I'm all right, Giacomo

I'm catching the train to and from Rome three times a week at the moment. The service is much the same as it always was: trains invariably late or simply taken off without notice, carriage doors that don't open or that require Herculean strength to budge, then block halfway or spring back on a suitcase or pushchair, toilets that won't lock, or that no longer have doors, or that have had the toilet bowls ripped out, leaving a ragged hole edged with faeces as the sleepers whip past below. Too many people, too few seats. Unimaginative graffiti inside and out. Windows that have been nailed shut at the service of air conditioning systems that don't work at all or that work too well, or that drip brown liquid onto people's heads. I've been using the train for at least eight months a year for the past eleven years, while promises have been made and unmade and remade, and nothing has changed. It's a disgrace, and a national one; in one of those rare exceptions to the rule that things get worse below Rome, regional trains in the north are as dreadful as they are in the centre and south.

Except that now people have started to react. They haven't reacted through official channels by complaining to Trenitalia, or the government, or the regional authorities, or, if they have, it's had no result. They haven't blocked the lines - only suicides and snow do that. They haven't taken to their cars in significant numbers. Many of them don't buy tickets, but that's always been the case, and is less a protest than common sense, given that tickets are rarely checked and offenders, when caught, are given the opportunity to simply leave the train, and wait for the next one. They haven't organised themselves into committees, or vigilante corps. They've turned to their sewing machines.

These days, men and women, young and old, students and factory workers (insofar as one can tell) get on the train, find a seat (if they're lucky), open their bags and take out a piece of cloth, a large scarf, or a section of sheet, usually tailored to fit the seat, with two ear-like pouches to hold it in place. They arrange it over the rest of the seat and then sit down. The first time I saw this I was struck not just by the time that must have gone into the making of what is effectively a prophylactic device, but also by its intentionality. An object like this is the result of experience, long pondered . Someone has taken measurements, found the fabric, cut and sewn, adjusted the final product to fit. Perhaps there are templates available at station bars along the line, those flimsy paper shapes my mother used when making dresses. Perhaps it's just been a question of trial and error. The range of fabrics is enormous, and I wonder if some fashion orthodoxy might lie behind the choices people are making, or if something deeper is at work. Either way, paisley designs exert an intriguing attraction on a lot of big rough men in southern Lazio.

Now that the novelty of this has worn off, though, what strikes me most is the attitude it reveals. It's as though the only way one can fight against the filthy state of the trains is to protect oneself not from the actual dirt on the floor and in the toilets and on the windows but from one's fellow passengers. The seats themselves are invariably clean, because most people are clean. These home-made, ingenious covers represent a willed isolation from other people - a non-verbal name-calling. What they're saying is: To keep myself clean I have to isolate myself from you. The practice might be connected to the increasingly high proportion of non-Italian passengers on local trains, although I'd like not to think so. But it's what I've come to see as a typically Italian solution in that it leaves the problem - dirty trains - unchanged on anything but an individual level. In this sense, and in this sense alone, Italy has understood the sneering, small-minded, mean-spirited core of Thatcherism: that there is no such thing as society. 

  

Lists

A couple of days ago a site called listaouting published the first of a series of promised lists. The list contains the names of ten Italian politicians who have voted consistently in favour of anti-gay legislation, despite being, according to the people who've put the list together, gay themselves. The idea behind the list is that the ten politicians deserve to be outed not as gays, which is nobody's business but theirs, but as hypocrites. It's not a difficult concept to grasp. When a bunch of right-wing politicians here in Italy organised an event called Family Day, with the aim of defending the traditional family (sic) against the destructive and disordered forces of civil unions, a number of journalists published the marital escapades of the event's promoters - most of whom had been divorced at least once, and many of whom were currently living with their partners, unmarried or in sin, as we used to say, in blithe indifference to the rules of the Catholic church to which they all, at least nominally, belonged. They weren't being exposed as divorcees or adulterers but, once again, as hypocrites. Nobody seemed to feel that this offended their human rights. People who say one thing and do another, in that case at least, were seen quite rightly as fair game. No magistrate investigated the publication of their names or suggested that some heinous crime had been committed. Nobody talked about defamation, or presumed that the journalists in question suffered some form of mental illness. Nobody talked about media lynching or the need to protect individual privacy. These men, with their talk of the sanctity of the family and their strings of ex-wives and illegitimate children, were politicians. Being exposed as phonies was one of the risks that went with the job. The church, to which all paid lip-service, didn't seem to mind, after all. So why should they?

