Keeping it in the family:

the absence of young Italians from the public piazza

Pierluca Birindelli

The author analysed autobiographies written by university students, comparing his impressions with the
results of studies on young people carried out by Italian sociologists. The picture that he pieced together
of this generation “without fathers or teachers”, and of the related responsibilities of the previous genera-
tion, is far from encouraging. The modern generation of young Italians nurtures values pivoting on the
family and on self-fulfilment, and acts within spheres of friendship and sentiment at short radius. The
rest of the social world is mediated, experienced through films, internet and holidays. The universalist
attitude has been supplanted by a widespread and rooted particularism. The collective dimension that
transcends the experience of the individual and his reference group has lost relevance.

Short leashes: from the universal to the particular

In Italy it seems as if a potent nucleus of values, all referring to the immedi-

ate social environs of the person, is being progressively built up around the
lodestone of the family. This nucleus pervades and conditions the entire value
system of the young generations. Comparing the data of the six Iard1 sur-
veys for the subgroup of 15-24 year-olds2, we can clearly see how the value
system has progressively clustered in the sphere of private life at the expense
of collective commitment: young Italians are absent from the public piazza.
Religious and social commitment followed a negative trend up to 2000 and

1 
The Iard is a research institute in Milan that periodically performs research on young people.
See: Cavalli (1984); Cavalli and de Lillo (1988 and 1993); Buzzi, Cavalli and de Lillo (1997;
2002; 2007).
2 
Shown in brackets are the respective percentages for each value in the six surveys of 1983,
1987, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004: Family (82, 83, 86, 85, 86, 83); Work (68, 67, 60, 62, 61, 62);
Boy/Girlfriend/Friends (58, 70, 71, 73, 75, 80); Leisure pastimes (44, 44, 54, 54, 52, 54); Study
and cultural interests (34, 32, 36, 39, 34, 40); Sport (32, 32, 36, 34, 33, 38); Social commitment
(22, 18, 23, 22, 18, 25); Religious commitment (12, 12, 13, 14, 11, 19); Political activity (4, 3,
4, 5, 4, 6).

SOCIETÀMUTAMENTOPOLITICA, ISSN 2038-3150, vol. 5, n. 10, pp. 147-172, 2014

www.fupress.com/smp – © Firenze University Press DOI: 10.13128/SMP-15410
148 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

then began to rise again in 2004 (indicating a possible inversion of the trend);
the importance attributed to friendship and sentimental relations has shot up
(increasing by over 20% since the 1996 survey). Work, which came second in
the first two surveys, has dropped to third place since 1992, overtaken by love
and friendship with a broad lead. Between the first survey of 1983 and that of
2004, the importance attributed to the family went up by 2%; friendship and
sentimental relations went up by more than 21%. Work, on the other hand,
dropped by 5 percentage points.
De Lillo (2002 and 2007) made a significant breakdown of the values into
four main categories: 1) values connected with individual life: family, work,
friendship, love, career, self-fulfilment, affluent and comfortable lifestyle; 2)
values of a recreational kind: sport, leisure pastimes, entertainment and en-
joying life; 3) values linked to personal commitment: political activity, reli-
gious commitment, social commitment, study and cultural interests; 4) values
of collective life: solidarity, social equality, freedom and democracy, nation.
Interestingly, the values linked to personal commitment actually have lower
averages than those of “collective life”. However although the latter are con-
sidered important by young people, there is also a sort of proviso: important
for them or the people close to them. In other words, these are not seen as
generalised rights of the collectivity but as personal rights belonging to them
and their short-radius circle, in a particularisation of universal values. Thus, even
the values of collective life refer back to the personal social world: to their
nearest and dearest, within the cosy web of primary relations that they have
spun, and solidarity and freedom are harnessed to defence of that web. The
values acquired in the name of all are bent to the demands of security and
reassurance that only the very closest and most tranquillising social milieu
can guarantee.
And so, the modern generation of young Italians nurtures values pivoting
on the family and on self-fulfilment, and acts within spheres of friendship
and sentiment at short radius. The rest of the social world is mediated, ex-
perienced through films, internet and holidays. The universalist attitude has
been supplanted by a widespread and rooted particularism. The collective
dimension that transcends the experience of the individual and his reference
group has lost relevance. A society emerges, as distinct from a clan, when
the individuals acknowledge their duties and responsibilities not only towards
themselves, their families, friends or other members of their clan, or group,
but to any unfamiliar and anonymous member of that society. As horizons
open up further they come to perceive duties and responsibilities even towards
foreigners, aliens, non-human animals and nature.
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 149

In the autobiographies I have studied3 there is no trace of this sense of so-

ciety, or even of a local sense of community. When a young person complains

3 
Between 2001 and 2004, working as an Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University
of Florence, I collected 60 autobiographies written by young Italian students aged 22-29 (22
females and 38 males). As a final research paper, I asked them to choose between writing an
autobiography or an essay on a subject of their choice. They all chose the autobiography, re-
acting enthusiastically to the idea of writing about themselves. If anything, these young people
had difficulty writing about the Other. On each course, I devoted two lessons to a discussion
on what, according to the students, ought to be included in an autobiography. During these
meetings – a sort of focus group – I encouraged students to talk freely about themselves and
their experiences, starting from the perception of their identity. The biographical approach
comprises the collection and analysis of the life stories (written and oral) of individuals who
are particularly significant for the research topics. The heuristic capacity of the narration and
of the language, understood as both vehicle and builder of meaning, are at the hub of this
approach. Thomas and Znaniecki were the first to introduce biographies as a tool for analysis
in sociology ([1918-1920] 1958). They saw them as the best means for understanding social
reality: a person’s biography reflects the social context he or she belongs to and points up the
changes in the same. For an updated, comprehensive and extensive review of the biographical
approach see Miller (2005). The narrative dimension of the Self is essential for the construction
of individual identity. The story of the self is the general means proposed in this investigation
for the continual construction and reconstruction of an identity: knowing oneself to acquire
consistency, so as not to dissolve and to achieve not only the sense of one’s own confines, but
also of one’s own continuity and discontinuity over time. On the other hand, I also noted how
all the autobiographical accounts lend themselves to deception (or self-deception) introduced to
convince others (or oneself) about the good reasons, the positivity and the logical consistency of
one’s life story (Brooks 1984). The principal means for achieving this is through the construc-
tion of false links: in other words, narrative versions that artificially smooth over the discontinu-
ities in the personal history. These links are used to knit up coherent and rigid autobiographical
fabrics that in effect violate the autobiographical pact that obliges the writer not to tamper with
his or her own story (Lejeune 1975). Taking my cue from these reflections, I analysed the topics
that emerged from the autobiographies collected. The material was wide-ranging and dense
(the average length was 50 pages). The best way of extracting something without getting lost
is the analytic induction approach: by reading and rereading the material the crucial elements
related to the cognitive interests of the researcher eventually come to the surface. The educa-
tional itinerary and that of sentimental relations are the Cartesian axes that allow us to discern
the biographical progress of these young people. For a minority, a sojourn away from the family
and their hometown, or even abroad, offered an ulterior crucial opportunity for a redefinition
and enhanced awareness of the Self. Pondering on all this, I arrived at the creation of a fra-
mework within which I could analyse the autobiographies; it was constructed on the basis of
various concepts and theoretical propositions from sociological, anthropological, psychological
and psychoanalytical literature. Another crucial source of inspiration were the various surveys
about young people carried out over the last thirty years at both Italian and European level,
such as Oecd, Eurostat, Eurobarometer. An extensive explanation of the method developed in
this study is given in the first chapter “Mapping the Land of the Young: Developing a Method”
of the book The Passage from Youth to Adulthood: Narrative and Cultural Thresholds (Birindelli 2014).
150 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

