FRASCATI, ITALY—In this hilltop town famous for white wine and grand villas, Federico De Maria declares himself an unfortunate member of a blighted cohort.

“They call us mammonis,” says De Maria, 28, using the Italian slang for mamma’s boys, who live with parents well past the age when it seems reasonable. “But I don’t want to live at home. I would have left a long time ago if I had a job.”

It’s not for lack of trying.

De Maria graduated with a university degree in biology last May. When he couldn’t find work in his field, he tried for pretty much anything, from national park ranger to hotel doorman. Two weeks of supervising kids at a summer camp and one day washing dishes in a restaurant was all he landed.

He then spent the equivalent of $175 on a month-long course to be a guide for a major museum in Rome. When he learned the company would not help pay for benefits, including pension and health insurance, he decided the $265 a month he would be left with wasn’t worth the commute to Rome, 20 kilometres north.

“I applied to be an apprentice pizza maker, but they wanted three years’ experience,” says De Maria. “I said to them, ‘If I had three years’ experience, I’d already be a pizza maker.’

“Then I tried to be a baker. I said, ‘I’ll work for free. I’ll move big sacks of flour — just teach me how to make bread.’ No one went for it. Even as a slave they didn’t want me.”

De Maria is the ruggedly handsome type, with dark curls and a bearded, friendly face. He drove to a coffee shop in Frascati’s central square in a beat-up Opel, the insurance paid by his divorced mother. He smiles a lot, but when he talks of his future, he has flashes of gloom.

“I live day-by-day,” he says. “I’m not thinking long-term because that’s something that scares me. I’d like a family, but I can’t imagine how I could do that.

“I can’t see myself leaving home within five years. If it wasn’t for my mother’s help, I’d be living under a bridge.”

The story is similar across the European Union, where 22.4 per cent of people younger than 25 are unemployed. It runs from a low of 7.8 per cent in Germany to a staggering 50 per cent in Spain.

In Italy, even the jobs leave little to look forward to. Fully 25 per cent of workers under 35 are on flexible contracts — everything from internships to time-limited jobs rarely longer than one year. At least another 15 per cent are “autonomous” — self-employed professionals or tradespeople — although many of these people work on temporary contracts, too. These jobs come with low pay, no benefits or company pension plan and, in the case of most internships, no salary.

Nine out of 10 first jobs are temporary contracts, and they rarely lead to permanent employment. The best most can hope for is to bounce from one contract to another. Young Italians denounce it as legal exploitation, one that pushes many to look for futures in other European countries, or overseas.

A 2005 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report found Italy suffering a net “brain drain” of highly educated people, the only major European country in that state at the time.

Dire job prospects have given birth to a label that has come to identify a whole generation: “I precari” — the precarious ones.

“It’s a labour market that doesn’t allow young people to become responsible adults,” says Giuseppe Roma, director general of CENSIS, a leading research institute that conducts socio-economic studies for the government and private sector.

“They have lost their dignity,” he adds. “Other generations were considered important — the young rebuilt Italy after the Second (World) War and the generation in 1968 rebelled. This one doesn’t have a role.”

Roma warns it will come back to haunt a rapidly aging country when managers and professionals retire in large numbers.

“We have a dramatic situation,” he says. “When a country doesn’t have a generation ready to take over, it risks not having a future.”

It’s a jarring change for a nation where a collective sense of la dolce vita lingered at least until 2002, when Italy adopted the euro currency. With Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister, the transformation of cultural sensuality into kitsch, led by his TV empire, became the least of Italy’s problems. Public debt hit 2 trillion euros ($2.6 trillion) — 120 per cent of GDP. Yet Berlusconi seemed more focused on bacchanalian “bunga bunga” parties than economic reforms.

He was forced out last November and replaced by financial technocrat Mario Monti, whose emergency government has been praised internationally for austerity measures to eliminate the budget deficit by 2013, including raising the retirement age and reintroducing property taxes.

Some criticize Monti for lacking the courage to crack down on the massive underground economy. Untaxed transactions are estimated at 275 billion euros ($364 billion) a year, about 18 per cent of GDP, by the national statistics agency ISTAT.

Nor is Monti waging war on organized crime based in southern Italy, where unemployment has traditionally been much higher than in the north. The number of people between 15 and 34 years old who don’t work or study is at 47 per cent, according to the most recent figures for the south.

Instead, Monti is using the plight of young Italians to push for modest reform of the closed and nepotistic labour market. He recently spoke of a “terrible apartheid” in Italy, with “hyper-protected” older workers on the one hand and precarious, unprotected ones on the other.

Silvia Di Fonso, 31, sees the social divide daily at the state-owned Rai TV network. She has worked as a producer on contracts repeatedly renewed since 2005, earning much less than her full-time colleagues, and with no job security.

“It creates tensions on the job when workers don’t have the same rights,” says Di Fonso, sipping a beer at a bar in Rome’s Trastevere neighbourhood.

She shares an apartment with two other women in Rome, and gets help from her brother to pay 380 euros a month in rent. One flatmate is a 38-year-old psychologist who, Di Fonso says, has managed to find work for only 10 nights a month in a mental health facility. The rest of the time she babysits.

“Sometimes I think, ‘My Lord, will I end up like that? No, that can’t be my future,’” Di Fonso says.

Francesca Benedetti teaches 2-year-olds at a private preschool in Frascati. She’s 28, has a degree in social work, and lives with her boyfriend in an apartment at her father’s home.

