Filth two

An addendum to yesterday's post about the holocaust denier who teaches at Rome's La Sapienza university. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle about it as a result of the Repubblica article, with the Dean threatening suspension and the ricercatore demanding liberty of expression, while claiming that what he thinks and what he teaches are two different things. The Billy Bunter defence option, in other words. Given the moral bankruptcy of much of the Italian academic world, riddled as it is with nepotism, corruption, plagiarism and sheer incompetence, it certainly isn't hard to believe that he thinks one thing and says another, though I'd have thought it was an odd line for someone whose subject is philosophy of the law to adopt. But the real scandal is not that one sad sack has some odd, and clearly indefensible, opinions, whether he keeps them to himself, or blogs his arms off about them, or spouts them to a classroom of university students. The real scandal is that the man moved from the university of Teramo to La Sapienza in 1991. Since then he's taught one course (in March 2009). The number of students on the course? One. One student in 18 years. In the UK, and I imagine the rest of the world, this might not seem that strange: a researcher is expected primarily to research and only secondarily to teach. In Italy, though, most researchers have significant teaching commitments, which help to disguise the dreadful paucity of their research activities in both quantitative and qualitative terms. This man, whose name I won't bother to provide - because to be googleable is to be alive -, has been receiving a substantial salary for at least 18 years. A friend of mine, who works at the same university, recently found herself teaching English to a group of more than 200 students. She has been teaching dozens of classes this size, and larger, since 1985, as a mother tongue language teacher, or lettore. Unlike ricercatori, lettori aren't considered part of the academic staff, so my friend probably earns less than half the amount our holocaust-denying chum does. I wonder what the Dean has to say about that.

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?

Tengo famiglia (2)

I had occasion to write about nepotism in Rome's first and largest university, La Sapienza, almost a year ago, when investigations were being conducted into the university's dean, Renato Guarini, and some confusion about a nine-million-euro tender for an underground car park and his daughter's university career. You can find the details here. At the end of the post, I commented:

The cherry on the cake? The deputy dean and head of the faculty of medicine, a certain Luigi Frati, whose votes were decisive in Guarini's election as dean, has also been investigated for nepotism. His wife and two children all work, you guessed it, in his faculty.

That was last October. Now, as elections for a new dean come to their close, Dr Luigi Frati has emerged as the winner with 53% of the vote. An article in today's la Repubblica (I can't find a link for it) adds some piquant new details to his family's academic career. For example, his wife, now full professor in the medicine faculty, used to teach literature in high school. Well, let's be generous. A lot of writers have been doctors. Maybe she does courses on Chekhov ('Medicine is my lawful wife.'). Or on Italo Svevo and substance addiction. Frati's daughter, also a full professor in papà's faculty, has a degree not in medicine but in law. OK, we all watch CSI. Maybe she has the seat in Horatio Crane studies. Or maybe, just maybe, she's benefited from the oldest career structure in Italy, otherwise known as nepotism. 

I'm sure you know that nepotism comes from the Italian word nipote (indicating niece/nephew or grandchild) and that it was used to describe the way popes promoted their illegitimate children. These days, in Italian universities, they don't have to be illegitimate or even children - practically any family member or hanger-on can expect to get a leg up onto a chair of one sort or another, regardless of faculty. It's not as though anyone expects them to actually do anything. Italian universities are probably unique in the free world for their failure to measure themselves against other universities, whether in Italy or abroad. Italian universities were evaulated at national level, using internationally recognised and objective criteria, for the first and, so far, only time in 2006. This evaluation would make interesting reading if it were published but that hasn't happened. Clearly, the experience was so dispiriting for the Italian academic world that it's unlikely to be repeated in the near future. 

In the meantime, Frati's family are ben sistemati. And they aren't alone. Forty percent of university teachers in Messina share a first name and surname with teachers in some other university in the region. In Naples, the percentage is around 35. In Rome, it's slightly over 30. These people aren't all necessarily related but the odds are good. At the university of Bari, 42 out of 179 teachers have close relatives in the same faculty. And think about this. A study conducted by Roberto Perotti into competitions for posts in Italy's economics faculties found that the most important factor of success, by a wide margin, was already belonging to the faculty in which the job was up for grabs. Scientific production, measured in terms of publications in recognised international journals, played no part at all. 