So it's interesting to see how differently people have reacted to the publication of this list. It should be said at once that the list offers names, but no proof, but that's hardly surprising. What would constitute proof of gayness, other than a statement from the person in question or a compromising photograph? (Or a wire-tapped conversation? In the land of tapping, I live in hope.) The former ain't going to happen; the latter is likelier, and would certainly be more fun. So we can ignore the whole business or take the list on trust. Certainly, the reaction of the blogosphere seems to confirm the claims. Maurizio Gasparri, Berlusconi henchman and not the sharpest knife in the box, appears to be known as Culetto d'Oro (Golden Botty!). Roberto Formigoni, governor of Lombardy and leader of the cattolicissimo Comunione e Liberazione, an organisation that has sewn up more tenders for its members than I've had hot dinners, is rumoured to have had a quickie with George Clooney. Lucky Roberto. Gianni Letta, the power behind Berlusconi's throne, if that isn't too dignified a term for it, has had so many face-lifts he makes his boss look rugged. Roberto Calderoli, the charmer in the photograph and Minister for Simplification - something he does whenever he opens his lovely mouth - is the kind of man who keeps wild animals in his garden and wears T-shirts with Viva la Gnocca (Long Live Cunt!) written on them. If further proof is needed, it can, apparently, be provided. Paolo Bonaiuti, Berlusconi's well-oiled spokesman, is also on the list, as is Ferdinando Adornato, who started out as a left-wing intellectual and is now neither left-wing nor intellectual. Then there's Luca Volontè, also cattolicissimo and fetchingly jug-eared, who has stated that 'the founders of modern psychology describe homosexuality as a clinical pathology'. On the grounds that the lady doth protest too much, along with a whiff of the 'no smoke without fire' defence, I rest my case.

And, in one sense, the fact that they're gay or not is irrelevant. Because what's shocked me about the whole business is not the reaction of the people on the list. They've been lying (or refusing to answer questions deemed embarrassing )  for decades - why on earth should we believe them now? It's the reaction of others that worries me. Mara Carfagna, ex calendar girl and now government minister (and an old favourite of this blog), has talked about a 'defamatory attack'. Defamatory? In whose eyes? It's good to know that Ms Carfagna, whose mandate is to ensure equality of opportunity, considers an 'accusation' of homosexuality to be defaming. She isn't the only one. If I could have a quickie with George Clooney (just saying, Roberto) for all the people - on the left and right of the spectrum - who've talked about unwarranted invasion of privacy and the need to separate the political and the personal, and all this hogwash that's being used to swill away the central point - that the political actions of these men interferes directly and constantly with the private lives of others - well, George and I would be pretty much fucked out by now. Good night, George.

The worst offenders are, guess who? That's right, Italy's gay organisations. I won't list them here - they aren't worth it - but to hear them talk about the outing of homophobic legislators as though children were being thrown to the lions is the most sickening thing of all. Whose rights are they supposed to be protecting? The rights of men who deprive me of my rights? Of course people have a right not to come out, if they think it might harm them, sad though this is - I'd be the last person, for example, to defend a list of gay footballers (much as I'd like to see it). But that right simply doesn't exist when those same people, for the lowest and most squalid of of motives, use their power to cancel the basic human rights of others. The squirming sanctimonious behaviour of Italy's gay spokespersons as they fall over themselves to defend the hypocrisy of their masters is further proof that Italy remains a profoundly authoritarian country, terrified of raising its voice against the powerful, constantly in search of a crumb from the table, grubbing for scraps of advancement, ultimately behaving itself because it's only through submission to the dominant culture that privileges can be won. It's a lickspittle reaction and the people who represent the public face of gay Italy should be ashamed of themselves.

