What do foreigners think about Italy?

We analyzed three documents in order to answer this question. Specifically we analyzed a short video and two articles.

The short video, named “The World in 2 Minutes – Italy” shows a two minute long sequence of edited videos. The video displays a lot of stereotypes about Italy and Italians. The video-maker is not Italian: on his YouTube channel we can see he speaks Spanish. This is a useful information: this video is actually a montage that shows what foreigners think about Italy.

The list of stereotypes is long and contains Italian food, cars, politicians and many other peculiar habits. It could be useful to analyze the key-points of the montage: the first frames and the last ones.
The first part of the video is about Italians who are doing traditional dances. This seems to be the first characteristic of Italy, his strong bond with tradition. After a couple of traditional dances (or people dancing in general) it comes a sequence of Italian people beating up each other and swearing. Foreigners think that Italy is a place where people is used to swear and beat up other people. Anyhow the sequence of videos does not convey any sort of violence. It seems to convey uncaring attitude instead of violence.

The video goes on with a sequence of clips about Italian cars and mopeds, politicians and famous Italian people.

The last frames are about Mafia and soccer, two of the most frequent stereotypes about Italy. Particularly the last part of the montage displays Italian victory at the 2006 FIFA World Cup and Tiziano Crudeli, a soccer commentator, screaming “Goal!”

The two articles are taken from The Guardian (25 February 2014) and the New York Times (24 February 2014), two prestigious international newspapers. The argument of both articles is the recent achievement of Matteo Renzi who has just won Italian senate backing for his coalition government. Both articles are news stories. The use quotations of famous and significant people to value their information and to report the most realistic version of the fact. Renzi emerges as a young politician (he has never been in Parliament before), a demagogue who has great ideas but who does not seem to be able to put them into effect. Renzi made a one hour long speech in which he introduced his plans about the future of Italy. Matteo Renzi has been criticized because of his lack of details and the general mould of his speech. Marco Damilano, a political commentator from L'Espresso, said he spoke that way in order to empathize is role as outsider: he has never been so important in Italian politics so it's is not his fault if Italy is in such an alarming situation.

Generally Matteo Renzi's speech is told to be made for the TV viewer and not for the competent people: he spoke a lot but he didn't say nothing realistic and practical.

It seems that foreigners think that Italy is a place full of happy and uncaring people who like to dance and to sing but who is not able to manage themselves: Italians are only able to talk and talk actually saying nothing. Ridiculous politicians, and a nonsense long and complex bureaucracy are killing Italy. Food, cars and soccer are the main features of Italy.