Italy - People
The population of Italy was 62,246,674 (according to a July 2018 US Government estimate. Italy, with a population of 60 million people, has a pet population of 60 million and more than three out of ten Italian families own at least one pet. As a result of Italy’s changing demographics, family structure and regard for animals, the role of pets has changed over the years. This increased number and importance of pets translates into greater care and higher expenditures for food, health, accessories, and services. The pet care market also continues to benefit from increased attention to the wellbeing of pets, which are increasingly considered as family members.
Italy is a country of remarkable diversity and contrasts. There are the Alps and Apennines. the northern plain and the Riviera. There are people whose mother tongue is French or Germnan in addition to those who grew up with a regional variety of Italian or one of the mutually unintelligible Italian dialects. There are a multiplicity of cities, each with its own tradition.
Despite this diversity and frequenrt political and economic crises, observers continue to marvel at Italy's capacity for social and cultural resiliency andi continuity. The divisive potential stemming from diversity is contained and tempered by such shared cultural patterns as an admiration for urban life and an enduring loyalty to region and to familly. These patterns have enabled the Italians to cope with the challenges of massive migration, secularization andi changes in women's social position.
In August the Italians celebrate Ferragosto (officially August 15), the Italian nationwide vacation. Many churches in Italy believe that August 15, the feast day of the Assumption of Mary, is the day when Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, died. But her body was not subjected to the usual process of physical decay but was “assumed” into heaven and reunited there with her soul. The date is actually an ancient tradition that can trace its roots to the days of Emperor Augustus (63 BCE-19 CE) who proclaimed it an annual celebration and day of rest following the traditional harvest. During the Fascist era, the Italian government offered citizens incentives to travel for Ferragosto by offering discounted train fair. It was during this period that the holiday became such an important date on the calendar for the Italian people. By the 1960s, Ferragosto had become a highly popular holiday and cultural phenomenon.
Since 1870 when Italy was united and became a nation, one of the biggest problems for the government has been the problem of the South. The Italian word for the South is the "Mezzogiorno" or "the middle of the day" which refers to the heat of the sun burning down relentlessly on Southern Italy, drying up the already exhausted land.
Southern Italy is quite different from Northern and Central Italy: it is much poorer in natural resources now, although in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was rich and fertile; the climate is more extreme; and the history of the South has been different from the rest of Italy.
Different historical influences must have made for differences in the development of the people of the "two Italles." Ethnically, the two groups have different roots. North and Central Italy were settled by Teutons, Gauls, Etruscans and Asians. The South was settled by ancient Greeks and Carthaginians. Southern Italy, like the North, was part of the Roman Empire, but at that time was a flourishing center of Greek culture, rather than Roman.
After the fall of Rome, Southern Italy was deeply influenced by, Moslem culture; Moslems actually occupied Sicily for several centuries and their influence reached to the gates of Rome. Meanwhile North and Central Italy were influenced by the Church and the Holy Roman Empire of Northern Europe. After the Moslems were expelled from Sicily by the Norse, Southern Italy was at different times under Preach, Spanish or Austrian control until unification, completed in 1870. These monarchies had some effect upon the rest of Italy, occupying various duchies in the North from time to time, but the effect was not so profound as upon Southern Italy where their rule was longer and tighter.
Whether or not these differences account for the different "mentalities" of the North and South is open to question. The Southerner is less practical than the Northerner; he is more concerned with power than with money; he is more satisfied with gestures than with deeds. The "Mezzogiorno" puzzled and continues to puzzle the government and everyone who tries to raise the standard of living in Southern Italy.. Most sociologists and governmental exports agree that the problem is not explained merely by geography, climate and history.
By the 1870s Italian immigration to the New World (both to the United States as well as to Argentina, amongst other South American countries) began to increase. Indeed, some of the “fathers” of modern Italy spent time in the United States. Garibaldi spent enough time in the U.S. to gain a U.S. passport, and was offered a commission in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. The primary forces motivating Italian migration at its height from 1880 to 1920 were overpopulation, agricultural depressions, and discontent among the contadini, the "peasants."
The vast majority of Italian immigrants came from the poverty stricken south of Italy, that the area south of Rome, including the island of Si cily. Emigration from these parts was the only effective way Italians found of dealing with the poverty of Southern Italy. Obviously, it was a real solution only for those who left. Without land reform, irrigation, education and industrial development as well as new ways of thinking, the peasants of Southern Italy continued to live in abject poverty. Since the end of the Second World War, money had been poured into Southern Italy by the government and some of these changes have been accomplished, although more slowly and less completely than was originally envisioned by the government. There were therefore many Italians who were impatient with the slowness of the progress being made at home and they moved to the industrialized north of Italy or to other countries in Western Europe and North and South America.
