Anyone who has seen Titian's sumptuous painting The Worship of Venus might think that it is the ultimate expression of the Italian love for children. We are so used to tender Italian Renaissance images of infants-their tiny, chubby hands grasping a maternal breast, their dimpled pearly limbs-that we tend to think that it has remained a constant. Visitors to Italy, bewitched by the ease with which small children are accommodated and tolerated in restaurants, tend to believe the same thing. Surely this is the best country in the world to have a child, or to be one?
Until recently, I agreed. Charmed by the way our baby daughter enjoyed a triumphal procession down the main street of Cortona, with people stopping every few yards to pinch her cheeks and exclaim at her beauty, we thought of abandoning frigid Britain and moving there. After all, I spent my childhood in Italy, and my parents still live there. It is where I have set my new novel, the place I still think of as home. Wouldn't it be lovely to give our children the same sense of paradise-of being greeted everywhere with enthusiasm?
But there were too many facts and experiences that kept popping up to spoil this picture-chief of which was the exceptionally low Italian birth rate. Where two, or even three children are the norm amongst English families, Italian couples tend to have just one. Or none. The only Italian woman I know with three children is married to an Englishman. She is pitied as a sort of deluded drudge for this by her countrymen. I myself, with only two, am often told what a big family I have. Unlike the Chinese, the Italians have not needed a law passed to force them to have only one child. Despite the Pope's refusal to countenance contraception, they are no longer philoprogenitive.
I wonder whether, in fact, they ever were, and whether it is not the British, with our unlimited capacity for self-castigation, who are the true child-lovers of Europe. The writer Tim Parks, an Englishman married to an Italian, tells in Italian Neighbours of local astonishment at their struggles to get their children to go to sleep by eight o'clock. If you go to Italy on holiday, you will see dozens of children still being dragged around at midnight, or slumped in buggies. The reason for this isn't that Italians adore their children so much they cannot bear to be parted from them: it is that getting children to have the right amount of sleep is seriously hard work. So is teaching them to sit still or learn table manners. After seeing the white faces and shadowed eyes of so many Italian children, I no longer think that keeping them up until they fall asleep from utter exhaustion is an expression of love and concern.
Then there are the shops. There's Benetton, which is colourful but expensive and shoddy, and Upim, cheaper and fussier. Italian children are dressed as dolls, not kids, because they aren't expected to run around and get dirty as ours are. The imaginative playgrounds we take for granted are hard to find in Italy; you're lucky to find one climbing frame and a couple of scabby old swings. Parks are virtually unheard of. The Borghese Gardens in Rome, the Tivoli Gardens outside it, the Boboli Gardens in Florence are glories of baroque landscaping, but not for children, with their long gravelled paths and strictly boxed-in lawns.
This lack of sympathetic imagination-or perhaps parental choice-is reflected in their toys, almost all made by one manufacturer, Chicco. Brightly coloured chunks of plastic with minimal educational or entertainment value, they pale beside those from Letterbox, Tridias or Early Learning Centre. The only wooden toy I've ever seen in 35 years of living and visiting Italy is a Pinocchio doll. The children's television programmes are sickly US imports of dismal quality, and their books no better. Despite the great tenderness, wisdom and insight of educational theorist Maria Montessori, Italians remain stuck on the story about a lonely old craftsman who longs for his wooden doll to come alive-a doll who yearns to become a real boy.
If you look at how Italians portray childhood to adults, it is as something as dark and embattled as the stories the younger Ian McEwan dreamt up (McEwan is one of the most popular British authors in Italy). A couple of years ago, Simona Vinci's A Game We Play caused a sensation by describing the way a group of adolescents, playing in a gang, escalated sex games with two ten-year-old girls into murder. Niccol?2 Ammaniti's I'm Not Scared tells of a nine-year-old boy's discovery of a kidnapped child. One of the best novels to have emerged from Italy in recent years, its depiction of the two children's courage, humanity and courtesy contrasts starkly with the brutality and cruelty of the parents. Perhaps all cultures now have a sense of their children living in peril. But few have sustained the myth of being exceptionally concerned and affectionate, while doing so little to celebrate and foster the qualities that once made Italy a home of what children most respond to: beauty, creativity, order and love.
