From Fantozzi to My Son

Three Generations in Search of Happiness

1. When Fantozzi Stops Being Funny

Some encounters come to us through a book, a piece of music, a film or, as in this case, an interview rediscovered many years later. And sometimes words that seem to belong to another age suddenly force us to look differently not only at the past, but at ourselves and at the world we inhabit.

That is what happened to me when I listened to a long interview with Paolo Villaggio, recorded by Swiss television in 1975 [Paolo Villaggio. Unpublished interview on Swiss television - 1975]. I was almost mesmerised by it. Not simply because I recognised the intelligence of the man who had created Fantozzi, but because of the extraordinary clarity with which Villaggio explained what truly lay behind the character.

I had always known Fantozzi. Like everyone else, I had laughed at his misfortunes, his humiliations, his fears, his disastrous holidays, the Megaditta, Miss Silvani, the absurd hierarchies and that whole grotesquely distorted universe. Yet listening to Villaggio speak about his own creation suddenly changed the angle from which I saw him. Beneath the comedy emerged a social portrait far more acute than the jokes themselves had ever suggested.

Fantozzi was not merely an unlucky man, nor simply a caricature of the Italian office worker. He belonged to a very specific moment in history: a man who had already entered the affluent society, who had a job, a home, a car, a family, who went on holiday and owned a television, yet who was beginning to discover, just as part of the promise of prosperity was being fulfilled, that material progress and happiness were not necessarily the same thing. He had gained a position in the world, and with it came the fear of losing it.

That may be one of the character’s most modern qualities. Fantozzi no longer belongs to a society defined by pure necessity. His problem is not simply how to obtain something, but how to hold on to what he has gained and how to climb a little higher. His job means far more than a salary: it means security, recognition, belonging, the possibility of imagining a future. However oppressive, hierarchical and humiliating the Megaditta may be, being cast out of it would mean falling from the social rung he has struggled so hard to reach. And so Fantozzi despises the system on which he depends while continuing to crave its approval.

Villaggio understood that this mechanism extended far beyond the workplace. A car was no longer merely a way of getting from one place to another; a house was no longer simply somewhere to live; a holiday was no longer only a chance to rest. Possessions could also become signs of the position we had reached, or wanted others to believe we had reached. Consumption was no longer only about usefulness or pleasure. It was beginning to take part in the construction of identity.

Fantozzi wants to be invited, accepted, promoted. He does not truly dream of overturning the hierarchy: above all, he wants to find himself a few steps higher within it. This is where the caricature becomes uncomfortably familiar. Villaggio exaggerates a very real human need: the need to be recognised. And if the value of what we possess is measured against what others possess, the destination can never remain still. Reach one level and another appears above it; enter one circle and discover a more exclusive one beyond it; acquire something and someone else already has something better. Happiness becomes a horizon that keeps receding as we move towards it.

The world of Fantozzi contains another insight that feels remarkably contemporary: power is often strongest when it cannot be seen. The summit of the Megaditta is distant, almost mythical. Fantozzi understands the effects of the hierarchy far better than he understands who actually controls it. The great boss need not appear. It is enough that everyone knows he exists and behaves accordingly. The further away the top becomes, the more nearly superhuman it seems.

It is here that Villaggio’s vision, despite the enormous difference in language and temperament, begins to meet that of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Villaggio reaches social criticism through comedy and the grotesque; Pasolini through a cultural polemic that is often fierce, dramatic and provocative. Yet both are looking at the transformation produced by consumer society. Pasolini spoke of homogenisation and even of an “anthropological mutation”: people who came from entirely different worlds, with different dialects, customs and local cultures, were gradually beginning to desire the same things.

Television played an extraordinary part in that process. For those of us who live today amid the fragmentation of the Internet, it is difficult to imagine a country in which millions of people watched the same programmes, the same presenters and the same shows at the same time. Television played a decisive role in the linguistic and cultural unification of Italy. It brought news, entertainment, knowledge and a shared national language into millions of homes. But it also created a common imagination. It did not simply show people the world; it helped suggest what they should want from it: which car represented success, what sort of home was desirable, which holiday signalled prestige, what kind of lifestyle meant that one had finally arrived.

Pasolini saw above all the danger of homogenisation. Villaggio showed what that process could do inside the individual. Two very different roads leading to a similar conclusion: modern man likes to believe that he freely chooses what he wants, while at least some of those wants have already been shaped for him by the society in which he lives.

