes and textiles and machines and cars competitive on the world's markets - no longer available now it is in the eurozone, Italian industry faces an unprecedented crisis as imports from the Far East pour in. Production has plummeted relative to its neighbours, while labour costs have soared. A crisis is pending.

Raffaella Ottaviani is, on the face of it, one of Italy's lucky people. A graphic designer based in Rome, she has worked at the highest level of her profession in the capital for 20 years. But she was an employee of the city, and in her case the price of security was a salary so low it was impossible to live on. She quit.

"Berlusconi's remarks are absurd," she said. "We know very well that we are not happy. Italy is a disgraced country at the moment because it's lagging behind the rest of Europe. Whenever one goes abroad one is stunned by how far behind Italy is, in services, in the quality of life, in the cost of living, in housing, and above all in hope for the future.

"We don't know what model of society we are working towards. This is a country where the church is trying to drag us back to the Middle Ages. You can feel the pressure from the church, for example during the recent referendum on IVF treatment.

"Twenty years ago we had the idea that we were working for a society more equal, more just. We were trying to understand how to develop this country in the best possible way.

"The problem is one of values, of what to tell one's children, when the people in power are so corrupt."

Corruption is a fact that confronts people every day.

Maria Pia Pizzi is a streetsweeper in Rome, earning 1000 ($1700) a month, and when she saw an advertisement for a housing development in an unspoilt corner of the suburbs, she put her life savings into it, only to learn a year later that the scheme was a scam. Now the city has offered her a new home next to Rome's biggest rubbish dump.

"They say the area is totally under control, totally clean," she says bitterly. "Only a mug would believe them."

"What do those in power offer us?" asks Ottaviani. "That the only thing of importance is to become personally rich."

She added: "The only advantage that Italy possesses today is Europe, belonging to a community in which the law really works and not as it does in our country. I believe that the first crisis of our country is an ethical and moral crisis, and all the rest comes after that. I am too old to leave, but for the young people I think that's the only hope."

"If I was young," says Geneletti, "I would be so angry at this society. But they are not angry. Because Italians don't think they have any rights. They think they have to be meek, to meekly accept the crumbs that drop from the table."

- INDEPENDENT