about the shortage of good jobs, he is not thinking of other young Italians: he
means the lack of good jobs for himself.
The short-radius world is the collective benchmark of the young Italians:
they play safe, falling back on the familiar relations that are a source of securi-
ty. And they seem to swiftly draw the curtains on even the famous windows of
the communication society open on the Other, as if the visions they reveal are
a source of anxiety. The young Italians banish the heterogeneous from their
living spaces. Above I referred to the family as a lodestone and as a cosy web
(not the big one with the frightening windows!), and elsewhere I have used the
word coagulate to indicate this tendency (2014). The image is effective in indi-
cating how the young people appear to have tightened the strings, narrowed
the mesh of what counts in life, around a wound. Both the wound and the cure
continue to be the family, and they remain clinched to the latter because the
big world outside is rife with insecurity. They are focused on themselves and
on the present while the unfamiliar Other – the neighbour, the stranger – and
the future are both repressed, or at best considered remote.
The results of my own research confirm de Lillo’s vision, and place the
young people I met firmly on the particularist side of the equation. Any Other
beyond that short radius of primary and secondary affections is an absolutely
vestigial presence in the biographies: the subjects of the research simply did
not narrate any issues or experiences with a universalist significance. The
experience of the other is an exercise in decentralisation, undermining the
closure within ourselves. In reality, rather than meaning the end of the ego,
the arrival of the others signifies the beginning of adult life. The centrality of
the “other” stemmed from the conviction that there were two responses to the
crisis of the “we”: jumping onto the “ego orgy” bandwagon, passionately em-
bracing radical individualism, or instead a gradual reacquisition of an ethical
dimension of experience (Cassano 1989: viii-xii).

Beyond the nest: the jungle, God and religion

Nevertheless, some of the comments question the value centrality of the fam-
ily for the young Italians. The family would be a real value if, from the aspect
of social reproduction, we were to observe a sort of evolution in the meaning
attributed to it by an adolescent and by a thirty year-old: from the family as
a nest to the thought of building one of your own. Instead what emerges is an
instrumental and egoistic vision of the family.

The value of the family seems to me to be purely that of the nest, totally un-
connected with any future project and all the risks that brings with it. There
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 151

appears to be no change at all in what ‘family’ means to a 15-17 year-old or a

25-29 year-old. [Mario, M, age 25]

With a touch of cynicism, one is almost led to think of the centrality of the
family as a sort of ennoblement or hallowing of what is actually a choice of
convenience: that of remaining a child as long as possible rather than becom-
ing the creator of another family nucleus. [Carla, F, age 23]

Another student, Sara, sees the self-absorption and the resulting lack of
social commitment and the disengagement from public life as generated by a
society that forces one to become hard: a jungle. The young people feel that
they have to defend themselves to survive, and they see no way out. Only a
generational change in the ruling classes could yield some positive effect.

Compared to previous generations, the world we live in is really tough, highly

competitive; to do the simplest thing, we young people have to move moun-
tains, far more than in the past. There’s a lot of talk about civilised and evolved
societies; but down here, very often you feel like you’re in a jungle where only
the strongest animal can win. We’re turning into animals that have to put feel-
ings to one side if we want to achieve our ambitions, realise our dreams [...] We
are simply adapting to survival as best we can in a society that’s been handed
on to us in this condition by previous generations. We’ve grown up with the
watchword of “success at all costs” without any consideration for others. Those
who can’t survive in this jungle are marginalised and considered as misfits, and
then they really do become misfits [...] I don’t think at this stage there’s any way
of changing things until there’s a generational change at the top levels of the
political scene [...] The world that has been built is one where to move forward
you have to harden yourself. [Sara, F, age 25]

It seems that the few young people who do try to get beyond themselves turn
to religion. In the Catholic ambits they succeed in forging strong and rich human
relations with adults, something the autobiographies show to be extremely rare.

It was through the Church that I got to know older people that became my
friends. Even though we don’t always understand each other, even though we
each have our weaknesses and often make mistakes, the relationship between
us is alive, and for me they represent a strong example of humanity. [Ales-
sandro, M, age 23]

In a time of cultural relativism, and individualism taken to extremes,

it appears that the religious institutions continue to provide a compelling
152 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

idea or ideal. The observant Catholic students tend to display more open-
ness towards others along with greater trust in the institutions. At the same
time they are more intransigent and more critical of craftiness, evidently
being more conscious of the negative repercussions of such a talent (Cartocci
2002: 228). A full-blown existential crisis brought Lorenzo back to God: in
a sort of reawakening, he independently rediscovered the faith previously
experienced as an imposition of his family. It’s the return to a soil sowed by
his parents.

At that time I really had hit rock-bottom – in the sense that I was continually
tormented by grief and anxiety – I had absolutely nothing left to cling to; I felt
so lost and confused that I could see no way forward. I felt abandoned and I
instinctively turned for help to something which, at the time, I didn’t believe
in the existence of. I started to pray fervently and read Christian books, and
they gave me relief and comfort. Gradually I also started going to mass again.
I had completely stopped going […] except occasionally, and even then simply
going through the motions for the sake of my family and of society rather than
out of any real interest. Suddenly I found myself overwhelmed by a sense of
peace and serenity: leaving doubts and fears behind me, I was transformed into
someone who was always cheerful and full of initiative. I realised that I had re-
ceived the gift of faith, which allowed me to understand and appreciate things
I didn’t even know existed. My priorities have changed, or rather completely
reversed. I give less importance to material things; I’m always looking for the
soul behind them. [Lorenzo, M, age 23]

Alessandro discerns considerable changes in values between his generation

and that of the 1960s-70s. He believes in his family of origin, and also in the
possibility of building one of his own.

