A 75-year-old Italian woman has taken her two adult sons to court to force them to leave the family home, reigniting a debate about Italy’s generation of “big babies” who refuse to move out.
The men, aged 40 and 42, had resisted pressure from their mother to leave home in Pavia, northern Italy, even though both have jobs.
“Neither of them wanted to know,” said the mother, who told the court her sons declined to contribute to household expenses and expected to be fed.
The mother, who is separated from the boys’ father, won her case, with the presiding judge ordering the pair out by December 18. In her ruling, the judge said there was no law “giving an adult child the unconditional right to remain in a property owned by their parents, against their parents’ will”.
Multiple generations of Italian families have traditionally lived under the same roof. More recently, persistently high youth unemployment and soaring rents have added to the attraction for many young Italians to stay put.
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But critics also say they hanker after home cooking and the free laundry service provided by their parents. This has seen them dubbed bamboccioni, which roughly translates as big babies.
The stay-at-home phenomenon is most pronounced in the south, where 71 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds were living with their parents in 2020, according to Italian statistics agency Istat. That was up from 62 per cent in 2001.
In the richer north, the figure was lower at 64 per cent, but still far higher than the European Union average of 49 per cent.
Not all Italian judges have been sympathetic to fed-up parents paying to support adult children. In 2017 a father who cut off his 26-year-old daughter’s allowance after she spent six years at university without graduating was ordered by a judge to keep contributing.
The year before that, a court told a father in Modena to carry on paying for his son’s education even though the 28-year-old had a degree and was taking a course in experimental cinema.
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That year Italy’s association of family lawyers lobbied for a law forcing all Italians to move out of the home by 28.
“Judges are preventing this country from growing,” said Gian Ettore Gassani, then head of the association.
