Fear is contagious. It doesn’t need a passport, doesn’t wait at borders, doesn’t care about your postcode. It travels through news feeds, dinner-table conversations, and the quiet dread you feel scrolling your phone at 2 a.m. And right now, in Italy — the country I call home — that fear has settled in like a low-frequency hum that won’t stop.
I’m writing this from Rimini, where the Adriatic breeze carries the scent of salt and fried piadina, where tourists still flock every summer as if the world isn’t burning at its edges. But beneath the surface of this beautiful, stubborn country, something has shifted. A collective mood — part anxiety, part exhaustion, part anger — has taken root. And it’s not imaginary.
The Numbers That Keep You Up at Night
A report called FragilItalia: “War and Peace”, prepared by Area Studi Legacoop and Ipsos and referenced in Roberto Bargone’s article in La Repubblica, paints a portrait of a society in distress . The most widespread sentiment among Italians? Pessimism. Not the philosophical kind you debate over espresso. The gut-level kind that makes you hesitate before buying new shoes because you’re not sure you can afford heating next winter.
85% of Italians expect the cost of living to rise in the near future . Let that number sit with you for a moment. Eighty-five percent. That’s not a fringe opinion. That’s almost everyone.
And the international stage isn’t helping. Italians’ views on global conflicts are “clearly negative,” with low approval for military interventions and deep concern about consequences . The finding that 89% of respondents are most concerned about the attack on Iran tells you something important: people aren’t just watching the news — they’re calculating how far the shockwave will travel before it hits their front door .
Wars Don’t Stay “Over There” Anymore
Here’s something I’ve learned — not from textbooks, but from living in a wheelchair in a world that loves to pretend everything is fine. Nothing is ever just “over there.” A war in the Middle East changes the price of gas in Bologna. A conflict in Ukraine reshapes the energy bill landing on a pensioner’s doormat in Calabria. The British sociologist Anthony Giddens made this point years ago: globalisation has woven individual lives into distant events so tightly that a geopolitical crisis becomes a kitchen-table problem .
I don’t need to simplify this for you — you already feel it. You feel it when the supermarket receipt is longer than your arm for half the groceries you used to buy.
The FragilItalia report captures this with uncomfortable precision. Italians aren’t just worried about abstract geopolitics. They’re worried about their lives — the texture of daily existence, the sound of a child asking why things cost more, the weight of not knowing what next month brings.
A Country Divided, But Not the Way You Think
On the Russia-Ukraine conflict, 61% of Italians consider Russia an aggressor nation . That’s a clear majority. But a significant portion looks for explanations in broader geopolitical dynamics, which means public opinion isn’t a monolith — it’s a mosaic of lived experiences, media consumption, and personal values .
What unites people more than any political position is the desire for it to stop. 48% believe peace must be achieved as soon as possible . That’s not naivety. That’s exhaustion dressed as pragmatism.
The stance on the Middle East is even more striking. 50% of Italians describe the Israeli intervention as “a massacre of Palestinian civilians” . This isn’t a data point you skim past. It reflects a growing moral sensitivity — a population that, for all its internal divisions, still responds to human suffering with something resembling conscience.
The Geography of Fear
And then there’s the fear that keeps European defence ministers awake. 54% of Italians believe it’s “possible” that Europe could become the next theatre of war . Meanwhile, 83% fear terrorist attacks .
These aren’t paranoid fantasies. They’re the rational responses of people who’ve watched the post-Cold War promise of stability crumble in real time. The pandemic taught us that catastrophe doesn’t send a polite warning. Now, war and economic instability are reinforcing that lesson.
The German sociologist Ulrich Beck called this the “risk society” — a phase where global dangers become central to everyday consciousness . Risk isn’t just something that exists out there in statistical models. It’s perceived, amplified by 24-hour news cycles and the relentless scroll of social media. (To keep things accessible: Beck’s idea is that modern life forces us to live with risks we can’t individually control, and that awareness itself changes how we behave and feel.)
