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.

Chinoiserie

This illustration appears on one of my favourite blogs, The Age of Uncertainty (where you can see it in a bigger version). I love the way it uses a sort of squiggle to reinforce the depiction of shadow. Steerforth, who discovered it, hopes it will make its way around the blogosphere. I hope so too.

You can find out more about it by clicking here.

Lone nuts and first followers

Are you a lone nut or a first follower?

(From Cynical-C Blog. Thanks.)

Fuck off, Binetti

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

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

Saints and charlatans

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

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

Writing in Rome

If you'd like to spend a month in Rome this summer, before the weather gets too hot, and want to flex your writing muscles at the same time, you might like to consider signing up for the Summer Institute Creative Writing and Literary Translation, run by John Cabot University. Mark Strand and Booker-shortlisted Simon Mawer are, respectively, the Poet and Novelist in Residence, and I'll be running the fiction workshop. Just click on the link for more information.

Gil Scott-Heron: I'm New Here

Don't miss this interview either...

The Wonder of Whiffling

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a book called Toujours Tingo by, as I said then and will repeat now, the splendidly named Adam Jacot de Boinod. The book, a sequel to The Meaning of Tingo, trawls the world's languages for the wise, witty and inconsequential, gathering, among other gems, such terms as chapponage - the act of sliding a finger into a chicken's backside to see if it is laying an egg - and womba - the smile of a sleeping child.

Well, Mr Jacot de Bionod has done it again. His new book, entitled The Wonder of Whiffling is a mine, once more, of the kind of information you never imagined you needed and, once it's acquired, will wonder how you lived without.

To put you in the mood, here are three questions that only this book can answer:

A parnel is:

a) a species of seabird

b) a priest's mistress

c) the lining of a cassock

To call pigs to their food, a 19th century Irish farmer would say

a) hurrish

b) pleck-pleck

c) poa poa

An applesquire is

a) the son of a cider-maker

b) an orchard's bookkeeper

c) the male servant of a prostitute

If you'd like the know the answers to these, along with a host of other lexical wonders, I wholeheartedly recommend The Wonder of Whiffling.

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.

A writer's life

I just make Facebook friends with fiction writer Viet Dinh and what's the first thing I do? Steal this cartoon from his excellent blog, that's what.

How do I live with myself?

For PC users everywhere

Customer care

I was leaving the FAO building in Rome a few days ago when a display of half-price books caught my eye in the international bookshop there, run, I believe, by the Lion Bookshop. The last thing I need is more books, so naturally - in the way these vices perpetuate themselves - I stopped to see what was on offer and found some nice new Penguin editions of a handful of Maigret novels marked down from €10 to €5. I'm a sucker for Simenon (I can't believe I just typed that), so I picked out four and walked into the shop to pay. There were two women behind the counter, neither of whom showed much inclination to attend to me, so I waited in my usual polite way until one of them took the books off me in a crabby, ill-humoured way, as though I'd interrupted her in some more rewarding task. I told her, in English - it was, after all, an international bookshop - that they came from the half-price box outside. Ignoring me, she asked her colleague - in Italian - who had put the books there. Pat, said the other woman. She had no right, snapped Crabby. I can get full price for these books. Well, I don't know, said the other one, you'd better ask Pat when she gets in. She can't just take books off the shelves and put them in the box when she feels like it, continued Crabby. The other woman shrugged. Well, you'll have to tell her yourself, she said, while I stood there, wallet in hand, waiting for the discussion to finish. Eventually, I asked Crabby, also in Italian, if she intended to sell me the books or not. My intention, if not my tone, was ironic. She clutched the Maigrets to her chest. I suppose I can give you a 30% discount, she said, in a tone that suggested I'd been caught in the act of extracting a tenner from her purse. Normally, if anger is a cooking technique, I'm more of a pot roast than a stir fry, but this time my temper flared and I told the woman I wouldn't have the books if she gave me them, and left. But I wish I'd made her sell them to me at the full discount, if only out of spite. What she's done, of course, is make it unlikely that an incorrigible book-buyer (me) will use the shop again; she's also responsible for this post. On the other hand, she did save €6.

