Smarter than the Italians
Petronella Wyatt examines the new and convincing evidence that Britain is a more cultured place than Italy — and France Ask any European what he or she associates with the British and their answers may include beer, football, yobbishness, a troubled monarchy and slavish support for President Bush. One of the replies they will not give, however, is ‘cultural life’. For it is indubitably true that we have, fairly or unfairly, the reputation as the Thick Man of Europe.
Our newspapers continually reinforce this notion with lightweight features on ‘celebs’ and mock horror tales about how few schoolchildren know who won the Battle of Trafalgar or who took part in the Battle of Hastings. Worse still, we read, many adults believe Shakespeare fought Hitler. Now an even more shocking truth has been thrust upon us.
According to a new survey, commissioned in Italy, the ignorant British are more cultured than the natives of the homeland of Michelangelo and Verdi. Commissioned by the Touring Club Italiano (TCI), the survey’s findings include the startling fact that we British go to more serious concerts, films, plays, galleries, museums and libraries than the Italians: 34.3 per cent of Britons went to the opera, ballet or theatre last year compared with just 22.7 per cent of Italians. We even visit more ruins and monuments. Indeed, we score higher than Italy in every category except sport. Almost a third of us have visited a gallery or a museum in the past year, compared with barely 20 per cent of Italians.
All this is hardly to be believed. Can our dire education system really have produced a nation of cultured thinkers? And if so, whence comes our reputation for philistinism? It is part of our national temperament, of course, to run ourselves down. George Orwell and the Bloomsbury group were scathing in their assessment of the British intellect. Sir Thomas Beecham famously remarked that the English may not like music but they love the sound it makes. Yet as H.L. Mencken pointed out, most intellectuals and artists denigrate their countrymen. They see it as their role to provoke, insult and create controversy. They exist to challenge the complacent status quo.
On the other hand, could this survey be some sort of joke? I telephoned John Julius Norwich, the historian and fund-raiser for Venice. He assured me that the Touring Club Italiano was a distinguished organisation which is responsible for all the most detailed guide books on Italy. But could he give credence to the idea that the British are more cultured than the Italians? Surprisingly, he could. ‘I’m always amazed by the number of well-dressed Italians I see in first-class train compartments reading comic strips,’ he told me.
This is not to deny that Italy is abnormally rich in culture, but it appears Italians care little for it. One of the few organisations dedicated to restoration in Italy is Fondo per l’Ambiente Italia, founded in 1975. But many people, including Guido Venturini, the director-general of TCI, argue it was all too little, too late. ‘We are sitting in the most beautiful country in the world, but the Italians appear to be wholly unaware of it.’ There is no equivalent of the National Trust. As Lord Norwich points out, Italy’s preservation bodies do not own their properties ‘which makes it difficult to make longterm plans about restoration’. Nor do they have the money. The Italians are now appealing for foreign funds to excavate artefacts buried under the ash at Heraculaneum.
So why are we British regarded as stupid? Lord Norwich believes that the British reputation for philistinism derives from the fact that most of the English tourists Europeans see are football hooligans. ‘We are the worst ambassadors for our country, when actually we do go to more museums.’ He adds, ‘Our middle classes are generally cultured. You follow your parents and your grandparents.’ This is borne out by David McNeill of the Arts Council. ‘There is a perception that we are uncultured. But it is a myth,’ he insists. ‘There is increasing participation in the arts in this country. Gallery and theatre attendences are rising. They are on the up all the time. The British are also much more open to new things.’ Since 2001 four out of five people have attended at least one arts event, compared with two out of five in Italy. Christopher Millard, the director of communications at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, points out that 326,000 people attended the opera or ballet last year. He also points to the huge success of country house opera not only Glyndebourne, but Garsington and Grange Park.
John Allison, the editor of Opera magazine, believes Italy is going through ‘a cultural trough, Berlusconi-style’. The Royal Opera House puts on more performances than La Scala. During the 1960s Harold Wilson’s subsidising of the arts made opera a popular art form with every socio-economic class. Then there was the great opera revival of the 1980s, fuelled by a rapidly growing economy. Regional companies like Opera North and the Welsh National Opera have enjoyed a remarkable success. Outside London there is a real cultural interest in the art form, which is strangely lacking in its birthplace.
One of the foremost historians of Italy, Denis Mack Smith, believes the Italians often take their culture for granted and are ‘less educated musically than the English’. Italy’s cultural consumption is falling dramatically and is a source of concern to many Italians. Part of the problem is that Italy’s stagnant economy has caused the government to cut art subsidies to a lower level than those in Britain. Yet that is not the only reason. After the death of Puccini in 1924, many opera houses were turned into cinemas. Good films were made by Visconti, Fellini and De Sica, but Italy never created a home-grown cinematic industry. Thus the staple cinematic diet was poor Hollywood fare. More and more opera houses closed as the population turned to pop music, television and football.
