Italy's year of devastation

I'VE spent the past few months with some of my family fixing up an old house in a small, very steep town called Introdacqua in the Abruzzo region east of Rome.

I'VE spent the past few months with some of my family fixing up an old house in a small, very steep town called Introdacqua in the Abruzzo region east of Rome. The early days hardly provided the type of schmaltzy Under the Tuscan Sun experiences that everyone thinks of as "my sojourn in Italy". We arrived 20 hours after the earthquake in the region that killed more than 300 people.

What was it like?

Every night for two weeks there was a jolt or tremor. All the churches and public buildings were closed. Despite the wet and cold, families slept in cars or bedded down in tents in the campo sportivo. Several young people from Introdacqua studying in the regional capital L'Aquila, a university town about 50km from my town, lost friends in the collapsed student hostel. In a region that has the highest longevity in Italy, the fear, paura, was palpable. Gelsina, my 96-year-old neighbour, reminisced about the Avezzano quake in 1915 when 30,000 people were killed.

It was not surprising that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's decision to stage the G8 summit in L'Aquila was seen by some as inappropriate, while others might call it a typical crazy-genius move. Tourism is Abruzzo's main economic activity and the devastation in L'Aquila, and indeed the whole of the Abruzzo, has struck at a deep emotional level all across Italy and abroad. (More than $1million in aid has been raised in Australia.)

Abruzzo, the most traditional region, is Italy's emotional heart. It was the birthplace of Ovid, the Roman poet, and Gabriele D'Annunzio, the nationalist poet. It's a region of shepherds, famous for mountains that, around our town, soar to more 2000m. It is real Italy, the birthplace of many Australian Italians who, as mountain people, emigrated to work on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. Abruzzo is also earthquake-prone.

It is very hard to take precautions against being obliterated by falling masonry in a place where the multi-storied stone and concrete houses have stairwells of 45 degrees, a lot of streets and alleys are only a metre or so wide, and the roads disappear into nothing but slippery steps, topped in our case by a precipitously placed 900-year-old tower that looks wobbly at the best of times.

Even in L'Aquila, which has relatively wide streets and beautiful porticoed buildings on the main street near the fountain of the Hundred Heads, the probability of being any way from buildings is almost nil. The earthquake had so such force it ruined a transept of one of the most important first millennium basilicas in Italy, the 1000-year-old Collemaggio, which stands in a field. The church still shows the ancient damage in its stucco caused by the bolts of crossbows fired during a siege by Saracens. In it lies the intact body of St Celestine, the only pope to abdicate; he found Rome so chaotic and corrupt.

The quake happened at the beginning of Holy Week, very important in Italy. Easter is the central holiday and religious feast, kept the way Australia does Christmas. People go to church who normally don't. Everyone goes home for Easter. Families get together for a big dinner. It is the beginning of spring and the kids are looking forward to end-of-year exams and summer holidays, as doubtless were the students buried in the L'Aquila hostel. They included one girl of 13, a scholarship student born in Italy of an Albanian family, the first in her family to aspire to an academic high school and then a university education.

This year, in solidarity with L'Aquila, the regional festivities were toned down or called off across Abruzzo. The Easter Sunday pageant and procession in Introdacqua, usually accompanied by fireworks and auguries and public displays of bonhomie, was cancelled and we had a dour Easter Sunday mass outside in the car park.

Undaunted, the traditional huge Good Friday procession in Sulmona went ahead. Early in the evening there was an incongruously festive air with stalls selling ludicrous Tweetie Pie and Spider-Man helium balloons. But an air of sadness gradually settled. The piazza filled with the elaborately red-robed men's sodality (fellowship) carrying, in slow swaying rhythm, great torches and the statues of the dead Christ followed by the Madonna in full, regal silk mourning clothes. The men intoned the doleful Miserere written in Sulmona 500 years ago, and the newly fervent crowd blessed themselves repeatedly.

IT'S easy to think of Italy as that romantic place in the sun where legions of Audrey Hepburns whizz around all day on Vespas past breathtaking historic Roman monuments, and where people live the good life 24/7 with an endearingly bumbling carefree attitude. It's harder to think of a people whose sense of history, culture and identity is besieged by a tsunami of illegal immigration and that has an ageing population to which the immediate post-earthquake television reports bore testimony. Legions of ancient nonnas (grandmothers) were shown being carried out of ruined houses.

