In Italy, family is reckoned to be everything. You might say the Mafia is a grotesque parody of Italian family life. Food comes into it. A Cosa Nostra clan is often referred to as a cosca, after the Sicilian dialect for “artichoke”: families are as tightly bound to each other as an artichoke’s overlapping leaves. For rival clans, there is strength in numbers, so families had better be big. In 1988, in the old Mafia town of Giarre, I met the largest known family in Sicily. A non-Mafia clan, it consisted of ten males and ten females. The 50-year-old mother had been pregnant for 180 months of her life, and was worshipped locally as a sort of biological miracle. Unlike the Cosa Nostra, she gave the label “made in Italy” a good name.
Andrea Bajani, one of Italy’s brightest literary stars, has written a novel that scorns the family as an institution and all who defend it. The Anniversary, a bestseller in Italy, is narrated by a middle-aged Italian who has abandoned his parents in disgust. His father, a violent, inadequate man, runs the domestic life of the “ill-fated family” like a dictator, routinely beating his wife and wishing cancer on her best friends. (“He wanted her to be nothing so that he could be something,” we are told.) Unsurprisingly, the narrator has chosen not to see his parents in a decade. “They’ve been the best ten years of my life,” he lets on.