We've all heard colorful tales of mammoni—Italian mama's boys—but David Kertzer's story might take the grand prize. The cofounder of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Kertzer tells of a friend in Naples whose new husband asked her to cut his toenails. When she hesitated (rightly so), he explained that his mother had done it until they got married. They had married when he was thirty-two.
That's an extreme case of mammonism. Stefano Arena might be a more prototypical mama's boy. Arena, twenty-two, still lives with his mother, father and sister in an apartment in Milan. "My mom cooks for me and washes my clothes," he says. "She's the best mother in the world." He pauses. "I'm not just saying that because she's staring at me right now."
Or take Roberto DeLonghi. A 31-year-old from Naples, DeLonghi could do his own laundry; but when his mother offers, the prospect of neatly folded shirts and paired socks trumps any yearnings for independence.
They're not alone: Nearly 100 percent of Arena's and DeLonghi's friends still live at home. Studies show that a startling 82 percent of Italian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty live with their mothers. Italy has the highest percentage of what is called "intergenerational cohabitation" in Europe—one much higher than the norm in the United States, where the number stands around 40 percent, according to a recent European Community Household Panel Survey.
It's no wonder that Sigmund Freud, the father of mommy issues, was obsessed with Italy; he even had one of his first Oedipal dreams there. A century later, the image of the devoted Italian son, a perpetual failure-to-launch, still clings to the public imagination, while the image of his selflessly devoted mother pushes on.
But while we tend to assume that the boys stay home to avoid growing up, their mammas may actually be the ones blocking the door.
"My mother would be thrilled if I moved back home," says Enrico Moretti, a 38-year-old Milan native. "She'd boast about it to all her friends." Moretti should know. Now an associate economics professor at University of California, Berkeley, he coauthored the 2005 study, "Why Do Most Italian Young Men Live with Their Parents?" In other countries, having an adult child living at home makes parents question where they went wrong; Moretti and his colleague Marco Manacorda found that Italian parents are significantly happier when a child is living at home. The happiness of children, however, didn't seem to be affected.
So how do parents ensure that their children remain in the nest? "They bribe them," says Moretti. "They offer a free car, free rent, free food."
Not surprisingly, Stefano Arena's mother, Laura, disagrees and points to a sluggish labor market and sky-high rents to explain why sons stick around. "Is it my fault that apartments are expensive and jobs are scarce?" she asks. Like most relationships in Italy, however, this one seems codependent. "Since mammoni are loath to leave home, even for a job, the economy suffers," Moretti says. "And when the economy suffers, jobs are harder to find, so more children stay home."
Regardless of who is "at fault"—the sons, the mothers or the motherland itself—Italy's full-nest syndrome does have consequences. When children live at home longer, fertility rates decline, Kertzer says. Italy already has one of the lowest rates in all of Europe; by 2050, the median Italian age is projected to rise to fifty-four and the population to decline by nearly 15 million, according to the World Health Organization.
"Many Italian men don't even want their wives to have more than one child. They're worried they won't get the attention they're used to," Kertzer adds. "For their part, women, who have seen their brothers live at home until thirty-five, know how demanding children can be. They shy away from such heavy responsibility."
Consider Ambra Genovese, whose 26-year-old boyfriend Gianni still lives at home in Milan. "Although he'd never admit it, Gianni thinks that la moglia è come la mamma—"the wife is like the mother." I've seen how much his mother does—cleaning up after him, doing all the housework—and I don't want to follow in her footsteps," Genovese explains. It turns out that Italy has more than enough children; it's just that those children happen to be middle-aged men.
Fortunately, some Italian families manage to navigate the mother/son relationship on a more moderate course. Federico Ceretto lives with his girlfriend a few blocks from his mother in northern Italy. "My mother still offers to fix me dinner, and if I'm sick, she'll be here," he says. "Her availability is really sweet." At thirty years old, Ceretto would be labeled a mama's boy in the United States; in Italy, he is considered unusually independent. "Sure, I see my mother every day," he says, "but because I don't live at home, she doesn't have much say over what I do." (In other words, she's not the boss of him.)
As with many Old World traditions, mammonism has made the journey overseas. Diego Salvatore Segalini, a self-proclaimed mammone, was born and raised in Brooklyn; his mother, Maria, was born in Sicily. "When I went to college in Poughkeepsie, New York, I lived two-and-a-half hours from my mother," he says. "It felt like I was studying abroad." When Diego graduated, he "picked the closest point in Manhattan to Brooklyn, so I could be as close to her as possible." Now twenty-seven and engaged, he can detect mammoni traits surfacing in his work as a financial analyst. "I'm known as the sensitive guy who people can trust," he says. Like any good mama's boy, he's grateful to his mother. "She did a wonderful job raising me and taught me how to be compassionate, honest and caring." He also notes, somewhat wryly, that his fiancé is learning the true meaning of mammone. "Last New Year's Eve, she asked what we should do. I replied, 'What do you mean? We're going to my mother's!'"