There are, thank God, exceptions. For those of you read Italian, here's a piece by Aldo Busi.

A roof over one's head

Lovely, isn't it? It's the courthouse of Terracina, a small town on the Italian coast about 70 miles south of Rome. I first saw the building a few years ago, when I was sued for non-payment of an absurdly inflated bill by a structural engineer who ran his business from behind a pull-down shutter. I won that case, paying my lawyer slightly more than the original bill would have been; a Pyrrhic victory, but a victory nonetheless. I was back there again yesterday, dealing with a febrile but tenacious offshoot from the original sequoia-sized sin, committed more than ten years ago, of trying to put a roof on my house . This involved a small but necessary structural addition to the walls of the house, a narrow reinforced strip between wall and roof known as a cordolo that graces nine out of ten of the surrounding buildings. But things happened, as things will, and the top floor of the house was seized and sealed off - in the legal sense - before the new roof could be put on. For eight months we lived with rain, layers of flimsy plastic that lifted off in the slightest wind and almost suffocated a passing widow, a last-ditch attempt to transform 120 square metres of house into a terrace-cum-swimming pool (honestly!) before covering the house with temporary sheets of corrugated black material that, like so many temporary solutions in Italy, remain in place a decade later.

The original crime, that of constructing the cordolo, has long since been expunged by time. The second, that of violating the entirely virtual seals designed to keep the house roofless, should have met the same fate, but has been kept alive by the mendacity of a local policeman (vigile urbano), piqued that I didn't respond to his willingness to accept a bribe, who filed a report suggesting that the temporary roof was a much more recent addition and couldn't therefore benefit from the statute of limitations. So far, so clear? I thought not. The generous option would have been to spare you explanation, but the nature of the story requires a little confusion and the self-doubt and generalised sense of anxiety that confusion can produce. I should say that violating seals (and yes, I'm fully aware of the double entendre) is a penal offence in Italy, punishable by a spell in jail. Another source of anxiety.

We appealed against this report as soon as it was written, producing two witnesses to testify that the temporary covering had been added well before the date provided by the vigile urbano, who, incidentally, had already been found guilty of corruption in another context. Years passed. The rain continued to fall on an increasingly shabby would-be roof and, in places, the floor below. Heat continued to rise from the house all winter with an extravagance that doesn't bear thinking about. People were born and, alas, died. I was in England when I heard about the first hearing, in March this year. Not from my lawyer; that would be too much to expect from someone who's already earned at least twice what the original roof would have cost, to little effect. One of my two witnesses phoned me in a panic the evening before to say that she'd just received aletter telling her to appear in court and couldn't possibly go to Terracina the following day. I phoned the second witness, who'd not been notified at all. I phoned my lawyer, who said that I shouldn't worry and that the hearing would probably be rescheduled in any case. Was I needed? Apparently not. Which was a relief. 

The hearing, as predicted, was rescheduled, but not before the vigile urbano had admitted, on oath, that the date he'd provided had no basis in fact but was simply a presumption on his part. Without this presumption, no crime had been committed within the times recognised by the Italian legal system. I was, to borrow a term used constantly and with similar inaccuracy by Berlusconi, 'innocent'. Unfortunately this wasn't enough to avoid the second hearing yesterday. We arrived at nine o'clock. We left, almost seven hours later, at quarter to four. The inside of the building is as hostile as its exterior, concrete and more concrete; with temperatures in the low 30s, as they were yesterday, and no air conditioning outside the actual courtroom, it's no place to pass the best part of a day. We acquired squatters' rights to a row of four chairs just outside the courtroom, taking it in turns to press our nose against the glass that allowed us to watch, but not hear, the proceedings. We only realised later that we could have gone in and followed each hearing live; we'd assumed, in our ingenuous privacy-respecting way, that the people drifting in and out of the place were connected to the trial, rather than people like me, who were simply obliged to be in the building and within earshot of an eventual summons. And lawyers,of course, distinguishable by a dress code that imposed vertiginously high heels and hemlines for the women, regardless of age, and strangely shrunken jackets in silky materials for the younger men. As though the cast of Ally McBeal had been outfitted by Victoria's Secret.  

