Three Things Italy Sucks At

The list of things Italy always comes out on top is staggering - food, wines, sports cars, art, heritage sites, opera, design, fashion, countryside, seaside, you name it. However, there are three specific areas where one can’t help but notice that Italy actually sucks. Let’s take a look at them starting from the bottom.

#3 Modern Pop Culture.

Aside from its glorious traditional music, if you look at Italian rap, rock, dance (if any) and pop music Italy ranks incredibly poorly. One of the reasons for that, in our view, is that modern music - blues, R&B, rock ‘n roll, jazz, dance, pop and so forth - was mainly born in the US and the UK. From the very beginning, for countries like Italy whose language wasn’t English, making music essentially meant aping American or British singers and musicians. Needless to say that the same goes for the other crucial form of pop culture - TV.

#2 RESPECT FOR WOMEN

The issue is very delicate and the views on the topic are strong and very divisive. So let’s just cast them aside for a moment, and let’s take a look at a the latest survey on rape run by ISTAT, the main producer of official statistics in Italy. According to this survey 20% of Italians think that actually the way women dress is to blame when it comes to rape, and 17% deem it right for husbands to check on their wives’ phones and social media, and 40% of men think that a woman can stop a rape, if she really wants. The latest news seems to back up this disgrecaful Italian trend. Not far from Venice a jilted man kidnapped his girlfriend, stripped her naked and forced her to walk for hours in the woods.

#1 Red Tape

Everyone who has spent some time in Italy knows this - bureaucracy is a nightmare. One fact sums it up quite nicely: Italians spend 400 hours in a line per year. That means 16 days every year spent at public offices to get all sorts of documents, stamps or even to pay bills. On average that amounts to 5 years spent in a line in a lifetime.

To make things worse, there is the fact that the majority of people in Italy still pay their bills at postal offices.