Thinking about it afterwards, I realise I shouldn't have been surprised. The main branch of the Lion Bookshop is notorious for its ill-mannered staff and over-priced stock, despite its claim to be an important reference point for the English speaking community. Perhaps someone should tell them about the Almost Corner Bookshop.

It should be part of the deal

I was going to do a simple post today, celebrating my blog's third birthday. But I've just received an email that I thought I'd share with you instead. It comes from someone who doesn't sign his (her?) name but shops at Waitrose and mails from the address ckr@waitrose.com. The subject is "It should be part of the deal that I as an individual is (sic) told the book I am reading is written by a homosexual."

Had I known you were homosexual I would not have chosen to read your book. But once bitten............. etc! Your plea (read this) for others to see reason and accept homosexuality falls on deaf ears with myself and the majority of people. The recent years of outpouring of vile homosexual promotion from every corner, has done them no favours whatsoever. Instead we now know "homophobic" attacks have never been greater. I am not in anyway supporting this, just reporting facts.

But why should we (the general public) be forced to agree with such depravity. When gays become unwell, as they will, it is of their own making. They bring about their own demise. Penetrating the anus, the bodies sewage system is an extraordinary low life act. Why would anyone ever want to engage in any activity that involves their own and others faeces?! It is the most direct way to pass life eroding disease from one individual to another.

The only cure for A.I.D.S is to stop the debauchery that causes it.

I'm not sure which of my books ckr has read, but I hope the experience wasn't too distressing (or, indeed, faecal). In the meantime, it might be worth considering some sort of colour code indicating the sexual preferences of all authors to protect such delicate readers. And why stop at authors? Why not doctors? Busdrivers? It should be part of the deal....

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.

Wrap it up

This sculpture, outside the House of Deputies in Madrid, may look like a Christo but it's just been wrapped to protect it from damage during the works taking place in the square (I imagine). Christo prides himself on the fact that all his work is temporary and that he has no existing artworks. If public works take as long to complete in Spain as they do in Italy this statue looks set to remain under wraps for longer than anything ever covered by the well-known Bulgarian packager and his collaborator-wife, Jeanne-Claude, now alas dead. I can't help wondering if her body was cremated or embalmed in some way. The earliest example of meaningful wrapping I remember was Lon Chaney's Mummy. And now I really must take a nap.

The case of the haunted scrotum

Want to know more about this? I thought you might. Well, you can find out all any decent-minded person (or, indeed, andrologist) might need to know by clicking here.

(Via Boing Boing)

By the way, there is no connection between this post and the preceding one, although I do have my suspicions about the undescended right.)

The art of public speaking...

...as exemplified by Sarah Palin on Fox News, when asked what she thinks about Obama's slump in the poll numbers:

"Of course they're sinking. It was just a matter of time before more of that reflection of the people's uncomfortableness that they feel towards this administration is manifesting in these poll numbers," she offered.

Quality gifts from Madrid

Nintendo

Coming home on the train from Rome last Friday evening, I put on my earphones and then, as I invariably do, fell asleep. When I woke up, half an hour later, the train was somewhere between stations, the lights in my carriage were off and all I could see in the darkness was the face of the young woman sitting opposite me, illuminated by the screen of the Nintendo she was staring down at, like a Georges de la Tour Madonna.

Touching with intent

This is an extract from the anti-homosexuality bill proposed by the Government of Uganda:

You can read the entire disgraceful document here.

Gallery back

Maybe it's because I was exhausted and suffering from a bad case of gallery back syndrome by the time I got to the Prado last week, but these two paintings, both by Velásquez, made a big impression on me as consummate images of weariness. Even the gods get tired. Mercury and Argos don't have the strength to raise their heads, while Mars, the epitome of the professional soldier who's seen too many battles, looks as if he's wondering what he'll be told to do next. Neither of these paintings, it seems to me, could have existed without the precedent of Caravaggio's extraordinary fusion of the mundane and the divine, although I suppose it's possible Velásquez may have seen no more than one or two examples of the Italian artist's work and simply been influenced by a naturalistic zeitgeist. (I've just checked and Velásquez visited Italy twice, in 1629-30 and 1649-51, so it's more than likely that he was perfectly familiar with Caravaggio and the influence he'd had by that time. It was during Velásquez's second visit that he painted the extraordinary portrait of Pope Innocent X, criticised by the pontiff for being 'too truthful'. I wonder what Mars would have said if he'd been asked.)