Zygmunt Bauman took this further with his concept of “liquid modernity” — a world where nothing stays solid long enough to lean on . No stable jobs. No predictable futures. No certainties except uncertainty itself. The fears described in the FragilItalia report fit Bauman’s framework like a glove: Italians aren’t just scared of specific threats, they’re struggling to imagine any future at all.
Pessimism Doesn’t Hit Everyone Equally
Here’s the part that genuinely stings. The report shows that pessimism is growing “among the most vulnerable groups, reaching 91% among the working class” .
Ninety-one percent.
I know what it means to be vulnerable in a system that wasn’t designed for you. I was born in Albania in 1986, arrived in Italy at age five for medical treatment, and I’ve spent my life navigating a world built for bodies that move differently from mine. Dystonia — a movement disorder — put me in a wheelchair, but it never managed to put me in a box. I earned my astronomy degree in Bologna, my Master’s in physics in Milan, and I founded FreeAstroScience because I believe knowledge shouldn’t be a privilege.
So when I read that the working class is drowning in pessimism at 91%, I don’t just see a statistic. I see the faces of people who’ve been told — through policy, through neglect, through sheer institutional indifference — that their fears don’t matter. Sociology confirms what common sense already knows: inequalities amplify the perception of risk . If you have fewer economic and social resources, every crisis hits harder, and the fear grows louder.
Fear follows the lines of social stratification. It always has.
So What Do We Do With All This Fear?
The easy answer is: nothing. Scroll past it. Change the channel. Order another aperitivo and hope the world sorts itself out.
But fear, as the article itself argues, is a signal . It tells us something is broken. It also tells us that people are paying attention — that there’s a widespread awareness, even if it’s wrapped in anxiety rather than action.
Transforming that awareness into something constructive is the real challenge. The article calls for strengthening social and economic policies, supporting purchasing power, reducing inequalities, and investing in diplomacy . These aren’t revolutionary ideas. They’re the basics. The fact that they still need to be stated tells you how far we’ve drifted from them.
There’s also a cultural dimension that I think gets overlooked. We need to rebuild trust — not the blind, naive kind, but the earned kind . Trust that institutions will act in citizens’ interests. Trust that speaking up matters. Trust that the future, while uncertain, isn’t predetermined.
I’ve spent my life refusing to accept that my circumstances define my possibilities. “Never give up” isn’t a slogan I put on a T-shirt — it’s the operating system that got me through surgeries, through years of rehabilitation, through an Erasmus semester in Istanbul where I proved to myself that the world is bigger than any diagnosis.
And I think that same stubbornness — that refusal to surrender to despair — is what Italy needs right now.
The Quiet Demand for Peace
What strikes me most about the FragilItalia report isn’t the fear. It’s what lives alongside it: a strong demand for peace, stability, and security . Italians aren’t asking for miracles. They’re asking for the bare minimum of a functioning society — the ability to plan ahead, to feel safe, to believe that tomorrow won’t be worse than today.
That demand deserves to be heard. Not patronised. Not dismissed as populist anxiety. Heard.
Because pessimism, left unaddressed, doesn’t just stay pessimism. It curdles into resignation. It erodes trust in institutions and in the very possibility of change . And once that trust is gone, rebuilding it becomes the work of generations.
A Final Thought From Rimini
The sun is setting over the Adriatic as I finish writing this. The light here has a particular quality in the evening — golden, almost thick, like honey poured over the water. It’s the kind of beauty that makes you forget, for a moment, that the world is complicated.
But forgetting isn’t the answer. Awareness is.
The fears that grip Italy aren’t unique to Italy. They’re the fears of a globalised world where everything is connected and nothing feels secure. The question isn’t whether we’ll face more crises — we will. The question is whether we’ll face them with policies that protect the most vulnerable, with diplomacy that prioritises human life, and with a cultural commitment to hope that isn’t naive but informed.
Fear is a signal. Let’s not waste it.
Gerd Dani is the founder and president of FreeAstroScience, a science and cultural group dedicated to making knowledge accessible to everyone. He writes from Rimini, Italy, where the coffee is strong and the questions are stronger.