Internal migration includes long and short distance moves, intra- and inter-provincial moves, and intra- and inter-regional moves. It has overwhelmingly been a move from agriculture, from the poorest areas of Italy, and from areas with the highest rate of natural increase and the highest rate of unemployment. It has resulted in the depopulation of mountain communes in both the Alps and the Apennines. A sense of foreboding hangs over Italy’s mountainous heartland. In the central regions of Lazio, Umbria and Marche, inhabitants increasingly are fatalistic about their prospects and mistrustful of government. Tourists see the pastures of sunflowers and poppies, abundant vines, rows of ancient olive trees and medieval hilltop stone towns but not the hard-scrabble day-by-day existence to get by. The inhabitants have battled for years to offset the decline in commercial agriculture, desperately exploring ways to refashion the area as arts venues, tourist destinations and centers of artisanal trades and crafts. The 2008 financial crash sent the regional tourism industry into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover fully.
Such massive migration has not been without its costs to participants and to their old and new communities. Until the mid-1960s migration was illegal because the fascist laws had not yet been repealed, and officially the migrants needed a job to get housing and housing to get a job. Rural migrants often ended up in dilapidated and crowded downtown housing or shantytowns (called “coreas” because of their notoriety during the Korean War) on the city outskirts. Shantytowns lacked sewage systems, electricity, Italy is also impacted by population movements, with an increasingly large population being rescued at sea by vessels. Migrants to Italy are now totalling close to half a million people. Less than 10% of migrants qualify as refugees as they are mainly economic and climate migrants, moving from areas of drought and desertification. UNHCR estimates that 129,000 people arrived by sea to the European shores in 2017 (as of 12 September). In 2016, 181,000 people arrived to the Italian shores via the Mediterranean Sea.
In Southern Italy in much of the 20th Century, the status of women was typical of most peasant societies. A woman's sole function after marriage was to bear and rear children. Her single most valuable attribute before marriage was virginity. The concept of a wife is not as a life's companion or the object of a man's love; but rather as a housekeeper and mother. Often marriages were arranged; thus the ideal of a love relationship was understandably foreign to Southern Italians. What other cultures consider the rewards of a male-female relationship were almost completely lacking. There were no "couples", as North Americans understand the term, who plan and live many aspects of their live; together. In Southern Italy, the father lived his life, the mother lived hers. They come together for the mist elemental of purpose: to create a family. As marriage, motherhood and a large family was almost the only road to status for women, it is understandable that they had many children.
Replacement levels of fertility were reached in parts of the North beginning with the 1910 birth cohort, while as late as the early 1980s the TFR in a number of southern regions still stood above replacement. By the century’s end, Campania (centered on Naples), although still having the highest fertility in the country, had a TFR of only 1.5. Remarkably, Sardinia, known for its economic underdevelopment, rugged terrain, and traditionalism, and which in 1960 had the highest TFR in Italy (3.5), as might comfortably comport with both economic and SDT theory, had Italy’s lowest fertility (1.04) by the end of the century.
The deep drop of the fertility rate in Italy to among the lowest in the world challenges contemporary theories of childbearing and family building. Among high-income countries, Italy was presumed to have characteristics of family values and female labor force participation that would favor higher fertility than its European neighbors to the north. We test competing economic and cultural explanations, drawing on new nationally representative, longitudinal data to examine first union, first birth, and second birth. Analysis finds some support for economic determinants of family formation and fertility, but the clear importance of regional differences and of secularization suggests that such an explanation is at best incomplete and that cultural and ideational factors must be considered.
Second Demographic Transition (SDT) theorists pointed to a shift in cultural values linked both to a move away from familism toward self-realization and a shift from religious attachments toward secularism. The fact that by the early 1990s Italy and Spain emerged as the countries with the lowest fertility proved a major surprise, if not an embarrassment. No official population forecast, either national or international, had anticipated a total fertility rate of 1.2 for any country, much less for Mediterranean countries, which are still commonly viewed as “laggards” and family-oriented.
Italy’s regional differences are tapping contextual effects that are not captured by existing economic or SDT theory and may be rooted in social networks, provision of local public services, availability of kin, and, especially, sociocultural norms regarding family building.
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