“Jokes about cowardly Italians,” says Christie Davis, at the University of Reading, “Are of French origin and can be traced back to a medieval comic image of the Lombards, the gibes of the disgusting Rabelais and the cold wit of Montaigne.

“This kind of French humour survived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then emerged as a cycle of narrative jokes after the humiliating French defeat by the Axis powers followed by occupation in 1940.

“The jokes are thus a statement of the self-image of the French as the warrior nation of Europe, an assertion of la gloire de la France.”

Come off it, love. Jokes about chicken-shitted grape-stompers abound because at the slightest whiff of trouble they head for the hills faster than you can say arrivederci.

Let’s pass over the war, the Italian football club that cancelled its tour of Britain in 2005 after the terrorist attacks and the three Italian men who were shot when the Titanic went down for ignoring the “women and children first” rule. (The only people on the whole ship, incidentally, to shove children out of the way in their frantic race to save themselves.)

Let’s look instead at this latest example: the captain of a cruise ship who flunked his shoreline fly-by before ditching the boat, leaving at least 11 passengers to die. He claims to have “tripped into a lifeboat”.

(He’s now in custody, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship. Even if he gets off, the audio tape of his refusal to return to the liner to assess casualties will ensure he’s never employed again. Italians are already selling t-shirts with the slogan: ‘Get back on board, for fuck’s sake.’)

Because I sense, among the obvious seriousness with which the tragic deaths of a dozen people are being reported, a lack of surprise in the British and American media about this captain’s behaviour. Surely there is more to it than lazy cultural stereotyping?

Now, I’d never dream of suggesting that Italians are genetically predisposed towards cowardice. That would be racist. But one has to ask: are aspects of Italian culture – particularly in the south of the country – flavoured too strongly by distorted “codes of honour” which actually discourage displays of outright bravery?

For many Italians, la dolce vita involves self-indulgence and self-enrichment without the inconvenience of paying the consequences. Taxes are there to be ignored, rules to be broken and – although most Italians are innocent in this respect – there is a particularly cowardly aspect to the country’s organised crime. Mafia mobsters like to show off and settle scores while minimising any personal risk.

Critics of the Italian military have argued that the same ethos pervades the country’s armed forces. The alleged actions of Captain Luigi Fishface display what, for the more sophisticated northern Italians, is an excruciating mixture of bravado and comic self-protection.

It’s possible to imagine a captain from another background taking the idiot risk of sailing his vessel right up to the shoreline in order to swank to his mates. But surely only an Italian would be caught trying to catch a taxi after hastily scarpering from his own beleaguered vessel.

The tragic Costa Concordia fiasco is quite unconnected, of course, to the money markets’ anxieties about the creditworthiness of Italian banks. Even so, no one will be too surprised if, over the coming months, Italy’s most influential bankers are spotted desperately trying to flag down their own cabs before creditors lynch them, Mussolini-style, and the international markets do to Italy’s economy what that reef did to the Concordia.

At any rate, it’s hard to see how Captain Fishface – who at one stage was “co-ordinating the evacuation” from the safety of a lifeboat – could have made himself look more spineless and irresponsible. The excuses he offered the media are as thin as Silvio Berlusconi’s latest hair transplant.

Just one possibility comes to mind. I’m told il capitano was from Naples, which, according to my Italian friends, is as close as you’ll get in real life to an episode of Jersey Shore. It came as no surprise to them to learn that, as disaster struck, the Captain was seen strutting around one of the ship’s bars with a girl on his arm.

Perhaps his secret plan was to dive into a spare lifeboat with the bosomy beauty and re-enact the final scene of a late Roger Moore Bond movie ­– you know, the one where the turkey-necked 007 and an orange-tanned starlet make their escape from a ship and get down to some serious snogging aboard the life raft.

At least Signora Snooki Fettucine, or whatever she was called, was spared this fate. What with the combination of Fishface’s duty free Old Spice, his garlicky breath and his panic-loosened bowels, the lass would almost certainly have ended up joining the list of casualties.