We started our wait with a certain optimism. The list of cases to be heard was pinned up on a noticeboard outside the court. Lambert + 1 was scheduled for 10.00. After an hour or so, we understood that the list wasn't simply inaccurate in terms of the time it had allotted to each case. Its order bore not even the slightest resemblance to what was going on. Case No. 17 was given immediate precedence. In Italy, 17 is an unlucky number; on this occasion, it's hard to say whose luck was worst. We gathered scraps of information about the case as people wandered in and out. It involved a man already jailed for attempted murder, an electric saw, a stalked grandmother, a locked cupboard filled with rifles, domestic violence in all its ugliness. More to the point, it involved 36 witnesses, each of whom - it became apparent -would be called to take the chair (there is no box). We watched them wait their turn to be questioned, all 36 of them. One young woman was cross-examined for more than half an hour; a man, who might have been her brother, even longer. People came and went, and came back again. Witnesses conferred outside the courtroom, where the judge, a slim, rather frail-looking woman who couldn't have been much more than thirty, listened and scribbled and sought clarity, and a man in a grey suit copied down, by hand, each single word that was said, because the only record that has legal value in Italy is produced by hand and therefore unalterable. There was much gnashing of teeth and wailing, principally among those whose cases, as the day wore on, were increasingly unlikely to be heard. 

One young man was particularly incensed. He'd been arrested for possession of a single marijuana plant some seven months ago and kept under house arrest ever since. If his case didn't come up, this could easily become a year or longer. He wandered, wild-eyed, around the echoing humid foyer at the building's heart. He was still there when we left; his lawyer had promised him that some deal with the judge had been struck to ensure his case be heard. I hope, for his sake, this was true. We had our brief moment of glory, when our witnesses were asked to stand up to be seen, an act that appears to carry some mysterious inexpressible judicial value, and the judge, who'd eaten a sorry looking sandwich within feet of us only half an hour before, rescheduled the hearing for February 2012, ten years to the month since the seals, which have never existed except on paper, were actually violated. It's a good thing none of us had anything better to do with our time. Except that, of course, we did. We could have worked out a system, for example, that took into account the time a hearing was likely to take on the basis of the number of witnesses called. It wouldn't have been that difficult. Anyone with half a brain could have done it. Perhaps one day, when the ministry of justice is less concerned with rendering the prime minister immune from the judicial system of the country he's been elected to govern, someone will have a go. If they need any help, they only have to ask.   

PS. I don't know when this photograph was taken but the dead tree outside the courthouse is still there. Still dead.

Evil, the banality of

Not the most attractive looking man you'll ever see, but there's nothing that distinguishes him from a thousand other petty bureaucrats, the kind of people you see in offices throughout Italy, helping or hindering their fellow citizens, as the case may be. His name is Massimo Sensini and he's the elected (Northern League) mayor of a small town called Fossalta di Piave, 40 miles north of Venice and the place where Ernest Hemingway was injured during the First World War. Among its 4000 inhabitants is a four year old girl of African origin,whose father, after years of working in the local industry, was recently made redundant and is now working in Belgium, sending home what he can to support his wife and four children in Italy. The little girl goes to the local school, called 'Il Flauto Magico'. It's an all-day school and the children have their lunch there, paying a certain amount for the privilege. The little girl's mother asks for help from the local authorities to pay for her daughter's lunches (she's already paying 50 euros a month for the teaching and other services provided). But the council can't help.