New docs, old tricks

Medical faculties in Italy held their admission exams today, to decide the fortunate few thousand who'll be working in the country's hospitals and surgeries five, ten, fifteen years from now, depending on how long it takes them to butter their way to the top. It's been a fraught few years for would-be doctors, with scandals popping up like mushrooms after rain. Bought exams, entire faculties involved in wholesale corruption, you name it, someone's done it, in Bari and elsewhere. So the mood this year has been one of general alert. And a good thing too, particularly at the Cattolica university in Rome. This private university happened to notice that an awful lot of candidates, in the words of the Medicine Dean, Paolo Magistrelli, "had applied to do the admission test along with their parents or other members of their family, hoping in this way that their relatives (doctors) would be able to help them answer the questions correctly."

The number of relatives (doctors): 140. These shining examples of Italy's professional class were siphoned off to do the entrance test in a separate room. Leaving their unfortunate children to do the test alone.

A variety of salad leaf

This week's Times Higher Education Supplement has a leader on the appalling treatment meted out to foreign language teachers by Italian universities. I wrote it. Here's a taste:

I became a lettore in 1982, in Rome. The building I worked in was a box of concrete and rattling glass that would soon be declared unfit for purpose and abandoned. My first class, for beginners, had almost 100 students and was held in a room the shape of a boot. Standing at the toe, I watched what I taught being relayed to the hidden third of the class beyond the heel. Students would turn up hours before class began for a seat within sight and hearing of me. It didn't surprise me that only 10 per cent of Italian students graduated.

I didn't have space to describe the room we were given in the place to which the faculty was moved a few years later. The building had been a private clinic of some sort. There was a padded cell on the third floor and in some ways I'm surprised we weren't told to store our books and receive students in that. But someone had a better idea. The morgue. Perhaps it was felt that the chilly atmosphere would help us to preserve our linguistic freshness. (You'll need to read the piece to understand this reference, and the title. And if you'd like to leave a comment, I'd be delighted.)

Papal bull part two

Well, would you believe it? Ratzinger's decided that his presence at La Sapienza would be 'inopportune'. It's hardly the first time his cowardice desire to avoid conflict has overruled his spiritual, and political, responsibilities. Less than a month ago, he chose not to receive the Dalai Lama for reasons that had very little to do with religious divergence and everything to do with Realpolitik. Who can blame him? It's what you'd expect from the leader of a tinpot state the size of a football field. Still, since when has 'inopportune' been part of the papal lexicon? If Jesus had been more 'opportune', just think, he might have avoided the cross and ended up dressed in gem-encrusted frocks and leopard-skin pillbox hats - or something very similar - like his most recent representative. He might have been able to issue diktats on just about everything from stem cell research to civic administration. He might have, but he wasn't. Never mind. The new man doesn't do self-sacrifice, or risk, or exposure to conflict, or open discussion. He's an expert, after all. He's the pope of fucking everything.

Oh yes. Italian state television devoted over half (16 minutes!) of its news programme (TG1) to this story. As if that weren't enough, it twisted the facts to suggest that the pope had in some way been prevented from appearing at the event. He chose not to come. Repeat. He chose not to come. How many times does this need saying? He chose not to come.

More papal bull

It's Ratzinger's week. Not content with assuming the position (see below), he's stirred up a hornet's nest at La Sapienza, Rome and Italy's largest university. Invited to the inauguration of the academic year (which, typically, takes place months after it's actually begun) by Rector Guarini, himself currently under investigation for corruption and no doubt eager for a little pontifical indulgence, B16 is going to have to deal with demonstrations and all kinds. Why? Initially, because a group of physics professors pointed out in a letter to la Repubblica that, according to Ratzinger, the church did the right thing with Galileo, which would tend to exclude him from the cradle of rationality and scientific progress that a secular seat of learning such as a state university represents, in theory at least. Since the letter was published, a lot of other people in the university have expressed similar doubts about the need to invite the obscurantist leader of a non-democratic foreign state to its opening day. More power to their elbow, say I.

Naturally, there are those who defend his presence, insisting that not to invite him would be tantamout to censorship. How many times must it be said that censorship means preventing someone from communicating his or her ideas in an absolute sense? It isn't censorhip if the Daily Mail chooses not to host the writing of Noam Chomsky. It isn't censorship if the Vatican chooses not to invite Vladimir Luzuria to its Christmas shindig. It's common sense, editorial policy, institutional policy, whatever. It's perfectly licit to prefer not to invite a man whose opnions run counter to everything a university should stand for. In any case, the word of Ratzinger hardly goes unheard. The man's a total media tart, rarely off the TV screen or out of the press, his every querulous fart apparently worthy of national attention.