Listening to Villaggio, the interview gradually stopped feeling like a document from the past and began to concern me personally. As he described the Italy of 1975, I suddenly became aware of a simple chronological fact that made everything less abstract: I would be born four years later, on 18 November 1979.

From that point on, I began to think in terms of three generations and three different Italies: the country Villaggio was observing and my parents’ generation had inhabited; the country into which I was born and in which I became an adult; and the country in which my son is now growing up. Not in order to decide which was better, but to understand what had genuinely changed and what, under new disguises, had remained: the need for security, the hunger for approval, comparison with others, the desire to possess, and above all that question that keeps moving further away each time we think we have finally reached the answer: when will it be enough?

2. I Was Born Into the Answer

I was born on 18 November 1979. For most of my life, that date was simply my birthday. Looking at it now from a greater distance, I realise that I came into the world at the end of a decade that had profoundly changed Italy, just as many of the certainties on which the previous generation had built its life were beginning to fracture.

Naturally, I have no direct memory of that Italy. I do not remember inflation, the Years of Lead, energy austerity, political violence or the social transformations of the 1970s. But generations do not begin culturally on the day they are born. We inherit the world built by those who came before us, and we absorb their values, fears and expectations through the people who surround us.

The adults among whom I grew up still belonged to an Italy that carried a very recent memory of scarcity. For many of them, a permanent job meant far more than employment. It meant being able to support a family, plan ahead, pay for a home, perhaps take out a mortgage and put something aside. A house meant security, saving meant prudence, a car meant independence. Throwing away something that might still be useful could feel almost morally wrong; taking on unnecessary debt was viewed with suspicion. These attitudes came from experiences I had never lived through myself, yet they were still present in the way the adults around me understood the world.

I came afterwards. I had not known the hunger of the post-war years or lived through the economic miracle. I had not seen the refrigerator, the television set or the family car enter ordinary Italian life for the first time. To me, these things were already normal. And perhaps this is one of the defining features of my generation: we grew up taking for granted many things that, for those before us, had represented genuine achievements.

In only a few decades, Italy had moved from a society that was still largely agricultural, poor and provincial to one that was industrial, urban and modern. Millions of people had moved from the countryside to the cities and from the South to the industrial centres of the North. Work, family, housing, language, clothes, leisure and even the way people imagined the future had changed. For those who had grown up before and during the war, a better life meant above all escaping hunger, insecurity and the absence of basic comforts. For their children, prosperity acquired new symbols: the car, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the television, home ownership, the possibility of going away on holiday.

By 1979, however, that almost automatic faith in progress had already been shaken. The oil crisis, car-free Sundays, energy austerity and high inflation had damaged the assumption, so characteristic of the boom years, that next year would almost inevitably be better than this one. The political climate was equally troubled: Aldo Moro had been kidnapped and murdered only the year before, and the Years of Lead were still current events, not history.

At the same time, family life and social norms were changing rapidly. Divorce was legal, reform of family law had established a new legal equality between husband and wife, and in 1978 Italy had introduced both legislation on voluntary termination of pregnancy and the National Health Service. Women were claiming greater personal, cultural and economic autonomy; younger generations were questioning authorities that only a short time before had seemed almost immovable. Italy had become freer, but also more unsettled. There were more possibilities and fewer certainties.

I was born into that contradiction. Late enough to find modern Italy already built, yet early enough to grow up among people who remembered very clearly what had existed before it. My generation therefore grew up between two memories: one of a society in which the essential things had to be fought for, and another in which it was becoming increasingly difficult to decide what was essential at all.

That is why Villaggio’s Italy has never felt entirely foreign to me. It predates my birth, of course, but it belongs to my history. It had shaped the adults who raised me and, through them, shaped part of me as well. I arrived later, but I did not arrive somewhere else.

During my childhood and adolescence, the process accelerated. New forms of consumption arrived, new technologies, new possibilities. What had represented a destination for one generation became the starting point for the next. And as prosperity increased, so did comparison.

Perhaps this is where the most important transition between my parents’ world and my own adult life occurred. Their generation could still imagine, at least in theory, a relatively linear path: find a job, establish oneself, start a family, buy a home, retire. By the time my generation reached adulthood, that path was already becoming far less predictable. Work became more mobile, careers less linear, technology continuously altered the skills required, and security increasingly gave way to adaptability.