When I hear people talking about my generation, sometimes I find it hard to

immediately understand exactly what they’re talking about, because I see it as
devoid of identity. For us young people of today there’s no common ground
of identification, something we can unanimously believe in. Something started
in the 60s and 70s that has led to the loss of certain very important values. I
can’t help noticing the hypocrisy of people who take up arms against the death
sentence while being in favour of abortion. Abortion seems to be seen more
as a convenience for couples than a form of suppression of a human life. Lots
of girls even have more than one abortion; this makes me think that too much
freedom, the achievement of too many rights, can actually damage the entire
social fabric and future generations. I’m aware that such ideas run against the
grain of current ideologies, but they’re the values I believe in. Maybe they
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 153

don’t identify a generation, but they do identify me. For me marriage still has
a meaning, it’s something I believe in, that I aspire to and hope to achieve.
Moreover, I also think that to succeed in building a life and a family together
with another person should be a source of satisfaction and pride, as it must
have been for my parents. [Alessandro, M, age 23]

Alessandro’s very clear ideas make him an exception to the majority of

the other young people in the research. Whether or not one shares his con-
victions is beside the point: the point is that he actually has convictions that
go beyond his personal life. His father, clearly another exception, has set
him a good example, and Alessandro aims to try to follow in his footsteps.
His father has taught him that in life you often have to make sacrifices to
achieve something worthwhile. He has schooled him in the harsh facts of life,
pointing out his privileged position and putting the candy-coated influence
of the media into perspective. Behaving like a father rather than a friend,
Alessandro’s father talks to his son, and tells him about his own life. As we
shall see later on, this is essential for the meaningful transmission of values
and visions of the world, and as a consequence crucial for the young person’s
very identity.

I believe that we all have models and figures that we take inspiration from. I
learnt – and am still learning – from my father that life is very hard: it’s made
up of sacrifices and it’s not a bowl of cherries like they make out. I’m learn-
ing from him that the things closest to my heart are very hard to achieve, but
that they give you enormous joy when you do attain them. I think that these
are values more typical of his generation than of mine, maybe because, as my
parents never tire of telling me, my generation got it all handed to them on a
plate. [Alessandro, M, age 23]

Forays from the nest: crisis, love and friendship

As also emerges clearly in the Iard surveys, sentimental life is central for Ital-
ian young people. The two biographical turning-points4 found in their biog-
raphies are: 1) the passage between secondary school and university which
is experienced in different ways and profoundly influences the transition to

4 
An effective approach to the analysis of the texts is to focus attention on the biographical
turning-points (Strauss 1959), that is the moments that the subject sees as watersheds, where he
or she glimpses a before and after in the itinerary.
154 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

adulthood. Although in Italy it is not publicly endorsed as such, it is the closest

thing to a rite of passage that emerges in these stories; and 2) the end of a love
affair, perceived as a moment of profound change and redefinition of the self.
In the lives of the young people I met, the end of a love story was the only
time they felt they had their backs against a wall; the only test of the stability
of their identity was in the sentimental sphere. It represents a watershed, a
crossroads on the other side of which the individuals redefine their identity,
change their lifestyle and sometimes completely revolutionise the way they
are. They may adopt a new hairstyle and dress code as outward signs of this
change; their cultural tastes may alter, they may go out more, with new groups
of friends, or read more. But focusing all your efforts on yourself, or at most on
the person or people you love, is not good news for the process of constructing
a persona. The young people in the autobiographies do not reveal any form of
social engagement. Often friendship makes up for the shortcomings of family,
sentimental relations and even in the sphere of self-fulfilment. The important
things are to do well in school, find a job (in actual fact, one would happily
do without), find a partner. When this self-set itinerary bordering on solipsism
throws up some disappointment (failed exam, difficulty in finding work, end
of a love story), depression is just round the corner.
Before I started this research I was labouring under the misapprehension
that the sentimental sphere was more important for young women than for
their male counterparts. But as I found relationships are the most important
turning-points in the biographies of the males too. “I think that being with
someone, living the relationship to the full, is one of the best things that has
ever happened to me” [Marco, M, age 23]. The differences that did emerge
were, perhaps, the greater detail with which the females describe the relation-
ships, and more importantly the fact that for them the correspondence of af-
fection is projected more towards the future creation of a family5.
The end of one relationship casts Lorenzo into despair:

During my first semester I became completely depressed; even now the very
thought of it ties my stomach in knots and paralyses me with fear. The last
straw was the breakdown of a relationship with a girl I got to know during one
of my courses, whom I’d been going out with for about four months. [Lorenzo,
M, age 23]

5 
The sentimental sphere is the only domain where I recognized gender differences in the
young people’s life stories. For other identity dimensions, the “family imprinting” (within the
Italian culture and social structure) supersedes by far any other possible interpretations.
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 155

Then the start of another brings him back to life, and also generates a
more intense and altruistic social life, so that even engagement in public life
appears to be a spin-off from the sentimental sphere.

One of the happiest times of my life was when, in Florence, I got to know a
Mexican girl […] She had a very feminine and charming way with her. At that
time, I’d had quite a few girlfriends, always short affairs, and I’d gone out with
girls that were physically more attractive than her; but never before had I expe-
rienced the feelings, emotions and excitement that she made me feel. In the five
months that we went out together – after that she had to return to her parents
in Mexico – I was happy and carefree, jolly and cheerful and overflowing with
love for everyone. Nothing got on my nerves, nothing intimidated me. Every-
thing paled by comparison with the interest I felt in her. At that time, I felt I
was important and fortunate, I felt invulnerable and unassailable; at the same
time there was so much love pouring out of me that I continued to be humble
and altruistic, grateful to everyone and for everything, feeling a lack of interest
in material things that I had never experienced before. I became altruistic and
I began helping my neighbour. [Lorenzo, M, age 23]

The encounter with people of different values and lifestyles is an expe-

rience that is essential for focusing your own, but even these appear to be
circumscribed to the realm of the sentiments. Initially disconcerting because
they bring family values up for debate, the outcome of such encounters – at
the end of the affair – is the usual return to the family and its security. The
foray towards value growth starts from the nest and then, after just a few ten-
tative steps, hairpins back to it again.

