Ode To The Runaway: Why Young Italians Should Flee The Family Nest

-Essay-

TURIN — Yes, I am a runaway.

I left home when I was 16. I can still remember an ode to runaways that I found in Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street, which sums it all up in a very effective manner: “For only that which we knew or practiced at 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing therefore can never be fixed: having neglected to run away from home. From 48 hours’ exposure in those years, as in a caustic solution, the crystal of life’s happiness forms.”

Runaway. Every time someone uses such an expression as an insult, I take it as a personal offense. It is brandished to accuse someone of incompetence, unreliability and slovenliness. It is an expression that reveals a lot about the person who uses it and a lot about Italian culture.

It is the title of a rap song, and it is often used by parliament members of different political factions to antagonize one another. But, in the end, it shows that we are knee-deep in incurable familism, that we are afraid of innovation, that we tend to mock those who try carving out their own destiny, that we are hopelessly stuck in a reclined deck-chair posture that leads us to look at the world without ever trying to change it.

Underpaid jobs and mental health issues

I think of the many who — at 30 years old, in their messy bedrooms still plastered with posters — yearn for escape, trapped in their suffocating family net. How much of this unhealthy relationship between parents and their children contributes to the disconcerting statistic that proves that half of the murders in Italy happen within one’s family?

I’ll try to read the Istat report on young people in Italy from afar as if it were an impressionistic painting. According to this report, 67.4% of Italians between the ages of 18 and 34 live with their parents. From 2002 to 2022, that number rose by 8%.

Young people are the least valued and worst-treated age group in Italy.

That same segment of the population is the one with the worst scores in mental health, aggravated by even more intense cohabitation during the pandemic. Young people are the least valued and worst-treated age group in Italy, the most affected by unemployment, and often forced into involuntary part-time and underpaid jobs. In Italy, the younger you are, the poorer you are.

And then, how many of our youngsters had to leave the country altogether? The number of young people who left the country to work or study abroad between 2011 and 2021 would be 1.3 million. But even this emigration (a story very similar to mine, a solitary teenage migrant in the United States) is always seen as a misfortune, not as a liberating leap toward a healthier and freer future.

It’s love versus freedom

Far away from patriarchal or matriarchal authority, we see runaways as ships without a mooring. They are a danger, a threat to our tribalist mentality that needs to frame individuals into easily recognizable compartments. They are wild cards.

Runaway could be a compliment for those who have found the strength to escape the oppression of their family, a word of appreciation for those who have dared to emancipate themselves. But it never is. It is instead used to describe someone who makes the incomprehensible choice to become an outcast and a beggar.

It’s not just the fear of leaving the family nest, it’s about low salaries and high rents.

Perhaps it is a good time to recall the cultural classification that Italian writer and director Luciano De Crescenzo made in his movie Così parlò Bellavista (“Thus Spoke Bellavista”): There are “nations of love,” where lives are guided by the aggregating power of family; and “nations of freedom,” where lives are guided by the most unbridled individualism.

We, Italians, Spanish, Irish, Greeks and Poles, De Crescenzo said, live in a nation of love. Come Christmas, we decorate a nativity scene because we are so moved by the collective element of the family. While nations of freedom, the British, Scandinavians and Germans, obsessed with privacy, prefer the stand-alone Christmas tree and push their little ones out of the house as soon as they turn 18.

Kids, run away!

But why are so many young Italians remaining trapped in their family homes? It’s not just the fear of leaving the family nest, it’s about low salaries and high rents. But then again, why don’t we do something, at a policy level, to subsidize and encourage renting for people under 30?

Probably because we, the parents, like things just the way they are. It’s a thin line between mocking our “big lazy crybabies” and secretly being pleased to still have them at home, making us feel less lonely and less old, like we could forever be “young parents.” We are not, and it’s time we set our children free.

This is an ode to runaways, from a runaway. And an exhortation: Kids, run away. Escape. Leave. Even if it’s hard. Even if it’s dangerous. Even if there are no guarantees of success and the risks are many. Not doing it — not even at 20, 25 or 30 — will become a regret “that can never be fixed.”