In the summer of 1979, I attended a two-month workshop in Aosta, an enchanting market town in a fabulous long Alpine valley of northern Italy. To give you an idea of just how fabulous, the nature park there is called the Gran Paradiso, or Great Paradise. And it deserves the name.

Val d'Aosta

It’s Italy in political terms only. It was once a town in a country called Savoy stretching from Turin in the south to Chambéry in the north. Its king ascended the Italian throne when it was first created, but at the price of giving up the northern part of his ancestral lands, today part of France.

Aosta became the only French-speaking area that stayed with him, because it was on the Italian side of the Alps. Mussolini, as a fanatical nationalist, resented having a French town within his Fascist nation, so he shipped in lots of people from the deep south, from Calabria. Other Italians followed after the war so, when I got there, the French-speaking population was an embattled minority. Like many native groups being submerged by incomers, they had a single term for the Italian-speaking outsiders: they were all ‘Calabresi’.

One old Aostan particularly sticks in my memory. He joined me on the terrace of a hotel, where I was enjoying a warm Alpine sunset over a glass of wine, and poured out his heart into my not entirely willing ear. The tragedy of his life? His daughter who had married an “Italian”. Why, he told me tearfully, she could have married someone from Chambéry or Turin – either would have been acceptable – but instead she chose someone from Genoa. Now, in my book that’s a northern Italian city; in his, it was from the deep south, its inhabitants just another version of Calabrese.

The tears weren’t only down to sentiment. There was a fair element of liquid lubrication there, as it was easy to tell whenever he leaned close enough for me to smell his breath. Which made it slightly surprising when he announced to me with great seriousness that he never touched alcohol. It took me a while to understand what he meant, but eventually it dawned on me: he never drank spirits. Wine, on the other hand, simply didn’t count as alcohol. More an essential component, I suppose, of the very spirit of the Valley of Aosta.

Why am I recalling all this now?

Because yesterday it became clear that Italy, my native country, had elected a hung parliament in which various brands of nationalists and populists took most of the seats and prepared to bicker with each other endlessly over power. “Ingovernabile” was the verdict of one of the leading dailies of the nation.

Well, it’s not the first time Italy has seemed ungovernable. When I got there in 1979, it had been two months without a government. When I left, it had been four months without a government.

And yet, it all ran perfectly smoothly. Buses turned up at bus stops. Shops were open and sold goods. Restaurants operated. You could get a drink when you wanted one even if, unlike my Aostan acquaintance, you felt inclined to move beyond wine to something a little stronger.

It was an object lesson to the world, I felt. A nation could live just fine without a government. We all make far too much fuss about the need to have governments around all the time.

Indeed, in Italy, especially right now, the problem isn’t the absence of a government. It’s going to be when one or more of the leading parties forms one. Their xenophobic, intolerant and populist nationalism may well be just the kind of thing that would have made Mussolini proud.

Italy may be about to deliver another object lesson to the world. It may show us all that it’s far less dangerous to have no government than to have entirely the wrong kind of government. A lesson the United States is already teaching us daily.