During the summer holidays, I got to know this guy. He was really nice and he
said he was in love with me! He was very critical of the church and of the peo-
ple who frequented it. The discussions we had made me look into myself and
begin to question the things my parents believed in and what they had taught
me. It wasn’t about rejecting everything I knew, but maybe about rediscovering
those values or, if necessary finding others. He too believed in solidarity and
equality and saw the great injustices that there are in the world; but for him the
only way to change things was to rebel against those who held power. I asked
myself if my going to church was simply a habit, or if there was genuine faith
behind it. Since I was a child I have been familiar with the Focolare, a move-
ment of Catholic inspiration which is genuinely open to everyone, to people
of all beliefs (religious and other), of all origins and cultures and of all ages.
Naturally, during the crisis, I called all this into question too, since up to that
time it was one of the many things that I’d inherited from my parents. What I
156 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

did realise, however, was that the friendships that had emerged in this context
were all stronger, because they were underpinned by a sharing of what you
could say were “transcendent” ideals. It seemed to me that this was already a
good starting-point on the way to achieving that more united and just world
that I could glimpse in the distance. [Irene, F, age 23]

The lack of real and autopoietic social engagement

The Iard researches indicate that the associations most frequented by the
young people are sports clubs, followed by the religious, cultural and vol-
untary associations. Only 5% of all the youngsters interviewed in 2004 de-
clared that they actively participated in organisations engaged in voluntary
and social work6. This is somewhat surprising in view of the notion, com-
monly found in sociological and politological literature, that young people
reject classical political participation in favour of an individual engagement
in voluntary work7. In reality it seems that they reject both in favour of sports.
But even then, since the majority do sport purely for the purpose of physical
fitness, there are actually very few occasions of group sport that can act as an
authentic testing-ground.
No form of social engagement, either in politics or in social or voluntary
work, surfaced in the autobiographies I analysed. There is no sign at all of ac-
tion within civil society, as opposed to individualised behaviour. Only five out
of the sixty youngsters writing the biographies had taken part in political, cul-
tural or voluntary associations. Even in these cases it was a choice with family
precedents: the civic commitment was “inherited”. Only Marco appeared to
have embarked independently on a course of voluntary work, systematically
devoting part of his free time to this activity.

Over a year ago I became a blood donor, and about the same time I became a
member of Ronda, an association of volunteers that aims to help the homeless
in this area, bringing them bare necessities such as food, clothes and moral

6 
This finding puts the apparent reversal of the trend of participation in social life captured
in the value statements of 2004 into perspective. At European level, 16% of young people
aged 15-30 are engaged in voluntary activities (Eurobarometer 2007). In another survey (Eu-
robarometer 2013) we find that 14% of young people from Finland and the Netherlands have
participated in an organisation promoting human rights, while the percentage drops to 6% for
the young Italians.
7 
For an extensive analysis of young people’s political participation, both at Italian and Euro-
pean level see: Bontempi and Pocaterra (2007); Pirni, Monti Bragadin and Bettin Lattes (2008).
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 157

support. It’s a world I discovered on my own: I went looking for it. [Marco,
M, age 23]

The non-involvement in associations of the young people in my study, like

those of the national surveys, has cut them off completely from situations in
which they puts themselves on the line, relating to adults and the principles
governing areas of life beyond the family.
As regards politics, the rejection of any form of participation becomes even
more striking. To refer again to the Iard surveys, in 2000 the question on po-
litical attitudes recorded a huge leap in the most extreme answer – “politics
makes me sick” –: the 26% share was more than double that of the first survey
in 1983. Never before had the first two answers, indicative of political engage-
ment or at least interest, reached such low levels – 40% as against the historic
peak of 53% in 1996 (Ricolfi 2002: 261) –. The rare flicker of any political
commitment to be found in the youngsters’ biographies is essentially playful
and almost festive in tone: demonstrations and sit-ins at school are seen as a
break from the daily round. Means and ends are reversed and the important
thing is to hang out together: the declared ends offer the opportunity to be
together, act as aggregating factors; aggregation as a means continues to lose
ground to aggregation as an end in itself. We get the impression that the
young students’ demonstrations are more of a performance than a rally in
the accepted sense, bringing to the surface a dislocation between public ac-
tion and the expediency of everyday strategies. At the same time that they’re
rallying in the square against private interference in the university, they’re
queuing up to sign on for internships so that they can benefit from a work-
study experience.
In Italy ritual sit-ins are by now practically scheduled in the annual school
calendar. Ostensibly spurred each year by increasingly vague and sometimes
absurd and contradictory motives, they are proposed by marginal minorities
and generally peter out lethargically without leaving behind any significant
forms of political mobilisation or socialisation. With few exceptions, the only
principles they appear to uphold are the legitimacy of interrupting a public
service and, quite often, of damaging public property.

The beginning of the new school year was total chaos: as a result of the law
that had just been passed, our school had to get rid of one of the third-year
sections, and the choice fell on ours since it was the smallest, the idea being
that we’d be divided over the other sections. What better pretext for a good old
sit-in? And it certainly wasn’t the first either, my school had always been in the
vanguard for forms of protest: in the first year we organised a sit-in because of
the poor quality of the loos; in the second to get the road leading to the school
158 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

entrance tarred. My first insalubrious experiences (getting drunk, smoking pot,

acts of petty vandalism) all took place at school. Needless to say the two week
sit-in, where I was there every night, in the end came to nothing except about
500 euros of damage; and so our class was broken up, and to tell the truth I
wasn’t really that pushed about it. [Nicola, M, age 25]

We are in any case dealing with evident contradictions between ideal state-
ments and practical conduct: there’s a gap between saying that you think
something’s right and actually thinking it’s right, and then there’s another gap
between what you think is the right thing to do and actually doing it.

When it came to voting on the sit-in, I voted against. When I was asked why, I
replied that I saw it as a farce, listing the reasons why it seemed totally ridicu-
lous to me. No-one was able to come up with any response to my criticisms,
but despite that the majority voted for the sit-in, and mine was the only vote
against in my class. [Sandro, M, age 23]

What the young people proclaim in the collective demonstrations is nega-

ted in their everyday behaviour. “Me and a couple of mates of mine succeeded
in organising demonstrations for the most futile reasons, with the sole purpose
of avoiding school on the days we had tests or interrogations in class” [Gio-
vanni, M, age 25].

The most exciting experience of all was definitely taking part in the World
Youth Day that was held in Paris in 1997. The site of the rally was this huge
field where an unbelievable number of young people had already ensconced
themselves. We spent the entire night all together in that field without sleeping
a wink; in fact there was no way it would have been possible to get any sleep in
that situation: there were people dancing, others playing music, in short it was
a huge party. Naturally we couldn’t resist challenging a group of Spaniards to a
game of football, using our flags as goalposts. Apart from the football match,
the next day we were all totally zonked, and in fact some of us slept right
through the Pope’s mass. [Luca, M, age 24]

Further, the politicised image of youth in the media appears to be seriously

out of kilter.

