-Essay-
BERLIN — There are people who say they can physically feel the longing for Italy. A year without Italy, they claim, is a lost year. They crave the cicadas, the golden light, the sun-kissed and wrinkled skin of old locals standing by the sea, speaking with their hands; the deep green of the olive oil and the creamy white of the burrata cheese.
You know that you’ve returned by the coffee, which miraculously tastes perfect once you reach that first rest stop across the Italian border.
The German longing for Italy has become a cliché worth analyzing, deeply rooted in our psyche. Many trace it back to Goethe’s journey in the 18th century, often cited as the beginning of Germany’s love affair with Italy.
Around the turn of the 20th century, islands like Capri lured wealthy businessmen and writers with whispers of scandals, promises of wild parties, a lenient attitude toward homosexuality. Post-war prosperity put German cars back on the Brenner Pass, headed south to the sun. When guest workers began arriving from Italy in the mid-1950s, they carried with them a taste of Italian culture, and by 1958, 3.5 million Germans were vacationing there, with special trains running to Lake Garda and South Tyrol.
Now, a fresh wave of Italian admiration has emerged, different from the post-War years—it’s Instagrammed, curated, lifestyle-focused, and easy to market. Social media overflows with lemon vases, striped umbrellas, jute bags from the Berlin Italian fan shop “Amore” hanging on fair-skinned German wrists, with a cap reading “vabbè” from the cooking blog Splendido. You can even buy pasta-water-scented candles.
City dwellers are a little overly fond of Neapolitan pizza. Italy lovers constantly say buongiorno and ciao and watch the Instagram stories of Sam Youkilis, the photographer and content creator who perfectly captures the light of Italy. And the talk show by ZEIT author Sophie Passmann on ZDF is called Neo Ragazzi and advertises itself as being like a “holiday in Italy”.
Italy fans love videos of Italian children who know exactly what they want to eat from a very early age. They even love the staged TikToks in which some Italian guy freaks out because his American wife broke the spaghetti before cooking it.
The author of this article explicitly includes herself in this; with every visit to Italy, the return to the misanthrope paradise of Berlin becomes more unbearable. After all, there are many things to be sorely missed: fashion, for example, or vegetables that taste like something. And there’s more to be jealous about: Italians allow themselves to be passionate, and they have families where people talk to each other at the dinner table.
Myth of lightness
Is this why do so many 30- or 40-year-olds dream of a casa in Tuscany? Maybe they inherited the dream from their educated parents, the ones that say, with some emphasis: “It’s not cappuccinos, it’s cappuccini” or “You don’t make carbonara with cream.”
Mercedes Lauenstein is also responsible for this new longing for Italy. The journalist is co-founder of the cooking blog and newsletter Splendido. She says it all started in 2015. When pressed for the one reason, Lauenstein admits it’s the food that ultimtely convinced her to move.
In German cities, real Italian specialties are hardly ever on the menu.
She and her partner noticed that, in Germany, there are still “a shocking number of misunderstandings and completely misleading culinary representations of this very simple cuisine.” This is certainly also due to the gastronomic representation of Italian cuisine in German cities, where real Italian specialties such as testaroli or agnolotti are hardly ever on the menu.
An Italian twist can also be observed in music: look at the song Bologna by the Austrian band Wanda or the success of the band project Crucchi Gang, which sings German pop songs in Italian. In his book Azzurro: 100 Songs from Italy, the author Eric Pfeil tells the story of Italian pop music and explains his love for the country. He assesses the German longing as follows: “It’s about the myth of lightness, about leggerezza and sprezzatura. We are bathing in the shallow water of clichés.”
Pure trivialization
“Sprezzatura , this unknown lightness,” says a song by the Hamburg musician Erobique about that ability that appears specific to Italy: making difficult things look effortless. The Germans feel jealous of how much Italians love themselves and their lifestyle. They would love to spend their free hours of the day raving about the meal they ate last night instead of complaining about Deutsche Bahn, the neighbors or the weather.
And because as a German you know that you are a bit uptight, you are always a little afraid that the Italians hate you and after 11 o’clock you only order espressos instead of cappuccinos, even if they are much too strong for you. Because if you order coffee with milk after lunch, you could end up in one of the many videos on the Internet in which Italian waiters shaking their hands at you about this bad habit.
Those yearning for Italy are borrowing an identity that they like a little better than their German one. “Italy will continue to offer us Germans, who are suffering from multiple crises, a stable parallel world in which the fiery red sun is constantly plunging into the sea and the unimportant always seems to be given priority over the important,” says Pfeil. “But that’s because we have the privilege to vehemently ignore all the conflicts within Italy.”
