MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The journalist Jason Horowitz tells a story about his younger days before he had any experience under his belt and he was trying to land a job in Rome. He worked up the courage to ring the buzzer of Sylvia Poggioli - yes, NPR's Sylvia Poggioli. He asked if she might need a news assistant. As Jason tells it, she answered in her, quote, "famous gravelly voice" and told him, quote, "to get lost." Well, Jason ended up - a few years, a few twists and turns later - as the Rome bureau chief for The New York Times. So it did all work out. He has now written a memoir about his adventures along the way. It is titled "The Italian Job." He's with me now. Jason Horowitz, (speaking Italian).
JASON HOROWITZ: Thanks so much for having me. (Speaking Italian).
KELLY: I'm so glad you didn't answer me in Italian, 'cause I just exhausted most of mine.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: It would have been downhill. I do need to note, I am a reporter myself, obviously, and so I, of course, pinged Sylvia to confirm this account. She replied right away. She says she has "no memory of telling anyone buzzing my door to get lost," direct quote. She does remember a very nice lunch with you when you were covering a papal trip together, I guess, in 2019.
HOROWITZ: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
KELLY: Yeah. It prompted me to wonder, among other things, what language you might have been conducting this alleged door buzzer incident in, because among other challenges, you didn't speak Italian when you launched this whole I'm going to move to Italy and be a journalist project.
HOROWITZ: That's right. I definitely - I rang the citofono - the intercom - in English. And it did happen, and I totally understand that Sylvia does not remember it, because it was probably - she thought it was just some weirdo (laughter) ringing her doorbell, and that was that.
KELLY: She probably wasn't that wrong (laughter).
HOROWITZ: Yeah. She was not wrong. Yeah. That was - it was back when I had just moved there. I was totally, you know, unqualified for pretty much anything. So it took me quite a while to sort of build up, you know, the language, but also the know-how and skills where I could actually start working.
KELLY: Yeah. Talk to me about Italy and beauty - I mean, so inextricably linked in the American imagination. They've got the art and the food and the fashion and the cars and the weather. And you have a great quote in the pages. It's from an Italian physicist who says it's easy for other countries to be well-organized when that's all they have, when you're ugly.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: It's like - the implication being what? So what if Italy is messy, chaotic, everything's crumbling. We're beautiful.
HOROWITZ: When I think of Italy and I think of beauty, clearly, the first thing that strikes you - right? - is just the unbelievable, you know - for lack of a better word - beauty of the place. And what some, you know, leaders of industry there, the way they talk about it, too, and they say, it's actually important for Italian innovation and the sort of ingenuity that Italians have because the landscape is never flat, because there's always something blocking you, something beautiful blocking you. You have to look around things. You have to look - it forces you to look differently at problems.
And I also remember another famous architect, Renzo Piano, was talking to me about beauty, and he said, along the lines of, you know, the cosmetics industry and the modeling industry and movies, they've all commandeered the word beauty. And that's actually not what Italian beauty is about. Italian beauty is relationships. It is loving the place that you're in. It's appreciating the place that you're in. That was his definition of beauty.
KELLY: Yeah. So much in this memoir is about pushing back against stereotypes of Italy. There's the stereotype of Italy as beautiful. There's the stereotype of it as chaotic. And you pushed back on some of that, as do I. I'll note, I have lived in Italy. You and I actually know each other. I've seen you in Rome. The roads, when I was there, at least a decade ago, living there - the roads were better than here in the U.S. The autostrada was glorious - the tunnels, the airports. There were quite a few things that, however they looked, they worked better than here in the United States.
HOROWITZ: Yeah. I mean, I think that there's all these cliches about Italy. And a little bit, Italy is complicit in that, because it has this enormous tourist industry, and it wants to sell itself as the home of spritzes and pasta and pizza because a lot of people come, and it's all so wonderful, right? But there's just so much more to the place. So they sell that part of themselves. But they're also incredibly well organized. They're incredibly innovative. Everything works.
KELLY: You tell all kinds of great stories about the people you met and got to interview, from popes to famous architects and soccer stars and designers and multiple prime ministers, including the current one, Giorgia Meloni, who you've interviewed. You knew her before she was prime minister. It sounds like she still replies to your texts.
HOROWITZ: Every now and then.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: She's Italy's first female prime minister, and you write that under her, and I'm quoting, "Italy has become an unexpected island of stability in an increasingly unstable Europe." That's so much. Tell me more about what you mean.
HOROWITZ: Meloni has now - she's about to serve a full term. She's the longest-serving prime minister in the history...
KELLY: It's five years...
HOROWITZ: ...Of, you know, modern-day Italy.
KELLY: ...Full term?
HOROWITZ: Yeah. It's five years. And, you know, when you talk to leaders from other countries, they would often say the problem with Italy is that there was always somebody new at the table, at the European Union, say - right? - or at the G7. And so that hurt Italy. So Meloni's stability, I think, in and of itself, is actually progress for Italy, and it's something she's enormously proud of. There's a big question is whether she's done anything else besides sort of serve a long time, right? And that's the major debate going on in Italy right now.
KELLY: Without giving anything away, you - over the course of the years that you're chronicling in the book, you leave Italy. You come back to Italy. I will note, you are no longer Rome bureau chief. You've moved on to a posting in Spain. But I wondered about a question that you pose at the very beginning of the book, in the prologue, where you ask, would the gravity of Italy always exert its force on me? What do you think?
HOROWITZ: I think, in a word, yes (laughter). There's great writers who have written about this. And one talked about this idea of this continual tension and everything. Italy always pulls you back. There's this gravity. I am very happy to be pulled back to Italy.
KELLY: Right.
HOROWITZ: I think that it is enormously fascinating. It is enormously sort of instructive in its own way - a place that everyone thinks of as this land of the past. I've seen so many different iterations of politics there before I saw them elsewhere in the world. So it's a great teacher to me, Italy, and I'm glad that it pulls me back.
KELLY: Jason Horowitz - his new memoir is "The Italian Job: A Memoir Of An American Reporter In Rome." (Speaking Italian). Thank you, Jason.
HOROWITZ: (Speaking Italian).
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