At this time of the year sit-ins are almost systematically organised in all the
schools, a phenomenon that tends to be considered as a sort of extension to the
Christmas holidays [...] l’Unità depicts the figure of the young person fighting
for his ideals as a sort of mythical hero, making the student who demonstrates,
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 159

organises sit-ins and draws attention to himself a model to be followed. Ac-

cording to various articles that have appeared in l’Unità, this type of young
person represents the birth of a new generation that claims its rights and fights
for them. I don’t think that this is a correct representation of young people at
all: fundamentally, at the time of secondary school we’re not even aware yet
of what we want from life. It seems to me a rather idealised and exaggerated
image. [Giovanni, M, age 23]

It seems that only when the parents are politically involved are their sons
and daughters stimulated to some form of engagement. In her autobiography
Laura explained that at home they had always talked about politics and dis-
cussed what was on the news:

The sit-in was a way of collectively addressing problems that I already had my
own take on; being able to exchange notes and discuss these matters with older
students stimulated me greatly and definitely enriched me [...] My family sup-
ported my political interests; at the parents’ meeting called to discuss the form
of protest we’d decided on, my mother was the only one to stand up for the
students. [Laura, F, age 24]

Even when young people do congregate in places with a distinct political

connotation, the choice appears to be incidental or expedient. In the final
analysis they offer nothing in terms of social or cultural enrichment.

The reason for this new meeting point [an ARCI social club]8 was essentially
that in the winter you couldn’t stay outdoors all day long. We’d always go out
after five o’clock, when it was already dark and there was practically no light-
ing. Added to that, the passion some of us had for playing cards and for video
poker led us to meet up in that place. I used to go there regularly for about
four years until I finally decided to quit. It was so sordid that all my problems
loomed larger inside those four walls. And the people who went there were
even more sordid than the place itself. The subjects of discussion never veered
beyond football, pussy (for which no more genteel synonyms were ever used),
motorbikes and cars. [Matteo, M, age 25]

I collected a huge amount of material in my survey, and my analysis of

it made it abundantly clear how far we had moved beyond the situation de-
scribed by de Lillo in his Iard reports (2002 and 2007) and by other Italian

8 
The equivalent of a labour club in England.
160 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

sociologists9: in these youngsters’ autobiographies the sphere of collective life

was nowhere to be found. I was giving a series of lectures on the MA in Media
and Communication at the University of Florence at the time, and my class
consisted of 33 Italians and 6 foreign postgrad students aged between 25 and
30, all of whom had travelled a lot. In 2003 the imminent American invasion
of Iraq was filling the newspapers and TV programmes, which also superfi-
cially addressed questions of international politics. So I decided to carry out
an experiment: I asked the class to write a list of the ten most important things
in life. Multiplying ten important things by 39 students you get 390 important
things: of all 390 only one had anything to do with collective life (peace in the
world) and was mentioned by one of the foreign students. Out of class, several
of them told me that they intended to take part in peace rallies the next day
in Rome, and claimed that they were ready to demonstrate for things beyond
the narrow radius of family, sentimental relationships, friendship and self-
fulfilment. Clearly there was a dislocation between taking part in demonstra-
tions and the areas of life in which they located their biographical turning-
points. The older brothers of the young people I had analysed over the three
years of research under study were evidently in exactly the same boat.
The real breakthrough in the latest nationwide surveys is that the forecast
shift in the participation of the young from the world of political parties to
that of voluntary work was drastically wrong: the statistics show, as my re-
search confirms, that young Italians play no part at all in the political, civil
and social life of the country. There were, nevertheless, some acute observers
who had already perceived this failure of engagement over twenty years be-
fore, and what’s more in a region (Emilia Romagna) that had always been in
the front line of political sensitivity.

Under various disguises and appearances we can discern a failure, a pro-

found and recurrent lack, the substantial absence of any tangible or ideal
form of solidarity among the young people of Emilia Romagna. Obviously,
we are dealing with identities or subjective concepts that are fairly ephemer-
al, polycentric, experimental and relative, but despite this, compared to other
situations, even within Europe, we are faced with a young person without
any vocation to solidarity, politically, religiously and even socially secularised,
that is suspicious and reluctant to go beyond his own opinions and move on
to some form of participative commitment or belonging (Cipolla 1989: 10)
[my translation].

9 
Among others, see two recent and interesting contributions on the topic: Gozzo (2010) and
Pirni (2012).
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 161

As already stated, the general tendency is to see this as the result of po-
litical parties and associations that are old and stale in their approaches to
topical issues and have totally failed to adapt to the personality of the young.
To put it another way, the reason young people do not participate is because
they don’t identify with institutions and associations which were, so to speak,
created by their parents. Another interpretation offered by sociologists sees to-
day’s young people as less inclined to join or subscribe to formal organisations,
full stop. The youngsters move freely in an unrestricted space, experimenting
different contexts and institutions, but only as visitors, without any permanent
affiliation: zapping through the different ambits of society, they dwell inconse-
quentially within them for little more than a “click”.
However, as Gianfranco Bettin Lattes (1997) has pointed out, we ought to
remember that all sociological surveys in Italy prior to 1968 revealed young
people’s total lack of interest in politics; on the contrary, they expressed a strong
interest in a “quiet life”, levelling them out on the same positions as the adults.
This was the famous “Three M” generation (moglie/marito, mestiere, macchina
– wife/husband, job, car). The aspirations of this generation were perfectly
attuned with the enhanced expectations of material wealth that characterised
the climate of reconstruction in Italy. Today, these expectations of widespread
prosperity are totally lacking, we need to draw the due consequences.
Coming to today, we can see the loss of historic memory that character-
ises most of the young people and their parents and teachers – meaning by
historic memory one that embraces at least three generations (in other words,
the memory of grandparents) –. The Now Generation is characterized by cul-
tural traits typical of consumer-mediatised societies. The concepts of “mili-
tancy”, of “investment”, of “deferral” lose their effectiveness when the future
is crushed onto the present. Empirical studies on young Europeans promoted
by the European Commission reveal that the values declared by most young
people belong to the category of defensive values: peace, environmental pro-
tection, human rights, freedom of opinion, the war against poverty. A general
feeling of insecurity pervades the younger generation in contemporary Eu-
rope; this sense of insecurity is deeply rooted and cannot be attributed solely
to economic problems.
Still following Bettin’s interpretations, an analytical reading of the Eu-
robarometer surveys (2007 and 2013) on young people allows us to identify
six types of value orientation among the young: individualists; conformists;
neo-conservatives; post-materialists; committed Christians; traditionalists.
Suffice it to say that 4/5 of the young people interviewed in Europe fall into
the first three types, namely the individualists, the conformists and the neo-
conservatives. Then, on top of that we have the familist syndrome, perfectly il-
lustrated by both the phenomenon of the extension of the juvenile phase, and
162 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

by the “scientific” overlapping between family and politics, work and social
career. The surveys carried out so far tend to rule out that we are dealing with
a generation oriented towards social participation and universalistic attitudes.

