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According to William Keegan (the _Guardian_, 26 January) all of the Italians he encountered at a journalism seminar in Venice last week expressed sadness at Britain’s imminent departure from
the EU. That may apply to those whose job it is to observe and think about international relations but I’m not sure it still holds true in my neck of the woods — a semi-rural area in the
Sabine Hills north of Rome. If people even bother to consider Brexit here, it’s with a roll of the eyes and a wish not to hear any more about it. It wasn’t always like that. Four years ago
people began to ask me what was happening to England — always “England” rather than “Britain” — a country previously bracketed as safe, reliable and therefore not requiring scrutiny or
concern. My standard get-out reply, “It’s nothing to do with me, I’m Irish,” was treated with a wave of the hand, “England, Ireland, it’s all the same place.” Now, of course, people know all
about Scotland, Northern Ireland and the troublesome border with the Irish Republic. It reminds me of how we all gradually became familiar with the constituent parts of the former
Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. That’s not a flattering comparison and it’s not meant to be. An Italian friend of mine explained to me that he had always looked up to England as a country you
could rely on never to do anything crazy. Not like Italy where everything is always a shambles. For him, the very public playing out of Britain’s current identity crisis is like discovering
that a staid, respectable uncle is actually leading a shady double life. This is said with that touch of satisfaction that only comes from seeing a formerly exalted figure brought down to
size. The problem for Britain’s image abroad is that its own, uniquely strident, popular press, combined with the internet and particularly social media, means that partisan messages aimed
at domestic consumption are seen everywhere almost instantly. The _Sun_’s “Up yours Delors” headline played to a relatively small international audience in 1990. Today the situation is quite
different and many Europeans feel understandably insulted by the aggressive barrage of anti-foreigner rhetoric they see emerging from Britain. Naturally, it’s always the most egregious
examples that get the greatest coverage. And then there are the tub-thumping performances of pro-Brexit MEPs in the European parliament. Ringing with hubristic, nationalist pride, these are
redolent of a type of loud-mouthed populism all too familiar to most European countries but oh so terribly un-British, or so we all thought. When the Italian prime minister, Vittorio
Emanuele Orlando, broke down in tears at the Paris peace conference in 1919, the British delegation looked on in embarrassed contempt. To them, no doubt, it was a confirmation of the natural
order of things — the over-emotional, intemperate latins behaving to type while Anglo Saxons, with their resolute stiff upper lip, determined the fate of the world. Of course national
stereotypes are just a convenient shorthand, and are often inaccurate — for example, in my experience most Italians are actually quite reserved and extremely conscious of personal dignity.
But, once formed, these stereotypes are hard to shift. Hard, but not impossible.