And that is also true: our love of Italy is pure trivialization. The drowning refugees off Lampedusa are of course excluded from the longing for Italy, as are the thousands of slaves in the vegetable-growing factories. Giorgia Meloni is a fascist, but doesn’t she do funny things with her face? And that salmon-colored outfit was so chic, too.
Whether Italy’s traditions are authentic is no longer important: we want them to be authentic.
The Germans use Italy for their own sense of well-being. We glorify Italian traditions and channel in our Italian dreams a skepticism towards modernity; the crises of the present encourage this escapism, the longing for the supposed good old days. Of course, la nonna still shapes the pasta by hand, how lovely.
Whether Italy’s traditions are authentic is no longer important: we want them to be authentic. Take the singer Madonna: she has celebrated her birthday several times in an Italian hotel in Apulia that only pretends to be old. An entire borgo, a village, has been recreated for this purpose. Kim Kardashian took photos there when she arrived for a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show. This art-loving, traditional Italy is nothing but a myth, says Eric Pfeil. Take the US series White Lotus , which attracted masses of Americans to Sicily, because that is where the second season is set. In one episode, the main character Tanya is served a mozzarella that was supposedly made by a blind nun in a cellar.
Boom economico
Historian Alberto Grandi has written an entire book about this Italian exaggeration of food and traditions. It is called Mythos Nationalgericht (The National Dish Myth) and caused a small scandal in Italy when it was published: the historian shows that many of the oh-so-well-protected historical traditions are anything but old.
Right-wing politicians in particular found what Grandi was describing outrageous. Namely, that a society that experiences a historical shock and thus rapidly loses its sense of identity, must therefore invent traditions. Many of the country’s supposedly ancient traditions are actually quite young: pizza in its current form is said to have only become popular in the 1950s, carbonara was invented for U.S. soldiers during World War II. Tiramisu and panettone are based on recipes from the last 50 to 60 years. And pasta could be seen as a victory over the fascists, who wanted to suppress pasta because Mussolini didn’t like it and wanted to make Italy independent from wheat imports.
Germans love the Italians, but they don’t respect them. And the Italians respect the Germans, but they don’t love them.
Sebastian Heinrich, journalist and podcaster, describes how Italy experienced the boom economico from 1958 onwards and how mass consumerism “changed the country more quickly and dramatically than any other period in modern history”. Between 1958 and 1963, the Italian economy grew even faster than the West German, French or British economies. Until the oil crisis in 1973 ended the boom. According to Grandi, this also led to Italians seeking their identity in invented traditions.
The Germans still see Italy as a somewhat run-down country, but at least beautiful — as if the progress of the post-War period had never happened. There is a saying: “The Germans love the Italians, but don’t respect them. And the Italians respect the Germans, but they do not love them.”
Forms of self-deception
When Germans rave about the beauty of the Amalfi Coast and cornetti con crema, they rarely talk about Europe’s oldest university in Bologna, or the fact that computers were invented in Italy with the Olivetti typewriter. And who knows what the Italian app developer Bending Spoons will achieve now that it has taken over the file-sharing platform WeTransfer? The Italians invented moon boots and condoms, and maybe even the telephone (although there are different opinions on this). They are a lot more industrious and future-oriented than we think.
But Italians themselves often ignore this and perpetuate the dolce vita stereotype, demonstrated by the angry reactions to Alberto Grandi’s book. In Italian there is a term that Sebastian Heinrich also explains in his book: bel paese.
This Instagram version of Italy may look wonderful, but it’s make believe.
Originally coined by the poet Dante, with an ironic undertone describing the distorted self-image — some would say the overestimation of themselves — of many Italians who firmly believe that they live in the most beautiful country in the world. It is a form of self-deception that makes the drama in the country more bearable: we may have had Silvio Berlusconi, but at least we also have cypresses and Sardinia; another prime minister is resigning, but at least the sun is shining over Sicily.
As Alberto Grandi once said: Italy’s beauty is idealized and used by Italians who delve into a brilliant past because they don’t really believe in the future. But maybe we can say the same about all those Germans who love the Italy they see on Instagram, with its pretty traditions, because they can’t love their own country and its past.
This Instagram version of Italy may look wonderful, but it’s make believe. Let’s say Invented around the same time as spaghetti alla carbonara, circa 1944.
