Italy

John Hooper - One of the great paradoxes: Italians will not obey laws, yet they will adhere—and with steely rigidity—to conventions. (...) Only when a law happens to lie close to the blurred frontier that separates it from being a convention is there a good chance it will be respected.

John Hooper - When foreigners look around for a country with which to compare Italy, they usually light on Spain, or maybe France or Portugal, where the cultures are actually very different. No one ever mentions Japan. Yet it has often struck me that il piacere di stare insieme is one of several things that link the Italians to the Japanese. Both put a high value on the appearance of things. The Japanese, like the Italians, have a recent history of wielding an economic power that far exceeded their influence on the world stage. Both have traditionally had a high level of savings. Both have a tendency to form anticompetitive, cartel-like structures and partly for that reason have engendered seemingly indestructible organized-crime syndicates. Japan, like Italy, is highly seismic. And both are long, narrow countries where the vast majority of the population is crammed into river valleys and narrow strips of land along the coast. You have only to look at the hinterland of Naples or the near endless conurbation that follows the Po to the sea to realize how accustomed Italians are to living cheek by jowl.

Klemens Wenzel von Metternich - Italy is a geographical concept (original: Italien ist ein geographischer Begriff).

Benito Mussolini (interviewed by Emil Ludwig, 1932) - It is not impossible to govern Italians, merely useless (original: Difficile [governare gli Italiani] ?' Ma per nulla. E’ semplicemente inutile!)

Proverb - Fidarsi è bene, non fidarsi è meglio (To trust is good; not to trust is better).

Proverb - Chi va con lo zoppo impara a zoppicare. (Whoever goes with the lame learns to limp. French: Qui fréquente un boiteux apprend à boiter.)

Beppe Severgnini (in La bella figura, 2005) - Being Italian is a full-time job.

Beppe Severgnini (in La bella figura, 2005) - Italians prefer exceptions to rules.

Beppe Severgnini (in La bella figura, 2005) - We think it’s an insult to our intelligence to comply with a regulation.