Why are all the Italian women miserable?

The Neapolitan Novels, A Sister's Story and misery in contemporary Italian literature

Mar 05, 2024

Back when I still lived in Boston, in the North End, in a dim apartment building run by two insane Italian ladies1 off a glorified alleyway, I read the Neapolitan Novels. It seemed fitting. After all, I lived in the Little Italy of New England. There were men of indeterminate old age sitting outside in their undershirts, garbage bags piled on the sidewalk on trash day, and small winding streets drenched with the scent of garlic. Every summer weekend, there were parades down the streets dedicated to some saint or another, and in August there was St. Anthony’s Feast, a festival so big and encompassing that I found any reason at all to be out of the house for the weekend. I could barely hear myself think.

The view from my window during the Feast of St. Anthony. Why yes, that’s a stage with a band playing, literally 50 feet from my window, thank you for asking. Notice the crowded buildings and impassable streets.

I bought all four of the novels2 by Elena Ferrante on a whim, because if I was going to read a series, I needed to read all of them, and have them all in the same edition. That’s book logic for you.

As I read, my overall impression was one of both admiration and chagrin. It was wonderful to see female friendship depicted in all of its complex forms, and the novels are an achievement in and of themselves. But my main takeaway was that the books were bleak. Everyone was miserable. And I don’t mean in the ‘I’m living in impoverished conditions’ sense. I mean: I felt no joy from these characters. There seemed to be no reason that they kept living. They argued, they fought each other (physically and verbally), they gossiped, they had no ambition. The first two books weren’t so bleak, but by the time I made it to book 3, all I could think of was: why bother?

I finished the series, but never could shake the feeling of misery. The characters were awful to each other. If the point was to illustrate the drudgery of life, well then message received. Finishing the books felt like a marathon.

I eventually donated my books, chalking my reaction up to my own preference. I guessed there was something about the length of the stories - looking at two people across a nearly 60 year time span - that just did not work for me. I also figured that if someone were to summarize and write my entire life, maybe it would look miserable to them, too. So I wrote off the perceived Italian misery as a fluke.

Then I read A Sister’s Story.

Spoilers Below

As part of my Short Month Short Books attempt, I picked up Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s novel. The story is ostensibly about the narrator’s relationship with her sister, but I once again found myself suffocated under the weight of misery.

The narrator is never named. We know her sister’s name, Adriana, and the name of literally every one else. This is most likely a commentary on how the narrator doesn’t feel like her own person, or feels worthy of notice, which again, does not bode well. Much like Elena Ferrante’s Lenu, this protagonist finds a way out of poverty by using her intellect and getting an education. But what is supposed to be a story between two sisters becomes focused on Adriana: Adriana’s troubles, Adriana’s son, Adriana’s accident, Adriana’s abusive relationship with her husband. Adriana might as well have been the protagonist, for I knew so much about her and so little about the narrator.

When I finished, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the narrator. After a few crises in her early adult life, she moves to France and works as a professor there. While the novel is ostensibly about her coming back to her Italian hometown to deal with her sister, the novel is told via flashbacks and is set so squarely in the past that I could not care less about the ‘present day’ story. It also left me feeling bereft of any meaning - I didn’t care what was happening in the present because there weren’t enough details. A Sister’s Story appeared to be predicated upon the fact that the twin crises of the narrator’s sister coming to stay with her, and her husband leaving her, damaged her enough that she never did anything else again in her life. What was a lively life in Italy is reduced to teaching, a narrow apartment corridor and a shared cat in France. The narrator comes back to Italy, seemingly giving up her academic career to take care of her injured sister. She still speaks to her ex-husband, and sublimates any sense of self into others. She got out, why is she coming back? I never got a clear answer. Why is she sacrificing so much for this sister? Ultimately, what did I care what the narrator was doing or feeling? There wasn’t enough of a personality to hold onto.

And what does our poor narrator have to show for all of this self sacrifice? Nothing. How is she repaid by the people around her, namely her family? Terribly. Her sister uses her name to get credit at stores, and the narrator is then on the hook for thousands of lira worth of clothing. Her husband refuses to be honest with her, even though it’s clear that he’s having an affair. Her brother-in-law threatens her when she goes to check if he’s ok. Her father chastises her when she shows up at the hospital to see her sister.

These people are terrible, I kept thinking as I read. They treat our protagonist awfully. Why does she keep going back? I suppose that’s true to life, but it doesn’t make for a pleasant read, and it doesn’t mean that I - or the characters - have to accept it. For a novel that included so much sun and sand and beach, I left feeling very dejected.

Great for: short reads, folks who like translated literature, descriptions of Italian countryside, sand, and sea
Bad for: people who do not want to be depressed while reading

As this misery turned from fluke to pattern, I wondered if there was a reason behind it. These 5 books were all contemporary novels written by Italian women. They were about Italian women, and both had absolutely miserable family dynamics. This was getting to be much too much of a coincidence, so I did what I do best and started over analyzing.

In terms of a brief historical background, Italy as a country was unified in 1861. It was made up of various city states prior to that, and parts of what are now modern day Italy belonged to other countries. Oh sure, there was the Roman Empire and the Vatican, but there was also Rome and Milan and Naples and Florence and Venice and Bologna that all operated as various city states with various rules at various points in time. I joke about France’s chaotic nature, but truly, Italy has them all beat.