The amusing thing is that his defenders refer to him as an academic. Of what? Theology? Next year I imagine they'll be inviting an astrologer or someone who can read the entrails of slaughtered goats on the grounds that these are also rigorous academic disciplines. And talking of cultural pluralism and open-mindedness, which is what Ratzinger's critics are accused of lacking (hah!), it's interesting to see that one of Rome's most historic art cimemas, il Labirinto, is being forced to close because the proprietors of the building want to replace it with something more profitable. And who are the proprietors? That's right. The Vatican.

Tengo famiglia

La Sapienza in Rome is the largest university in Europe. This isn't necessarily an advantage: the place is famous for its overcrowded classrooms, Byzantine administration, no-show professors, assistants in de facto charge of courses, massive drop-out rates, er, too many cars. In an attempt to solve the last of these problems, work began n March on a new underground car park. The cost of the car park? Almost nine million euros (six million pounds). It's being built by a company called CPC (Compagnia progettazione e costruzioni), the chairman of which is the architect, Leonardo di Paola. Di Paola isn't just an architect and businessman; he also teaches at La Sapienza. His son Marco, CEO of CPC, and chairman of ANCE, the association of young constructors, does too. Last Friday, seven tax officers spent eight hours in the relevant offices to try and see where that odd fishy smell was coming from.

While they were there they had a closer look at the documentation surrounding a recent appointment. Maria Rosaria Guarini, daughter of La Sapienza's dean, Renato Guarini, became a researcher early last year after winning a concorso (competition) for the post. The specific subject she chose to present for the exam was Estimo (Estimation), taught by Professor Di Paola (sound familiar?). The first part of the exam was conducted in the Professor's private study, conveniently situated in the same building as the offices of CPC. Later parts were held in the Faculty of Architecture, where Ms Guarini, already an employee at La Sapienza, gallantly fought for the post against two other candidates, one of whom had failed to attach a list of publications to his application, while the other 'declared but failed to present three publications'. The only person to show up for the final written and oral exams was Maria Rosaria Guarini. It took a month and six meetings to give her the post, despite her failure to publish anything at all. Her sister, Paola, has been teaching at the university since October 2006 - officially; unofficially she'd been teaching for some time before that on a tecnico-amminstrativo contract. Her partner, a geologist, also teaches at La Sapienza. As Italians caught with their snouts in the truffle sack so often say: Tengo famiglia (I have a family to support)

The cherry on the cake? The deputy dean and head of the faculty of medicine, a certain Luigi Frati, whose votes were decisive in Guarini's election as dean, has also been investigated for nepotism. His wife and two children all work, you guessed it, in his faculty.

Language slaves: update

It's come to my notice that numerous teachers of foreign languages in Italian universities (yes, lettori), despite having regular full-time contracts, are expected to make up any lessons they may have missed as a result of illness or public holidays. In other words, they aren't paid when they're ill or when they're prevented from working by state-imposed interruptions, even though they, like all other workers with regular contracts, pay national insurance and have the right to be paid in both cases. In other, even simpler, words, they're being shafted.

This is an administrative decision, proving once again that there are two battles to be fought. The most visible is for academic status, although that's not worth a great deal in the humanities faculties of Italy, where full professors are often unpublished (or as good as: look up S. Nuccorini in any reputable citation index) and, mercifully, unsung, except by themselves. The most irritating is the one for basic workers' rights, routinely denied us by ignorant and servile university administrations.

Language slaves

An update on the situation of university language teachers in Italy, otherwise known as lettori. The academic year looks set to begin with the usual mood of rage tempered by resignation as emails from colleagues throughout Italy relate the new attacks on the category, almost but not entirely composed of non-Italians, by the ill-educated, largely unpublished, downright stupid, short-tempered, wilfully or idly vicious caste of native professors and their administrative lapdogs.

Three emblematic situations.