She’s on a temporary contract, with no benefits, sick leave or vacation. The school makes sure she works no more than 7.5 hours a day — another half-hour would, by law, mean higher pay. She’s also responsible for cleaning and mopping up the classroom.

She is paid 5 euros an hour, the equivalent of $6.55. For the past six months, she took a second contract job working in the evenings with kids from troubled homes. But the municipality that was supposed to fund the project pleaded poverty. So she didn’t get paid.

Having adopted the euro, Italy could no longer devalue its currency to keep the price of exports low. Temporary contracts served the same purpose by keeping labour costs down, says Filomena Trizio, head of the NIDiL union representing precarious workers.

One result is that companies got lazy, Trizio argues, and didn’t invest in productivity. GDP per hour worked is $44 (U.S.) in Italy, the lowest of Europe’s major economies, according to the OECD. It’s $58 in France and $54 in Germany.

Another problem for the young is that Italy looks increasingly like a gerontocracy. Men hold on to jobs — patriarchy rules in politics and the economy, if not the home — long after it seems decent. Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, is 86. The average age of Monti’s cabinet is 63. The head of the TG4 TV channel, Emilio Fede, accused of supplying Berlusconi with girls for sex parties, is 80.

Then there’s the system of raccomandazione — where personal contacts, rather than merit, open the door to jobs. A survey published in December for the labour ministry found that 61 per cent of Italian companies rely on contacts, including recommendations from people they know, for new hires. Only 24.6 per cent of companies consider CVs. In Italy’s south, personal contacts account for 70 per cent of new hires.

Making matters worse are trades and professions that act like medieval guilds, setting prices, standards and limits on their numbers. Access is often kept within families, passed from one generation to the next.

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Monti’s “liberalization” plan initially included removing minimum fees for lawyers, notaries, accountants and architects; increasing the number of notaries and pharmacies; allowing bakeries and pharmacies to open Sundays; and giving a transportation authority the power to set the number of taxis. But lobbying against the moves — from pharmacists, taxi drivers and others — has been fierce, and Monti is backtracking on some.

He has also taken a stab at Italy’s stifling bureaucracy with proposals that would make it easier for those under 35 to start a business. The World Bank ranks Italy 87th on its “ease of doing business” index (Canada is 13th).

Unions have vowed nationwide demonstrations and Emma Marcegaglia, president of the powerful Confindustria employers’ group, has accused them of “protecting the chronically absent, thieves, and those who don’t work.”

Yet even Paolo Bastianello, a Confindustria vice-president, describes the battle as ideological and unnecessary. Nothing stops companies from laying off employees for economic reasons, and the number of workers who legally challenge dismissals using Article 18 is relatively small.

“Article 18 isn’t a big problem,” he says in an interview. “The problem today is finding people jobs.”

Bastianello is president of Marly’s, a pret-a-porter fashion manufacturer that employs 70 people. It struggles with shifting export markets and a recession that forced the layoff of 17 people, including four young workers.

“We have all become very precarious,” says Bastianello, when asked about the tough job prospects of young people. “Consumers aren’t buying.”

Paola Bucciarelli, 30, considers the focus on Article 18 by governments and business leaders a disgraceful attempt to divide and conquer.

“They want us to believe that the problem is people like my parents, who had protected jobs,” she adds, referring to her mother, a teacher, and her father, a retired railway worker. “The reality is different. The problem is uncontrolled public spending, it’s corruption, it’s organized crime, it’s tax evasion and it’s all the governments that did nothing about those things.”

Bucciarelli graduated a year ago with a master’s degree in history. She landed a six-month apprenticeship — without pay — archiving documents. Then she got a three-month contract, for a total gross salary of 3,500 euros, teaching job seekers about worker’s rights enshrined in the Italian constitution.

Article 1 describes Italy as a democracy “founded on labour,” a country that “recognizes the right of all citizens to work and promotes those conditions which render this right effective.”

“It takes a great effort to believe that those articles have any meaning,” Bucciarelli says.

After a second three-month training contract, she was out of work for a year. Last September, she landed a part-time job monitoring children on a school bus.

“Basically, I’m a babysitter,” she says. “It’s not exactly my dream job.”

She had a chance at another training contract in Bologna, but the salary was too low to pay for rent. So she lives with her parents in the town of Sezze, about 75 kilometres south of Rome.

“My parents are my safety net,” she says.

In 2005, a government study found that 36.5 per cent of men aged 30 to 34 still lived with their parents, compared to 18 per cent of women. Foreign media at the time portrayed the trend as involving young people too spoiled to leave home. But most don’t have a choice. .

There’s no welfare program for them to fall back on. And the only unemployment insurance scheme is funded by large employers and available only to full-time workers they lay off. Young people can only dream of those jobs.

In caring for their young adults, parents spare the state much social tension.

“In Italy, the father is doing well and the son is doing badly. But together, each is doing not too badly,” Roma says. “Thanks to the family, we have millions of youth who are not poor and desperate.”

She has a master’s degree in English literature. Unable to find work, she left for Australia, where she spent a year working as an Italian language teacher. She returned a month ago and is unemployed. She inevitably finds herself lacking one qualification or another, such as a teaching certificate, for any decent job. “Everywhere I turn I hit a wall,” she says.

For the past nine years, she’s been in love with Daniele Biagini, 27, who is about to start a two-year apprenticeship as a lawyer, without pay.

“It’s stressful,” says Angeli, who lives in Grottaferrata, a town near Frascati. “I’m only 27 and I feel old. I want to be independent, I want a family, but how?

“My parents started with nothing and built their lives. How can I build a future on uncertainty? How can Italy?”

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