*A room in the Palazzo d’Accursio that shows all of the crests of the different ruling families/parties/whatever in Bologna’s history. LOOK AT HOW MANY THERE ARE.*

One of the writers in my writing group recently mentioned a book about the unification of Italy, and whether it was a good idea or not. I haven’t read it yet, but she told me that the author’s answer was, I’m not really sure, but I don’t have any better ideas. The summary of The Pursuit of Italy even argues that the strength of Italian cultures comes from its individual regions, not from a central unified state.3 So if we’re to look for a reason why contemporary Italian novels are depressing, we need to start with their provinces.

The Neapolitan Novels take place in Naples, as their name suggests, and A Sister’s Story takes place in Abruzzo, which is on equal latitude with Rome but on the Adriatic Coast. Meaning, we’re looking at Central & Southern Italy as settings.

When the movie ‘House of Gucci’ came out in 2021, the most instructive article I found an article in The Cut detailing how there really is no ‘true’ Italian accent. Yes, there’s academic Italian, but many dialects of Italian remain and are still spoken today. The Italian you’d learn in a classroom isn’t necessarily ‘real’ world Italian, whereas the French I learned was pretty passable for talking with everyday French people. Sure, there’s accents and regional differences in France, but I didn’t need to worry about wholesale different dialects when I traveled around La Francia.

I bring this up to highlight how regional differences are still a Very Big Thing™️ in Italy, more so than maybe any other country I’ve visited. Sicilians will often consider themselves Sicilians before Italians, and this is true for many of Italy’s other provinces as well. A unified Italian identity is usually subservient to a provincial one.

Since its unification, there have been significant differences in Northern vs. Southern Italy. Northern parts of Italy belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, France, and Austria-Hungary at times. The North of Italy has always been more industrialized, while the South has always been more rural, agrarian and depressed economically. Those articles you see about being paid to move to Italy? They’re almost always small towns in the south of Italy.4 Though the above map is a meme, it’s basically true. It makes sense that Lenu in the Ferrante novels and our unnamed narrator in Di Pietrantonio’s works try to leave Southern Italy for elsewhere - there’s more opportunity for advancement in the North, or even beyond in the EU.

This isn’t to say that it’s all sunshine and roses in Northern Italy. My family is Northern Italian, and both of my Italian great-grandparents immigrated. I wonder what they’d think of me now, trying to go back to the countryside they left, but that’s a tale for another day. This need to leave home, though - is it cultural? Baked into the folds of my DNA? I certainly found the area I grew up in stifling and left the minute I could.

Further, Italy’s democratic backslide does not help matters. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, was elected in 2022. She’s also a a neo-fascist. I’m not saying this to be dramatic - Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) is a very right-wing populist party with Fascist roots. There does seem to be some pushback to the very conservative ruling party, namely that Sardinia just elected a Democratic President.5 But this cannot help any sense of suffocation and the desire to be elsewhere.

Brief non-depressing interlude: my great-grandparents were from Emiglia-Romagna, which is known as the foodie region of Italy.6 They were both from small towns, each about an hour outside of Bologna. Bologna has the world’s oldest university, the University of Bologna founded in 1088, and is known as Bologna La Rossa for not only its red roofs, but also its left leaning allegiance to Italy’s Socialist parties, whose color is red.

*Some red roofs of Bologna, courtesy of yours truly*

I have been told that there are still very strict gender roles in Italy. That wasn’t entirely my experience when I went, but then again, I have only been once. I’d be more inclined to talk generalities about women in France, a place where I’ve spent about a year of my life. I can say this, though: until the January 1st, 1948 constitution, Italian women could not pass on citizenship. Only men could. My journey to being legally recognized as Italian would be much simpler if I could go through my great-grandmother,7 but as it stands, going through a male line is still the easier option.8 In some ways, the inferiority of women was baked into the legal framework of Italy for centuries.

So being a woman in Italy could be suffocating for reasons that I don’t understand. Strict gender rules generally points to a more conservative culture, which I can imagine chafes, inspiring misery and a desire to leave.

We’re starting to get a clearer picture of why folks, especially women, in Italy might be more miserable than usual, but these reasons are no different than the US. We’ve got regional differences between the North and South, and authoritarian creep and depressing politics, too. We’ve got morose literary fiction books to boot, but: Americans have always had a sense of optimism about them. There’s a kernel of hope baked into even the most bleak of narratives. There’s a thousand reasons why this is the case, but it could be the defining difference. If literature is supposed to reflect life, reflect a people, then it’s logical that American narratives (of which I am used to and write) are more optimistic than what I’m encountering in Italian literature. People can be depressed anywhere, even in picturesque seaside landscapes.

Maybe I’m doing nothing more than enforcing an American-centric viewpoint on a country that’s not my own. I could be looking for an answer where there is none. Maybe this was the answer all along: to hold up a mirror to my own suffering. I have a very small sample size to work with, here. My brain does nothing but think, so when it notices a pattern, I have to dig deeper.

The answer to my question is, I think, to read more. More Italian literature, more Italian fiction in different genres. Who knows, maybe I’ll finally find some happy women. If not, then I’m sure I’ll be back with a Why Italian Women are Still Miserable Part 2. If you’ve got contemporary Italian novels written by donne, let me know. Especially if they’re not depressing.

The Chaotic Reader

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