Not what you think.

I love this country so much!



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Failure on a civilisational scale

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Just reading a thing about permanently unfinished municipal projects in Italy.

There are a lot of them.

They do these things differently in Italy. Or rather, fail to do them. Failure on the epic scale is an everyday Italian experience. It's as if they were in competition with the ancients, bent on creating instant ruins to rank alongside the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. Motorways, viaducts, stadiums, swimming pools, museums, multi-storey car parks, theatres, railway stations... there is almost no type of public building that, in the past half century, the Italians have not given up on halfway.

A new survey of Italy's unfinished building works found 360 scattered around the country, with 160 in Sicily alone.

...

A couple of kilometres up the road, a municipal swimming pool and a so-called "polyfunctional centre" containing an open-air theatre, both of them sink holes for investments of tens of billions of lire and many years of work, stand unfinished, vacant and half-wrecked. A multi-storey car park in the town, under construction for a generation, was completed only a couple of months back. So was the town's hospital, after 40 years on the stocks, but as one local man told me, "It was born old. And although it's been opened, now they are closing it down again, as part of the rationalisation of Sicily's health service." Meanwhile, the town's theatre, begun nearly 60 years ago, and a children's play centre (intended 20 years ago to be the main attraction of a local park) have yet to be completed.

Local people offer explanations for these failures, but it is hard to know whether or not to take them seriously. In the case of the polo stadium, I was told that the architects had made a mistake in their calculations and given the stands too steep a rake, breaking the legal norms. Meanwhile, the technicians involved in building the swimming pool supposedly made it 49 metres long instead of the regulation 50 metres.

Can such idiocy be credited?

...I might add that when the Italians do finish something, they do such a colossally bad job of it, the thing they build has to be torn down in ten years as a public safety hazard.

...and then isn't.



A friend of mine posits that Italy is a country in retirement. It has pretty much done everything it set out to do:

Conquered the world. Check.
Become the cradle of post-Imperial Christian civilisation. Check.
Rediscovered the writing of the ancient Greeks and started the Renaissance. Check.
Invented banking and money. Check.
Produced the greatest painters and sculptors the world has ever seen. Check.

And now, as the American bumper stickers say, it's spending its kids' inheritance as fast as it can.

Except that there aren't any kids.



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Ah yes, good old Italy...

never fails to disappoint.

The February 28 concert of the well-known band, specializing in performing baroque and late Renaissance music, in the Pantheon, was coming to an end, but a woman, apparently a Pantheon keeper, got onto the stage and said the concert was over, requesting everyone to leave the building.

She said the hall should be closed at 18:00. The audience of several hundred did not believe their ears and asked the musicians to continue performing, but another Pantheon employee, a man, stopped the concert again and told everyone to leave the building to the audience's indignant cries "Disgrace!"

"I sent a letter with apologies on my behalf and on behalf of the Cultural Heritage Ministry to the Russian musicians for the impermissible behavior by some Pantheon keepers who vulgarly interrupted the concert because the visiting time was over," Bondi said in an official statement distributed Sunday.

The video of the incident was posted on RIA Novosti's Russian-language website and on YouTube. The YouTube recording shows the woman appear on the stage at the time of 5:00.

Many Italians condemned the Pantheon keepers for the incident, writing that they were "ashamed to be Italian."

Don't worry about it. As an official representative of the Outside World,

I'm authorised to tell you, we're used to it.



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There's something wrong with Italy

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I don't speak or read enough Italian to be able to tell you anything more concrete, but there is something seriously wrong with this country.

And while it does not manifest itself in quite the same ways as That Thing That is Wrong with Britain, it is every bit as serious.

What do I mean?

Some time ago, I wrote a somewhat muddled post about how the British are forgetting who they are. I compared it to a novel by Ursula le Guin in which an evil wizard had torn a hole in the fabric of the universe in an attempt to live forever. All the cultural memories of all the people of Earthsea was draining out through the hole, and the people had forgotten their history and how to raise their kids. They had become bestialised by this terrible spell, and it was all so that one man could cheat nature.

What is happening in Italy seems to be different, on the outside, but there is something about it that smells like that.

Nothing, of course, can ever stop the Italians from being Italian, and the rot has not gone so far as it has elsewhere because the time when Italy was still a mainly agrarian, Catholic society is still within living memory.


Last winter I went with a group of friends down to visit Monte Cassino, and we stopped by Fossanova on the way home.


And I keep having the same thought: What happened to the Italians?

We drove through some towns down there that looked like they were sets for a Mad Max post-apocalyptic movie. I've lived in buildings put up by Italians in the last ten years, and they fail even to perform the basic function of shelter from the elements. The extreme crappiness of current Italian construction is legendary. How did they get from Fossanova to the apartment that fails to keep out the rain?

And what's with the 1.3 birth rate? I'm told by people with kids that the Italians are still nuts about them. That you can't push the pram down the street without getting mobbed. So why aren't they having any?

But there really is one thing above all others that creeps me out. That gives me chills in July.

It's that...

this man is the most popular "opera singer" in the country.

Aren't the Italians supposed to know when a man can't hold a note?

I mean, heavens. It's embarrassing.



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I'm annoyed

I lost my hat.


A really good hat.

Left it on the train from Milan after Trenitalia had spent the day trying to put me in an insane asylum. I really want it back. So much that I've been considering actually calling the Trenitalia customer service line.

But I'm afraid. It's Italy. I don't know what happens to people who call customer service numbers. It could work out. I could even, possibly, get my hat back.

But you never know. Maybe calling a customer service number results in a crack team of commandos breaking feet first into your apartment windows and taking you away to a dark room in an unknown building somewhere.

But it was a really good hat.