In Viterbo, despite pressure from the unions and lawyers, lettori continue to be obliged to clock in, unlike all other teaching staff, because they aren't considered teaching staff, and to fill in registers and reports of their activities, unlike all other administrative staff, because what they do is teach. For the director of the university language centre, a woman called Alba Graziano who's published a couple of books on George Meredith (one of them in a series edited by, er, Alba Graziano), lettori are tecnico-amministrativo personnel, and that's that, so fuck logic and the evidence of her own eyes. She probably wouldn't recognise a language teacher if it hit her in the face (don't tempt me), but she knows enough about protecting her turf not only to force her language slaves to have their activities timed like office staff, but also to inform them that they're overpaid, under-worked and, in the face of the university contract, which presumably she hasn't - or can't - read, part-time workers, with all the effect this has on pensions rights, and so on. I don't know how much they get in Viterbo, but it's unlikely to be more than the €1,150 I get each month. That's right, about £700. Poor sods. No wonder they're demoralised.

In Rome, a colleague is told that she has to come into the university three days a week to teach her hours, something she's been doing with great success for the last few years in two days. She refuses, pointing out to the rabid barone - responsible, god help them, for timetabling - that her contract says nothing about the number of days she has to teach but only the number of hours. All hell breaks loose. Meetings are held. At the highest level. There is much shouting in corridors as short-fused middle-aged women with too much power and money face the prospect of paradigm shift. The university isn't concerned with the quality of my colleague's teaching, which is recognised as being exceptional, but with punishment and the blind wielding of power. Ironically, the stick it's chosen to beat this particular drum (and colleague) is the contract used for the short-term recruitment of professors. That's right. Professors. Sounds familiar? When it's in the interests of the university to treat lettori like clerks, they're clerks. When, less often, it's in the interests of the university to treat them like professors (i.e. when office staff get a raise and teachers don't), they're suddenly, briefly, hiked up a notch. Until the next time they ask for a piece of chalk.

In Bologna, a colleague asked to have extra holiday to make up for holiday lost through illness this summer, as stipulated in her tecnico-amministrativo contract. She was told that she can't take any holiday during the period of teaching activity. Why not? Why doesn't this contract apply to me? Because I'm a teacher? Well, yes. Er, no. But I can't have time off because I should be teaching? I didn't say teaching! So what do I do? Whatever you do, you can't have time off.

Heads, they win. Tails, you lose.

Mortadella turns

The much assailed Italian PM Romano Prodi, often referred to - without affection - by his opponents as Mortadella, turned on his voters a couple of days ago from the only authoritative pulpit available: Porta a Porta, Bruno Vespa's chat show-cum-political forum for the masses and Berlusconi's favourite soapbox.

Probably in response to recent and entirely justified attacks on misuse of public money, lack of accountability, corruption within parliament, etc. Prodi pointed out that the kettle of the average Italian was in no position to call the pot of his/her elected government black. He didn't refer to anything specific, aiming his comments at sons following in their well-heeled father's professional footsteps, an Italian practice that goes back to the guilds of renaissance Florence and before. But he was clearly thinking of, among other things, the epidemic of bought exams in universities like Bari and Messina as the new academic year kicks in. This, like flu, happens every year but more people seem to have been caught with their cheating little fists in the honey pot this autumn and the university of Bari has just annulled its entry tests to medicine and dentistry, making a lot of doctors' and dentists' aspiring offspring very unhappy indeed.

Anybody who's taken a state exam in Italy will know that no ruse is too complicated or absurd (or expensive) not to be considered as an alternative to studying. Dictionaries in pockets are child's play in a country where mothers sew pouches inside their sons' trousers to hold microscopically reduced cribs. Cell phones, needless to say, haven't helped. But there isn't always need for subtlety. In some cases candidates come into the room with older, wiser heads who simply do the exam for them. In others, they wander outside to consult the books they need, protected by a doting grandmother in the corridor. Attempts to discourage copying are often defeated in court, which all too often prefer casuistry to common sense. A high court decision some years ago said that it wasn't enough to catch a student with photocopied material in his pocket; he had to be seen to be using it. In exam rooms in Italy, where people are crammed in like illegal immigrants on a fishing ketch, this is damned near impossible.

I remember during a language exam some years ago I was sure I'd spotted a small bilingual dictionary between the sturdy thighs of a female candidate. I told my female colleague, who went to ask her to hand it over. The student refused and we were treated to the unseemly sight of my colleague trying to wrestle her thighs apart, until someone pointed out that the girl would sue the university for assault if she didn't back off.

Credit where credit's due

My first class after ten months away. I explain what the course involves. I tell them what they'll be learning and how we'll be doing it and what book we'll be using, I give them the usual pep talk, making them feel good about they already know, excited about what they'll know in ten weeks' time. I'm funny, I'm warm, I'm encouraging, I'm student-friendly. I'm hot shit. This is what teaching is all about, I think.

