Letter from Italy: Your Rome correspondent, back on the native sod for the Christmas festivities, was elbowing his way through one of Dublin's many crowded shops when he received a news flash from home.
My "Ansa" news service was happy to tell me that, on that particular day, there were no less than 15 million cars on Italian roads while traffic jams in and around Rome were in the order of 30km long, gridlocked and going nowhere. And you thought the M50 was bad.
Next up on my text message service was the less than comforting news that Iole Tassitani had been found. She was the 42-year-old daughter of a well to do notario(notary) from a small town near Treviso, northeastern Italy. In early December, Iole had gone missing, prompting police to suspect some kind of kidnap. Just before Christmas, they found her body, literally in pieces, all neatly stored away in the rubbish bin in the garage of an "acquaintance" (subsequently arrested).
As we head into the new year, the news from Italy is not great. Just about every economic survey published predicts a miserable growth rate (1 per cent) for an increasingly less competitive economy from which young people are on the run because they cannot find a job. The OECD's recent Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) report on education basically claimed Italian educational standards have fallen "statistically significantly below the OECD average" and that Italy is now to be bracketed along with Portugal and Greece.
Then, too, there was the report published last October by Confesercenti, the association of small businesses, which claimed that "Mafia Inc" is Italy's biggest company. With revenue coming from extortion, loan sharking, burglary, theft, counterfeiting, contraband, kickbacks and public-contract control, Italian organised crime has an estimated annual turnover of €90 billion, or 7 per cent of Italian GDP, they suggested.
Other research, this time carried out by Cambridge University, claimed that Italians are the least happy citizens in 15 western European nations surveyed (for example, 36 per cent of Italians trust their politicians as opposed to 64 per cent of Danes).
Worse still, yet another, much-touted report claimed that Spain has overtaken Italy in terms of pro-capita income and general living standards. Carried as the main, front-page story on many dailies, this report touched on a particularly sensitive nerve because Italians have always felt slightly superior to the Spanish. The suggestion that the country, which until 30 years ago was firmly in the grip of dictator Gen Franco has now made such fundamental socio-economic progress that it has overtaken Italy (" il sorpasso") is shocking to some, depressing to others, yet totally predictable to many. In day-to-day chitchat, one of the most oft-repeated observations made by frustrated Italians concerns Spain and the palpable progress they see that country making, in direct contrast to Italy.
High point in this season of mists, melancholy and frustration came when the New York Timeshad the temerity to publish a front page "winter of discontent" analysis of modern Italy. Accurate and articulate, the piece described Italy as a country bedevilled by low growth, fractured politics and organised crime, seemingly incapable of resolving fundamental problems and perhaps already in irreversible decline.
To some extent, the article merely summarised much of the negative news with which (some minority) sections of the Italian media daily bombard us - 11 per cent of Italian families live below the poverty line; 70 per cent of 20-30-year-olds still live at home; US investment in Italy is down to $16.9 billion (by comparison, the figure for Spain is $49.3 billion); two of the biggest-selling books of the last year are La Casta(The Caste), dealing with the privileges and unaccountability of Italy's political classes, and Gomorrah, a book about the camorra (mafia) in Naples. (Two books, by the way, which have featured in these pages).
Thanks to a mechanism that the Irish can understand well, the article prompted a terrible furore. It is all fine and well for Italian analysts and experts to warble on about low wages, low use of internet, low foreign investment, low birth rate, oversized pensions and an oversized public debt but when a foreigner does it, then there is trouble. State president Giorgio Napolitano, on a visit to the US at the time, felt called on to downplay reporter Ian Fisher's observations while interior minister Giuliano Amato wrote a letter to the New York Times, complaining that the article was "only a parody".
We Irish can understand only too well just how easily "foreign" criticism can touch a raw nerve (remember that German ambassador's observations of Ireland as "a coarse place"). Italians, likewise, are sensitive to foreign criticism, especially US criticism.
However, even the greatest Italophile would have to concede that there is more than just a grain of truth in a vision that sees Italy as a country gripped by a sense of social, economic, political, cultural and, indeed, spiritual crisis.
All, however, is not lost. As we head into the new year, Italy rules the world in at least one sphere. Italy are current football world champions, AC Milan are the European and world club champions and the Inglesi, after years of looking down their noses at Italian football, have had to appeal to an Italian, Fabio Capello, to come manage the national team in its hour of need. Come on, Fabio!