How to Be Italian

Twenty-three years ago, Beppe Severgnini was a small-time writer at a local daily in his hometown, Crema. For most people, it's a town of 33,000 folded away in the hills outside the Milan metropolis. For him, he says, it's "my everything." So when he was tapped for a job at Milan's Il Giornale, a leading national paper, Severgnini humbly [an error occurred while processing this directive] declined. He left journalism altogether to study law — his father's trade.

A few months later, he came to his senses. Il Giornale's editor Indro Montanelli took him aboard and, as if to quell all Severgnini's provincial doubts, made the 27-year-old the paper's London correspondent. That London jaunt not only took Severgnini's fledgling journalistic career to the national level, but also gave him the material for An Italian in Britain, which became a best seller in the U.K. in 1991 and established him as a writer with global appeal. Severgnini, a fan of contradiction, prefers the term "provincial international."

In La Bella Figura, Severgnini's third book to be exported from the Italian peninsula, his propensity for contradiction has found ample room. "Italy," he writes, "is the only workshop in the world that could turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis." And one into which outsiders enter at their peril. "Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing," warns the writer. In Botticelli, who strove "to reconcile Plato and Christ in a representation of the beauty that derives from the union of spirit and matter," foreigners only see "flowers, sea and a girl surfing on a seashell. It's a trap. For 500 years, you've been falling into it, and we've been chuckling as we watch."

When composing An Italian in Britain and Ciao, America!, his U.S. best seller, Severgnini was writing for Italians — translating them was an afterthought. "This time it was the other way around. Bella was written for an international audience," he says, even though Italians got first crack at reading it last year. In a typically culinary metaphor, Severgnini says: "It's like when you cook a good meal for your fiancée and your friends love it."

In La Bella Figura, he takes us on a 10-day whirlwind tour of the country. A purposeful but ever-playful host, he stops in Tuscany to poke fun at notions of paradise, but not without criticizing the Tuscans for humoring us. He calls one fantasy "a kind of ultralight meal — stuzzicchini. It's the classic Tuscany book: give people what they want to hear." Then there's the opposite fantasy, equally skewed: "The pasta scotta: pasta swimming in garlic sauce. It's Italy as hell. Heavy stuff. You go to Sicily and how corrupt! Half of that is true." In his book, Severgnini cooks up a compromise dish: "Let's just say that Italy is an offbeat purgatory, full of proud, tormented souls, each of whom is convinced he or she has a hotline to the boss."