La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind

Beppe Severgnini

Nov 2008 · Sold by Crown

About this ebook

Join the bestselling author of Ciao, America! on a lively tour of modern Italy that takes you behind the seductive face it puts on for visitors—la bella figura—and highlights its maddening, paradoxical true self
 
You won’t need luggage for this hypothetical and hilarious trip into the hearts and minds of Beppe Severgnini’s fellow Italians. In fact, Beppe would prefer if you left behind the baggage his crafty and elegant countrymen have smuggled into your subconscious. To get to his Italia, you’ll need to forget about your idealized notions of Italy. Although La Bella Figura will take you to legendary cities and scenic regions, your real destinations are the places where Italians are at their best, worst, and most authentic:

The highway: in America, a red light has only one possible interpretation—Stop! An Italian red light doesn’t warn or order you as much as provide an invitation for reflection.

The airport: where Italians prove that one of their virtues (an appreciation for beauty) is really a vice. Who cares if the beautiful girls hawking cell phones in airport kiosks stick you with an outdated model? That’s the price of gazing upon perfection.

The small town: which demonstrates the Italian genius for pleasant living: “a congenial barber . . . a well-stocked newsstand . . . professionally made coffee and a proper pizza; bell towers we can recognize in the distance, and people with a kind word and a smile for everyone.”

The chaos of the roads, the anarchy of the office, the theatrical spirit of the hypermarkets, and garrulous train journeys; the sensory reassurance of a church and the importance of the beach; the solitude of the soccer stadium and the crowded Italian bedroom; the vertical fixations of the apartment building and the horizontal democracy of the eat-in kitchen. As you venture to these and many other locations rooted in the Italian psyche, you realize that Beppe has become your Dante and shown you a country that “has too much style to be hell” but is “too disorderly to be heaven.”
Ten days, thirty places. From north to south. From food to politics. From saintliness to sexuality. This ironic, methodical, and sentimental examination will help you understand why Italy—as Beppe says—“can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters or ten minutes.”

Ratings and reviews

Nothing but insults and made beliefs. The real Italy. Please, read. I am an Italian who's been teaching Italian in America for over 17 years. I have lived in Milan, unlike the author I do not see in ten days how we Italians are really like or all about. One hotel, one train station, one bedroom, one restaurant one of anything does not makes us all Italians. There is nothing in this book that resembles "La Bella Figura," and I think to have printed in the back cover that Italy puts on a "seductive face for the "visitor" gives Americans a very bad name. I am not laughing at the insults and, if you allow me to give you true facts, I'll tell you. Ten days to see what? Lets have some real numbers, 85% of Italians have never seen an American nor a "visitor." That leaves 15% who might not share the same feelings and reduce the numbers by a 7%. The author talks about trains and train stations. There are over 320,000 passengers who on trains daily in Milan's Stazione Centrale; 120 million passengers a year. Stazione Centrale is also the home of "Freccia Rossa" and "Freccia Argento." Both of those trains take you from Milan to Neaples in THREE HOURS. Generally, the people in hotels in Italy are not Italians. 90% ot homes and apartments don't have the parquet. The have tiles, many of them washed every day. There is no one in Italy, that I know of, who would show you a chaotic bedroom. Are you kidding me? The author is. I have a lot of friends, cousins, aunts, a coupe of parents who live in Italy, and it seems to me that the author must have visited the only junky bedroom with computers in it in Italy. I am 50 years old, and I have been wearing a suit since I lived in Milan at the age of 17, right about Fiorucci was making a name for itself. There is so much more to say. But, if the reader wants to laugh at the way we Italians live life, you are not welcome, and we Italians do not put on a face for anyone.

About the author

beppe severgnini is a columnist for Italy’s largest circulation daily newspaper Corriere della Sera and covered Italy for The Economist from 1993 to 2003. He is the author of the international bestseller Ciao, America! He lives with his family in Crema, on the outskirts of Milan.