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According to an article in today's Independent, Maria Vittoria Brambilla, the Italian minister for tourism (seen here discussing policy with her employer), has announced that the Palio di Siena, the traditional horse races that occupy the city's main square for much of the summer, should be banned, along with all other public spectacles involving cruelty to animals. Not because of their intrinsic violence towards dumb beasts, with whom Brambilla ought to feel, at the very least, a nuance of sympathy, nor because they provide a substantial source of revenue for the Mafia, but because they damage Italy's image abroad.

In the same newspaper, Christina Patterson has this to say about David Cameron and his putative political encounter with Silvio Berlusconi this week:

How do you solve a problem like Berlusconi?

David Cameron has clearly been having a lovely time visiting his foreign counterparts, offering a little lecture here, a little pat on the back there and generally revelling in being one of the Most Important People in the World. If some of them can't quite match his background, well, one wouldn't want to make them feel awkward, and some of them – Obama, actually – have other qualities that make up for it.

But Berlusconi. Oh dear, Berlusconi. How the hell do you conduct a meeting with the biggest joke in international politics, a man so surgically enhanced that he now looks like a ventriloquist's dummy? How do you talk to a man who can't even have a snack without a bevy of luscious lovelies? How do you do that and retain a micro-molecule of dignity?

Cameron's solution to a challenge that might defy Debrett's lacked his usual lightness of touch. He turned up late. Almost an hour late. He skipped the planned talks and went straight to the dinner, and skipped a press conference, too. In the photos, Cameron weirdly managed to look like Berlusconi's taller, plastic twin. He also managed to look something he's rarely looked before: deeply, excruciatingly embarrassed.

Maybe someone should take Ms Brambilla to one side and explain that the odd dead horse - however lamentable - does far less damage to Italy's international 'image' than the raddled old nag to whom she owes her brilliant, and probably bareback, career.

Strage

Thirty years ago today I was teaching English at a summer school in Malvern. The students, aged between 12 and 16, were mostly from Europe and the largest group came from Italy. They rarely watched the television - I don't remember now if they were discouraged from doing so or simply preferred to do other things; there are few things less interesting, after all, than watching TV in a language you barely understand, and most of the students there spoke very little English. But on the evening of 2 August the television room was packed with Italian students because a bomb had destroyed Bologna station. Some of the students came from the area; two or three of them had relatives who were starting their holidays that day and might easily have been involved. When the first images of the station, parts of which had been reduced to rubble, appeared on the screen, the room fell silent, and remained silent until one of the older girls began to cry, which set the other kids off. I wasn't the only teacher there who spoke some Italian, and we were kept busy translating the news as it came in. There were no satellite dishes then, no Sky; all we had was the BBC. Mrs Smith, the person in charge of the school and herself Italian, was also busy, comforting the younger children, organising sandwiches and coffee, phoning people who might know more. I'd been through Bologna - one of the busiest stations in the country - but never stopped there. I didn't know then that I'd be living only thirty miles away two months later, in what was still the aftermath of the event, an aftermath that continues to echo. Around 80 people, many of them children, died in the explosion; others were wounded, or blinded, or permanently crippled. Not to speak of the collateral effect of this kind of tragedy, friends lost and families destroyed. To begin with, the assumption was that there had been an accident, but that assumption didn't last. No one claimed responsibility for the attack, which was attributed to right-wing terrorists, on the grounds that left-wing terrorism was more selective. In the thirty years that have passed since then, people have been accused and convicted of the crime, and in some cases have completed their sentences and are now free. But no one genuinely believes that the perpetrators of the crime have been punished, or even identified. It's hard for me to read about the bombing without remembering the faces of those children - one of whom actually lost a cousin in the attack - stranded so far from their homes, frustrated by distance and language; children who might just as easily have been blown to shreds themselves. There's a commemoration of the event each year, organised by the families of the victims, and presumably this will continue as long as these families survive. Most years, whichever government is in power sends a representative or two, and the reaction of the crowd is a useful indication of public perceptions of guilt and the complicity of certain elements within the Italian power structure, or palazzo, as Pasolini called it. Few people doubt such complicity. This year, with a contempt that's hard to stomach, the government is totally absent from the commemoration - not even a deputy minister has been sent off to take the flak and express at least formal condemnation of the massacre. If proof were required of the continuity of responsibility - moral, if nothing else - that links Berlusconi and his gang to the people that murdered 85 innocent travellers and wounded a further 2000 thirty years ago, we need look no further.

But who will protect us from our protectors?

Guido Bertolaso, the head of civil protection in Italy, looks like turning into the gift that keeps on giving. After being flown to Haiti by Berlusconi to offer his expert advice, he upset Hillary Clinton by calling US aid to the country 'pathetic', only to be contradicted by the Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini, on behalf of the government. As head of said government, Berlusconi's typically diplomatic response was to pat the man on the back and promise him a ministry, at which Bertolaso had the grace, at least, to cover his face, probably to hide his satisfaction.

