Flattery in Italian Culture

"Polite lies and flattery can be utilitarian on occasion but, most of the time, must be honestly classified among the devices disinterestedly designed to make life decorous and agreeable.  They are the lubricants that make human relations run more smoothly.  Flattery somehow makes the wariest of men feel bigger, more confident, and therefore more indulgent, generous and almost magnanimous.  It is so common in Italy as to go practically unnoticed.  One breathes it as one breathes the scent of violets in woods in the spring, without recognizing exactly what it is that gives one such a delicate sensation.  Everybody is constantly being praised by everybody else.  A decrepit man is always told he looks years younger; any old hag that she is beautiful, more beautiful this year than last, today than yesterday, tonight more than this morning.   Almost imperceptible flattery is in the eagerness with which your orders are obeyed,  or the obsequiousness with which your advice is sought in matters in which you have no particular experience."  (Barzini L, The Italians, New York:  Bantam Books, 1964. p. 76)

"Flatterers are especially common in Italy, where the people have always employed such arts offensively, to gain advantages, destroy rivals, and conquer power and wealth; and defensively, as the squid uses ink, to blind and confound powerful men, dictators and tyrants."  (p. 152) 

"Plain speaking is often a dangerous practice.  Obscurity is the rule in almost all fields.  Most newspaper editorials, art criticisms and political speeches are, as a rule, clothed in elegantly ambiguous prose.  One must not make unnecessary enemies.   One never knows when one's widely accepted and non-controversial opinions will turn out to be compromising and daring.  One conceals one's thoughts, unnecessarily at times, because, for one thing, to conceal them is never dangerous while to reveal them might be so.  There are often, of course, less discreditable reasons.  Concealment in difficult times may be the only way to protect one's liberty, both one's inner liberty, in which things may be thought as one wishes, and one's practical, ordinary, everyday freedom of action.  This is the kind of prudence the citizens of Communist countries well know." (p. 223)