Love

Love is taken very seriously by Italians - 99% of all their songs are about love - and it is endlessly thought about and debated, for after all, what is life without amore? The debate covers a large number of key issues: What effect does falling in love have on your diet? Is love good for your health? Is love possible without sex? Is sex possible without love? Is universal love possible? And what about free love? Whole television series are devoted to couples in love, couples out of love, couples looking for love, children and love, elderly people and love, and so on. The subject has endless scope and involves the entire nation.

Italian men are expected to behave in a certain way. The very popular former President, Sandro Pertini, was a happily married man whose private and public morality nobody would have dreamt of criticising. When, in his mid-seventies, while admiring the latest Alfa Romeo sports' car he was heard to say: 'What a beautiful car - not for one's wife, of course!', he was just being very Italian.

Whether or not Latins really are dynamic lovers, Italians bask in the glory achieved by their forebears and millions of people continue to think that they are.

However, it seems that trying to live up to their reputation causes widespread problems. Long articles appear now and then in the press with statistics on the high numbers of male Italians who suffer from impotence. But help is at hand with high performance wonder drugs like viagra whose Italian sales are breaking all records.

Most verbal insults are related to sexual behaviour. Men will accuse women of free and easy sexual morals, calling them puttana (whore) and so on. When and if women swear, they tend to attack the virility of men by calling them gay, old, or impotent.

Nevertheless, the legend of the Latin Lover lives on, and Italian males can read other articles in the newspapers with greater satisfaction, like the one reporting the comforting fact that Italian condoms are half a centimetre longer than those used in other countries.

 

Melodrama

Patronage

Outsmarting other Italians

Politicians

Literature

Left or right

Language

Home

Grain, grape & grappa

Government

Women

Giving Presents

Friends

Food

Family Matters

Etiquette

Education

Dialects

Dental Care

Crime & Punishment

Shopping

Business

Bureaucracy

Animals

Allegria

The Press

Children

Special Relationships

Custom and Tradition

Health

The Eat-alian Way

Sense of Humor

You are what you wear

Television

Avoiding Tax

Mummy's boys

Manners

Driving

Love

A Contradiction in Terms

How other people see Italians

How Italians see rich foreigners

North and South