Finally, I ask them if they have any questions. A hand shoots up.

'What happens if I fail the exam? How many credits will I get?'

Dispirited? Yes.

The natural order

Two friends and colleagues (lettori: if you don’t know what they are click on the label below) were summoned a few days ago to the office of a professor in their faculty, head of department and died-in-the-wool barone (ditto).

He showed them a 60-page wodge of text and tables and said that he needed the English translation within a week. You can share it out among yourselves, he added, with unexpected munificence. My colleagues glanced at each other, surprised. And with reason. This isn’t the place to provide a detailed job description of a lettore post, so I’ll simply say that the translation of university documents at the drop of a hat isn’t included.

One of my colleagues pointed out that each page would take at least an hour and a half and asked if the time they spent on the work, assuming they agreed to do it, would be taken out of their annual tot of hours. Barone bristled. I’m sorry? he said, looking up. Otherwise, how would we be paid? I beg your pardon? he said.

My other colleague, in her turn, pointed out that teaching was starting this week, so that, in any case, they would have no time. I also teach, said Barone. Yes, but not quite as much as we do, my colleague reminded him. (The ratio is something like 1:6, entirely in Barone’s favour.) She might as well have added, And nowhere near as well.

Deeply offended by such insolence, Barone swept them from his room. If you aren’t prepared to do it, he announced, I’ll find someone else. Rome is full of English people. His last words, as he closed the door in their faces with that subtle irony only years of professorship can forge, were: Grazie per la preziosa collaborazione.

They behave like this because they’ve been allowed to. Italian universities work on a fagging system Flashman would have recognised immediately. It’s perfectly normal for people to work for nothing for years: typing, baby-sitting, writing humdrum pseudo-research for non-peer-assessed publication and seeing their own names appear behind their sponsors, who’ve glanced at the paper once, if that.

Finally, their spirits broken, the first few crumbs are thrown their way (a doctorate, some contract teaching, an unpaid place on an exam commission) and the rise begins. No more toast-making at dawn, no more shoe-polishing. Research! They’re still expected to earn their keep, of course, but at least they’re being paid. At least they have tenure. And look, beneath them, a lower order of creature awaits to ease their load.

Our problem, as lettori, is that we don’t perceive ourselves as a lower order. We see ourselves as equals (and often, with justification, betters). They see us as serfs. It’s a cultural problem (which means it’s also, implicitly, racist) of incommensurability and I don’t see any way round it.

Oh yes, the document they were told to translate contained evaluations of the teaching staff (a category from which we’re officially excluded), conducted, apparently, by themselves.

This is how Italian structures do accountability. (Otherwise known as trasparenza.) Aaahh.

Running Babel to advantage

Like some mythological beast, the university language centre I work in is about to undergo what looks like its final metamorphosis.

Its first director treated it as a centre of power and money cow, running the place as an occasionally benign dictatorship until she was crossed by higher forces. (The disadvantage of wielding power in a feudal set up is that there's almost always someone nearer to God than you are; in this case, the Magnificent Rector, as they're touchingly known in Italy.)

Director No. 1 was replaced by a woman whose sense of self-esteem is so highly developed she was once seen stamping out of the Bank of Italy screaming, I'll have you closed! (For the benefit of my Italian readers, Vi faccio chiudere!). She stuck it for fifteen months, during which the place ran on auto-pilot.

And now we have Director No. 3, a law professor. He's going to be supported by something called a giunta. (Translates as junta: among its definitions is: Military dictatorship, a form of government wherein the political power resides with the military.) In theory, this will give him the expert didactic advice he's going to need in order to run a centre devoted to the teaching of foreign languages at university level.

The startling thing about the junta is that not a single member of it is a professional language teacher. We haven't even been asked.

Yet no one here seems to think it startling at all. This is a state of affairs that would be hard to imagine in a university in any other country in the world.

How to become a full professor in Italy

a) Wait until the university in which you work as a lecturer invites applications for a full professorship.
b) Write a book of no academic value by throwing together work from other books and stealing material from colleagues further down the food chain.
c) Have the book published by the university you work for, as a piece of original research, in a limited number of copies. Say, 250. Publication paid for by the university.
d) Present the book as a publication entitling you to the position.
e) Be interviewed by friends and colleagues, including those who authorised the publication.
f) Get the job.
g) Let 247 unsold copies of the book gather dust in the office of a colleague while you stalk corridors and shout at underlings. Barone.

