Apparently, heredity is considered a career path in Italy:

Under a deal signed with unions this week, 76 employees of Banca di Credito Cooperativo di Roma (BCC di Roma) must take early retirement but they will get a choice: either take a payoff or leave your job to your son or daughter (or indeed any relative “up to the third degree”, which would allow the post to be left even to great-nieces and nephews).

And this isn’t limited to the Roman financial district:

[W]hether formally or informally, many positions are handed from parent to child. As recently as 1992, the government in Rome issued a decree reserving a fifth of all the openings in the Italian postal service for relatives of employees and ex-employees. A recent study found 44% of architects and 42% of lawyers were the children of people who had practised the same profession. It is next to impossible in Italy to own a chemist’s shop unless your father or mother had one because the number of licences that can be bequeathed is controlled by the authorities.

Perhaps the most bizarre example of inheritable employment surfaced in Florence, where the legal entitlement to sketch tourists outside the Uffizi gallery was also hereditary. Talent for drawing, of course, may not be passed on.

This sounds like the feudal-like nepotocracy of some backwater banana republic. Except that, of course, Italy is one of the world’s largest economies. Maybe merit-based social mobility is overrated…