Now it turns out that the megalomaniac buffoon's favourite superhero - Rubbish in Naples? Send Bertolaso! Earthquake in Abruzzo? Send Bertolaso! Cat stuck up a tree? Send Bertolaso! - isn't Mr Clean after all. Tapped phone calls have revealed a richly flavoured stew of corruption, fixed tenders, jobs for the boys and the brothers-in-law, with, as a spicy topping, the usual scattering of whores, escorts, masseuses and pimps (see photograph). Bertolaso denies it all, then most of it, then says that it was all too much for one man. He's on TV every night, bewailing the injustice of it all and insisting that everything he's done he's done for Italy. This clashes with a comment he was heard to make while 'solving' the rubbish problem in Naples, to the effect that an emergency stopped being an emergency when the TV and press stopped talking about it, a definition Haiti would do well to remember.

The shit has hit the fan just as the government was about to pass a law that redefined Italian Civil Protection as a Società per azioni, i.e. a public corporation quoted on the stock exchange, with Bertolaso as its natural CEO, thus removing any shred of accountability other than to its shareholders. Given that Berlusconi has been using the civil protection apparatus, and Bertolaso, for such unlikely activities as building the Pharaonic structures originally intended for the last G8 summit and the world swimming championships - a beanfeast for the construction companies involved but hardly natural emergencies - the new law didn't seem that much of a big deal; it merely legitimised the status quo. These latest developments have cast the law, and Bertolaso's saintly dedication to the national good, in a different light.

Fuck off, Binetti

Good news for all those people, like me, who know that the best way of getting rid of Berlusconi is to concentrate votes on the Partito Democratico (PD), but just can't stomach it while Paola Binetti, fundamentalist catholic and - alas - member of the Italian senate, is a PD member. Well, she's gone. That's right, gone. After announcing her opposition to the candidate chosen by the PD for the regional elections in Lazio, Emma Bonino, she's taken her obscurantism and intolerance where it belongs, to the UdC, a party I can't bring myself to describe after a decent lunch. She ought to be a lot more comfortable there. Among her new chums is Rocco "Buttplug" Buttiglione, an orang-utan lookalike and self-styled catholic philosopher, who was forced to resign from his role as EU commissioner some years ago after making a homophobic speech, and then whined about freedom of expression and ungodliness until he was fobbed off with another sinecure. He was working for Berlusconi at the time, without any noticeable spiritual unease, whore-mongers presumably being less disturbing to the soul than the idea of civil partnerships.

Binetti has made a number of previous appearances on this blog. You can find one of them here, along with a picture of her favourite item of jewellery. And while I was looking for a picture to grace this post (and found the one to the right, where the senator is caught discussing that specific item), I came across Binetti's blog. As you can see, it was rather short-lived, withering away after only four posts. I wonder if the little poll she ran (see right, beneath the profile link) discouraged her. She asked her readers if they wanted the law permitting abortion in Italy to be 'modified' (theodem newspeak for 'revoked'). Of the 26 people who bothered to vote, 84% said no. That's the trouble with the internet; it's just too bloody democratic.

Saints and charlatans

In religious circles there's a term - bilocation - that describes the ability of certain extremely holy figures to be in two places at the same time, obviously for miraculous purposes. Padre Pio was reputed to have this extraordinary power, popping up here to wave a bloody hand at the devil, popping up there to...well, we needn't go into details, but I'm sure a good time was had by all. But this photograph is the first time to my knowledge that an entire group has been able to duplicate itself, presumably at the bidding of the grinning master of ceremonies on the podium. I guess it's a loaves and fishes thing.

(My thanks to Peter and Wayne for drawing my attention to this sacred image.)

The shopkeeper is always right, well, sometimes

I was in my local profumeria last Sunday. This particular profumeria is the size of a large provincial bookshop (in a town that doesn't have a bookshop), its walls and shelving units lined with exquisitely packaged small bottles containing liquids of no intrinsic value at prices that would make a homoeopath blush. I mention it because, on the way out, a radio announcement said that Berlusconi was due to be released from hospital that day. The shop-owner, a middle-aged woman, commented: 'As far as I'm concerned he can spend the next month in hospital.' Any demographic breakdown of Berlusconi's electorate would find a disproportionately high number of middle-aged female shop-owners in the centre-south of the country, so this was a very encouraging sign. What was even more encouraging was that she was prepared to share her view of the matter so freely with her customers in a town in which seven voters out of ten opted for Berlusconi in the last elections.

No-B Day (two weeks late)

Not hot news, I'm afraid. I wrote the following piece the day after the No-Berlusconi Day march in Rome almost two weeks ago, then put it to one side to settle. Well, it has, and there's nothing I want to change, so here it is.

The day after No-B Day, the anti-Berlusconi march in Rome, the war of numbers is in full swing. For the organizers, the demonstrators were over a million, for the police no more than ninety thousand. According to La Repubblica, one of the two Italian newspapers currently being sued by Silvio Berlusconi and arguably the most powerful force in the confused and fragmented opposition to the prime minister, the march attracted half a million. Il Giornale, the paper owned by Berlusconi’s brother and edited by Vittorio Feltri, Berlusconi’s pit bull, calculated a mere two hundred thousand. Well, as Mandy Rice Davies once said, it would, wouldn’t it?

