Staying Home With Mamma

Jesus Emiliano Coltorti, a 25-year-old Roman actor, would love to move out of his mother's apartment in the city's fashionable Trastevere district and get his own place. His mother knows it, too. "I understand he's grown up and he will go away sometime," sighs Paola Sechi. "I just don't want to lose him."

Chances are, she won't. More than 70 percent of Italian sons under 30 live with their parents. And when Italian children do move out, they don't go far: nearly 43 percent of Italians between 18 and 64 live within a kilometer of their mothers. Street-corner sociologists deride the stay-at-home-with-mamma phenomenon as il mammismo, or "mamma's boy syndrome." They cite the culture of the strong Italian family--complete with overbearing mother and coddled son--as a reason for the rising incidence of mammismo.

But its real roots are economic. High rents, unemployment among Italy's young and paltry state services mean that Italian children are staying at home with their parents longer. In 1990 about 52 percent of Italians from 18 to 34 lived with their parents; in 1998 the percentage rose to nearly 59 percent. "Everyone I know would live alone if they could," says Raffaella Diamanti, a 33-year-old theater designer. "But the economy doesn't give them the chance."

Not yet, anyway. In a country where youth unemployment hovers around 32 percent, most of the jobs available for Italians in their 20s and 30s are temporary ones, lacking social benefits and job security. The average job hunt for young Italian adults takes about four years, according to figures released in May by ISTAT, Italy's national statistics institute. White-collar professionals like teachers and architects can expect to make about 2 million lire, or $955 a month. So it's hardly surprising that in big cities like Rome or Milan, where the smallest apartments can run 1 million to 1.5 million lire a month, few twentysomethings move out.

Most make peace with their situation. The most common reason given by young people living with parents, according to a 1998 report by ISTAT, is that they're happy with the living arrangement. "Their mothers service them and their fathers support them," says Chiara Saraceno, a social-science professor at the University of Torino. Marcello Magnano, a 34-year-old cab driver who lived at home until he married at 27, remembers that, thanks to his mother, "I did nothing at home--just made my bed."

With in-house service like that, why move out? Most universities don't have dormitories, so there's no place to go during college. Nor is there a tradition of roughing it as a poor student: "The idea that you might have a lower standard of living while you're studying isn't a part of youth culture in Italy," says Saraceno. And there's a cultural stigma against moving out: unless you live in the sticks where there is no university nearby, leaving your family to work or study is not acceptable to Italians. "People will say that something is wrong with your family, or your relationship," says Saraceno. The only legitimate reason to leave the family is marriage--something Italians are doing later and later.

Once they do marry and raise a family, women often end up caring not only for their children but for their parents as well. Daughters, in particular, serve as de facto social security for their aging mothers. Fifty-eight percent of grown Italian sons and 69 percent of daughters with infirm mothers see them several times weekly. It's overwhelmingly women who are picking up the slack for the state's lack of social benefits, cushioning the blow for unemployed sons, or nursing sick or aging parents. A 1998 ISTAT report showed that while a quarter of working men did nothing at home, the same number of working women put in an additional 40 hours of domestic labor. "There's a mommy economy at work in Italy, and there's a daughter economy too," notes Linde Laura Sabbadini, director of research at ISTAT. Italian women may despair at having to care for their children even after they're grown. But at least they can count on someone taking care of them when they get old.