Fantozzi lived in terror of losing his job. My generation also came to know the opposite problem: finding a job stable enough to be afraid of losing in the first place. Fantozzi suffered from a system that was too rigid. We increasingly encountered flexibility, discontinuous careers, constant change and the need to reinvent ourselves. We became freer to change direction, but less certain that the road we were travelling would still exist further ahead.

And yet a great deal of Villaggio’s man remains recognisable. The need to be acknowledged is still there, as is the comparison with those who seem to be further ahead, and the peculiar way in which what we have can suddenly seem insufficient the moment we see someone who has more. What has changed is the scale. Once, comparison was largely confined to the office, the neighbourhood, a circle of friends, the people we actually knew. Gradually, those boundaries disappeared.

We moved from a society in which owning certain things could signal that we had arrived to one in which it is often no longer enough to own them or experience them. We feel compelled to make them visible. And that is a decisive shift, because social comparison is no longer occasional. It can become continuous.

Looking back at my own birth date, I realise that I grew up precisely along this fault line. I watched objects that had once been achievements become ordinary necessities, and I watched new desires emerge wherever previous ones had already been satisfied. I was born into a society in which my parents sought above all security, and I became an adult in one that demanded adaptability.

Nearly half a century later, the question implicit in Villaggio’s analysis has hardly aged. We possess things that in 1979 would have seemed like science fiction. We communicate instantly across the world, travel with extraordinary ease, have access to an almost limitless quantity of information and use technologies that continually change the way we work and live. Yet that pull towards the next thing, the thing that should finally make us feel complete, remains strangely familiar.

The objects have changed. Companies have changed. Television has changed. Work has changed. Desire, perhaps, has changed much less.

3. My Son’s Past Begins Today

This is where the story inevitably turns towards the future. Until now I have been looking back at the Italy into which I was born and at the world my parents’ generation handed down to me. Today I find myself on the other side of that process. I am no longer only someone’s son. I am also a father.

My son was born in 2019, exactly forty years after me. It is a simple coincidence of dates, but the symmetry gives the passage of time an almost physical shape. I was born at the end of the 1970s; he at the end of the 2010s. In those forty years almost every tool through which we communicate, work, obtain information, travel and construct our identities has changed. And yet that distance makes me wonder how much the deepest questions have changed at all.

If I can now look back at 1979 and ask what kind of world was handed to me, one day my son will be able to look back at 2019 in much the same way. A year that to me still feels recent will become, for him, the distant beginning of his own life. And the question then becomes unavoidable: what kind of world have we handed to him?

Generations do not pass on only objects or material conditions. They pass on ways of seeing. My parents passed on to me, usually without ever stating them openly, a particular relationship with work, money, security, possessions and the fear of losing what one has. Only later did I understand how much history was hidden inside those attitudes. One day my son may discover something similar about us.

My parents belonged to a generation that still carried the memory of scarcity. Mine experienced the expansion of possibilities. My son is growing up in something different again: an excess of possibilities. Our grandparents often had to choose because they could have very little; we watched the number of choices multiply; our children may have to learn how to choose precisely because, at least in appearance, almost everything is available.

The society in which my son is growing up is no longer the world of mass television described by Pasolini and Villaggio, in which millions of people received the same images at the same time. Today each individual can receive a personalised stream of information, advertising, images and desires. Television once proposed roughly the same models to everyone. An algorithm can now propose a different world to each person.

For my generation, obtaining information was still partly a problem. You looked for a book, consulted an encyclopaedia, went to a library, asked someone who knew more. For my son’s generation, the problem may be almost the reverse: learning to distinguish, within a nearly infinite quantity of information, what deserves trust, attention and time. Perhaps one of our greatest responsibilities as parents will no longer be to teach children how to find something—almost everything will be findable—but to help them decide what is worth looking for.

And then there is speed.

News is consumed and forgotten within hours. Devices age almost as soon as we buy them. Conversations take place while we are doing something else. Work follows us beyond the places and hours that once contained it. We gained the extraordinary ability to be reachable almost anywhere, and then discovered how difficult it had become to be unreachable.

Fantozzi clocked in when he entered the office. The time clock was a symbol of subordination, certainly, but it also marked a boundary. There was a moment when work began and, at least physically, a moment when one left it behind. Today that boundary is far more porous. Smartphones, laptops, digital platforms and remote work have created enormous freedoms, but they have also allowed work to enter almost every part of the day. We have dismantled many old rigidities and, in doing so, risk carrying with us at all times the very thing from which we wanted greater freedom.

