>Being French and having lived in Italy for 18 years, I have been able to get some good experience of Italy and Italians. So I’m going to describe Italians from a French point of view. The other way around will no doubt be taken care of by Italians!
>Compared to the French, Italians are loud, approximate, impatient, and most of all, very individualistic. I think that this last one is due to the fact that Italy has not been a nation for a long time. As a result, in the twenty first century, Italians don’t really have that sense of belonging to the Italian nation. People from one region continue to have a lot of mistrust towards people of other regions. Actually, they mistrust just about everybody outside their own home. You can see that, for example, in the governments that don’t resist more than one year or two. And that is sad, because this is what is keeping them from shining as a nation, which they otherwise would be quite capable of.
>Italian administration is lacking organization. But, Italians in general are disorganized. This probably stems from the fact that they don’t trust one another; collaboration is next to impossible. This is slowly improving, but they still are decades behind. When I first took home in Italy, just getting a phone line and electricity turned out to be a challenge. I won’t even mention the more complicated things as residence, tax, insurance and so on. A nightmare.
