Quickie Divorce – Italian Style
Before the divorce laws were reformed in the 1960s and 1970s in the USA, people who wanted a quick divorce often went to Nevada or perhaps to a Caribbean country where a divorce could be obtained more simply and quickly. In Italy three years of separation are required before one can obtain a divorce; in fact it takes a minimum of five years to : establish the separation, complete the waiting period, and get a final court hearing. A couple in which one or more want to remarry quickly (and both are in agreement) doesn’t want to wait that long. The most popular destination for a faster divorce is Romania, but other nations such as Spain and Great Britain are also used. The country needs to be in the European Union so its decree will be valid in all EU nations.
Photos of Elvis Festival in Germany
I sent these as an e mail attachment to readers of this newsletter. Some people told me they could open only two of the seven photos attached. If this is true for you, and you are desperate to see the other five pictures, simply send me an e mail to bobnordvall@hotmail.com and I can forward the photos in a different format.
Helping Italy with Its Deficit Problems
A prominent French international banking official was interviewed about the general problem of government deficits in Europe. When asked about Italy, he noted the high rate of personal wealth in Italy. He said Italy was a country with a lot of wealth, but the people don’t want to give it to the government (pay taxes) so the nation has to live on credit. He wondered why other European nations should help a country whose citizens are unwilling to help it themselves.
Movida – The Problem Not to be Solved
Movida is a Spanish word the Italians use to describe the night life of young people. In Pistoia there are two squares where young people congregate at night, and there are pubs that cater to them. In one of the local papers there has been a series of interviews with young people (in their 20s and 30s) about what they like and don’t like in Pistoia. The universal complaint – not enough night life. On the other hand, the newspapers from time to time carry stories of the protests of the residents living near the two squares where young people assemble. These stories have the theme that the police have promised to keep the noise and rowdiness down, but, in fact, have done little. This is an issue where neither the youth nor the local residents are ever going to be satisfied – at best it is a compromise.
Good News and Bad News from Pompeii
The good news is that tourism to the site is up 10% this year. The bad news is that the most requested and photographed building is not one of the usual favorites – such as the house of prostitution with its erotic frescoes – but rather the wreckage of House of the Gladiators which collapsed last year due to rain and neglect of maintenance.
“Red Hots, Hot Dogs, Hot Doggie”
This is the cry of the hot dog vendor at the ballpark in the USA. Recently while cycling I came across a guy with a food truck along the road who was selling sandwiches, drinks, etc. One of items offered was a hot dog. I’d never had a hot dog in Italy so I gave it a try.
In the USA there would be a pot of boiling water with hot dogs in it. The vendor would take one out, put it in a hot dog bun, and give it to you. There would be mustard, ketchup, onions, etc on the counter for you to put on the hot dog. The hot dogs might be on a grill rather than in a pot, but would be already cooked.
In Italy, the guy took out a hot dog, made some cuts along the top of it, and put it on the grill. Then he took out a bread roll (not a hot dog roll) and grilled it too. He asked if I wanted onions. When I said yes, he took these out to grill. He got out some ketchup and mayonnaise (Italians put mayonnaise on hamburgers, French fries, hot dogs, etc.). I told him I wanted only mustard. When the hot dog was cooked, he took the bread roll and made a channel in the bottom half to insert the hot dog there. He then put mustard carefully over the bottom half of the roll before inserting the hot dog. He next put a streak of mustard on top of the hot dog itself. All in all he probably took five times as long to prepare a hot dog as would be typical in the USA. It is just another example of the great care Italians take in matters that are important to them (e.g. food, clothes, etc.). As probably is true in other countries too, the Italians take much less care for the items that are not important to them such as being on time.
How was the hot dog? It tasted like a hot dog anywhere else. The only hot dogs that I have ever tasted that are far superior are the Kosher Zion all beef (no preservatives) ones you can get in USA.
Cortona
A friend who works for a city tourist agency got me a seat for a free tour of Cortona and nearby Lucignano. It was sunny and close to 100°. The tour bus was air conditioned, but it was a walking tour. Cortona is the town near which Frances Mayes renovated the house as described in her book, Under the Tuscan Sun. After the success of the book, she had to move to a new location (address suppressed) nearby to avoid the tourists who came to her house. Cortona is at the top of a hill overlooking a large valley. The vistas are lovely. As is often the case, not only is the town at the top of a hill, but within the city itself the streets go sharply up and down. Among the sites we saw were a Medici fortress, a lot of art of the Sienese school, and a large Etruscan tomb complex.
For some of my photos from this trip go to http://thisweekinitaly.com/cortona-2011 As always if you click on the thumbnail photo, you get an enlarged photo with a caption under it.