Villaggio’s intuition about invisible power also takes on a new life. The megadirector of the Megaditta was distant, inaccessible, almost mythical. Today an algorithm may decide what we see, a platform may suddenly change the conditions under which thousands of people earn a living, an automated system may accept or reject an application. Decisions are still being made, but the person making them is often harder to identify. There is something profoundly Fantozzian about the contemporary phrase, “It’s the system.” No one appears to have decided anything, and yet the decision exists.

There is perhaps an even deeper change. The megadirector no longer needs to stand above us at all. We can carry him inside ourselves. No one has to tell us constantly to produce more, improve ourselves, remain efficient, informed, fit, interesting, socially present and, ideally, happy. We often impose those demands on ourselves. Even happiness can become a form of performance. It is not always enough to live well; sometimes we feel compelled to make sure that our lives look good as well.

The need for recognition that Villaggio placed at the heart of Fantozzi has therefore not disappeared. The Internet has simply made it continuous. A photograph can be a memory and, at the same time, content. A dinner can be an experience and also something to display. We can begin to look at our own lives through the eyes of an imaginary audience, asking not simply whether something gives us pleasure, but whether it will appear desirable to someone else.

And yet it would be deeply unfair to describe my son’s world only through its dangers. He is growing up with possibilities I could not have imagined at his age. He can see distant places within seconds, listen to almost any music ever recorded, speak to people thousands of miles away, enter enormous libraries, create images, sounds, texts and videos with tools of astonishing power. He is growing up at precisely the moment when artificial intelligence is beginning to alter, once again, the relationship between human beings, knowledge and work.

The answer cannot be to shield him from those tools. The challenge is to teach him to remain capable of deciding when to use them and why. A tool remains a tool as long as we are the ones directing it. When it begins to determine our time, our attention, our desires and even our mood, something has quietly reversed.

Perhaps the genuinely scarce resource of his generation will be attention. For my grandparents, scarcity was often material. For my parents, many opportunities were still scarce. For our children, what may become scarce is mental time: the ability to concentrate on one thing, to be bored, to wait, to read without interruption, to listen to another person without looking at a screen, to do something without immediately feeling the need to share it.

I live this contradiction myself. My work, music, teaching, concerts and projects coexist with digital tools that allow me to do things that would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago. Yet for precisely that reason I feel an increasing need to preserve places where time still moves at a human pace. The piano, in this sense, is almost the opposite of the smartphone. I can obtain a score instantly, listen to a hundred recordings and access almost every piece of information ever written about a work. But no technology can remove the time required for those notes to become truly mine. An interpretation cannot be downloaded into maturity.

Perhaps this is one of the things I would most like to pass on to my son: not nostalgia for a slower world that will never return, but the knowledge that not everything that can be accelerated should be. Learning, playing an instrument, getting to know another person, building a relationship, raising a child, truly understanding a book, changing one’s mind, becoming good at something—all of these require time. Technology can eliminate much wasted time, but it should not persuade us that slowness itself is waste.

When I think of my parents, part of what they passed on to me can be reduced to a handful of very simple words: work, sacrifice, security, prudence, saving. None of these should be romanticised. Sacrifice can become pointless self-denial, prudence can become fear, security can become conformity. Fantozzi himself is partly a caricature of what happens when the fear of losing what one has becomes so powerful that it prevents one from being free. But I would not want to replace those excesses with the opposite belief that every desire should be satisfied at once and every limit must be overcome.

What I would like to pass on is something more difficult: the ability to desire without becoming enslaved by desire, to work seriously without allowing work to become the sole measure of one’s worth, to earn money without confusing money with value, to enjoy things without asking them to explain who we are.

Parenthood itself has changed. Children today can become more central to family life than in previous generations, more protected, more closely followed, more carefully observed. There is a danger here opposite to that faced by many children in the past. If children were once expected to adapt too quickly to the adult world, today we can make the mistake of rearranging the entire world around them. I would not want my son to remember a father who removed every obstacle from his path. I would rather he remembered a father who was there when the obstacles came.

And this is where the whole reflection becomes unavoidably personal. What will he actually remember of me? Almost certainly far less than I currently imagine. He will not remember which car we owned in a particular year, which phone I used, or which device was considered the latest thing. Many objects to which we now devote time, comparison and desire will soon appear absurdly obsolete, just as some of the technological wonders of the 1980s now seem almost touching.

