Boom!

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Buondì.

On Monday I published Episodes 7, 8 and 9 of this year’s FREE Summer Series, which aims to cover the fifty or so years of Italian history from the end of WWII up to Berlusconi and the euro.

In case you’re new around here, or have been lazy about reading emails, previous years’ Summer Series covered ‘La storia di Roma’ (30 articles), ‘Il Medioevo’ (30 articles), ‘Il Rinascimento’ (30 articles), and last year’s ‘Dal Risorgimento alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale’ (30 articles), so a grand total of 120 articles + online audio.

And this year’s FINAL summer series will add another 32 texts. Find them all here. That’s plenty of FREE study material for anyone who wants to make use of it, though most people don’t bother…

But for those who do, read, listen, avoid using a dictionary, and your Italian comprehension skills are bound to improve. Try it and see.

So anyway, I have this theory that to understand a country – in a very general and superficial way, mind you – all you really need is a light scattering of concepts, which may be names of people or places (Washington, Elvis), dates (Dec 7th 1941), nouns (civil war, stars and stripes), adjectives (red state, blue state), even consumer items (Coca-Cola, Model T Ford).

Understanding can hang on basically any conceptual hook. My examples are from the USA. Wherever you live, I bet you could add dozens, hundreds, even thousands of words that you associate with that country, and that help you understand it.

Try it with a country you know less well – for example, for me, China – and it’s evident immediately how little I know, in comparison.

I studied bits of Chinese history during a chequered education, but haven’t been there and don’t know anything of the language. I guess I could put together a rather sketchy briefing for a passing Martian if asked, but I’d have a lot more to say, and with a lot more confidence, about The Good Ol’ U.S. of A.

Which brings me back to Italy, and the Ford Model T.

Over the previous four years my word/concept cloud for the country I’ve lived in for twenty-six years (but haven’t paid much attention to) has expanded somewhat, mainly thanks to our history series, as I don’t have time for TV and so on.

Even when I was first here, back in the late ‘nineties, I head people talking about ‘Garibaldi‘ ‘partigiani‘  and the ‘boom’. Over the years, I added concepts that I almost couldn’t avoid, such as last-weeks ‘neorealismo’ (very depressing black and white films), and the inescapable ‘Berlusconi’.

The remaining twenty three articles in this year’s Summer Series will likely add more to my portfolio of ‘concepts’ that Italians all seem to know about but which date from before my time or which I’d never understood the implications of: ‘le Brigate Rosse’ ‘Craxi’, ‘Falcone e Borsellino’, and many, many more.

The Ford Model T – I learnt at school – was an early example of mass production, which meant the automobiles were cheaper than those of competitors, so more accessible to anyone with a little cash to invest in improved mobilty. If you were a small farmer, but doing OK, sooner or later you’d want one, to run your family into town/impress the neighbors.

The car was a hit, and featured in Hollywood movies, for instance, co-starring with Laurel and Hardy. But the Ford Model T ‘concept’ in my head is about much more than just a cheaper automobile.

Ford paid well, we learnt at school, not out of altruism, but so as to ensure the workers in his mass-production plant were themselves potential customers for the products they turned out so efficiently.

The vehicle, as a concept, represents the time when working class Americans began to have cash to splash, and so, in effect, the beginnings of the consumer-capitalism age which we live in today.

For where would Apple and Tesla be if their products were not affordable enough for billions of us to buy? Certainly  they’d not be two of the world’s most valuable companies.

Wikipedia tells me that the Ford Model T was produced from 1908 to 1927, so from a few years before, to about a decade after, WW1, taking in the ‘roaring twenties‘ (another useful conceptual meme to know about).

Things in Europe were good for a while (‘flappers’), but in the USA things were good for workers, too.

And then came the ‘thirties and the depression, fascism in Europe, and WWII (see last year’s summer series for details).

Italy, amongst other places, got thoroughly messed up as a consequence. Reading the first few episodes of this year’s series, it’s difficult not to feel gloomy.

But then, FINALLY, things start to pick up, and the economic growth that working-class Americans had had a taste of in the ‘twenties, at last arrived in Italy – the famous ‘boom’, and other well-known concepts from those decades, so ‘Vespa’, ‘RAI’, ‘autostrade’ and so on.

Ragazzi, basta with the boring geopolitics and the ruins of the world war!

Episode 9 has the ‘boom’, and from next week, all the fun stuff starts. These next seven or eight weeks we’ll find about what made modern Italy the way it is (for better or worse), we’ll effortlessly absorb the concepts that shaped the life of my Italian father-in-law (now in his late-eighties) and –  directly or indirectly – influenced my wife’s younger years, about which I know little.

How come, for instance, that my own childhood (in the UK) felt at times so grim (the industrial disputes of the ‘seventies, punk rockers, Thatcher, unemployment), yet all my Italian wife can recall of the period are ice creams at the beach and fun parties, a sort of never-ending golden period, which was only shattered when she met me?

You were brought up in the war, she jokes, as I juggle plastic pots of leftovers into our over-stuffed ‘frigorifico’.

I was brought up by people who were brought up by people who lived through the war, I corrected her. But hadn’t forgotten it.

It’s a puzzle. While us Brits just seemed to get more and more miserable with the passing decades, Italians crawled out of the ruins into their new republic and, eventually, a new economy, seemingly with their memories wiped clean.

Apart from occasional tales about hiding in caves and eating cats, few scars seem to have been left, and none passed down.

Perhaps Italians have just gotten very, very good at forgetting the bad stuff, on which light will be shed in future episodes.

In the meantime, catch up with these links:

• • Episodio 1. Gli orrori della Seconda Guerra Mondiale in Italia
  • Episodio 2. Lo sterminio degli Ebrei in Italia (1938-1945)
  • Episodio 3. Gli italiani massacrati nelle foibe (1945-1946)
  • Episodio 4. Il trattato di pace di Parigi e le condizioni per l’Italia (1947)
  • Episodio 5. L’Italia diventa una Repubblica (1946)
  • Episodio 6. Il cinema neorealista
  • Episodio 7. Il Piano Marshall e la ripresa economica dell’Italia (1947)
  • Episodio 8. La Guerra Fredda nel mondo e il centrismo in Italia
  • Episodio 9. Il boom economico degli Anni ’50

Alla prossima settimana!

P.S.

This week EasyItalianNews.com is having its bi-monthly appeal for donations

They publish three bulletins for learners of Italian (text + audio) each week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

You should subscribe. It’s free.

How come? Because people who value the bulletins send in donations, mostly small amounts, $5, $10, $25, etc.

No problem, Mark 12:42-44, but thanks also to those occasional folk who send the electronic equivalent of a C-note. There are writers to pay, poverini, tapping away at their old model laptops in their unheated garrets, remembering generous donors in their prayers.

So there you go, that’s my part done: if you’ve found EasyItalianNews.com helps your Italian compehension/motivation, whatever, yet haven’t got around to showing your appreciation, do that here, while you think about it:

https://easyitaliannews.com/support-easyitaliannews-com/

Or, if you’ve not tried their free material yet, as I said, you should subscribe.

That way you’ll get your share of the bible widow’s two, very small, copper coins before the EasyItalianNews.com team expires from hunger, thirst, and (it’s very hot right now) lack of air-conditioning.

Donate | See who donated

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