Lifestyles and quality of life of Italian people: an historical perspective

In literature, different terms have been used in order to indicate different aspects of life conditions of a population: level of living, standard of living, lifestyles, quality of life and so on. During time, subjective measures entered in the conceptualization of living conditions, with the aim to integrate objective measures using evaluation, concern, satisfaction, expectation or happiness measures. In this review, our aim is to provide an overall picture of the life conditions of Italian people during the last 150 years, in terms of standard of living, habits, behavioral models, and life situations. In this sense, we will refer mainly to the lifestyles. Lifestyle, which may be circumscribed even only to some social issues, is an appropriated term to describe a long historical period during which different cultural, social, political, economic and environmental factors have had a determining weight on life conditions of the populations. In the first part, concerning the period from the unification of Italy to the second postwar period, we give and historical description of social situations depicted from objective data. Secondly, focusing on the last decades, but extending where possible to the past, we point out to the identification of some social aspects that we can assume as slices of lifestyles, namely participation, spare time, and lifestyles strictly speaking, and finally, considering the happiness of individuals. Using data coming from Istat survey “Aspects of Daily life”, these aspects are analyzed also using subjective measures and satisfaction indicators, essential components of quality of life. Only basing on multidimensional and subjective data it is correct the switchover from the measure of the lifestyle to the measure of quality of life, both at terminological and content level.