Marriage Italian Style
They don’t make marriages like that anymore
The institution of marriage, after being quite stable for a thousand years, is undergoing radical change in Italy. This obviously has a great deal to do both with the role of the Church – or lack thereof – in modern Italian society and with the general social evolution of the West of which Italy is of course a part.
“Divorce Italian Style,” the film to which the title of this note makes indirect reference, won Marcello Mastroianni an Oscar nomination in the early 1960s. It was about the old kind of Italian marriage, one emphasizing the “till death do us part” aspect of the matrimonial rite, a “sacrament” in Catholic theology. As a sacrament, only God – and certainly not a mere judge – could disjoin a couple properly united in Holy Matrimony. The secular shortcut that provided the plot for the film was the homicide of one of the happy spouses.
In practice, there were many other more common alternatives. During a millenium of marriages that for the most part could not be undone, whether mistaken or not – though the rich and influential could often find a way (here) – Italy developed a wide range of other more or less socially acceptable coping mechanisms. The first and most striking of these was that absolute “physical fidelity” – not having sex outside of marriage – was not the bedrock of the relation. As an instance, taking and keeping lovers was, and to a slightly lesser degree still is, socially tolerated in Italy.
Many of these relations become stable over time and it is not really unusual to be presented to a wife or husband at one kind of quite formal affair and then to meet the “close friend” of twenty or thirty years at some other, more casual event. For Anglo-Saxons, these situations can create interesting problems of etiquette and tax even a fairly elastic memory.
It must be understood that this particular social freedom applied in a roughly equal way to both men and women – at least in the more civilized parts of the country – which if nothing else had the advantage of making the numbers come out right since it notoriously takes “two to tango”. Where it did not was in the unhappy rural South, caught halfway between the Moslem “purdah” tradition of North Africa and the licentiousness of urban and Northern Italy. The slack was taken up by a tolerance for “crimes of passion” in Southern Italy – but never in the North – and by peculiar conventions confirming male dominance, as in the Calabrian wedding portrait above with the man seated and the woman standing at his shoulder, ready to serve.
It should not be seen as a paradox that the advent in Italy of legal divorce – available since the mid-1970s, if difficult and costly to obtain – appears to be slowly having the effect of making sexual fidelity more important to the Italians. As “breaking up” becomes marginally easier, there is less reason to have to bear tolerance.
The really interesting thing about all this is that the single most impressive piece of data about marital trends since divorce became legal thirty years ago shows the institution of marriage itself falling dramatically out of favor. Simply, between 1975 and 2005 the number of marriages performed annually in Italy collapsed from 373,784 to 250,974. That is a steady drop over time of an average 1.1 percent a year.
In that same period, the number of legal separations has increased by 300 percent. In 2004 the courts conceded above 128 thousand divorces and separations, 352 a day or one every four minutes. The average age at marriage has also climbed sharply for both sexes; it is now 33.2 years of age for men and 29.9 years for women, increases of 7 and 5 years respectively over the last three decades.
Most of these numbers come from a recent study by the Rome-based think tank Eurispes. As is so often the case – but believing this is an “Upper Italy” vice – the most intriguing of all of their data are the lesser parts. Divorced men are somewhat more likely to remarry than divorced women – 7.7 percent and 6.6 percent respectively. This is probably not a significant difference, but Italian feminists – a rather small category – have explained that it depends on the “greater insecurity” of the males, who by remarrying “attempt to cancel their previous failure”. A greater surprise is that, in 10.5 percent of all marriages performed here, one of the spouses is not an Italian citizen.
Finally, another and rather more spectacular change has to do with the role of the Church, as mentioned at the beginning of this note. In the last thirty years the number of couples preferring a church to a civil wedding has crashed from 91.6 percent to 67.6 percent. A great part of the recent resurgence in the political activism of the Catholic Church in Italy has to do with the growing understanding that when the legal environment does not tend to obligate the Italians to behave as observing Catholics, they will not bother to do so.