Hmmm... tough call.

It's hot

I'm trying hard not to have last summer happen again. I'm consciously working towards a positive attitude to the heat. I'm having my tea on the balcony. I'm appreciating the nightly cold showers and am really not very bothered that my caldaia doesn't work. I'm careful not to move around too much in the early afternoon.

But it's hot. By anyone's standards except Africans, 31 degrees C. is hot.

Italian summer protocols:

1 - Be thin. If you are remotely overweight, the heat will be a misery for you. If you are poor, you can use both your poverty and the heat to your advantage by having them help you lose weight. You can get thinner by entirely losing your appetite because it is too damn hot to either eat or cook, and you are too poor to eat in an air conditioned restaurants every day. One of the first things stranieri notice when they come here is that the Italians are nearly all bird-thin. Tiny little sylph-like creatures (with inexplicably and horribly loud voices). There is a reason for this. All the fat people died in the early bronze age from the heat.

2 - Have a job where you can sit in air conditioning for large blocks of time.

3 - Have a place in your home where you can sit outdoors not doing anything like a balcony or garden.

4 - Live in a nice town that doesn't have bad air quality, too many tourists, filthy gypsy beggars, horrifyingly loud traffic and isn't entirely populated by crazy people who want to swindle you and then kill you with their motorini and laugh while you lie there bleeding, wondering why you didn't stay in England isn't Rome. Live in a town that has lots of birds, flowers, gardens, sea breezes and nice friendly people who will sometimes give you a free gelato when you're looking down.

5 - Have a freezer. (I don't have a freezer. Not even the little one built into the top of my fridge. The reason for this is obscure, but when I asked the landlord to get me one he looked doubtful in that inimitable Italian way that says 'why are you bothering me with this trivial thing? Can't you see I'm busy loafing around and having a good time?', and said he would try. Try? TRY!? Just effing go and effing buy one! What the hell is the damn problem...?!

Ahem...

Anyway, if you have a freezer, the thing to do is to take a 2 litre plastic pop bottle of water and freeze it. When the temperature suddenly rises at 3 am, as it does, and you wake up in the night gasping for air, you take the bottle of ice, wrap it in a tea towel and take it to bed with you under a sheet. The ice cools the air under the sheet. It's like air conditioning for your bed.)

5 - Buy a fan. The folding kind that you can carry around with you in your hand bag. If you are a boy, I don't know what to tell you; you can't carry a fan. Sorry, but it's a rule. Learn to sit next to women with fans I guess.

6 - Carry a damp flannel in a plastic bag in your handbag. This can be re-cooled at any fountain and applied to the face, neck and arms at will. Buy a large supply of flannels, so you can take a clean one with you every day. Once again, boys = no hand bags. Sorry. Just dunk your head in every fountain you see and be grateful you don't have to worry about spoiling your makeup.

7 - Cultivate a Kwai Chang Cain Zen-like state of mind in which the heat cannot get inside you. You feel the heat, but it remains on the outside of you. The inside of you remains normal, serene and non-sweaty. I am working on this, and I think it can be achieved if you don't think too much about hot things, like being wrapped in large sheets of velvet dipped in warm treacle...

I think it's time to go to the air conditioning office.

Found something out about Italians being weird

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So, I finally found out the answer to another Weird Italian Thing.

Italian houses all have either wooden shutters or these impenetrable blinds on all their windows. I have blinds, which are the most common thing in this part of Italy.

They're pretty useful, actually. You can put them half way down so when the sun is on you, you can make shade, but also allow some air in. They have slots between them so you can put them down sort of all the way, but not quite and it keeps the zanzare out, and lets some air in. You can put them down all the way when it is really windy or rainy and the weather stays outside.

Sometimes they come with locks, so you can put down the one on your balcony most of the way but leave a little space at the bottom so the cat can get in and out, but burglars can't get in.

But Italians don't use them that way. They just keep them all the way down all the time every single day. There is an apartment building opposite ours that I thought was unoccupied because I have never seen the blinds up on any of the apartments. Then one day, one of them was up, and I could see people having normal life inside. There are 17 windows on that building visible to me now, and only three have the blinds up at ten thirty in the morning.

The blinds absolutely block the light. Completely. They make it as though there is no window in the room. They are a wall, so the rooms must be utterly pitch black inside. And they block the air movement too. So I can't imagine what sort of state the room would be in when it is, as it is now, 29 degrees C. out.

Well, I found out why Italians do this insane thing that makes me worry I live in a country full of vampires.

The sunlight fades the furniture, you see.

And when they tell you that, and while you're blinking at them in wordless stupification at the insane weirdness of Italians, they give you a look that says, "Man, these stranieri are weird!"



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Sprung

Apple blossom in S. Marinella. Pic taken on the way home from the traino yesterday.




The beach at S. Mar. in January.

The Worst Person in the World

but the Catholics in Lazio seem to just luuuuuuuurrve her.

"il Foglio" had done something else. It had sent one of its top journalists, Marianna Rizzini, to explore the dioceses of the Lazio region in order to hear what its priests and faithful think about the Bonino candidacy.

The response of the first diocese surveyed, Viterbo, was unrelenting. The title: "Grassroots Church with Emma. Survey in Viterbo. Catholic opinion firmly, sometimes fervently, in favor of the pro-abortion, pro-divorce, pro-euthanasia candidate, who has called the embryo 'an inert lump'. Objections rare, and timid."

In effect, in Marianna Rizzini's report from Viterbo, the only ones who opposed Bonino were the "missionaries" of the Movement for Life, who dedicate their lives to seeing that children are born, not aborted.

So, NewChurch, how's that whole "New Springtime" thing workin' out for ye?