As far as demonstrations in Rome go, I’m an old hand and I’d lean towards the organizers’ estimate. I’ve marched against the war in Iran (with two million others) and for index-linked salaries (over a million), against state violence and church interference and spending cuts, for women’s rights and immigrants’ rights, not to speak of more Gay Prides than I care to remember, but I’ve never been so overwhelmed by the sheer number of people taking part as I was yesterday afternoon. Overwhelmed in a physical sense, as the march moved out of a tightly-packed Piazza Repubblica and poured, like slow-flowing oil released, into not only Via Cavour, the official route, but all the surrounding streets, to converge further down towards the square behind Santa Maria Maggiore. Overwhelmed and, more than once, made anxious by the thought of being crushed as the marchers were funnelled into narrow streets and the pace of the march slowed down to a back-destroying shuffle; made anxious, as well, by memories of Genoa and G8, despite the apparent absence of police, because there were hardly any to be seen. Two hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? A million and a half? Who knows? Midpoint along the two and a half mile route, when the speeches in Piazza San Giovanni were already under way, we were texted by friends who still hadn’t managed to leave Piazza Repubblica. With more than two miles of impassable city streets, I’d say the mass was critical, and leave it at that. Besides, numbers aren’t the only handle on a march. More intangible, but of equal import, is the mood. And the mood two weeks ago was benign, even festive, less carnival-like than Pride but with a similar undercurrent of frustration released, of an anger and sense of injustice both mitigated and nourished by being shared. Certainly, the level of political discourse was low, the most

popular chant near me comparing Berlusconi to a pezzo di merda, but there are times and places for subtlety and this wasn’t one of them. People were wearing purple, a colour without political affiliation, Berlusconi masks, fright wigs, balloons, improbable combinations of shell suits and pashminas. Banners were hand-made, hand-written. Protest was artisan, and inventive. Someone had cut a hole in the middle of a photograph of Berlusconi’s face and popped her finger through it in place of a nose. The caption on the photograph was Pinocchio.

And there were flags, the red flags of the various remnants of the Italian left, the green flags of ecologists, a sprinkling of rainbow flags revived from their last day out in the sun, the white flags of Italia dei Valori, the party founded by Antonio Di Pietro, one of the group of magistrates whose Clean Hands investigation in the early 1990s brought down the old system and, ironically, paved the way for Berlusconi’s rise to power. The government line today is that the march was hi-jacked, if not actually conceived, by Di Pietro, Berlusconi’s arch-enemy. Neither of these accusations is likely to be true, although there’s an undeniably strong coincidence of intent between the marchers and Di Pietro’s party and it probably hasn’t done Italia dei Valori any harm to identify itself with the event. It’s simply easier to attack a single public figure than a million private ones, each of whom has made a decision autonomously, without any idea of personal gain other than that of living in a country where some day, one day, certain kinds of behaviour will be recognised as intolerable, from its leaders at least.

Because what struck me most wasn’t the presence of political factions but the variety of individual faces, not only young and old – and with a heartening presence of the former – but ex-hippies and pensioners, new-agers and office workers, stalwarts of popular protest and people who might never have marched before but felt the need to do so yesterday; even, I’d guess, a significant number of people who voted for Berlusconi in good faith and can no longer tolerate being represented by the man. Not to speak of the range of accents, from the deepest south to the even deeper north; in a country that stigmatises, and allows itself to be stigmatised, in geographical clichés, from racist Northern Leaguers to Mafia-friendly Sicilians, it was uplifting to hear so many different voices being raised together.

Government papers made much of what they call the confusion of the opposition in Italy and, in many ways, the opposition has only itself to blame for this. But the No-Berlusconi Day march yesterday wasn’t confused at all. It had a single voice. It wasn’t – and wasn’t intended to be – a propositional event. Marches don’t make policy. Its purpose was to tell Berlusconi that, despite his often repeated claims, he hasn’t been elected by ‘the people’ at all, but only by a minority of the people, and that, in any case, election is no guarantee of immunity from the law. As purposes go, this isn’t even political, and the lack of official patronage from the Partito Democratico was a wise move on its part. Because electing call girls as local councillors, and bribing lawyers to keep their mouths shut in court, and maintaining contacts with organized crime, aren’t political positions in modern democracies, but offences to both the law and a public sense of decency. Marches like yesterday’s are a useful reminder to us all that, despite appearances, despite the shameful deceptions of the media and the even more shameful arrogance of power, such a thing as decency continues to exist.

Man meets small spiky object. Object wins.

Berlusconi's bloodied nose is already an exquisitely political space, populated on the one hand by those who see the Capo's body as sanctified ground and therefore untouchable (i.e. his supporters) and on the other hand by those who see his body as sanctified ground and therefore untouchable (i.e. the opposition). Of course no politician is going to say that small spiky objects should be thrown at one of the caste, and I don't expect them to. But it really shouldn't be that difficult to point out - as so far only two politicians have done - that Berlusconi has devoted the last 25 years of his life to painting his opponents as evil baby-boiling communists, a violence that has been greeted with a Jane-Austenesque meekness by a series of opposition leaders, most notably Walter Veltroni, the man who adopted spinelessness as an ideological stance and lost the last election as a result.

