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A peculiarly Italian part of the problem is the stay-at-home son, or mammone. More than 80% of men aged 18-30 still live with their parents, enjoying the coddling of doting mamas who take care of all the boring details of daily life, leaving the son free to spend his time and his income on pleasing himself. Who'd want to give that up before he had to? Nowadays, the typical young Italian mammone has even become a figure of ridicule.
But a new study by a pair of under-40 Italians who teach economics — Marco Manacorda at London School of Economics and Enrico Moretti at the University of California, Berkeley — points out the parents are as much to blame. After a 1992 reform of social security that raised the national retirement age to 64, parents continued to earn enough to keep their adult kids at home. The researchers found that a 10% increase in parental income resulted in approximately a 10% rise in the proportion of children living with their parents. Antonio Maceri, 27, for example, graduated last year with an architecture degree from Polytechnic University of Turin, and lives contentedly with his folks in the small town of Valdugia. "I'm happy here," he said. Even when he lived on his own during college, Maceri says he was eager to spend weekends with mom and dad to see friends and get his laundry done. Now that he is working, free rent and dinner on the table enable him to focus on his career. Only once he has an architecture studio of his own, Maceri says, will he consider moving out. And settling down with a family of his own? "I don't even think about it. That's a ways down the road."
The veneration of family and the desire of young people to live close to their parents runs deep in Italian culture. It's why you find far fewer retirement homes there than in other Western countries. Caring for elderly parents is still considered a social duty; grandparents return the favor by watching over children after school; and on Sunday, gathering all the generations together for a leisurely family lunch remains a regular nationwide ritual. But there is also a dark side for up-and-comers in a society that one young Rome activist calls "neo-feudalistic." Mario Andinolfi, 34, who hosts a radio talk show and bangs out a popular blog on the problems of his generation, warns that Italy's tightly knit social structure is simply not designed for an ever-more-competitive world. "The mentality in this country is too familial," he says. "We keep Grandpa at home, but that means whoever takes care of him can't find a real job. You are always expected to be the good son of the family, where risk is not allowed. Nor is hoping for something better than your father."
But Andinolfi sees one potential catalyst for revolutionary change new to his contemporaries: the Internet, which he calls "this generation's 1968." He says that more and more young people are tapping into blogs like his to share information that can change attitudes and define new strategies. Even though he concedes the Web has not yet been transformed from a talking shop into a political instrument, he's optimistic it will be. "We haven't figured out how to turn the discussion into action," he says. "But when we do, we will be able to mobilize like you can't imagine."
For now, though, Italy's leadership lies in the hands of politicians steeped in the old ways. And they are plainly determined not to let go. In the walkup to the April election, Berlusconi and his center-right coalition rammed a new electoral law through Parliament that takes a big step back from reforms in the 1990s that gave voters more say in choosing their individual representatives. Now party leaders again decide the list of candidates behind closed doors. Among the center-left opposition, there was much back patting for a so-called "primary" last October that anointed Prodi as the candidate. But he was in effect preordained for the top slot by the absence of any realistic rivals — much less young ones.
What voters fear is that whichever coalition wins, it will, as always in Italy's fractured political system, have to spend much of its energy on keeping the alliance from disintegrating. That's not exactly a recipe for bold renewal in a country facing an urgent need to revitalize the economy, reform the pension system, and add flexibility to the labor market without tossing away basic job security for the coming generation of workers. Meanwhile, both coalitions talk up their solution to the demographic emergency: competing onetime cash bonuses for families with newborns, instead of the subsidized child care that would do far more to encourage working mothers to have more babies.
Mariangela Potenza, 24, who left her home in the southern town of Bernalda in Basilicata, on the heel of the peninsular boot, to pursue a degree in high-tech art restoration at the University of Florence, is uninspired by any of the entrenched political élite. "It's the same faces saying the same things," she says. "There's nothing that transmits innovation or novelty to the voters, nothing that stimulates me as a young person." Viviana Beccalossi, 34, Vice President of the northern region of Lombardy, agrees. "I respect my white-haired colleagues, but you have to find a mechanism for mixing in the new generation," she says. "It's fine if there's a minimum age for the Senate (40), but there should be a maximum age too." It's not just the age of the two candidates for Prime Minister that under-40s find dismaying: now both coalitions are talking about nominating the popular President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, as the first Italian head of state to serve a second seven-year term. And he's 85.