On arrival in Italy 13 years ago, one of the many aspects of Italian life that took your correspondent by surprise was the sense of after-dark curfew in the capital. Life in our part of residential Rome (Montesacro) seemed to end at about 9.30 p.m.
Bars and restaurants all shut early. The only people seen on the streets were commuters, alighting from buses and scurrying home.
With the exception of the weird and wonderful Trastevere area, which boasted a very lively nightlife, most of the city centre seemed deserted at night.
Those memories came to mind last week when reading the conclusions of the latest annual report by the state research institute, CENSIS, whose president, Mr Giuseppe Roma, described Italy as a country "in the trenches" in which Italians are experiencing a profound sense of disorientation.
For example, 68.4 per cent of Italians are frightened to go out at night; 45.3 per cent have reinforced, bulletproof front doors; 38 per cent have installed burglar alarms in their homes; 20.4 per cent are frightened of parking their car in a garage or covered space; 12.2 per cent check the back seat for intruders when they get into their car; nearly 600,000 people have moved house recently because they had either been burgled or lived in an "unsafe area"; 47 per cent claimed they avoided crowded public places.
Perhaps you had a different image of Italy, one of a carefree Latin people eager to sit around under olive trees late into the night, drinking good red wine, strumming a mandolin and exclaiming "To hell with tomorrow" as they break into a rendition of bel canto.
There may once have been such an Italy, but it was a long time ago.
The modern Italian psyche, by and large, expresses many of the concerns of post-industrialised, late-20th-century, globalised man all over the developed world.
There is little sitting around late at night. People have to get up early for work (or to look for work), while Coca-Cola, a Walkman and a mobile phone are preferred to red wine, bel canto and a mandolin.
Paranoia is alive and well. Statistics show that inhabitants of regions such as Campania (Naples), with a serious organised crime problem, feel much more threatened than their compatriots in more prosperous northern regions such as Valle d'Aosta or Trentino Alto Adige.
In these central Italian parts, at least one of our neighbours keeps a gun in his house for self-protection and considers us foolish because we do not.
The sense of distrust of the unknown is often palpable. Italy remains a country where business is often better carried out face to face, where it can be helpful to introduce yourself by saying that "a mutual acquaintance sent me".
"Italy is really in the trenches. I use the metaphor because there's a sense that Italians are really trying to protect what they have . . . It's like in the 1950s when Italy moved from an agricultural to an industrial society, and it took a huge collective effort. Now we're moving again to a more complex economy . . . and we have to make this new effort", Mr Roma said in Italy Daily last week.
The sense of siege comes partly from the vista of a much-changed Italy in a post-2000, single-currency, single-market world where the old state holding companies (and with them permanent and pensionable jobs) have been privatised and where traditional protectionism has been replaced by pan-European competition.
Undoubtedly it comes from Italian concern about an Italy moving towards a new multi-ethnic society in the wake of the waves of east European, Asian and African illegal immigrants whose clandestine arrival makes daily news headlines; 48.3 per cent of Italians said they feared such immigrants would become "a source of conflict".
On the other hand, the sense of siege is linked to traditional factors such as the continuing strong sense of the family unit. Recently we had dinner in a friend's apartment, a single man in his early 40s. His mother lives in the flat below, while his two brothers live in flats on either side. This is not unusual; 90 per cent of final-year university students admit to phoning home at least once a day, every day.
Indeed, recent analysis suggests that any economic planning that fails to take account of the defacto "Family Welfare State" could do immense damage, since it is clear that the strong family unit makes up for all manner of failings by state services.
In the meantime, approximately 25,000 new mobile phones are sold each day in Italy, many of them bought by parents so as to keep tabs on their offspring out there "in the trenches".