Now Italians are more likely to burn down their opera houses than visit them. The destruction of La Fenice in Venice was found to be arson. The government pledged to rebuild this jewel by 2000. It failed. Other than La Scala there are 13 subsidised opera houses — the financing of which Berlusconi intends to stop. They remain dark most nights of the year, while monuments and museums are left to crumble or are turned into fast-food outlets. Not since the Renaissance have the Italians been in the cultural forefront. Cicero and his peers would not recognise the modern Romans — who are not their descendants, in any case, but the descendants of barbarians and slaves who overran an empire. They are more interested in cutting a bella figura in a new suit or a flashy car than listening to bel canto.
We British, meanwhile, read 15 per cent more books than the Italians and buy 22 per cent more classical CDs. (There is no Italian Classic FM.) Lord Norwich believes this is partly due to the proliferation of regional universities, there are 50 per cent more here than in Italy. David McNeill believes we are no longer ‘nervous about culture’. He adds that the British have been ‘too hard on ourselves and we have the tendency to take the mick out of pretension. Yet the barriers are being eroded all the time.’ But is it the case that the British have for centuries been more cultivated than our European rivals, especially the French, give us credit for? Roy Porter’s book The Enlightenment, published in 2000, claims that the British have always had their thinking caps on. In the 18th century, the British avant-garde was admired not only at home but abroad. Nor did Britain constitute a network of persecuted rebels or underground authors, as in France and Germany. Our contribution to the Enlightenment was immense, fuelled by the thoughts of such men as Newton, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Hume, Hutton and, later, Jeremy Bentham. Not for nothing did Dr Johnson call the period ‘an age of authors’.
Culture flourished partly because formal censorship in Britain had ceased in 1695. Ambrose Philips’s magazine the Free-Thinker was launched in 1718. The French philosophes looked to us as the birthplace of contemporary culture. Voltaire in his Lettres saluted England as a ‘nation of philosophers’. Francis Bacon was the prophet of modern science, Newton had revealed the laws of the universe, Locke had demolished Descartes and rebuilt philosophy. Later, Diderot remarked, ‘In England, philosophers are honoured, respected, they rise to public offices, they are buried with kings.... In France warrants are issued against them.’ A constitutional monarchy and increasing social mobility contributed to the dissemination of culture. England in the 18th and 19th centuries experienced profound population growth, urbanisation and a commercial revolution marked by rising disposable income. Foreigners were astounded to see how the ‘quality’ mingled with the rest at places like Vauxhall and St James’s Park. The Abbé Prevost marvelled at the coffee-houses, which he called ‘the seats of English liberty and thought’. London had ten times more coffee houses than Vienna and more clubs for the cultured middle classes — such as Johnson’s Literary Club — than any other European nation. We also built more theatres and more art galleries. Founded in 1769, the Royal Academy held annual exhibitions whose appeal was enormous: 1,680 visitors jammed into Somerset House one Friday in 1769 for the RA show. In 1753, the British Museum was the first public museum in Europe intended for the use of the masses.
Nor should we forget the role of the rise in print culture. Between 1660 and 1800 over 300,000 pamphlets and book titles were published. Even the poor country people, commented James Lackington in the 1790s, ‘shorten the winter nights’ by reading Fielding and Richardson. The annual total sale of newspapers in 1801 had reached 16 million. Increase in general prosperity buoyed up the market and helped the spread of British literacy.
We must not ignore the part played, however, by the maligned English aristocrat, usually portrayed as a buffoon who preferred claret and horses to art. The British upper classes were, in fact, the best-travelled in Europe. Some, surprisingly, went abroad specifically to hear opera. In 1733 Earl Stanhope wrote from Milan, ‘Opera is the chief entertainment of all English strangers here.’ Sir Francis Dashwood, builder of one of the finest Palladian houses in England, was moved to form the Dilettante Society for the discussion of culture. Sir William Hamilton’s art collection was one of finest in Europe. Most Canaletto views of Venice were bought up by the British — among them, those now at Woburn.
It is an irony, therefore, that it is Italy that should have commissioned this survey of European culture, and an even greater irony that the country of blue-painted savages it once subjugated should come out on top. It might also have the added advantage of silencing the French un peu. The Italian embassy in London, incidentally, declined to comment. No one there even knows the name of one of their country’s cultural bodies. A case of finita la musica?
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