Watching a Classic Italian Film
Among the many Italian films I have watched this summer (to maintain my language skill) is “Il Grido” (The Scream) by Antonioni from the 1960s. The four leading performers in this film are: Steve Cochran, Betsy Blair, Lyn Shaw, and Alida Valli – only one Italian. I doubt that the others spoke Italian, but in Italy film soundtracks were (and still may be) all dubbed, even those in Italian. I’ve been told that the Italian film studios did not have secure sound stages to record dialog as the film was shot. It is also probably true that it is cheaper to dub dialog than it is to take sound equipment on location.
Buying a Train Ticket in the USA
You can order an AMTRAK ticket on the computer, but you have to pick it up at the train station. You cannot get an e ticket, as the airlines have. In Italy you can even get a ticket via text message on your cell phone. You simply show the text message to the conductor when he comes to collect tickets. As I have mentioned, there are situations in which Italy is more modern than the USA.
The Beauty of Adams County, Pennsylvania
I went recently to the opening of a new winery near Gettysburg. It is located on the top of a hill that commands a 360 degree view of the surrounding countryside. The vista is beautiful. Tuscany is known around the world for its lovely landscape, but at times Pennsylvania is similarly gorgeous. What Tuscany has, that Pennsylvania does not, is charming villages nestled in the hillsides.
Adopt a Highway
This is a program under which organizations and businesses in the USA agree to clean up periodically a stretch of a local highway. Thus the groups are doing a job for which the government would otherwise have to pay or which might go undone. This kind of program is unlikely in Italy. In Italy the idea is that the citizens pay taxes, and it is the government’s job to provide all necessary services. A small example of a lower sense of civic pride and responsibility in Italy.
Signs and Things Inconvenient
If you go into a store in Italy where things are a bit upset because the store is remodeling the premises, you might see a sign saying something like “We sincerely ask for the patience of our esteemed customers while we are altering our premises to serve you better.” Such signs are always in extremely polite language. If, on the other hand, the bathroom is not working, there will simply be a sign “broken” on the door. Things like bathrooms not functioning are so common that they do not call for a polite explanation. I thought of this recently when I saw a sign on a broken water fountain in a museum in the USA that said “Out of order. We apologize for the inconvenience.” You won’t see that sign in Italy.
Newsweek Praises Berlusconi
Generally the US press does not speak well of Berlusconi so the article below is an interesting exception. It implies that Berlusconi has been able to do much now because he has a solid majority in Parliament, but in fact he had a solid majority too in his last government and accomplished little. As the article points out the anti-immigration move plays well with the public, but probably does not address the real problem of crime. The immunity bill for top politicians mentioned certainly does not benefit Italy as a whole. Berlusconi has made a start in seriously addressing the Naples garbage problem although they still may be sending a lot of garbage to Germany to be processed there. Here we see the typical Italian ploy of a splashy initiative to a problem which usually has little or no follow-up. Stay tuned on the garbage issue as well as the issue of facing the big underlying economic problems of the nation.
In his first 100 days in office, Silvio Berlusconi may have done the impossible: to a degree unprecedented in modern Italian history, he asserted control over this seemingly ungovernable nation. The opposition parties are mired in squabbling, and Berlusconi, now prime minister for the third time since 1994, has an approval rating of 55 percent—higher than Britain’s Gordon Brown, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy or Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
That anyone in Italy has managed to be so successful is surprising. More than most Western European countries, Italy has long been bedeviled by corruption and a system that gives disproportionate political weight to small parties. Berlusconi’s predecessor, Romano Prodi, was stymied by his center-left party’s tiny Senate majority and the government’s fractious nine-party coalition. But Berlusconi, the 72-year-old media mogul, cannily exploited a 2005 electoral law that wiped out these small parties to win a surprise landslide victory from which the opposition is still trying to recover.
His center-right party now has 174 seats in the Senate (versus the left’s 132) and while he enjoys something of a honeymoon period with the electorate, he has also wasted little time in consolidating his authority. One of his first acts: pushing through a bill that gives the top four national officeholders, including the prime minister himself, immunity from prosecution while in office. The bill passed overwhelmingly last month, and put an end to outstanding criminal proceedings against Berlusconi (which he and supporters say were politically driven).
That this new law was a possible conflict of interest did not go by unnoticed, but Italians are feeling too poor to pay it much attention. After 10 years of near-zero economic growth—Bank of America predicts 0.5 percent growth this year—they are demanding security, financial and otherwise. And Berlusconi is delivering, with an iron-fist-in-velvet-glove competence. Emblematic has been his ability to clean up Naples, buried for months under trash in part because the surrounding communities simply did not trust the government to manage the landfills. Ever the showman, Berlusconi held cabinet meetings in Naples—fulfilling a campaign promise to do so until the trash was cleared—and appointed a “garbage czar” to fix the problem. In July, Parliament approved Berlusconi’s plan to open new landfills and incinerators, and permit soldiers to protect temporary landfills from angry residents. Days later Berlusconi said 50,000 tons of trash had been removed.
With a similar resolve he tackled the perception that violent crime is on the rise (despite data showing otherwise), and that foreigners are to blame for it. In July, the government declared a state of emergency to fight illegal immigration and proposed a law mandating fingerprinting for all Roma living in camps in Italy. Berlusconi softened the plan in the face of opposition from human-rights groups and the European Union. But in early August, he deployed thousands of troops throughout Italy in a bid to crack down on immigration and petty crime.
Such tough tactics could give Berlusconi the cover to tackle some of Italy’s deeper issues. Italians now pay some of the highest taxes in Western Europe, at 43 percent, and have some of the lowest salaries—leading to widespread tax evasion. Public debt remains at more than 100 percent of GDP; servicing it costs Italy 5 percent to 6 percent of GDP annually, says Bank of America’s Gilles Moec. Berlusconi has pledged to reduce spending (in contrast to his first term), but doing so will make it harder to fulfill a pledge to cut taxes or to stimulate growth. Yet Berlusconi must figure out a way. Italians like him now, but what they really want is economic stability. Cleaning up trash and harassing immigrants won’t be enough.