Holy moly

This may resemble a sacred anatomical relic, like Saint Bartholomew's foreskin or the toe-clippings of some martyred Roman matron, but it's actually the central part of a chiropodist's window display in the Cortes quarter of Madrid. The rest of the window is devoted to corn plasters and diagrams of half-flayed feet (which also have an inadvertent religious air, portrayals of flaying being a popular theme in late 16th and early 17th century art - there's a particularly gruesome example of some unfortunate saint having his skin peeled off in Palazzo Corsini in Rome). All the putti are doing here, with their harps and whatever the other instrument is meant to be, is framing the chiropodist's skill with a recalcitrant bunion or two.

One of the best things about Madrid was the unobtrusiveness of its churches. In five days, the only one we went into was the cathedral, an unmatchably charmless building attached like a carbuncle to the side of the Palacio Real, where it no doubt brought comfort to generations of simple-minded Hapsburgs and their court of buffoons and dwarfs. It's now the home to some of the worst religious art I've ever seen, and I imagine that's true of all the other churches we didn't bother to enter, despoiled of their riches during the civil war, which are now to be found in the Prado and elsewhere, in grand and secular state.

The book I took with me to read during my stay was C.J. Sansom's Winter in Madrid, which looks like a failure of the imagination (mine) and, in some ways, was, as I plucked it from the pile of unread novels in my study at the very last minute, as much for its size as anything else. But it turned out to be an ideal choice. It's always a pleasure to read a novel set in a place you know, and it's even better when you're discovering the city as you read, in a game of real and virtual narrative mirrors. Gran Via, Plaza Mayor, Puerta del Sol - I shared them with Harry Brett, the novel's hero, as he struggled with poverty and corruption in post civil-war Spain and I, less manfully, with far too much to eat and drink in a much richer, and safer, city than the one the book describes. It's a well-researched novel and, I thought, thoroughly gripping on an intellectual and emotional level, its wilful flatness of tone reflecting the sort of austerity you find in films like Brief Encounter, an austerity, finally, of the heart. I don't know what Sansom's politics are, though I'm sure he's anything but extremist. Still, he spares few punches when he talks about the shameful collusion of the catholic church in the spirit-crushing destruction of Spain under Franco. There's a particularly appalling moment in the book - in the midst of the routine cruelty oppression feeds on - when some prehistoric cave paintings are found, only to be smashed to rubble and dust as pagan.

The photograph on the left is of a statue on the Gran Via, on the roof of one of the splendid 20th century pseudo-Baroque extravaganzas that line the street. When I took it, I thought of Icarus, but Icarus would have lost his wings well before hitting the ground, so now I assume it represents a fallen angel. It has a Gormley-like feel to it, as though the act of falling had stripped away the angelic qualities and left the bare man, upturned; even the wings look more like the leaves of a large succulent than aerial limbs, designed for flight. He's no more a creature of the spirit than the chubby gilded urchins are in the chiropodist's shop, entertaining their plaster foot with a tune or two.

Tourists

Decades ago now, I read a short story set in the future, when time travel was so common people chose eras rather than places for their holidays: Tudor Britain rather than the Maldives. The hero, for reasons I don't remember, decided to visit Judaea in the days leading up to the crucifixion of Christ. Naturally, the holidaymakers had to be prepared to play their part in whichever event they chose to visit, to blend in, and the hero, with the rest of his group, was dressed and coached appropriately, instructed in what to do and say. The tour organizers took them through the main scenes: Gethsemane, the Passover with Pontius Pilate addressing the crowd and asking them whether they wanted him to pardon Jesus or Barabbas, the stations of the cross, and so on. When the group was ready, the holiday began. Everything went as expected. Before long they were gathered in the square beneath the governor's palace and Pontius Pilate was talking to them, in Latin, with the two men – Jesus and Barabbas - standing by his side. The hero didn't understand what Pilate said, but he waited for his cue to shout Barabbas. Free Barabbas. It wasn't until he began to shout that he looked around and saw that everyone shouting Barabbas had come with him, from the future, and that all around the square, pushed to the edge, their voices drowned out by the tourists, were the actual inhabitants of the place, who were shouting Jesus. Free Jesus.