As a man of the 20th century, Berlusconi, and his advisers, know full well that violence can be instigated through the kind of name-calling populism he's based his political career on, and Piazzale Loreto - not to speak of a certain Romanian balcony - is proof that it can, and usually does, backfire on the instigator. And it's odd that, during the act of Berlusconi worship performed by yesterday's main news TG1, no one saw fit to mention the fact that half an hour earlier in Piazza del Duomo he'd been screaming Shame! Shame! to a bunch of hecklers, whipping himself, and his relatively modest audience, into a frenzy of hatred. Chi di spada ferisce, di spada perisce, as they say in Italy.

The two politicians are Antonio Di Pietro (Italia dei Valori) and Rosy Bindi (Partitio Democratico), and I take my hat off to them both. And if a small plaster model of the Colosseum bounced off the head of Daniele Capezzone one of these days I wouldn't be the least bit upset. (How's that for instigating violence?)

Kapow! Biff! Clunk!

Berlusconi and his trained seal, justice minister Alfano, have been crowing about their latest victories against the Mafia - two arrests that just happened to coincide with the anti-Berlusconi march in Rome last Saturday (about which more anon). Proof, they say, that this government is cracking down on organised crime in an unprecedented fashion.

It's a pity the police don't agree. COISP, the independent police union, says that the recent arrests are a victory for the police and no one else, certainly not for a government that, rather than help in the fight against crime, actually impedes it by cutting resources. According to COISP, the police in Palermo don't even have the paper they need to print warrants.

Listen up, Batman!

Crossed digits

I've spent too much time today trying to get our television in the kitchen to work. Or, to be more precise, trying to get our NEW television in the kitchen to work. Everything was fine until a few months ago. We'd sit and eat our lunch while cooks showed us how to tart up ten euros-worth of groceries, then watch the 1.30 news with a mixture of anguish, irritation and incredulous hilarity, turning it off when the sports news started. A few hours later, we'd turn it on again, while cooking, and sometimes eating, dinner, to see if the official stories had changed. Italian TV journalism, for someone used to the way things are done in the UK - one human interest story, ideally involving children, a rapid skimming of the day in politics with a couple of sound bites and a brief nod at the rest of the world (the States or a really big disaster in one of those places that otherwise don't exist), all of it dosed with knowing irony and pseudo-detachment, except for the bits with children, which would make a Hallmark rhymester cringe -, compared to all this, I repeat, Italian TV journalism is, well, too much information.

The BBC, in its wisdom, does the sifting first, to remove their notion of what constitutes the chaff from their notion of what constitutes the wheat. The RAI, in its sublime contempt, removes all the wheat it can find, lets the chaff ferment and thrive until it has a life of its own, then shovels it through the screen and into the homes of the telespectators, as they're still, touchingly, known, less to make things grow than to suffocate them at the moment of conception. What makes the two main news programmes, TG1 and TG2, interesting, though, despite all their directors' efforts, is that news of a sort gets through. Because something is always more than nothing, even the most self-serving and obscurantist something. Umberto Eco once pointed out that conspiracy theorists should read the financial news with more attention because all they need to know is there, and the same might be said of Italian TV journalism. Reading between, above, below and despite the lines, there's little that isn't, in some way, said.

So, everything was fine until a month or so ago, when the process of moving from analogue to digital TV began in Lazio, where I live. The first step involved the shift of two channels - one state, one owned by Berlusconi - to digital, immediately depriving us of TG2, the news programme that, unofficially, 'belonged' to the Northern League. Pazienza, we thought. We can live without Bossi and his green-shirted cronies crusading against minarets and kebab joints. We might not even need a television in the kitchen. We'll wait until the whole shebang goes digital. Which it did, a couple of weeks ago. We stared at the fizzing lines for a while before giving in and deciding that what we really needed wasn't just a decoder, a trifling expense I deeply resented, but a brand-new telly, a much larger expense that, for some reason, I resented far less.

Off we went to our local electrical goods emporium (TRONY - NON CI SONO PARAGONI!) to buy one. Flat screen, the thickness of a Dan Brown, 26 inches. These days TVs programme themselves. All you have to do is sit and watch. Except that it couldn't find the channels, or not very well, and even the ones it did find looked small and sounded tinny. We weren't happy. We needed something bigger, and better. We packed it back in its box and went to exchange it. For something bigger, and better. Trony is the only retail outlet in Fondi that looks as though it might belong somewhere else, in a country where retail rules. The prices are reasonable, the choice wide, the credit facilities all too readily available. Even the people who work there are courteous and informed (I mean this). But even Trony was a little stressed out as the entire populace of Fondi (or its grandmother) queued, decoder in hand, to get their mojos home and working. Romero would have loved it.

We now have a 32 inch Samsung, a thing of great elegance and beauty. We've had it since Saturday. Unfortunately, despite being auto-programmed half a dozen times a day, and sworn at, and coaxed, its gleaming black screen remains unsullied by images of any kind. There was a brief, exhilarating parenthesis when a local channel transmitting highlights from this summer's international folk dancing festival broke through the darkness to reveal some meaty grass-skirted Polynesians air-rowing their way across a creaking stage. Apart from that, nada. So this morning we called the aerial man. And, as is usual when confronted by an expert, I learnt all kinds of thing I hadn't known. I learnt, for example, that my aerial was laughable out of date. I learnt that aerials necessarily have an alimentatore (don't ask) and that I didn't have the faintest idea where ours was, although it's most probably behind a large kitchen dresser filled with glasses. This will have to be moved. I learnt that, even with Sky, the RAI and many commercial channels will be unavailable. I learnt that if I wanted to continue watching cooks vie with each other over pasta-making machines and Daniele Capezzone, currently the vilest of all Berlusconi's mouthpieces, strut his mendacious self-serving stuff (and I do, despite myself, want this), I would have to spend something like 200 euros, on top of the cost of the new TV. I learnt that I could extend my Sky contract to a second TV for a modest monthly sum and a less modest sum up front. I learnt that whatever I decided I wanted I would have to wait some days before I got it. Learning isn't painless.

