Italy’s Aging Bambini

Mauro Toro wanted the freedom to follow his dreams. So he moved in with his mother.

That meant he could sell his home and use the money to buy a 46-foot yacht. Now Toro, 35, spends much of his time sailing the Mediterranean, taking paying passengers on his own boat or working as a skipper on other vessels.

And aside from a few inconveniences, he really enjoys living with Mom.

“I like it that I don’t wash my clothes,” he explained. “I like it that if I don’t have dinner out, I can have dinner when I come home, without cooking. I like it that my bed is always made.”

Toro is a mammone, or “mama’s boy,” and more or less proud of it. He is part of a huge number of Italian singles in their 20s and 30s who live with their parents and see advantages in the setup for both generations, while finding nothing at all embarrassing about it.

Many Italians of all ages look favorably on such arrangements. Young men and women often find it difficult to earn enough to run their own household, while parents like to have their children at home even after they are grown.

Italy’s highest appeals court created an uproar this year, however, by taking things one step further. Ruling in favor of an adult son who sued his estranged father for support, the court declared that the parent had not just a social but also a legal duty.

Still, it isn’t the law that nurtures this form of family togetherness.

Challenged by the youth revolt of the 1960s and ‘70s, the Italian family adapted rather than stand rigidly by its traditions. The under-30s of 1968, the watershed year of rebellion, and their children have together constructed a new pattern that preserves the family’s central role in Italian life by offering stay-at-homes unprecedented freedom, plus enormous economic and personal benefits.

In other Western European countries such as Germany, France and Britain, it is far more common for young adults to move out and live on their own. The new Italian pattern became standard over the last decade or so partly because it helps ease other problems: Rents are up, university graduates have greater difficulty finding good jobs, and young adults spend more years in school.

As a result, 59% of Italians ages 20 to 35 live with their parents, according to government statistics, up from 46% a decade ago. The trend coincides with a plummeting Italian birthrate, now less than 1.2 children per woman, which itself is partly a result of later marriages.

This all forms an interlocking pattern--what some might call a vicious circle. It’s hard to get a good job and strike out on your own. Life with your parents can be very pleasant, with no restrictions, so there’s less incentive to leave. And if you’re not married, the thinking goes, you might as well stay in the nest.

“It’s very comfortable to continue to live with Mom and Dad, because they are taking care of everything and you ... are free,” said Rossella Palomba, a demographer with the Institute for Population Research and Social Policies in Rome.

“You can go out in the evening whenever you want,” she said. “You can meet your girlfriend or boyfriend at home. Of course the parents know of this moment of intimacy, and they are not against it. So you are completely free.... You are really a kind of king in the house.”

In the old days, young Italian women often lived at home until they were married, generally needing permission to go out at night. Many saw marriage as their only way to escape parental control. A man living at home often had to accept his father’s advice--or orders--at a family business or farm. Although families were close, there was rarely any doubt that the older generation was firmly in charge.

So one might wonder what, exactly, the parents get out of the new arrangement.

Domenico De Masi, a sociologist at the University of Rome, said he sees the relationship between generations as a fairly straightforward trade. Using the amount a child would otherwise typically pay monthly for rent and food, he said: “The parents ‘give’ $1,200 to their children, and the children give company to their parents. It’s an exchange of sentiment for money. It’s prostitution.”

Avoidance of solitude is the key issue, he said. And given the lingering influence of old attitudes, for many middle-aged Italians that means not simply having a spouse around but ensuring that the younger generation stays in the picture.

“The fear of being alone arises for an Italian couple while they’re still young, while for an American couple the fear of solitude comes when they’re old,” he said. “A young American couple doesn’t make an investment in sentiment. They make their investment in the Dow Jones and Nasdaq.”

In the United States, many people expect that they might spend their final years in a senior citizens home, and they need to save up the money to do this. But in Italy, that is seen as shameful.

“Even today, to send your own parents to an old people’s home is considered despicable, deplorable, something that should not be done, because the old folks should stay with you as long as they live,” said sociologist Franco Ferrarotti.

Palomba added, however, that for the stay-at-homes, she sees “some side effects, because of course you are still a child.”

“Your level of psychological independence, autonomy, is not so high,” she said. “So for everything, you still ask your parents for suggestions and support.”

Tommaso Genovese, 33, a businessman who has always lived with his mother except when residing or traveling abroad, said he thinks that all mothers love their children but that Italian mothers are more possessive--and they never stop seeing their sons as “my baby, my bambino.”

“It’s a nickname for a son,” he said. “Let’s say if she’s talking to you about me: I’m her bambino. ‘Mio bambino.’