What he will remember are feelings. Whether home felt peaceful or tense. Whether his father listened when he spoke or always seemed to have something more urgent to do. He may remember the journeys long after he has forgotten the vehicle in which we travelled, a piece of music we listened to together more clearly than a hundred things we bought, a walk, a laugh, a family ritual, an ordinary evening that for reasons no one could have predicted remained somewhere in his memory.

When I think back to my own childhood, I do not remember it as an inventory. I remember atmospheres, people, habits, ways of speaking, ways of being together. My parents did not leave me only the objects of their generation; they left me a way of looking at those objects, and of deciding how much they mattered. It will probably be the same for my son.

I like the thought that he might remember me at the piano, that music might remain in his memory as an ordinary presence in the house, and that he might have seen how much patience, work and attention are required to make something beautiful. But I would also want him never to confuse that with the idea that a person is worth only what he is able to achieve.

Perhaps this is where I would like to break a chain that runs all the way back through the story of Fantozzi. The need to be accepted, measured and recognised has not disappeared. If anything, the Internet has multiplied the occasions on which we can be compared and judged. I would like my son to have at least one place where he never has to prove anything. And I believe that place should, above all, be home.

That does not mean teaching him not to be ambitious. I hope he will want to learn, discover, travel, build something of his own and become good at the things he loves. But I would like him to understand the difference between ambition and comparison. Ambition can grow out of the person we hope to become. Comparison too often grows out of the fear that someone else is worth more than we are. The first may eventually reach a destination. The second almost never does.

Fantozzi never truly arrives because there is always another rung above him on a ladder built by somebody else. As long as the value of our lives is measured on such a scale, there will always be someone higher up. In my son’s world, the danger may be greater still because the ladder no longer ends at the walls of the Megaditta. It can extend across the entire planet.

I have no idea what work my son will one day do. Some of the professions he may choose probably do not yet exist. But I can imagine qualities that will still matter: curiosity, critical judgement, adaptability, discipline, imagination, empathy, the ability to learn. And perhaps also the ability not to mistake one’s profession for one’s identity. Fantozzi is tragic precisely because the Megaditta has swallowed him whole. Even away from work he remains Ragionier Fantozzi.

I would like my son to work seriously and still know how to come home. To want to improve without losing the ability to stop. To use technology and know how to switch it off. To need other people, as all of us do, without handing them the entire authority to determine his worth.

Perhaps what one generation passes on to the next is not so much a set of answers as a set of questions. My parents’ generation handed me the question of security: how do we build a life solid enough not to lose what has been achieved? Villaggio and Fantozzi handed me another: what are we prepared to surrender in order to be accepted by a system whose real centre of power we may never even see? Our age adds at least one more: how do we remain masters of our attention, our desires and our time in a society that competes constantly to capture them?

In 1979 I entered my parents’ world. Forty years later, in 2019, my son entered mine. Many years from now, he will look back at these years in much the same way that I now look back at the years in which I was born. Some of our technologies will seem primitive, some of our anxieties absurd, some of our habits almost comic. But when he thinks of these years, he will not think first of smartphones, the digital revolution or artificial intelligence.

He will think of his father.

And within that memory, without ever needing to analyse it, will be the age in which we lived.

There will be the way I looked at my phone while he was talking, the time I gave him and the time I failed to give him, the way I reacted when things went wrong, the way I spoke about work, money and people who had more or less than we did. There will be music, journeys, family habits and all those small gestures through which children learn what their parents truly value, usually while the parents themselves imagine that no one is watching.

Perhaps this is the conclusion I never expected to reach when I began with an interview Paolo Villaggio gave in 1975. Villaggio was describing the Italian of his own time through Fantozzi. Four years later I was born into the world that man had helped create. Forty years after that, my son was born. In between, the objects changed, work changed, communication changed, families changed, technology changed, and even the forms through which power enters our lives changed.

And yet some questions remain astonishingly familiar.

The refrigerator can become the smartphone. Mass television can become the algorithm that constructs a different world for each of us. The Megaditta can become a platform, and the megadirector can dissolve into a system whose face no one can quite identify. The tools change and the language changes, but the need to be recognised remains, along with the fear of not being enough and the endless movement towards something that should, at last, make us feel that we have arrived.

I do not know what answer my son will find, and perhaps it would be wrong for me to try to give him one. I can only try to leave him the means to arrive at an answer of his own. And if one day he can remember his childhood as a time when the world moved at extraordinary speed, often governed by forces that were becoming harder and harder to see, but where at home there was still someone capable of stopping for him, then perhaps I will have given him something that no technological progress will ever make obsolete.