The teachers at the school - there are five of them, all women - decide to forego their own lunch in turns and give it to the girl. Everything's fine until the mayor hears about it from the social services. He summons the school principal, a certain Simonetta Murri, to condemn the 'gross irregularity' of the situation and accuse the teachers, effectively, of stealing council property through their 'misuse' of lunches assigned to them, an act that incurs 'a loss of revenue for the municipality'. The principal agrees. The teachers are told that if they continue to deprive the education system of five lunches a week, they will be disciplined. The little girl now does only half a day at school, going home for lunch and staying there for the afternoon, deprived of 50 percent of an education that she, more than anyone, needs if she is to belong to the country she lives in and to which her father has contributed as a worker and tax-payer in the past.

Needless to day, according to Sensini and Murri, this has nothing to do with racism. For Sensini, the lunches are part of the teachers' salary and it is illegal to auto-reduce one's salary. For Murri, all children are equal and what would she do if all her pupils wanted free lunches? Has anyone else asked for a free lunch? Well, no, not yet. The speciousness of these arguments is self-evident, but what strikes me most about them is that these two people, insignificant in themselves yet given the kind of responsibility over others that can make lives worth living or not, are behaving in the same way as other people, in other places and at other times, whose small, considered acts of brutality, sustained by an indifferent or conniving structure of power, have led to their fellow citizens being seen as less than human. Food's such a basic need, and the act of offering it such a basic human act, enshrined in all cultures as hospitality. How ironic that notions of law and principle and equality should to be used to rip an offered plate from the small hands of a hungry child.

Image

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.

Vatican update!

The Vatican has been having a bit of a rough time these past few days. News arrives from Poland that the 'miracle' needed to sanctify GP2 smells a bit fishy, news that has been roundly denied by B16. In 2006, it was claimed that the wandering Pole had cured a French nun of Parkinson's disease, described by GP2 as 'another sign of God's creativity'. Now it looks as though the nun might not even have had Parkinson's disease, suggesting that the creative one isn't God, but his earthly representatives. They'll have to fish around in the tub of other purported wonder cures to see what they can find. Maybe evangelist Benny Hinn has one he can spare, when he's finished talking to his divorce lawyers and counting his money.

As if this wasn't enough, tapes have just been published of conversations in which a Vatican chorister (correction: ex-Vatican chorister), a certain Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, known to his friends as 'Mike', has been pimping men at the rate of two or three a week for Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of his Holiness (correction: ex-Gentleman of his Holiness), known to his friends as 'Brenda', and deeply implicated in the latest wave of corruption scandals to fail to rock Italy*. Balducci's tastes are eclectic. Among the men that seem to have been procured by Ehiem are two black Cubans, a RAI dancer and a professional footballer, not to mention assorted seminarians. Still, he doesn't seem that easy a man to please. Ehiem's sidekick, Lorenzo Renzi, apparently told one of the lucky hookers to take the Viagra and not to touch the Gentleman's (correction: ex-Gentleman's) balls. Fussy! In a possibly related item, the Ratisbonne boys' choir appears to have been a hotbed of under-age sexual abuse under the direction of B16's brother, Georg, who ran the show from 1964 to 1993. Now why does the name Georg ring a bell?

And there's no cake without a small and delectable fruit perched on the top. In this case, the cherry is the news that money squirrelled away by Diego Anemone, one of the leading figures in the Italian Civil Protection corruption scandal and currently enjoying the comforts of a cell not that far from Balducci's, has been found in the safe of don Evaldo Biasini. (That's don as in catholic priest, not mafioso. I know, I know...) Something like a million euros was hidden behind a religious painting in the office of the priest, who just happens to be responsible for the financial affairs of an organization called the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Ever-so Precious Blood of Jesus. Where do I start?

* One of these facts about Balducci isn't true. Guess which!