“They would like to run your life forever,” he added. “She wants to know what I do, who I see. If I’m late, she’s going to call me: ‘Where are you? Why are you so late?’ ”

His mother’s place is in the coastal town of Anzio, a two-hour commute from Rome, where Genovese works, so he doesn’t go home every night, staying instead with his girlfriend in the capital. He and his mother use the phone to keep in touch.

“If she calls me too much, it annoys me,” he said. “If she doesn’t call me, I’m upset. Sometimes she lets two or three days pass without calling me, and when she does, I scream at her, ‘Why you don’t call me?’ Well, she’s getting old, so sometimes I get worried.”

Luigina Giacomo is a farmer’s daughter who went off to university, returned home for several years and now lives independently in Rome. She thinks that ultimately, the social rebellion of the ‘60s not only failed to bring the unlimited personal liberty many had sought but in some ways also backfired by making it more comfortable for young adults to stay at home.

“Of course it’s true that the children, after 1968, wanted to break the walls down, do what they want, not be obligated to do what their parents wanted them to do,” said Giacomo, 36. “But the parents take in their children whatever happens. If you’re a woman and you have a child and you’re not married, it’s not a problem, because in the end the parents are always ready to take their children back home.”

The children “don’t need to think about growing up or taking responsibility,” she said. “In a way, it became a backward revolution.”

Other features of Italian society reinforce the trend.

As more young people attend university, the years it typically takes to graduate have stretched out, with schools often considered “parking lots” for people who can’t find proper jobs. Employers prefer to hire graduates in their late 20s, when they are more mature, rather than offering the good jobs to people who zip through their schooling.

Meanwhile, the unemployed students mostly live at home.

“Things are not really changing, because the umbilical cord with the original family has not been cut,” Ferrarotti said. “The mama, the mother, is still there. Actually, she’s a terrible meddler. It’s a subterraneous but powerful influence.”

Many Italians feel that parents have a duty to support their children throughout the long growing-up and job-hunting process.

Even so, many felt that the top appeals court was out of line in its April ruling requiring a prosperous father to support his son.

“You cannot blame a young person, particularly from a well-off family, who refuses a job that does not fit his aspirations,” the court said in its verdict.

Most comment on the case was critical of the court for seeing support as a legal duty and of the son for suing. At the same time, many Italians say the father should have simply supported the son while he pursued further studies and hunted for a truly attractive job.

“I believe that if someone wants to keep on studying and doesn’t have work, it’s right for the parents to support him,” said Maria Cristina Del Vecchio, 61, who has two adult daughters living at home.

One of those daughters, Paola Onorati, 37, said that after attending university, she returned to her family’s spacious home in the small town of Montelanico because to her it was “a sort of paradise.”

“First of all, we like to stay with our parents,” she explained. “For us, the family represents everything.”

She also doesn’t earn enough money at her office job to live alone.

“Even if I had a good salary, I probably would not have a chance to live in a house like this one,” she said. “Most young people in Italy don’t have a good job, so they can’t afford to live alone [or] to start a new family.”

Being at home is also “a way to make our traditions live as long as possible,” Onorati added. “For example, my mother can cook traditional dishes from our small village, or prepare some special wine or special liqueur that they usually made probably 200 years ago. It’s not because she wants me to become a very good housewife but just because it’s a way to say, ‘These are your origins, these are your traditions, so you have to keep them.’ ”

Del Vecchio said it is “mostly the emotions” that she likes about having her daughters living at home. Onorati “fills the house,” she said. “When she’s not here, you notice right away. Waking up, you can tell if she’s here or not.”

Mauro Toro, the son who sold his house and bought a yacht, said even though he chooses to live with his mother, she likes to give him a hard time. In a conversation one day, she showed what he meant.

“When he comes home [from a sailing trip], he brings a huge bag of dirty clothes,” complained Maria Toro, 58.

“In the winter, the bad thing is he wakes up at noon,” she added.

“That’s not true,” Mauro Toro interjected.

“I call him and I say, ‘Are you coming home for lunch?’ and he says: ‘Leave it alone. When I come, I’ll eat,’ ” she continued.

Still, Italian mothers “are tied to their children,” she said. “The ways of an Italian mom and an American mom aren’t the same. I know about American women from reading the newspaper. An Italian mom worries, and helps her children, including unmarried children. She follows them closely even if they’re older, because they also remain more tied to us.”

Maria Toro said she herself thinks that what she’s doing “is wrong, because a child remains used to having things this way.”

“They don’t grow,” she said. “They don’t become mature.... It’s not because I want to be a good mother. It’s simply we’re together, and you just do it. But the children don’t appreciate it.”

That forced Mauro Toro to protest again: “Yes, I do!”