Many Italians keep thinking France as something necessarily ‘bigger and more important’ (in what, specifically, is not exactly clear). Thus, they automatically recognize to the neighbouring country a sort of ‘superior role’ out in the world and in Europe. While the first thought may be true under some aspect, the following recognition is - nowadays - a critical mistake based on an unbalanced evaluation between the French history (unarguably one of the most influential in Europe throughout the last millennium or so) and its actual size and place in the world (here, the same as a quite abundant bunch of countries whose clinical geo-political definition is something like ‘regional powers’).
On this track, yesterday I read an article where an Italian journalist, sorting out some still-strong-number of the French now uncertain economy and comparing those to the Italian depressive environment, declared himself ready and steady to suffer of the French version of the ‘decline’ rather than laying into the Italian paralysis.
Allow me to (modestly) disagree with that. The Italian and the French economies are, under a global point of view, quite similar one to the other, and heavily interdependent. It’s not surprising that, from the outside (and beside some specificity), they’re considered basically the same thing*, and they’re very probably tied to lay in the same social, industrial and economical destiny (whatever it might be, anyhow within the EU).
So, to plan to get off the Titanic just to board on the Royal George results to be a quite surprising conjecture, to me at least.

Still, the journalist expressed an opinion to which masses of Italians would immediately associate with. Beside the ‘greener grass of the neighbour’ way of speech… why?
Being the supposedly French ‘bigger size’ off the desk, the way to ‘picture yourself to the world’ still stands clearly. And here, again, Italy and the Italians show to be the nastiest enemy of themselves.

The word France, still today, keeps immediately recalling vaunting concepts like a sumptuous kingdom, a huge colonial empire, Napoleon, Louis XIV, a UN Security Council Permanent Member. Even concepts as nationalism and chauvinism, or protectionism and statism - despite mostly deprecable - still project a sense of power and self imposition unmatched everywhere else. Quite unpleasant, maybe. Still, pretty powerful. Let’s say it: the French are good image creators and keepers. In fact, would you remember that such a proud and glorious country has been shockingly overwhelmed twice by the German troops within thirty years, and once temporarily divided in two pieces? Or that both of its victories in the world wars have been quite Pyrrus-style? Or would you go thinking that if there was a prize for the most idiot emperor ever, that would fall straight into Napoleon the third’s hands? And that, while playing the ‘master of the continent’ role, France has generated, directly or implicitly, more wars in the history of Europe than any other country? Or, in the end, that just a bunch of months ago the capital, the so-hyper-everything Paris, was practically under siege, crushed in suburbs’ riots?
Of course not. That’s where the magic is: France’s ability to focus on its positive and powerful images and to keep projecting these all over the world (quite often, even too much).

The word Italy, instead, has acquired today a strange taste in the mouth of many people. The sense of magnificence of the Roman Empire, the Florentine Renaissance and the Venetian splendour keeps matching with the positive - yet over-abused - concept of ‘creativity’ (i.e. fashion, design, style, etc.). Though, even the other jewels that would naturally follow (as, for instance, everything connected to the high technological development over engines, telecommunication and a variety of hyper-nano-complicated stuff) get sunk in that stereotyped mantra made of ‘pasta-pizza-mandolino’ now spread over the world. From who? From the same Italians, first and most efficiently: at home as abroad, our behaviour too often gives the perfect idea of where such stereotypes might be taken out from. Then, for instance, also from some Hollywood-guy of Italian origin: they’re rich, they’re famous, they’re all male, they think it’s so-fancy to reconnect to their blood because of some great quality Italian man seem to have… down there. No one seems to realize that such mantra muddles up concepts a good part of which are disagreeable enough - mixing sun, vine, good-food and charm to laziness, disorganization, political instability and corruption: the portrait of decadence.
If Italy wasn’t already the house of three powerful criminal organizations (and an interesting crossroads for some others), such decadence would at least acquire a ‘charming taste of ancient’. If one of its biggest cities wasn’t almost completely out of the control of the State and submerged by rubbish - mostly because one of those criminal organizations is based there -, that sense of decadence wouldn’t smell so badly. If, then, that specific city wasn’t the one from where all the words of the mantra come from, such decay wouldn’t be perceived so strongly all over the civilized world.

Every country has its darker side. Italy has it in its noisiest place.
Here we are, with the perfect recipe to be perceived as the portrait of a paralytic-decadence, despite the rest of the country might behave completely differently.