This story came back to me a few days ago when I was in Madrid. It's a shallow comparison, I know, but I was standing in Puerta del Sol, at the heart of the city, and enjoying that feeling of being both part of, and isolated from, a place, a feeling that's probably the essence of being a tourist. And then it dawned on me that all the voices I could hear around me, in what should have been a ferment of movida madrilena, a ferment I'd travelled over eight hundred miles to experience, were Italian. I might as well have been in Piazza Navona. We went to eat in a place called La Taurina, surrounded by the severed heads of bulls and matadors' capes, framed like fans, and every table was occupied by Italians, calling for paella and sangria and for Barabbas to be freed.I looked round, wondering where the real Madrilenos were hiding, waiting for the moment to reclaim their city.

Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long. They were packed like bocquerones (anchovies - don't worry, I'm just showing off) in the Museo del Jamon just round the corner, queueing in deceptively ordered fashion for rolls of exquisitely scented cured ham and something to wash them down with. The floor was covered with crumpled paper napkins, crumbs, the occasional abandoned glass; the noise around us was exclusively, exhilaratingly, intimidatingly Spanish. It felt like the real thing, which, of course, is what we were after, however much our presence contaminated it. Even the prices were foreign, as if we'd also time-travelled to an age in which a glass of decent wine and a ham roll could be had for a couple of euros.

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.

Eartha Kitt, with James Dean

One year on...

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.

Satin and tat

News from the very dark cave

The region of Emilia-Romagna has recently established that couples, including those with children, (in lay speak, 'families') are entitled to welfare provisions whether they're married or not. This has attracted the anathema of the local befrocked wingnut cardinal, a certain Signor Caffarra, the sour-faced old biddy on the right. He has announced that 'God will judge them.' Until such judgement is carried out, as the Great One's self-elected mouthpiece, he accuses the council of wanting to 'devastate the social fabric' and invites civil disobedience against 'a gravely unjust law that doesn't deserve to be respected'. It's hard to see exactly how one can disobey a law which simply extends already existing social services to a larger number of people, but logic isn't one of the Vatican's strong points and the usual fuss has been made.

In the meantime, a 75-year-old Syrian woman in Saudi Arabia has sentenced to forty strokes of the whip and four months in one of the Holy Kingdom's jail, followed by deportation. Her crime? She allowed two men into her house who weren't members of her family. They were bringing her some bread. Ah, families!

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?)

How many words a minute?

Charlemagne OK but Louis the Pious?

Unusually, as Amazon suggestions go, this one tempted me. Maybe because Louis and Pious are almost, but not quite, a visual rhyme. And then I saw the price.

Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,

As someone who has purchased or rated On Sparta (Penguin Classics) by Plutarch or other books in the Historical > BCE-500 AD category, you might like to know that Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer will be released on 15 December 2009. You can pre-order yours for just £67.93 by following the link below.

Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer Thomas F.X. Noble RRP: £71.50 Price: £67.93 You Save: £3.57 (5%) Release Date: 15 December 2009

Cubism in the round

I'm not sure if this is an offence to, and crass misunderstanding of, the nature of the original work or a useful and evocative reading of it (I suspect the former), but either way it's worth a look. (Thanks, Erin.)

Must be Santa

This is as festive as I plan to get, so far anyway (though I'll admit I was tempted by the Twelve Gays of Christmas). It's Dylan, who can (almost) do no wrong, and I think it's played straight, because otherwise it would be plain silly.

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.

Kapow! Biff! Clunk!

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

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

Listen up, Batman!