Arseholes (kangaroo) and princes (not)

Disaster was narrowly averted yesterday evening when Pupo, Pickles and the unknown tenor (see two posts down) came second in the Sanremo song festival. How they did this is anybody's guess, but foul play certainly shouldn't be ruled out and consumer associations are already asking for an investigation to be made. Given that the odds of the unholy trio not making the finals were substantial, there was clearly room for a little imaginative accounting down Ladbrokes way. I wouldn't be surprised if Bertolaso, the nation's saviour, hadn't put a bob or two on them, possibly even of his own money.

I'd have a more detailed account of the evening, which sounds fantastically unstructured and infantile in a way only Italian TV can be, if I'd seen it, but I was, and am, in the UK. Still, I'm sorry I missed the scene where an infuriated orchestra ripped up their sheet music and refused to play, not to speak of Antonella Clerici (see photo) exclaiming Che topolona! at the sight of the private parts of all-round entertainer Loredana Cuccarini or the brass band of the Carabinieri playing the Star Wars theme in a bid to calm things down, like a foretaste of the new regime. This kind of nonsense is not only the stuff of Sanremo legend - it's also, paradoxically, par for the course on Italian telly.

People who don't know the Bel Paese often wonder how on earth the Italian version of a programme like I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here can just go and on for hours, weeks, months, without anyone even seeing a kangaroo's arsehole, let alone eating one. Well, it's easy. All the people on it forget that they're there to further or revive their careers and just go completely OVER THE TOP! It's as though a horde of utterly spoilt children on truth drugs were given free rein to loathe each other and then, to their horror, slapped back into sense and forced to realise what they'd done. It's boring for hours on end and then deeply, grippingly, stomach-turningly awful in a way those of us brought up on the milder fare of Anglo-Saxon television can't begin to imagine. It's almost as excruciatingly adolescent as John Fowles' journals. Well no, not quite that excruciatingly adolescent.

Pickles returns!

The Sanremo Song Festival started its annual five-day occupation of RAI Uno last night, with the usual mix of old lags and young hopefuls, people with talent and people with friends, songs we'll be hearing on the radio all summer and songs that are so utterly dreadful they'll barely make it through to the final on Saturday evening, international stars (the unlikely pairing of Susan Boyle and Dita Von Teese) and indigenous celebrities - last night's guest was the charisma-lite footballer Antonio Cassano, who seems to think he's James Dean but is closer to Robin Askwith after the charm has been removed. His mother, in the audience, was apparently worried that someone might steal her mink, perfectly understandable given that she was surrounded by the nomenklatura of the RAI in all its brazen-faced finery.

But the best bit of the show was what happened when Antonella Clerici announced the arrival of Pupo (don't ask) and Emanuele "Pickles" Filiberto, along with a rather good tenor no one had heard of. At the mere mention of the appalling ex-heir to the Italian ex-throne a good proportion of the audience burst into spontaneous jeering, whistles, catcalls, etc. And they hadn't even heard the song! Some time ago I forecast that the grubby halfwit, after winning Italy's Dancing with the Stars, would be starring on Fop Idol. This was meant to be a joke. Given the speed with which satire is overtaken by reality in Berlusconistan (thank you, Wendell), I'll be more careful in the future. And if you'd like to hear the song, winningly entitled Italia amore mio, you can do so here. It's already been eliminated from the festival itself, so this may be your only chance.

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.

Personality politics

Local elections are coming up in Fondi and the walls of the town are plastered with advertising for the candidates for town mayor. They tend to appear in pairs, like teenage girls on a first night out. They use as few words as possible and prefer those words to have purely feel-good value. The bald man on the top right, for example, is saying yes to transparency. Beneath him the woman with the pleasant smile is suggesting that we start again, though to do what isn't specified. The man with the glasses on the bottom left is saying yes, you can, which is very generous of him, although, once again, I wasn't aware that his permission was needed. The girls on the top left have nothing at all to do with Fondi, or politics for that matter, but I felt like including them, if only to contrast their very focused plea with the vote-catching vacuity of the mayoral candidates around them.

