If I Was Born in Italy: Nonni, the Bell Tower, and Lunch at One

Imagine walking out of school at one o'clock and finding your grandmother waiting at the gate, as she does every day. She already knows what you will eat for lunch, because she has been cooking it since eleven. At home, your grandfather is reading the sports pages and complaining about the referee. If you were born in Italy, your nonni would probably be as present in your childhood as your parents, and nobody would find that unusual.

There is a reason for it. Italy is one of the oldest countries in the world: about one in four Italians is 65 or older, and women have on average fewer than 1.2 children. Fewer children, more grandparents, and very strong ties between the generations shape almost everything that follows.

Childhood & School: Oral Exams and the Maturità

School is compulsory from 6 to 16. Children spend five years in primary school, three in middle school (scuola media), and then choose a five-year upper secondary path at about fourteen: a liceo (classical, scientific, linguistic, artistic and others), a technical institute or a vocational institute. The choice is a big family decision, and switching later is hard.

• Talking your way through. Italian schools rely heavily on oral examination. Being called to the front to answer the teacher's questions in front of the class, the interrogazione, is a routine part of school life and a memory almost every Italian adult shares.
• The maturità. Upper secondary school ends with a national exam of written papers and an oral, scored out of 100, with 60 needed to pass. Officially called the esame di Stato from 1999 to 2025, it has gone back to its old popular name, esame di maturità. The day the first paper's essay topics are announced is national news.
• Grandparents as childcare. With school days that often end in the early afternoon and working parents, the gap is filled by nonni, who collect children, feed them and supervise homework.

Food & Rhythm: The Coffee, the Lunch, the Aperitivo

In 2025, UNESCO added Italian cuisine as a whole to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, joining the Mediterranean diet, which it recognised in 2010. Italians will tell you there is no such thing as "Italian food", only the food of a particular region, town or grandmother.

• Coffee at the bar. An Italian "bar" is mainly a café. You order an espresso (just "un caffè"), drink it standing at the counter in a minute or two, and leave. Cappuccino is traditionally a breakfast drink, usually with a pastry; ordering one after a big lunch marks you as a foreigner.
• Lunch matters. Pasta, then a second course, then fruit and coffee, at least on Sundays, when the extended family gathers around one table for hours.
• Aperitivo. In the early evening, friends meet for a drink such as a spritz or a Campari with soda, with small snacks, a ritual that spread from the fashionable cafés of 19th-century Turin, where modern vermouth was born, and Milan.

In Italy, a meal is less about eating than about staying: the table is where the family argues, makes peace and tells the same stories again.

Family Values: Living at Home Until Thirty

Young Italians leave their parents' home late. According to Eurostat, the average age was about 30 in 2025, compared with about 26 across the European Union. Foreign newspapers sometimes mock this with the word mammoni ("mama's boys"). Italians usually explain it differently: youth unemployment, short-term contracts, high rents and university close to home make moving out hard, and families see supporting adult children as normal rather than a failure.

The flow also runs the other way. Adult children often live a few streets from their parents, eat with them on Sundays and care for them in old age. Supporters see a strong safety net in a country with modest wages; critics argue that it delays independence and that the country's very low birth rate is partly a result of young people starting their own lives so late.

The Piazza and the Bell Tower

Most Italian towns grew around a piazza with a church and its bell tower, the campanile. From that tower comes the word campanilismo: an intense, sometimes comical attachment to your own town and its customs, and a matching suspicion of the next town over. You might be Italian, but first you are Florentine, Neapolitan or from a particular village, with your own pasta shape, your own dialect and your own saint.

• Many languages, one country. Standard Italian is spoken everywhere, but many people also speak a regional language, usually called a dialetto. The law recognises twelve historical minority languages, among them Sardinian, Friulian, Ladin, German, French and Slovene.
• Ferragosto. On 15 August, a holiday whose name comes from the Feriae Augusti of the Emperor Augustus, much of the country closes and goes to the beach or the mountains.
• Protected beauty. Article 9 of the Constitution commits the Republic to protect the landscape and the nation's historic and artistic heritage, and since an amendment of February 2022 the environment, biodiversity and ecosystems "in the interest of future generations".

Italy also has well-known difficulties. The south, the Mezzogiorno, has long had lower incomes and higher unemployment than the north, and many young graduates from both regions leave for jobs abroad. At the same time, Italy has become a country of immigration: about 5.4 million residents, roughly 9% of the population, were born abroad in 2024. The Italian classroom of today looks different from the one your grandparents knew.

Your Country vs. Italy

Italy combines long lives with very few births, and the numbers show it plainly. Pick your own country, or any other in the series, and compare.

Notice the pair of age figures: in Italy, people aged 65 and over outnumber children under 15 by about two to one. Compare that with Nigeria or Kenya, where it is the other way round, by more than ten to one.