Every year, almost two million British visitors travel to Italy on holiday or business, but their knowledge and understanding of the fifty-six million inhabitants of this Mediterranean peninsula is conditioned by stereotype images which are frequently negative.
David Willey, the BBC's Correspondent in Rome since 1971, describes in this lively account how contemporary Italians think, live, love, work, dress, eat, laugh and have fun. He corrects what he believes to be the distorted ideas of many foreigners about Italians and explains how the mass exodus of poor and usually illiterate Italian migrants during the past century affected the nation's image abroad.
During his research for this social panorama of Italy in the nineteen-eighties, David Willey has talked to hundreds of Italians, including anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, film directors, actors and actresses, peasants, professors, captains of industry, fashion designers, students, art restorers, policemen, chefs, judges, doctors, spaghetti manufacturers, priests, nuns, mayors, millionaires and kidnap victims.
David Willey, from his unique vantage point as a foreign correspondent, disputes the widely-held view that Italy is a country eternally on the brink of political