I'll keep you informed.

PS I've just noticed that I've used the word self-serving to talk about Italian institutions twice. I wonder why.

Troppo sapeva

I've just finished my usual round-up of the day's English language papers, sitting here at my desk in a small provincial Italian town, without even having left the house. I've read the Guardian, the New York Times, the Independent. I've glanced at the front pages of the Times in both London and Los Angeles, and even, god help me, the Daily Mail. I've checked out headlines in Australia and South Africa (OK; I'm exaggerating now - I do have work to do). All this would have been impossible only a few years ago, and I'd be tempted to write something rather dull, but positive, about the availability of information, the shrinking world, and so on, if it weren't for the fact that not a single paper thinks it worth reporting the latest developments in the Berlusconi-Mafia saga.

Of course, there are reasons for this. The indignation fatigue I mentioned in my previous post, which has spread beyond the national borders to sprinkle its sleepy dust over foreign news desks elsewhere. The 'what's new?' feel about so much of the information. The irreducible italianità of it all, with all those legal terms that have no equivalent in other 'normal' countries. The notion that Italy, despite the great 'organic' food and Andrea Bocelli and all those little men who can't wait to help us restore casali in Tuscany, shouldn't really be taken seriously, particularly right now with the tin-pot Casanova at its head. It's as though a whole country, one of the leading world economies and a member of all the most exclusive G clubs (7, 8, 20...), with forces in all the imperial outposts, had somehow been replaced by its comic equivalent, gurning and wiggling its hips in a corner of the room, only to be ignored despite its antics.

Which is more than a pity. Because Berlusconi's game is becoming wilder and more desperate by the day and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who cares one jot about Europe or, for that matter, the nature of populism and democracy, if only because it's the kind of game that could, as my mother used to say, end in tears. Two days ago he was in Sardinia, where he told his audience of young supporters that, if he had the chance, he would 'throttle' the people who made a popular television series about the Mafia (La Piovra) and all those authors who defamed Italy by writing about the Mafia. The last person to inveigh against La Piovra like this was Zeffirelli, a man whose career arc has plummeted from Visconti to the payroll of the Great Buffoon. The fact that Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, has written a public letter denouncing the latest plot to rewrite the legal code in Berlusconi's favour is obviously neither here nor there, though Saviano would be wise to hang onto his police protection yet awhile. Berlusconi used the verb 'strozzare', inelegant at the best of times and, in this context, deeply tainted by the lexical dye of Cosa Nostra. He also told a joke about Einstein, who died because 'he knew too much' (see title of post). Nobody expects the language of statesmanship from the man, but it would be nice if he could raise his game to the level of, say, someone selling silver-plated bracelets on a shopping channel.

Punished for good behaviour

If you're in Rome on 5 December you might like to take part in No-Berlusconi Day, the product of a viral campaign to eject the Buffoon from power before he does any more damage. Don't be put off (or encouraged?) by the fact that the demonstration is now being referred to, rather unfortunately, as nobday. It looks as though it's going to be a big event, although I detect a certain indignation fatigue setting in among people who, three years ago, would have happily ripped down the walls of Villa Certosa with their teeth and nails. Indifference, even if feigned, is both a pretty extraordinary way to react as things go from bad to worse and, at the same time, explicable precisely because of the decline from malgovernance to mafia that we're witnessing at the moment. It's a long story and others can - and will - tell it better than I can, but it's emerging from confessions made by mafiosi pentiti (grasses) that a series of terrorist attacks in Rome and Florence may have been instigated by two politicians - Marcello Dell'Utri (looking cultured in photo), B's right-hand man and already convicted of collusion with the mafia, and the Buffoon himself. They had political reasons for this and it doesn't take too fine a mind to work out what these might have been. But nothing comes without its price, and it appears that Berlusconi has been less than loyal to his old friends. A series of laws should have been revoked or modified to give the mafia more wiggle room. This hasn't happened, for reasons that we can only imagine. But it's ironic that the shit should hit the fan because Berlusconi has failed to keep his promise to the world of organised crime. The fact that the pentiti are now spilling beans to magistrates with what seems to be the approval of Cosa Nostra can only mean that it's in the interest of the latter to shaft their old comrade-in-arms. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, as the proverb has it. Which is rather a pity, because Berlusconi is getting more and more heated by the day.