The last time I saw Richard

...was Rome in 1984. He'd recycled himself as a tout for study holidays in England, with a windowless office in the basement of a travel agency near the station and a Battle of Britain style moustache (or maybe he'd always had that). He'd found the job through some family connection so plus ça change... He'd lost the haunted look he had on Capri and acquired a jaunty air that went with his new status as salesman.

He was living in an illegal structure on the roof of an abandoned new brutalist building that had once housed the Rome offices and showroom of Alfa Romeo (and is now the home of the Faculty of Letters of the university I work for). I remember dark blue carpets running up the walls, though that can't have been the case, and one of the first home computers I'd ever seen, with a program for landing planes on it. It had the air of a fuck pad, though not much fucking went on in it as far as I could tell. The word I'm looking for, to describe both Richard and his flat, indeed his life style at that time, is louche, tinged with sadness. We had a drink one evening on what he called his terrace, an expanse of untreated concrete roof surrounded by derelict factories, raised dual carriageways, railway cuttings.

Richard wouldn't believe I was gay, not really gay. I didn't have what he called a 'gay mouth', the infallible test apparently, a pursed affair, like Charles Hawtrey saying Matron. I had a boyfriend called Ian at the time, whose surface sweetness concealed a worryingly anarchic streak, as though Andy Pandy had a belt of explosives under his pyjamas. He looked a few years younger than he was (23), and Richard disapproved. The fact that Ian didn't have a gay mouth either only confirmed his feeling that I was being taken for a ride. (I wasn't.)

He changed his mind one evening in an Irish pub called the Old Goldoni, behind Piazza Navona, when Ian and I, hopelessly drunk on a mixture of wine and Guinness, began to neck for all we were worth, rolling across the table and onto the floor. Despite being a converted theatre, the Old Goldoni wasn't really the place for this kind of behaviour but the only person who seemed to mind was Richard, who'd bonded with the owner in a laddish way and felt we were disgracing him, as I suppose we were. We ended up in the Four Rivers fountain in Piazza Navona that night, narrowly escaping arrest. I don't know what happened to Richard after that.

Richard on the run

I was on holiday in Amalfi with friends, over twenty years ago now. We'd taken the ferry to Capri for the day and were walking across the Piazzetta when I heard someone call my name. Richard was sitting alone at one of the tables, wearing a hat and large dark glasses. He looked like a flushed, down-at-heel Truman Capote. I only recognised him when he slid the glasses down his nose and beckoned us over. You look like you're on the run, I said, laughing. I am, he said. Who from? The Mafia. Well, the Camorra actually. We didn't believe him at first. This is what he told us.

He'd been invited out to dinner by his girlfriend's father, a well-placed lawyer in Salerno, where Richard worked. The dinner was formal and Richard was seated, somewhat against his will, beside an over-dressed middle-aged woman. She asked him what he did and he told her that he taught at the university. He didn't say that he was a lettore and it probably wouldn't have made any difference if he had; she wasn't the kind of woman who'd understand the niceties of academic hierarchies. She looked interested for the first time since they'd started talking (I admit to adding this detail myself) and started to ask him exactly what he did. Richard's what my mother calls a bit of a romancer so I imagine he skipped the humbler aspects. Whatever he said he must have given her the impression that he had a certain clout. As they were leaving the table he kissed her hand and said, and I quote: Of course if there's ever anything I can do for you, don't hesitate to ask. Adding to us: As one does in these situations. Does one? I said. I don't. You don't live in Salerno, he said. You kissed her hand? I said. He nodded, hopelessly.

A few days later, she called him.
- I have a little favour to ask of you, she said.
- Of course, said Richard, sweating.
- It's a trifling matter. Un niente. My son is enrolled in your university. In the faculty of law. He's supposed to be taking an exam this month. Perhaps you could help him?
-Of course, said Richard, relieved. I'll do everything I can. Ask him to come to my ricevimento. On Friday mornings.
There was a pause.
- That would be rather awkward, she said.
- Well, perhaps he can call me at home, said Richard, one evening. Any evening will do. If that's easier. I can give him some tips to help him.
A longer pause.
- I don't think you quite understand, she said. He's a very busy young man. He really doesn't have time to come back to Italy and take the exam.
- I'm sorry?
- He's in New York. It's out of the question that he should come back to Italy to take one small exam. I'm sure you'll be able to help him. I'm sure you'll find a way to help him solve this little problem.
- I'll see what I can do,' he said.
A much longer pause.
- You do know who I am, don't you? she said.

