Many people have attempted to put their fingers on what Italy is, how Italians think, what it is about the country that’s so alluring. The task is beyond hard. It’s difficulty is perhaps part of the answer. Whatever Italy is, it’s certainly something that's baffling. It’s a land of conundrums: of complexities, of simplicities. It’s the country where, as Beppe Severgnini puts it in Bella Figura, “obedience is boring.” Where Italians, he says, “decide whether a particular law applies to [their] specific case. In that place, at that time.” Italians create and break laws every day--the same laws. As fast as one has been created, a way to break it has been fashioned . . . along with the permission to call others out when they break it. "Eh, Marco, look at that idiota!" But Italy is also that place where breaking a law is a sin (in the kitchen, that is). "To not salt the water? To not cook the pasta al dente? Are you mad?"

Italy's a land of paradoxes; home of the fastest cars and the slowest dinners. It's filled with hypocrites--not in the bad sense of the term. You know, that good hypocrite? It’s where a person is commended for his or her cleverness, known as “furbizia,” but also reprimanded for it; praised and reprimanded for the very same action, by the very same person. It’s a place of high morals (the mafia) and low morals (the mafia). It’s seething with extremists. Capitalists. Communists. Terrorists. But it has its fair share of moderates: "Italy's poised to be a superpower, Giovanni, but until then, can you pass me those cannoli?"

In order to navigate Italy's day to day, you must first recognize what’s obviously ludicrous, then, to follow, you must defy it. It’s a country a mere step out of time and of place; a country where the farther south you go the deeper into the past you find yourself. A land of clocks, not digital watches. It’s a land built on ruins. One that lives in ruins. One that is always building toward its future ruins. It’s a land of high-speed computers, HDTVs, people chatting through webcams via Skype--housed in a seventeenth-century palazzo, which was built over a thirteenth-century one, on top of a eleventh-century market, ad infinitum. Antique stores offer things truly antique, not “antique” lunch boxes from the 1960s. We’re talking illuminated manuscripts from the 1400s and chairs from three-hundred years ago.

Arguing in Itay is a "vero amore," a true love, a pastime. It's seen as a means to grow closer to one another. "If you love me, why don't you argue with me?" Italians argue over their beloved “calcio,” soccer, as if it were still the Middle Ages, as if medieval feuds continued into the present day--where one town is still enraged over the other’s knocking down the bell tower or burning down the castle.

It’s a land of the greatest imperialism (Rome) and of some of the greatest failed imperialism (Mussolini). It’s filled to the brim with martyrs and saints, magic and folklore, materialism and wealth . . . and, of course, poverty. Bombed buildings from the Second World War remain. Giotto’s glorious frescoes lining the entire ceiling in the cathedral in Assisi, which crumbled practically into dust during an earthquake, have been rebuilt, each little piece put back in its place, like putting a glass vase back together that had been shattered into millions of fragments under the smack of a sledgehammer.

Italy’s a dab of mercury on a marble table. You try to put your fingertip on it, but it just slips away. You keep trying, but you must surrender. It’s a nation made up of hundreds of nations, hundreds of peoples, all seemingly similar--they all say ciao, make pizza, right?--but these nations, these peoples, are drastically different. In their own eyes, that is. The margin of difference an Italian sees between his or her home and another's home is equal to the margin some nations see between themselves and others, between Russia and China, between France and Germany. It’s the land of “campanilismo,” “bell-towerism,” patriotism for one’s hometown, not country: a love captured in the metaphor of that unique sound given off by one's hometown's local bell chime.

But Italy for all its confusion is also so simple. A place that releases you and situates you. Where it's OK to express yourself, to slow down, to respect life over work, to admire the earth's beauty, the power of family and friends. Italy's mystery rests in its perfect rejection of any human attempt to solve the problems of the world.

And that name, "Italy"? So mysterious itself. Where did it come from? Solve that one and you win a prize. What would that prize be? An argument! Does it come from "Italus," that king of the Sicels (eastern Sicily)? Or does it mean "bull calf," as many ancient historiographers have claimed? I'm not quite sure, nor is any Italian. So, I return: What is Italy? I'll be asking that question for a long while, I think. And I'll love that I'll always have a different answer.