Button up

The France Soir correspondent in Rome, Ariel Dumont, has just been sacked for being anti-Berlusconian. This isn't what the paper says, of course. The editor talks about the need to rationalise its overseas representation for reasons of budget and denies any pressure from the newspaper's owner. France Soir is controlled by 23-year-old Alexander Pugachev, the son of the Russian oligarch Sergei Pugachev, the 605th richest man in the world, ex-Chekhist and close friend of Putin. Berlusconi, by sheer coincidence, is also a close friend of Putin, in what passes for friendship among people of this sort.

By further coincidence, the newspaper has also sacked Natalie Ouvaroff, its Moscow correspondent, who has been less than gentle recently with the feisty bare-chested salmon wrestler from St. Petersburg, the man whose reputation may not be besmirched, or else. The dinky badge to the right, by the way, belongs to the KGB ans may once have adorned young Vlad's lapel, or wherever they used to wear these things.

Still, things could be worse. Getting the sack isn't much fun, but it's better than being shot in the head.

Sticks, stones, words, lawyers

That Berlusconi and his associates don't trust certain magistrates hardly needs repeating. But it's odd how much faith they put in the due process of law when they're trying to shut up someone inconvenient. SB's already brought cases against newspapers in Italy and abroad, so far without success, but that isn't as important as establishing that acts of criticism will lead to substantial, even crippling lawyers' fees to prove their legitimacy. Now one of his right-hand men, Renato Schifani, a Sicilian lawyer and the owner of one of the senate's most splendid comb-overs until the Forza Italia image police got their hands on him, has decided to take Antonio Tabucchi, the author of, among other books, Sostiene Pereira, to court for an article he wrote for L'Unità, the ex-PCI that's already being sued by his long-time boss, SB. Tabucchi, whose name often pops among Nobel candidates, has been accused of besmirching Schifani's character, something the man does perfectly well for himself whenever he opens his mouth. Presumably Tabucchi mentioned some of Schifani's former associates, usurers, Mafiosi and the like, and didn't stress firmly enough that a man should never be judged by the company he keeps. If that weren't the case, of course, we'd hardly need to dig into Schifani's no doubt crystalline past for proof of unwise associations. I'd have thought the hands of a man who lends his professional skills to keeping the half-pint Buffoon out of jail were already quite muddied enough.

PS The word Berlusconi wasn't recognised by the spell-check of the computer I'm using to write this. It proposed, as an alternative, Lusciousness and an adjective referring to conifers. His old chum, the self-exiled 'socialist' crook Bettino Craxi, produced similarly improbable results, including Praxis, Cranium and Craving. There's a thesis here...

Shame

This cleverly designed bag with the handy noose-shaped handle might be the closest we'll ever get to seeing justice done in Italy. It's the old story. You've read it here on this blog a tedious number of times and pretty much anywhere else that's talked about Italy in the past twenty years. It's the one that begins: 'In any normal western democracy...' and then goes on to describe the latest exploits of a governing class that has never quite grasped the concepts of shame or accountability (in other words, the guardian angels of any democracy worth its name). It was bad enough under the Christian Democrats, who regarded the electorate as ignorant and tendentially obedient subjects, cowed by the authority of their masters. These days, under Berlusconi, we're simply tele-customers and it would, indeed, be more than fitting if the tin-pot Duce were to meet his end on the side of a shopping bag. What continues to astonish, though, is the extent to which shame has been excised from the body politic. You probably remember that Berlusconi's most recent attempt to wriggle out of the various court cases in which he's the accused was blocked by the supreme court a couple of weeks ago. But a couple ofweeks is all it takes to come up with a new solution. This time a bill has been proposed which exempts all ex-cruiseship crooners with hair transplants from prosecution, as long as their surnames begin with B. I'm joking, of course, but only just. It might have been better if such a law had been proposed. It's obvious that Berlusconi will never serve a day in jail, so legislation which really is ad personam might be the simplest option, howwever hard it is to swallow. Because the worrying consequences of this new proposal are that the putative prison doors will be flung open not only for our wily hero, but for all other kinds of equally serious evildoers, who will simply walk away scot-free and ready to re-offend, secure in the knowledge that they'll almost certainly walk free again, however many people they rip off. These are white-collar criminals, which means they're up there with Bernard Madoff, destroying lives while feathering already gilded nests. In my wilder days, I'd have called them filthy capitalist scum, and, guess what, those words still work for me. These people will be practically guaranteed immunity under the new law, which imposes time limits on trials. The more complicated the trial - and financial crimes are necessarily complicated - the less likely it is to be concluded within the time allotted. Oh yes, illegal immigrants, while fulfilling all the conditions of the measure, whose presence in this country is not a crime but an infraction, will nonetheless not be able to benefit from the law. The banker who squirrels away the savings of a thousand pensioners, in other words, will emerge unscathed. The Filipino woman who wipes their arses will find herself doing time. This, you won't be surprised to hear, is a sop to the Northern League, which tolerates, indeed encourages, large-scale business malpractice but doesn't like black faces cluttering up its super-sized shopping malls.