Her husband was the chief lawyer of the Nuova Camorra boss, Raffaele Cutolo, serving a life sentence at that time in a carpeted cell in Poggioreale. Richard's girlfriend asked him why he wanted to know. His eyes filled with tears when he described the way she pleaded and shouted and said that her father would kill her, and that Richard was pathetic, and that she never wanted to see him again. If he didn't do this one little thing.

The thing is that he would have done it if he could. It wasn't wrong. It was just not feasible. I think he was angry not because the woman had put him in such a position, but that he hadn't had the power to give her what she wanted. Her little favour.

Slow food

I had lunch today with an old friend and colleague, between exam shifts in the engineering faculty, processing students for language credits. We were actually in a hurry, so what we were looking for was slow food served fast, rather than fast food served slow, which is often the case in Rome, where even a MacDonald's queue can seem to take for ever.

We found a trattoria on Viale Marconi that I must have walked past a hundred times in the past, when I lived in the area, but never entered. Maybe because the window is full of forbidding notices saying NO CARTA DI CREDITO NO BANCOMAT NO TICKET, which means that all they accept is money in the traditional sense, something I was short of at the time. Today, though, it was raining, Lynne felt flu-ey, the bar next door was full. We went in.

Red and white checked tablecloths, walls half-panelled with wood (travertine would have been better, but hey! as Charlie might say), the tables large enough for everything that had to be put on them. No music, no fuss, the smell of well-cooked food. Nothing costing more than €7/8 on the menu. I'm off carbs so I ordered scamorza with prosciutto and some green stuff (cicoria) tossed with chili pepper and garlic. Lynne went for bucatini alla matriciana and an artichoke. Water (we were doing exams) and a basket of delicious bread (said Lynne, I couldn't touch it). Her plate of pasta would have served two. €25 (including my coffee). In just over half an hour.

Who else was there? University people, even a barone or two with their relative lackeys, a couple of pensioners eating tripe and sipping dark red wine, a trio of girls at the top of the stairs that leads down to the lavatory. There's a big hand-written sign by their table saying LUCE SCALA and an arrow pointing to a light switch. You turn it on going down and off coming up, or else. It's thanks to this kind of little saving, I suppose, that the place still exists.

Because one of the saddest things that's happened to Rome in the 25 years I've known it is the disappearance of places like this. They were two a penny. Now they're almost as rare as eel and pie shops.

Three things wrong...

The art critic Federico Zeri claimed there were three things wrong with Italy: the Mafia, the Vatican and the University. I don't have any personal experience of the first (though I know someone who did, and I'll get to his story later), nor direct personal experience of the second, which is strictly extra-territorial, though you wouldn't think so from the traffic jams along the Tiber embankment every Wednesday or the almost daily presence of God's ferret on the TV news. But the University? Right on, Federico!

I've been what's known as a university lettore for25 years, and in litigation for 23 of them. During that time, I've been sacked, redefined, demoted, been prevented from working in the absence of a contract, been obliged to continue working in the absence of a contract. I've been told by my superior that I belong to a category that ought to be exterminated, and that I will be 'made to pay' for arguing. I've been threatened with unspecified 'measures' for taking time off to attend my father's funeral. I've been propositioned by students of both sexes, and resisted (honestly). I've been promised publications that have never appeared and had more prestigious publications ignored or patronised. I've been treated like shit by just about every other university category, including students, in one way or another, except maybe the cleaners.

Zeri probably didn't even know that lettori exist. Because, of course, we aren't the problem.I was talking earlier about the way Italy imports words for concepts it doesn't really want to handle too closely. The corollary of this is that dozens of Italian words exist for which there is no real translation, words that sink their roots deep into the humus of the culture and won't be dug out. Qualunquismo. Menefregismo. Furbizia. Clientilismo. I don't know what bilingual dictionaries do with these words, but if you wanted to explain them through context the Italian university wouldn't be a bad context to start from. But maybe the best way in would be the word barone. It looks and sounds like baron, but is used to describe a certain kind of university professor. The feudal implications, needless to say, aren't accidental.

But this deserves a post of its own.