What makes Italy Italy?

Why the country's unwritten rules matter as much as the written ones

Italy probably has more laws on its books than any other country in Europe.

There’s a law banning sand castles on one beach in Veneto. Another law, on Capri, prohibits people from wearing wooden clogs. Feeding pigeons or seagulls is illegal in Venice, goldfish bowls are banned in Rome, and a town near Naples even outlawed dying.

But I think the country’s unwritten rules are a lot more interesting than the written ones -- and just as important.

They’ve even become a sort of unofficial theme of The Italian Dispatch. By my count, around a third of the posts so far have touched on them in one way or another.

But one thing I haven’t written about as much is why this invisible rulebook is so important. Why should Italy residents, visitors, and would-be visitors care?

Peppino De Filippo and Totò at a coffee bar in the 1956 film La Banda degli onesti (The Band of Honest Men)

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Cultural identity

The most obvious answer is that understanding the rules makes it easier to avoid embarrassing missteps. If you know that the word vediamo (“let’s see”) or forse (“maybe”) really mean “probably not,” you’ll save yourself some confusion. If you understand the concept of ritardo strategico (“strategic lateness”), you’ll show up to dinner parties at the same time as everyone else.

These unofficial norms also help make sense of the culture, they decode how things work, help outsiders fit in, and they might even make navigating traffic easier.

But I think there’s a far deeper reason to try to understand and respect them-- they are what makes Italy Italy. They’re at the heart of the country’s cultural identity.

And you can feel what happens when they start to erode.

When a restaurant opens for dinner at 5 p.m., relies on tips to pay its staff, or posts big signs for its English-language tourist menu, something is lost.

A tourist menu in Pietrelcina (EJL photo)

When businesses choose to remain open through the lunch break, or when a small bookstore, cobbler, or stationary shop is replaced by another souvenir seller, the local fabric frays.

And when young people leave the country because they can’t survive on seasonal work or when neighborhoods get hollowed out to make room for Airbnbs, Italy takes another step toward becoming a theme park.

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The compass

I’ve argued that being fluent in the unwritten rules is at least as important to understanding Italy as speaking the language itself.

That contrast came up in a discussion with Italy’s Coffee Secrets. Afterwards, in the comments, reader

Franky Be

posted an analogy I like: speaking a language is like having a map, he wrote, and understanding the rules is like having a compass.

The compass...

The importance of that compass gets at why I keep coming back to this topic.

So much of life in Italy operates through context and nuance more than through explicit instruction. It’s not possible to issue objective guidelines about when to use ciao, buongiorno, or salve, or how to interpret a barista’s subtle nod from across the coffee bar, or how to cross a busy street without getting run over. You learn these things the way Italians do: by watching and participating in a culture where everyone else already knows them.

In the end, these rules that may look like colorful quirks work as mechanisms of social cohesion.

Italy works -- surprisingly well, given its bureaucracy -- because residents can coordinate without needing everything spelled out. Shared expectations connected to time, space, distance, tone, courtesy, and food are a cultural shorthand that should be protected. They simplify life in a place where written rules often make them more complicated.

When these shared understandings weaken, the cohesion weakens with it. It won’t happen overnight; it will be chipped away. And if it goes on for long enough, the country risks becoming a place full of cultural icons -- the Colosseum, Ponte Vecchio, the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- but with no culture.

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📌And another thing

There is not shortage of law books in Italy (Wikicommons photo)

Depending on how you count, Italy has something like two million individual, enforceable laws, decrees, directives, and ordinances on its books at some level -- national, regional, provincial, municipal. Many are contradictory, outdated, or difficult to understand or enforce.

Why so many? There are a few main reasons:

• Unification: Italy inherited Bourbon, Napoleonic, Savoyard, and Papal legal systems, creating many overlapping layers of laws.

• Instability: Italian governments rarely last long, and each legislates for the short term until the next government rewrites everything again.

• Exceptions: The rulebook is riddled with carve outs for trade unions, professions, industries, cities, and regions, each creating a new cluster of laws.

• Proliferation: There’s a saying in Rome that translates to, “For every problem there’s a new law, and for each law a new problem.”

• The end of the day: Most laws are written without a “sunset” clause that would make them expire after they stop being useful.

Why delve into formal, written laws in an essay about the importance of unwritten rules? Because the more complex and contradictory official rules are, the more essential it is to know how to work around them. That means that in Italy, understanding unwritten rules is more than just cultural literacy, it’s a survival skill.

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