GENOA, Italy — There are few things more quintessentially Italian than pizza. Yet the country that introduced it to the world is having a hard time finding enough Italians who want to make it. Restaurants are short about 6,000 pizza makers. Almost half of young Italians are unemployed, but few want to make pizzas for a living.
Pizza-making is not the only job to have lost appeal among young Italians. Italy also lacks carpenters, nurses, electricians and even its famous tailors. Some 150,000 of these manual jobs remain unfilled. One problem, economists say, is that schools aren’t preparing students for this kind of work. But another is cultural: these jobs have lost their prestige.
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