Scum rising to the top

Last night's edition of Anno Zero talked about Fondi, the town I've lived in for the past eight years. Anno Zero is one of the programmes Berlusconi accuses of being fazioso, a holdall term that roughly translates as not being shamefully unbalanced in the speaker's favour. It's taken a while to look at what's been happening here, but it was good to see an entire edition dedicated to a situation that really would be unsustainable anywhere outside Colombia (and I apologise to any Colombian readers I may have immediately - I speak with the sort of ignorance about elsewhere normally exhibited by the current Italian government). People who haven't been to Fondi may have the impression that it's a sleepy market town, not quite on the coast, and that's certainly an attractive picture and, in some ways, true. Fondi has always been predominantly agricultural and remains a market town - it now has the largest wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Italy, and among the largest in Europe, a couple of miles from the old centre. This means that Fondi is also, in economic terms, a very rich town, or one, at least, that sees inordinate amounts of money change hands on a daily basis.

The police chief of Latina, the provincial capital, recently conducted an investigation into exactly what this involved and came to the conclusion that the local administration had been infiltrated by organised crime to such an extent that it was no longer viable, and should be removed. The dossier went to the minister responsible, Roberto Maroni. This isn't that unusual a situation in Italy, where illicit relationships between the Mafia and government are as common as those that take place in Putin's bed at Villa Certosa. The normal procedure is for the ministry to rubber stamp the dossier and dissolve the council, barring the incriminated public servants from future public office.

On this occasion though, thanks to the obstructionism - still unexplained - of three cabinet ministers, the rubber stamp wasn't applied. Maroni, instead, asked for 'clarification' of the accusations. The clarified dossier, which said exactly the same as its predecessor, duly returned to Maroni's desk some months later. Where it sat for as long as it (in)decently could. Finally, when the dirty rotten business was beginning to attract too much unwelcome attention and there was nothing the government could do but give in and send the whole gang home, said whole gang - mayor, councillors, functionaries (those who weren't in jail, that is) - upped and resigned. This not only made it impossible to dissolve the administration en bloc, but meant that all those who resigned could stand again at the next elections, something that will almost certainly happen.

The building you can see in the photograph above - a monument to post-fascist vulgarity with a touch of Luxor thrown in - is the new town hall. I've been meaning to write about it for some time, but one's heart sinks at such ugliness. Still, it was illuminating to discover last night that when its construction was open to tender only one company applied, and that this company was actually a consortium of companies, some of them with extremely dodgy pasts. Companies - and individuals - involved in public works in Italy are obliged to produce a document attesting to their Mafia-free status, a procedure that would have excluded these companies - and the entire consortium - at the outset. Or it would have done if the person responsible for checking hadn't 'forgotten' to ask them for it.

Now anyone who lives here knows that Italian bureaucracy doesn't do oversights - it will drive someone into the grave for a piece of carta protocollata - so this isn't very convincing. Not even Claudio Fazzone seemed convinced last night. Fazzone used to be a driver for a Christian democrat senator years ago. Now he's a senator himself, with hand-tailored suits, more money than he knows what to do with, villas scattered like confetti around the globe, the privatised water of the entire region in his fiefdom and the look of someone used to getting his own way. He's got a mean, tight little face, like something attached to the bladder of his head to scare people off. He's the kind of man who threatens to sue whoever disagrees with him, who waves sheafs of paper around in lieu of argument. Mind you, compared to some of the ex-members of Fondi council he's Isaiah Berlin.

An Anno Zero journalist tried to interview some of them, starting with the mayor, who told him to fuck off and then accused him of being maleducato. Then there was the ex assessore di cultura, a barrel-bellied martial arts instructor who could barely manage a whole phrase in standard Italian and whose CV apparently includes a spell as bodyguard for a Mafioso. Basically, as squalid a bunch of low-life crooks as you could wish to meet... There was a wonderful moment when the journalist was stalking the mayor along the echoing corridors of the new mausoleum to democracy that's been built on what used to be a small but respectable park, asking him dificult questions and being roundly ignored. (This was just before the fuck off moment.) Finally, the mayor seeks refuge in an office and tries to slam the door behind him, and the door doesn't quite fit the door frame. It rattles and shudders, but has to be jammed into place. The grandiose and unnecessary building has been thrown up so shoddily that the bloody doors won't close! Hallelujah!

And a footnote for those who follow Italian politics. It was great fun to see the Berlusconi- Fini conflict mirrored in a small but revelatory way by Fazzone and one of Fini's lieutenants, the unfortunately named Bocchino (don't ask - but if your dictionary gives 'cigarette holder', get a new one). Fazzone - fat, arrogant, litigious, vainglorious, intolerant, smugness and distrust stamped all over his ugly face. Bocchino - reasonable, logical, persuasive, disturbingly plausible. I'm no great lover of Fini or his colleagues, but what a pleasure it was to see Bocchino's distaste as Fazzone blustered beside him, a distaste so evident that even Fazzone must have realised that, perhaps uniquely, he didn't have a single crony there to back him up. Like monkey, like organ-grinder?

