Put together any group of Italian men under the age of 50 and mention the words la leva or la naia (military service) and you are guaranteed a reaction that is anything but indifferent.
If years of dinner-table anecdotes are anything to go by, those who have been through military service tend to recall the experience as having been, at best, a total waste of time or, at worst, an exercise in sadistic futility.
For years, young Italians have spent much time and energy trying to find ways around military service and, if they failed, trying to find ways of doing the least difficult service possible. Nowadays there is the possibility of choosing to do servizio civile, a sort of social service which sees people seconded to jobs such as museum attendant or ministerial archivist.
Recently one acquaintance, Pietro, who was granted servizio civile, was pleased to find that for his standard pay of £60 per month he had been assigned to look after a handicapped person.
At least, this is something useful, he thought. What Pietro did not bargain for was that his "social service" obliged him to live with a blind person who had a passion for discotheques. Pietro's main role in "social service" was to accompany his charge to discos, on an exhausting nightly basis.
Not everyone ends up performing such a useful function for the community. Ask those who have done their service about "VAM" (a type of guard duty), and the anecdotes begin to flow.
"VAM" is a 24-hour stretch of guard duty, in which the "soldier" stands guard for two out of every three hours, resting on the third.
The darkness, the night-time cold and, above all, the sheer boredom can drive people to strange behaviour.
Antonio, for example, became so frustrated by guard duty that he dramatically, and apparently to great effect, pretended to be suffering from acute appendicitis.
The down side was that he had his perfectly healthy appendix removed. The up side was that he got out of military service, three months before his scheduled discharge.
Another friend, Giuseppe, jokes that he knew of a lot of people who were sent off to do "VAM" but that, as of yet, none of them have come back.
Stories of bullying abound. New recruits are often the target of cruel jokes on the part of the nonni, literally grandfathers, but in this case usually fellow conscripts in their final months. People can be woken at 3 a.m. and "ordered" to scrub the nearest toilet with a tooth brush.
For the most part, people survive, no doubt putting the whole experience down to "character building" or even "good fun".
For some young Italians, who may have never been away from their families for longer than a weekend, the experience is not totally negative.
However, regular barracks suicides over the years testify to the fact that there are those less resilient to the gavettoni or practical jokes that tend to be a part of all-male institutional life.
It is also true that many young Italian males consider military service an unwelcome and meaningless interruption at what is often a critical moment in their lives, between the ages of 17 and 22.
For them and for the next generation of Italians, however, there is good news.
Speaking to the Parliamentary Commission for Defence last week, the Defence Minister, Mr Carlo Scognamiglio, argued that the time had come to phase out obligatory military service (la leva obligatoria) and make Italy's armed services fully professional.
Mr Scognamiglio hopes to file draft legislation that will see la leva phased out over the next five to six years, thus going a long way to meet the demands of those who have already filed 17 different legislative proposals aimed, among other things, at abolishing military service.
The new-look, "all professional" military machine would be 215,000 strong, down on the current armed forces strength of 280,000 (of which 136,000 are service conscripts).
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the logic of keeping a large, semi-conscript army has made less sense. These days, Italy's armed forces are mainly used as peacekeeping forces in such places as Bosnia and Somalia.
A recent parliamentary investigation into allegations of cruelty, sexual abuse and serious misconduct by Italian troops during the 1993 UN mission to Somalia concluded that conscripts were more likely to commit undisciplined acts of violence than professionals.
The committee chairman, Mr Aldo Spini, pointed out that such international missions not only require special training but also go far beyond the constitutional requirement for Italians to defend their native land.
"It would be better if those who went [on international missions] were professional soldiers or, at the very least, volunteers [attracted by the $80 per day pay]", he said.
The phasing out of military service will probably go largely unmourned in Italy. Dinner-table conversation, however, will never be quite the same again.