What's even worse is that, in their frenzy to attract the punter, these mayoral candidates haven't seen fit to indicate their political allegiances. Where do they stand on all that other duller stuff, like job opportunities and how local money is spent and, sorry though I am to bring this up, the role of organised crime in local government? I mean, I'm all in favour of transparency, but not if it's the transparency of De Meo's spiritual father, Saint Silvio of Berlusconi. And knowing that yes, I can might make me feel empowered at the outset, but it starts to lose its appeal if the person enabling me thinks money-laundering, or illegal parking, or building a villa on public land, are some of the things I'm empowered to do.

I think I'll vote for the Faith Tones. They not only have fabulous hair - I know where they stand.

Fear and loathing in Empoli

This sign, which forbids entry to all Chinese who don't speak Italian, can be found* in the window of a clothes shop in Empoli, near Florence. In an Italy that seems to have woken up and found itself racist and can't quite work out why, this looks like just one small tile in an increasingly large and ugly mosaic, if that isn't too colourful a term for the phenomenon. But there's an interesting and, to my mind at least, partly mitigating, story behind the sign. The owner of the shop, Gino Pacilli, says that he's sick and tired of Chinese customers coming into the shop, examining the way the clothes are made, trying them on, refusing to speak Italian when he asks them if he can help, leaving without buying or saying Grazie. He claims that they're simply checking out the competition and looking for items they can profitably make copies of, undercutting the legit producers from whom he buys his stock (almost certainly made in China). It's certainly true that there's a massive presence of Chinese sweatshops, invariably both illegal and exploitative, producing clothes in the Florence area, and that the Chinese community is the least interested of all ethnic communities in integration, to the point of concealing its birth and death rates from the local authorities so that documents can be recycled (Chinese immigrants to Italy rarely die, in official terms at least). So, while there's no doubt that the sign is ostensibly racist, there's also a sort of exasperation and anxiety behind it that shades the issue grey, just as the Rosarno riots two weeks ago were shaded grey by the social context in which they took place, the presence of organised crime, the absence of the state, and so on - a presence and absence from which both local people and immigrants suffered on a daily basis, and in which they were all, without exception, complicit. In this type of situation, blanket accusations of racism may be as compromised, and ineffective, as the racism they're attacking. In the meantime, Pacilli says that no more Chinese customers have entered his shop - a sure sign that they do in fact read Italian. If that were the case, of course, they could enter with impunity. But whoever said fear and its consequences were logical?

* The sign has now been taken down and Pacilli has apologised to the Chinese community about any offence he might have caused. Which solves precisely nothing.

Buzz

In Italian the word ape means 'bee', but it's also the name of the type of vehicle in the photograph above. It's a 50cc moped engine with the body of a small van or, in this case, truck, grafted on to it, and it's been the preferred means of transport in rural Italy and, I imagine, in much of rural Europe for decades. Most families that have lived in the centre of Fondi for a generation or so have a piece of land outside the town, which they use to grow their own fruit and vegetables and a little extra to sell, often from their front doorsteps, with the aid of the primitive sort of scales personifications of justice tend to hold, and Api are what they use to get themselves and their produce from one to the other.

Api are still pretty common in Fondi, although you rarely see anyone under 50 driving one - they're more comfortable in Smarts or ludicrously oversized four-wheel drives. Yet even those people who have moved up to cars drive them as though they were Api and obeyed the altogether less stringent rules applied to them, turning and braking without warning, stopping mid-lane to chat with someone coming from the other direction until someone else's patience finally wears out and horn pressure is applied. This generally works. It's hard to work up a genuine road rage if what you think you're driving is a jumped-up moped.

The front seat of an Ape is really designed for one but, under certain conditions, there's room for two and it struck me recently how perfectly suited Fondani were to meeting these conditions. Essentially there's room in the cabin for a big person and a little person and as Fondani age a sort of natural process of adaptation takes place to make them fit. The women grow larger and rounder, a mixture of hard-earned fat and muscle, while the men wither down into a hank of sinew topped with a cap. The bigger the woman, the smaller the man. This symbiosis not only makes Ape travel feasible, it also reinforces the heterosexual model of rural life: one man, one woman, one Ape. Two men would rattle around inside the cabin like dried peas in a can. Two women simply wouldn't fit.

