Lechery

In Britain, the focus has been on Berlusconi romping back to power a few weeks back. Much more interesting is the progress made by the Northern League up here in the Po Valley.

A foamingly right wing party, they captured 10% of the national vote, and much more than that here in Piemonte and the surrounding regions. They're anti-immigration (most Italian parties are anti-immigration, but they go further by being anti-EU immigration too), anti-gay, pro-death penalty and support the partition of Italy into a rich north and poor south. If they stood in the Home Counties of England, they'd win every seat by a landslide.

Anyway, the rather spurious point to all this is that Italy, particularly small town Italy, is a remarkably conservative country, especially when it comes to matters of society.

In the ideal Italian household, the man would go out and work, whilst the woman tended the house and spawned heirs. In the evening, the husband would come home and take the family round to Mamas (always, note, his mamas), where they'd be fed and have their laundry lovingly washed and pressed.

In the youth, this is reflected in a bazaar relationship between the sexes, in which your perfumed, flouncing, Italian Manchild spends his days leaching fiercely at anything even remotely female. The girls buy into this with the kind of rampant 'don't ask me, I'm just a girl' twittering that would have Germaine Greer reaching for her revolver.

I had this explained to me by a charismatic young vineyard owner (who had seduced one of my colleagues by pumping her full of premium Barolo ). "God gave me eyes! I'm Italian, I use my eyes to look at every woman! It means nothing, it is just for pleasure". Italian women don't so much wear their hearts on their sleeve as their aspirations on their arse. 'Slut', 'Goddess' and, the starkly blunt, 'Rich' are just three of the slogans I've seen pumping plumply up the Vias of Knockers this week.

This attitude is fairly alien to the British (at least the southern English, for whom the fear of social embarrassment means we need to twat down at least a bottle of wine before we'll talk to anyone who wasn't introduced to us by a member of our family) and it does have an enticing air of freedom and liberation about it. Until you realise that the whole shallow dance continues a culture in which men are (effeminate) men and woman are in the kitchen.

The Big Italian Momma stereotype is alive and well. And cooking and cleaning. Because, after all, that's all she's good for.