Mistrust of institutions: the inter- and intra-generational shortfall

The failure to take part in associative life, political or other, is connected

with the young people’s mistrust of the institutions: however, such mistrust
is not necessarily tantamount to a rejection of the status quo. Disillusion can
go hand-in-hand with perfect integration into a culture. Nevertheless, while
crucial to the functioning of society, trust in the political institutions and in
the social leaders is a sentiment that appears to be in free-fall among the
young people interviewed for the sixth Iard report (Buzzi, Cavalli and de Lillo
2007). This is nothing new: the trend has been in motion for several decades
and has now simply intensified. Scientific institutions are the only ones that
appear to command a significant degree of trust: 86% of the replies indicating
“great” or “considerable” trust in scientists. On the opposite side, the politi-
cians come off worst, with 87% of the young Italians interviewed declaring
“little” or “no trust at all”.
The disenchantment of the young people I met in my research is total, and
is harnessed to a marked lack of interest in the institutions. Only occasion-
ally is it entangled with feelings of rage and indignation, since few of these
youngsters venture beyond the grip of resignation. Giovanni is one of the
exceptions; even so, since he sees no potential path of change, his attention
turns inwards on himself. Since acting upon reality is not an option, the only
way out is individual and intellectual.

I live in a country that’s politically in ruins, without any authority, all that flour-
ishes are scandals, incompetence and power games. I’ve had enough of all this,
but I don’t think that I can or must change the world. We can and must change
only ourselves; everyone has to think in a different way. That’s our allotted role
in the contemporary fiction. [Giovanni, M, age 24]

In the rare references they do make to society, the subjects of the research
envisage an entirely individual relation. Both generational and inter-genera-
tional solidarity are absent: every experience of the Other is a private experi-
ence: the public piazza is deserted. Engagement in civil society (politics, vol-
untary work) is restricted to a tiny minority, and is always secondary. In short,
there are no occasions for experiencing a relationship with adults while feeling
like an adult oneself, or at least not too much of a kid. There’s a cognitive and
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 163

value gap between young Italians and their parents that generates disorienta-
tion and makes the young people incapable of planning their own future.
If you discard the interpretative categories, judgements and prejudices nor-
mally used to observe young people and attempt to understand what makes
them tick, assessing them independently of society as a whole, they simply
become invisible (Diamanti 1999). The only way to understand youngsters–
adolescents is by adopting a relational perspective, considering them in rela-
tion to their older brothers/sisters, to adults and to old people, so that we can
focus the differences in attitudes towards their life paths. Young people are
never observed relationally, construed by the way they relate to other (older
and younger) co-existent generations. If one had to define a shared element in
the generational awareness of young people today, it would be the sensation
that they’re on the line as a generation required to make ethical choices in an
everyday world limits no longer exist: in a society that is increasingly anomic
(devoid of rules) and amoral (ethically indifferent) when not blatantly immoral
(corrupt). The generational sense is embodied in the responses these young
people make to the problems of living in a society that neither makes nor in-
dicates ethical choices, but says to everyone: the choice of action is personal;
you’re on your own, since there are no shared social rules and the options are
no longer comparable, or rather they no longer make any difference (Donati
1997: 12 and 25). For a lost and disoriented generation “without fathers or
teachers” (Ricolfi and Sciolla 1980), the independent choice of a life path is
cloaked in solitude. Still more solitary is the quest for criteria to guide the de-
cision to go one way or the other, since the adults have dismally failed to con-
struct a system of values that the youngsters could adopt, criticise or oppose.
Older Italians are extremely wary of these youngsters. And that’s scarcely
surprising since they bring them up against their own shortcomings, their own
failures as adults, parents, mentors and teachers: the incapacity to propose
ideas that can be accepted or fought against, to formulate models of authority
that can, at least, be opposed. And so, they prefer them invisible: because when
the young people do act, when they demonstrate, what come to the boil are not
the novelties of the future but the issues and troubles of the present. Signs of a
time in which teachers and parents, rather than giving good or bad examples,
appear to be playing it by ear themselves (Diamanti 1999: 25-26).
The problem is not just a vertical, intergenerational one, but also extends to
horizontal, intra-generational relations. It’s hard to find any trace of a shared
feeling or project among today’s young people (Mannheim 1952 [1928]). As
one of my interviewees said, the fact that young people take part in demon-
strations should not be interpreted as a sign of engagement. These are simply
occasions – with marked aesthetic and recreational overtones – in which the
young person emerges from his or her egotistic isolation.
164 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

The impressions we get of young people – the way they speak, the way they
dress, the way they communicate, relate to each other and express themselves –
that’s not young people at all. What does the fact that thousands of youngsters
went to the G8 in Genoa mean? Does that make us all pacifists? Does that
mean we’re all anti-globalisation activists? Does it mean we were just all high
and reading Gandhi? Or does it perhaps mean that we ourselves don’t know
what we are, we don’t feel we belong to anything, we don’t identify with any-
thing. But we really miss not having that label; we really miss not being called
a “generation”. Because it would make us feel good to be a generation. Those
few, instrumental pretexts, where all you need to take part is to be young, al-
low us for a moment to feel like a generation: the concert, G8, the university
march, Siddharta, the VW Beetle, the PLO scarf. These are things that make us
feel we belong to something. It’s not much, and it’s pretty superficial feeling you
belong to a generation just because you attend something, or read something
or wear something that lots of other people like you attend or read or wear.
It’s just a sense of sharing that makes you feel less alone, less locked up in your
individualism. [Filippo, M, age 24]