The social security system is fragmenting within a country recording a low birthrate and with an economy struggling. The cost of living is soaring above the value of wages and the cities are ringed with terrible, poorly constructed, high-density housing developments that are breeding grounds for every social problem under the sun.

Despite all this, it is often said Italians know how to enjoy life. They appreciate natural and man-made beauty, have wonderful food and a social life punctuated by public festivals reinforcing a sense of their complex history. They still have a reverence for religion that permeates public life. They are optimistic, with low suicide rates. But mostly they have warm and supportive family relationships.

So why, after Spain, does Italy have the lowest birthrate in Europe? Why is it that, in a country where the family is everything, Italians don't have enough children to replace themselves? Italy is a place where the family provides support across and down the generations. Children are really loved, spoiled, cosseted and dressed like little princes and princesses; children are over-educated and so dependent on their parents that they stay at home until about 30.

In 1996 Italy became the first country where old people outnumbered young people. The lifetime fertility rate is only about 1.4 offspring for each woman. In Australia there was panic at 1.7 but recently it has crept up to about 1.9 (2.1 is considered replacement level).

Other European countries, with less congenial lifestyles and far less religious and family-oriented cultures, don't have the fertility crisis of the Italians. Although life in modern Italy is difficult, it has nothing like the social chaos, rooted in family collapse, of many other countries. Rates of single parenthood, cohabitation instead of marriage, teen pregnancy and abortion are very low compared with, say, Britain, which has one of the highest abortion rates and lone parent rates but a respectable birthrate. Or Sweden, which has a birthrate of about 2 even though abortion is high, though falling, and more than 60 per cent of first births happen before marriage.

So what is the moral of all this?

For some demographers and economists the lesson seems to be that the culture of Italy -- traditional, religiously oriented, family-oriented and consumer-oriented -- does not encourage having children because Italy hasn't adapted the family to the modern economy, particularly for women who want to work. Does family policy need to be designed to support fertility and women's other aspirations? There is something in this.

The Swedes, for example, deliberately pushed population growth to fuel their post-war economy and tied all the benefits of having babies to mothers also working. They lifted population growth but created a rather artificial work-centred family culture where producing children was part of what you did for the state and what the state did for you. The obverse side to this bargain was that the state, through well-run and cheap creches, would take over the care of children. That worked in Sweden; it is full of Swedes.

Try doing it in Italy. It would need more than luck to make a policy work that separates babies from their mamas, not to mention nonnas. And Italians are historically wary of state interference in family life. Some still remember family laws under Mussolini, basically designed to produce little Filii del Lupa (sons of the she-wolf), the junior fascist boys brigade. In Italy family is considered a policy-free zone, a "strictly private" sphere.

But what about the idea that gender equity-based family policies have more success in raising the birthrate? Sweden and Britain seem to prove the case. Ironically, Italian women get generous maternity leave, but they don't take it. In fact, Italy proves the opposite. Italy proves that fertility rates are often governed by much more complex cultural and social factors. In Italy, culture trumps policy. In essence, Italy has never needed family policy because it still has families that act like them. If things go wrong with young people in Britain or Australia or Sweden, the state is expected to pick up the pieces. In Italy you rely on family, so much so that young people, especially men, stay at home until well into their 30s, which leads to the substantial cause of Italian infertility: delayed marriage.

In a country with practically no unemployment benefits the young cannot afford independence, let alone marriage and the consumer stuff expected in a modern household.

But the story is different for nonna and nonno (grandfather). They are loaded.

Italy has one of the most astonishingly generous (and complicated) pension schemes in the world. Italians can retire on 75 per cent to 80 per cent of their salary. Most old people own their homes in which the children linger, taking advantage of family solidarity and accumulated wealth. Some social policy experts argue this means old people are being supported by the Italian state at the expense of the young.

But Italians know that to have a family you need a certain standard of living, and you also need mum, dad and nonno and nonna.

Take my friend Flavia, whose grandfather bought her a house when she married. Flavia now has one child Julia, aged five, with no more planned.

Italians don't want to think about what lies just over the horizon: the uncomfortable population gap left by little Julia's nonexistent siblings. The result of the highest net immigration in Europe means it's an African family that has just moved in down the street.