Filth

There's a piece in today's Repubblica about a holocaust denier. These people aren't really worth the effort it takes to denounce them (and if you're in the UK this evening, just don't watch Nick Griffin on Question Time - he isn't interesting or 'thought-provoking' and I guarantee he won't be trounced sufficiently to make the programme fun. Trust me on this). But this particular half-wit is interesting on two counts. The first is that he's employed by Europe's largest university, La Sapienza in Rome, where he teaches philosophy of law in a European Studies degree course. He's a researcher (at 59 years of age - this is, unfortunately, not uncommon in Italy's geriatric academe), although he claims to be a professor: this may reflect a more general problem he has with the truth. The second is that he's the provincial coordinator of the Forza Italia clubs in Seminara (Reggio Calabria) and the founder of one of these clubs in 2003. I can understand - just - why a university, on the grounds of guaranteeing intellectual freedom, might allow this kind of nonsense to be taught, although it's pretty tough on any student who might have to sit an exam with the man. But it's inconceivable to me that such a person should be allowed an administrative role in a political party that isn't, itself, committed to anti-Semitic revisionism. Does Berlusconi know about this? Or is he too busy selecting candidates for the regional elections in Putin's bed?

They know no shame

As you may already know, Berlusconi brought down the Prodi government a couple of years ago by purchasing the support, if not affection (i.e. they fucked but refused to kiss), of several senators. One of the first to slide his bum across the polished benches of the senate was a human blowfish of no discernible talent called Sergio De Gregorio, who received a tidy sum almost immediately. The last, and most clamorous, example of ideology bowing to the siren call of cash was the defection of minister of justice Clemente Mastella (you can see what I thought about all this at the time by clicking here). His name was mud for a few months, but he received his reward at the last European elections and now represents the Great One's party in Brussels, where he's recently had the indecency to complain about the crap expenses budget. No moats for Mastella, apparently - hard for a man who's lined his nest and his extended family's various nests with government lolly for the past thirty years.

Still, yesterday was a good day, in a schadenfreudery sort of way, because both De Gregorio and Mastella found themselves, bluntly, in the shit. De Gregorio was threatened with arrest for a small matter of money-laundering. Mastella, and his wife, popularly known as Lady Mastella and the president of the region of Campania, on the other hand, are under investigation for fraud, tender-fixing, distributing favours in return for votes, creaming off the customary percentages, corruption. There's a subtle whiff of Mafia about the whole affair, so it's all pretty much run of the mill. Lord and Lady Mastella, needless to say, deny everything. Well, they would, wouldn't they? as a call-girl in a more gallant age once told a judge. The cherry on the cake is that Lady Mastella has actually been denied the right to reside in Campania and six bordering provinces, including, I'm delighted to say, my own. Her world, she says, has collapsed about her. Oh good.

Sniff, sniff

First item on the lunchtime news programme on RAI 1 today was a hurriedly organised photo opportunity for Berlusconi and Benedict 16 at Rome's second airport. B16 said it was a 'joy' to see Berlusconi, who responded with a cheesy grin and a comment about 'racing through the air' to greet the befrocked one, as though he'd flown there under his own steam, and not in a ruinously polluting plane of the kind he normally uses to shift his harem from one villa to the next. You'd have expected B16 to follow up this greeting with a few words on his latest edict (the word bull comes to mind, although it isn't immediately associated with papal), the one about the havoc wreaked on children by divorce and extended families. I'd have thought that a fair amount of havoc had been wreaked on children by catholic priests, but that's by the by. Still, there he was, the supreme head of the catholic church and noted theologian, tête a tête with a head of state, a divorced man who's about to be divorced by his second wife for consorting with minors, a man with a family so extended its limits remain unknown, a man who apparently phoned his pimp in Bari at least ten times a day before said pimp hit fan. Which moral figurehead would miss a chance like that to set a poor erring sinner on the straight and narrow? Well, B16 for one.

They talked about the credit crunch.

Noblesse gets nobbled

I wrote a short post almost two years about Italy's ex-Royals, Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia and his appalling family, when the whole ungrateful gang decided to sue the Italian state to the tune of €260 million (plus interest) for the 'moral suffering' of being obliged to live in Switzerland for 54 years. You can read it here. They withdrew their claim some months later, presumably when it was pointed out that silence is often the better part of maintaining some small scrap of dignity, despite one's best efforts to piss it away. Soon after that, the remnants of the Christian Democrat party decided to candidate the son, Emanuele Filiberto (hereinafter Fibbie), for a seat in parliament. There was an exhilarating moment during a press conference in which the party leader was caught whispering answers to a sadly confused Fibbie, who clearly hadn't expected the press to be so insolent. Earlier this year, with his budding political career already in shreds, Fibbie won Italy's version of Dancing with the Stars, a victory that strained the definition of both 'dancing' and 'stars' but let's not be churlish; at least the boy knows how to wear a tux. Next stop, Fop Idol.

Now Pops is back in the news. He's about to be tried for having attempted to corrupt a public official in a case that involves prostitution, gambling, drugs and the sexual abuse of minors. Sordid stuff and, as Dorothy Parker once said about girls attending the Yale prom, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. According to a Milanese pimp who'd provided the man with an evening's entertainment, the would-be heir to the defunct Italian throne complained that €200 for the young lady's 'performance' was 'excessive'. I'd need considerably more than that to share a hotel foyer with Vittorio Emanuele, let alone perform in a bed, but a chacun son gout. Still, it's been a good cull this week for jowly old roués, with Briatore chucked out of Formula One. They say there's never two without three, so who'll be the third? I wonder. With the latest news about very large sums of money being extracted from the Italian tax system by a mysterious Dottore, the head of a certain media empire, maybe it would be wiser if Silvio Berlusconi stayed in the States.