At the beginning of every academic year, many universities in the UK present their students with little goodie bags. These bags contain fliers for local clubs, booklets with various bits of information on nearby doctors and on-campus events, loyalty cards or coupons for local shops and maybe a chocolate bar or a couple of condoms.

If something similar were made available for new expatriates arriving in Italy (and it should be), it would have to contain a copy of The Italians by Luigi Barzini. Written in 1964, The Italians takes a brilliantly eccentric look at the country and its people.

An early chapter (”The Peaceful Invasion”) offers this humorously grim view of the lot awaiting hopeful young expats in Italy:

Many find, at one point, like Hawthorne, that they can no longer leave this practically non-existent country. They can no longer face the harsher world where they came from, where they see things perhaps too clearly, and where every word in their familiar language has a precise meaning. They have become hopelessly addicted to the amiable and mild ways of Italy. Many also have nobody left to go back to. They cling to their little lair, the view of the sea from the hill, the view of the Coliseum from the window if you turn your neck far enough to the right, the view of the Grand Canal, the roofs of Florence, the decayed villas of Rapallo, a clutter of antiquities they picked up during the years, and their set habits. Italy is filled with people growing old, who can no longer think of leaving, living alone, comforted by a cat or a dog, waited on by a servant, an honest person at times but often enough an unscrupulous maid who feeds her family with what she steals. A day comes when these old people grow ill and helpless, far from the familiar sights and sounds of their youth, self-exiled for reasons which have become dim in their memories, in an alien place which they never really saw as it is and quite understood. At the end, they wait for death, some of them still dressed in gaudy and youthful resort clothes, surrounded by foreign sights and people who have somehow become the necessary props and conventional supporting characters of the imaginary drama of their lives. Many die every year and are buried hurriedly in the corner of an Italian cemetery reserved for heathens or heretics; some bodies are shipped home to practically unknown and indifferent relatives. Many die without having really discovered why they chose to live the last years of their lives in Italy, of all places.

(As well as death, The Italians contains a great deal on sex and politics.)