Having established that young people’s involvement in public life and for-
mal associations is practically non-existent, we have to ask: so what are the
young people up to? According to the Cospes study (Tonolo 1999) and the fifth
(2002) and sixth (2007) Iard reports, the youngsters just hang out together. It’s
time spent without a specific purpose, during which they communicate. For
most young people, friendship doesn’t appear as an opportunity for intensive
socialisation, for developing shared projects for the future, but more as a sort
of everyday companionship, a distraction from the problems experienced in
other social spheres where they cannot fully express their individuality.
In the 50s young people fought their battles within the family, taking up
arms against their antiquated parents. In the 60s the conflict went public, and
the young people saw themselves as a social movement. In the 70s consumer
phenomena led them to identify with certain lifestyles and languages. In the
80s they became the generation of the void, of annihilation, the Less Than
Zero generation (Ellis 1985). In the 90s and the early years of the new mil-
lennium maybe none of these hold for a generation without ideals, values or
projects to inspire or anchor it. The “click on yourself” generation. The young
are afflicted by uncertainty in a society increasingly short on love, increas-
ingly risky, that fails to offer them a safe and symbolically significant image or
plan. This explains the general feeling of having no solid benchmarks (Donati
1997: 24). No-one decides for them any more; everyone has to make their own
choices, independently constructing values, criteria, directions. And since this
construction takes place in a private sphere, inhabited by an emotional Self,
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 165

rather than boosting the acquisition of a social identity it instead tends the
formation of an unbalanced emotional identity. And it’s a fragile identity pre-
cisely because there is no We, the We being the germinal centre of any pos-
sible Me and of any possible You. The image of young people that emerges is
of a generation wrapped up in the private dimension; where it does exist, the
sense of belonging to a generation is bound up with issues that are existential/
individual rather than political/social.
Addressing an ideology, a holistic and simplified vision of the world, gave
yesterday’s youngster the chance to get his or her bearings, and then to choose.
Late-modern society has swept away the ideologies, and the ideals with them,
thus depriving young people of the cogent guidance of ethical choice. Ethical
choice simplifies reality, operating as a criterion that directs the decisive, final
decision for or against, whereas relativist compromise and opportunism foster
the notion of a reversible decision. Where there are no ethical foundations,
every choice is temporary, revocable and renegotiable.

We find ourselves facing so many choices. In the past, the possibility of mak-
ing choices was much more limited, partly because the family was much more
authoritarian and partly because the offer from the market and from society
generally was much less differentiated, added to the fact that the average fam-
ily was less affluent. Our lives now are a continuous series of choices. Even as
children we’re already seen as consumers, customers and targets of the market.
Having the chance to decide on the basis of our preferences is definitely a step
forward compared to the past; it’s very important and positive. But who teach-
es us to choose? And based on what criteria? And how can we be expected to
choose if we don’t even know ourselves? [Irene, F, age 23]

Ironically, the multiplication of the perceived possibilities of life risks mor-

phing into a giddy range of potential options from which it is impossible to
select and reject. In the face of this, the family is seen as the only clear and
reassuring benchmark, so that the difficulty of leaving has more explanations
than mere economic motives. The young live in an increasingly differentiated
and complex reality in which life options – real or virtual, subjectively per-
ceived or objectively existent – appear to multiply. The growing person has
to construe and map the existing scenarios, identify his or her place within
them, select, reject and move in one or more directions; at the same time, the
criteria for making choices become increasingly elusive and individual. The
absence of a ubi consistam is felt.

This expansion of the potential opportunities increases the anxiety of the

young person, and the concern about not making the right investments in his
166 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

or her future. That’s why young people now tend to put off the choice; they
try to postpone the moment when they will have to face up to the adult world.
[Roberto, M, age 25]

Meanwhile Italian adults marginalise the ethical dimension, ignoring it

when not flagrantly denying it in their behaviour. According to one of the
young people in my study, the cognitive difficulties adults have in getting their
bearings in late-modern society is not what it’s about. It’s a moral issue: the
adults wielding powers are egoists. This is a generation of only children, born
to parents who have transmitted to them the delusion of the crushed hopes
and passions of the 60s and 70s. 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin wall,
brought the crisis of last century’s dominant ideologies to the fore. In the fa-
thers (and mothers) it triggered hope but also disorientation, since the dis-
tinction between what was just and unjust collapsed along with the wall. A
generation without fathers or teachers, or older brothers.

The adults, especially those that have power, think only about themselves.
They have no morals. Young people don’t ask adults to be infallible, but to be
credible and serious. There’s a lot of talk about skills, about expertise to ad-
dress the challenges of globalisation. But we young people know that adults
don’t reward our efforts, they don’t consider the merit of people learning to
do things. Italian adults, teachers especially, reward bootlicking and craftiness.
And so we become crafty and crawlers. But it’s sad. This way you learn noth-
ing, except how to play up to the boss to get ahead. [Matteo, M, age 25]

Unable to find cogent yardsticks anywhere, the young people become indi-
vidualistic, squeezed into a volatile Self. The Italian family culture encourages
them to adopt such attitudes, while the collective dimension and values refer-
ring to the Other, have no place in their life experience. Not surprisingly, per-
haps, the Other is not pivotal to the thoughts of their parents either, nor of the
significant adults they meet. Exacerbating the semantic opacity generated by
the multiplication of informative and formative agencies are profound cultural
processes inherent to ancient and recent Italian history. These deeply-rooted an-
thropological attitudes are moulded by a communication that develops through
mutual influence into a sort of vicious circle. In such a circle the young person
may go astray unless he or she rapidly learns the rules of the game, hinging
primarily on the ability to cut a path through the jungle of life – the Italian art
of getting by – heedless of everything and everyone: Self at all costs, regardless of
the Other. It’s the culture of craftiness and malpractice that is instilled early on
into the relational baggage of the young: far from being blameworthy, duping a
teacher by copying in class proves that you’re smart enough to get away with it.
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 167

According to Cavalli (1999), some adults feel an obscure sense of guilt be-
cause they realise they haven’t done the right thing by young people. Rather
than looking in the mirror, the adults invent these images that supposedly rep-
resent young people, whereas they are really just sketchy self-portraits. This
seems to be a way of sweeping under the carpet something that makes the
older generation edgy and that it refuses to recognise as its own, and appears
to be particularly true when negative characteristics are attributed to young
people. It happens because many adults have mislaid the capacity to counsel
and listen to young people. They’re afraid of exposing themselves, of setting
themselves up as models to be followed or rejected, of engaging the young in
long-term, wide-ranging projects, of clearly stating what values they believe in
(because they’re not sure): in a word, the older generation is afraid of clashing
with the younger. And perhaps even more they’re afraid of being judged, of
hearing what they don’t want to know, namely what the young think about
their parents’ generation: “We’re dimly aware that we haven’t done right by
them” (Cavalli 1999: 254).
When the feeling of trust and loyal cooperation with one’s neighbour is
systematically violated, the young person risks entering a dangerous spiral
of isolation and unease. The lack of meaningful and trustful dialogue with
significant Others (Sullivan 1953) renders the construction of the youthful
Self fragile.

