ITALY: key ingredients, according to tim parks

On The New York Reviews of Books, Tim Parks lists the key ingredients of Italy - these are the structural reasons why Italy cannot possibly change:

• "A tradition of regional rather than national loyalties (exacerbated by the fact that government is actually strongly centralized); a high level of organized (but not ordinary) crime;
• the power of the family in every sphere of life, but notably the economy
• the melodramatically assertive tone of the labor force in all professional, commercial, and unionized sectors, whether they be taxi drivers, pharmacists, or steelworkers;
• a flare for making life complicated through bureaucracy and then for overcoming complication through evasion and petty corruption;
• A multitude of political parties with strong ideological or regional leanings; 
• A Church with a propensity to undermine rather than reinforce people’s loyalty to the state; 
• A tendency in general to foment and then thrive on a gap between the official version of events and their actual course, between rules and practice, appearance and reality."

Cul-de-sac.

Read the entire article here