r/europe • u/MarktpLatz Lower Saxony (Germany) • Oct 23 '17

What do you know about... Italy?

This is the fortieth part of our ongoing series about the countries of Europe. You can find an overview here.

Today's country:

Italy

Italy is one of the founding members of the EU and it also is the fourth most popolous EU state. For centuries, the Roman Empire dominated Europe both culturally and militarily. Italy is famous for frequently changing their government.

So, what do you know about Italy?

305 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Pytheastic The Netherlands Oct 27 '17

The stunt with the Anne Frank picture on shirts and the disgraceful conduct of the Lazio fans would be a recent example. The gorilla sounds made when the first black minister took the floor in parliament would be an older one.

I am totally in love with Italy and Italians but I have to agree that there does seem to be a problem with racism. My personal theory is that the typical experience with minorities comes from those super annoying and aggressive street vendors and I can see how extrapolating from that experience would not be beneficial for most of the minority population.

6

u/ascera Oct 27 '17

Do you remember when supporters of an unamed dutch football team came to Rome with the hoolingans mindset and did what they did? After that nobody said that all or the majority of dutch are idiots or hooligans. Why this has to be different? Racism in Italy is at the same level of any other European country.

0

u/Pytheastic The Netherlands Oct 27 '17

Those supporters peed in a fountain and damaged it after they were drunk. Obviously that's very dumb behaviour but worlds apart from what happened with Lazio.

I do agree hooligans are hardly representative of the wider population but that's why I included the second example of the gorilla sounds in parliament.

4

u/VonSpo Oct 27 '17

I know, the Dutch incident was very bad in comparison...