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?)

Love came down

Are you enjoying the latest cat-fight as much as I am? I'm talking about the one between the Vatican and the Northern League, after Roberto Calderoli, minister for simplification (and they don't come much simpler than Calderoli) criticised Milan's Cardinal Tettamanzi. Tettamanzi upset Calderoli by suggesting that in God's sight all men were equal, or something equally inflammatory, and forgot to add that obviously he wasn't referring to those born outside the mythical state of Padania, where men are men and have tigers in their garden, not to speak of she-bears and the odd wild pig. Calderoli's the man on the left. He's the man who took off his shirt on TV to reveal an anti-Islamic tee-shirt and then ran crying to Mummy when the Muslim world reacted badly, the way bullies always do when their bluff is called. He says that it isn't the job of priests to 'be political'. You know, the old 'Give to Caesar' line.Which didn't stop the Lega drawing on the Vatican's persuasive powers when it came to throwing out the idea of living wills in this country, or getting on its high horse about 'Christian traditional values' when the EU told Italy to take its crucifixes out of the classroom. Well, Roberto, one of those traditional values you hold so dear is hospitality to strangers, not clubbing them over the head and deporting them to Libya. Christianity isn't just for Christmas, Caldy. And I don't just mean White Christmas.

Mind you, Tettamanzi's words would ring a little truer if the Vatican bank weren't under investigation for money laundering.

Shock horror: Homophobic obscurantist has top job

I discovered an interesting fact about Italy's National Research Council (CNR) today, thanks to a letter in Repubblica. The CNR is a state-financed public organization that, according to its website, exists "to carry out, promote, spread, transfer and improve research activities in the main sectors of knowledge growth and of its applications for the scientific, technological, economic and social development of the Country." (I love that capital 'C'.) This is a laudable aim but it's a little hard to square with an event entitled Evoluzionismo: il tramonto di una ipotesi (Evolutionism: the twilight of an hypothesis), organized (although not apparently financed, for which much thanks) by the CNR, and intended to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. This is rather like celebrating the anniversary of Mother Teresa's birth by holding a lap dancing competition but there you go, there's nowt so queer as folk, especially scientific folk. Especially scientific folk in Italy's top scientific body.

The conference was organized by the deputy president of the CNR, a certain Roberto de Mattei. You'd expect someone in such a prestigious position to have a pretty impressive scientific curriculum, and you'd be right. Let's have a look. De Mattei is professor of that rigorous discipline, the history of Christianity and the church, in a place called Università Europea di Roma. No, I hadn't heard of it either, but that's hardly surprising. It's run by the Legion of Christ (currently under investigation by the Vatican) and only started handing out degrees three years ago, after being granted permission to do so by the then-Berlusconi government. The Legion of Christ is justly famous for its level-headed approach to molesting children scientific endeavour, as is another richly spiritual organization, the Lepanto Foundation, of which the same De Mattei is the president. Judging from its site, which claims that the stated mission of the foundation is to "defend the principles and institutions of Western Christian civilisation", the Lepanto Foundation is a sort of vanity press for the works of its main man. These include: "Turkey in Europe: benefit or catastrophe?" (I'll leave it to you to work out the answer to that one) and "Holy War, Just War". Just the sort of thing that qualifies a man to become second in command of a national research council and to make him supremely competent to talk about evolution. Sorry, evolutionism.

And if you're still not quite convinced of the man's credentials, here's the clincher. After the 2000 Gay Pride in Rome, which culminated in Piazza San Giovanni, de Mattei and some chums went along to the square to perform, in laboratory conditions naturally, a rite of expiation. So that's all right then.

(One last thing. The acts of the conference, edited by de Mattei, have since been published 'with a modest financial contribution' from the Publications and Scientific Information Office of the CNR.)

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.