In a social context in which honesty, sense of duty and responsibility are things
that hardly anyone cares about any more, quite a lot of young people – partly
as a sort of reaction against rampant corruption – suffer from deep loneliness.
They live closed up in a separate world where they have no dialogue with their
families, with the school or the rest of society, but only with their peers. Then,
to break out of this isolation, they resort to strong emotions, often beyond
what’s legally permitted. Many young people start taking drugs, even hard
stuff. [Eleonora, F, age 24]

The culture of dependency and the lack of a collective narrative

In the communication society, TV in its various forms, social media on the

web (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and even apps for Smartphones and Tablets
have supplemented the traditional sites of socialisation to generate a phenom-
enon of polyphonic socialisation. How do the young communicate in such a
society? And how do they recognise each other in their encounter with the
adult world? While formulating pertinent questions, we can also explode a
few myths about young people and their relations with adults. One is the
168 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

belief that young people are naturally creative and unconventional bearers of
change, whereas the young people I met in my research were quite conformist
and aligned with the prevailing adult culture. It is almost as if there is a sort
of connivance between fathers and sons, one that fans the flames of certain
dysfunctional mechanisms within Italian society.
As well as excluding the collective dimension – local, national or interna-
tional – closing-in upon the Self and failure to open up towards the Other
undermines young people’s self-awareness. To grasp what is happening around
us, to dialogue with the Other and with ourselves, we have to know where we
stand, representing who we are as social actors in time and space, taking a
range of dimensions into consideration (location, economy, culture etc.). The
revisitation of personal biography and collective history is what allows the indi-
vidual to reconstruct his narrative identity, and see his point of view of society
as a point of view. In traditional societies self-narration was almost automatic.
Past, present and future were linked through the stability of tradition, nature,
destiny and religion. There was little mediated experience, since daily life was
regulated by the situations, objects and people present in the community. But
the narration of the self has becomes increasingly important for all social ac-
tors, public and not, in modern and late-modern societies, while at the same
time the sense of individual identity can no longer be inherited or given:

Self-identity is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of traits, possessed

by the individual. It is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or
his biography. Identity here still presumes continuity across time and space: but
self-identity is such continuity as interpreted reflexively by the agent [...] To
be a ‘person’ is not just to be reflexive actor, but to have a concept of a person
(as applied both to the self and others) [...] A person with a reasonably stable
sense of self-identity has a feeling of biographical continuity which she is able
to grasp reflexively and, to a greater or lesser degree, communicate to other
people (Giddens 1991: 53-54).

The hardest part of communicating with individuals from different social

groups or cultures – and even with different age brackets within the same
group – is being able to think and act with a view to recognition of the Other.
Without this gradual other and self-recognition, the communication can be-
come a minefield. There is the risk of perpetrating a false recognition that can
lead to an egoistic type of relation (inter- and intra-generational) the Other for
Self or, alternatively, Self for Other: a dialogue characterised by the annihila-
tion of subjectivity. For recognition and dialogue, the mechanisms controlling
feelings of reciprocal dependency and control have to be deactivated. Dignity
must be given to both oneself and the Other through knowledge and trust,
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 169

by accepting personal and collective history, so that those with critical spirit
and courage can glimpse the other that is in us and think of Oneself as Another
(Ricoeur 1992).
This didn’t happen with my subjects. The original interpretative key for
this essay was: “Self without the Other: young Italians and the culture of
dependency”. I abandoned that because it could be misconstrued, because
it is only by relating to the Other that we acquire identity, and we cannot be
dependent in the absence of the Other. In the Bel Paese, in this very void filled
with egotistic relations dependency has gone viral: the Other in the young
people’s stories is a ghost, a simulacrum, an Other moulded to serve one’s
own ends, desires, needs, fears. The world that the young people invest in is of
short radius, with the centre in the family nest and the outer circle enclosing
friends and sentimental relations just a short way beyond. Everything beyond
this limited compass is experienced in a rapid and risk-free manner, through
the media or on short holidays: zapping and clicking while remaining safely
ensconced in the parental home – a place both physical and mental –.
In the book Sources of the Self (1989), Charles Taylor focuses the “culture of
authenticity” widespread in modern societies. This requires everyone to be
themselves while choosing between horizons that appear as given and tran-
scending the Self, creating a sort of oscillatory movement between the egoistic
ideal of self-realisation and the altruistic commitment to causes that can be
pursued through engagement and action. On the contrary, the young people/
children and adults/parents emerging from my research – equally responsi-
ble, each according to the respective role – are engaged in the construction
of false identities, in other words identities with meanings drawn exclusively
from within a culture of reciprocal dependency. This dependency starts from
the family and ripples out to the main sites of socialisation (school and work)
to become a crucial feature of Italian culture. Such attitudes might well be
described within a “culture of narcissism” (Lasch 1979) or indeed of hedon-
ism, individualism or particularism. I decided to refer to it as “dependency”,
because in the meshing of objective and subjective, structural and cultural
aspects, it seemed the term best fitted to the young Italians of the third mil-
lennium in their relations with adults.
The last decade has witnessed many devastating events: natural catas-
trophes, wars, terrorist attacks and economic crises. Such events can trigger
a learning curve (Boltanski 1999), but they have failed to jolt the younger
generations out of an immobility that inevitably leads to the construction of
individual and group identities crammed within the private world. Lacking
the lifeblood of any society nourished by the sharing and internalisation of
the values underpinning collective life, these private worlds are closed and
anaemic. And all the most recent forms of collective action appear to adopt
170 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTOPOLITICA

that same “already felt” (Perniola 2012)10 nuance of other rituals – cultural or
consumerist to a greater or lesser degree – ubiquitous in the autobiographies
of so many of the youngsters encountered during this research and elsewhere.
The lack of an adequate and plausible narrative that is capable of encom-
passing the social performances of individual and collective actors on the stage
of Italian public life – each one with his/her role and responsibility – seems
to impede an active awareness of the ongoing cultural crisis and traumas, in
young people and adults alike11. Leaving to the Italian family alone the ab-
normal task of being the only institution that creates meaning simply leads to
the production of hyper-particular scripts that cannot absolve the function of
fostering the sense of belonging to a collectivity, or to a group, or in the long
run even to the family itself.

References

Alexander C. (2012), Trauma: A Social Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge.

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10 
The Italian philosopher argues that, since the 60s, we live a second-hand “sensology,” produ-
ced by the media and underlying consumer attitudes. According to Perniola, the aesthetisation
of experience, typical of a society guided by “sensological” rather than ideological criteria,
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everything renders itself as “already felt.”
11 
See Alexander (2006 and 2012) for a holistic and sophisticated analysis of social performan-
ce and cultural trauma.
 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY 171

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