Political Dress Code
Most politicians in Italy dress elegantly. An exception is Umberto Bossi, head of the Northern League. Recently at an informal outdoor luncheon with some of his political comrades, while the others were wearing shirts without jackets, Umberto was wearing only a sleeveless undershirt. In the old days the lexicon of derogatory terms for Italians in the USA included Wop, Dago, and Guinea. The sleeveless undershirts, popular among Italians, were called Guinea shirts. Bossi is obviously intelligent and capable; he put together by himself a large political movement. Still he is very crude and uncouth in a way that no major politician is in the USA.
Good Summary of the Economic Situation in Italy Today
This article, translated from a major Italian newspaper, succinctly covers many of the major issues in Italy today.
How Italy Is Adjusting
By LUCA RASTELLO and STEFANO PAROLA
Turin, Italy
“MY friend, the only true fortunetellers are the judges: when they send you down for 30 years, you can be sure they’ve made a pretty accurate prediction of your future.”
El Viejo laughs and asks for only his nickname to be used. He is nearly 70, has been convicted of crimes linked to drug smuggling for one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world and has three passports — Italian, American and Venezuelan. In other words, he has all the right credentials for talking about the so-called informal sector, which, to many Italians, is the fundamental cause of our current economic troubles.
El Viejo mocks the Italians’ newfound passion for predictions. As stocks fell, politicians (our Parliament members are the highest-paid in Europe and our prime minister is, perhaps, the most farcical) fumbled, and the country risked a fate comparable to that of Greece, Italians discovered a hitherto unknown interest in analysts, agencies and financial oracles. We’ve been leafing through newspapers and punching remote controls in search of news about the spread between Italian government bonds and the German bund, even if we have only the vaguest idea of what it all means.
As so often happens in Italy, anxiety manifests itself in individualistic survival strategies. People turn away from government and broader society, fall back on family and clan loyalties and the informal sector. Sociologists call the result “amoral familism,” a term Edward C. Banfield coined in the 1950s.
There are upsides and downsides to this phenomenon. Italians have a great capacity for reconstruction after hard times — as after the Second World War, when the country emerged from ruins to become one of the most industrialized in the world. We tend to associate those resurrections with what we call the “art of muddling through,” of which we are masters. It’s the capacity to be flexible in the face of change — something families tend to do better than governments.
But this is allied to a deep mistrust of government and the public sector. As many sociologists have pointed out, localism and clannishness are the enemies of an open and meritocratic society. Access to the professions is considered almost a hereditary privilege here. And tax evasion is seen as a legitimate defense against an inefficient state.
Reducing the debt, balancing the accounts and stimulating growth seem distant objectives in these conditions. We are only now admitting there is even a problem. For 10 years, our society has imposed a rose-tinted, optimistic view of things — we have told ourselves that there is no crisis, that Italy overcomes every difficulty. Whenever the facts happened to burst rudely onto the scene, the reflex has been to shift the blame onto unspecified others: the markets, speculators, the European Central Bank. Moreover, the perception of individual well-being is still strong. Italians don’t feel poor; our public debt is alarming, but our private debt is not, unlike that in the United States. But the downside is near-zero growth: the economy is expanding at a rate of less than 1 percent per year.
And when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dons the robes of rigor and demands sacrifices, he is no longer credible: he even tried to avoid a confrontation with the facts by spreading the recovery measures over four years, so as to leave the most unpopular task to the government that will succeed him after the 2013 elections. Europe intervened, and the premier was finally forced to introduce more immediate budget cuts and new taxes, with the typically melodramatic comment, “Our heart bleeds.”
As it should, particularly for the young, who are at the mercy of a labor market consisting increasingly of temporary jobs, which has abolished protections without creating opportunities. Routinely dismissed by the left and right as “layabouts” and “overgrown babies,” they draw little comfort from emergency legislative measures like the reform of pensions they expect they’ll never receive.
The crisis will push them deeper into the informal sector and the system of clan and family welfare, or force them abroad to find jobs. In other words, the very society that led to this will be strengthened.
Perhaps that means we’ll muddle through again. Organizations like El Viejo’s, with their capacity for rapid accumulation of cash and their investments in every sector, will do fine. And as always, there are some who make a small profit out of the crisis — like the cross-border workers of Lombardy, who receive their salaries in Swiss francs increased in value by the weakness of the euro.
But we are reminded of that saying: we don’t inherit the world from our forebearers, but receive it on loan from our children. How can we resurrect Italy this time without that generation?
Luca Rastello, the author of “How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton, in Five Easy Lessons,” and Stefano Parola are journalists at La Repubblica. This essay was translated by Jonathan Hunt from the Italian.