I don’t expect to speak much Italian in Germany, but this was not true when I visited a friend who is studying at the University in Munich. He rooms with two other young men, one of whom is from Turin, Italy but works as an architect in Munich. We had dinner with one of his fellow university students whose father was Italian and thus knew Italian. On the train home from Munich to Florence I was in a compartment with a German family going to Austria to ski. The father and I talked in English, but when he found out I lived in Italy, we switched to Italian. He has taught himself Italian through his visits to Italy.

Speaking English in Germany

I’ve noted before that except for the elderly, most Germans speak English. Those who were in the former East Germany are a bit behind because under Communism the second language was Russian. I went to a concert in which the choir sang pieces in German, Latin, Russian, and English. The program contained the words of the pieces performed. For the Latin and Russian ones there was a translation into German of the words but not for the piece performed in English. It was assumed, I suppose, that the audience could understand the written English words.

Precision Bombing in WWII

In my newsletter number 70 (February 3, 2004) I noted that in WWII Allied bombers apparently did little damage to the large Milan train station but managed to almost destroy the church, in a residential section, that houses Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I saw another example of rampant inaccuracy in Munich. I visited the place complex of the rulers of Bavaria, a very large set of buildings. In the residence section I visited most of the 91 rooms open to the public. They were lavishly furnished with objects’ of the epoch, but few of these were originally in the palace. The buildings had been almost totally destroyed in WWII. Then I visited a complex of building that the Nazi’s built that were to be sort of a center and memorial of their regime. Hitler was to be buried there. Almost all of these survived the war with little damage. If you were bombing non strategic sites, this was a better one to flatten.

 Possible Hooray for Italian Inefficiency

 For the second time during the period in which I have made a yearly payments to join the Italian national health program, I have been issued a membership card that runs beyond the period for which I have paid. This got corrected last time. This time I received one of the new plastic cards with a computer chip. It lasts until 2018. One of the advantages of obtaining Italian citizenship (for which I could apply later this year) would be to avoid the yearly subscription fee for the health system, but I may have gotten this advantage already with my new card. Of course the proper thing to do is to point out this mistake immediately to the authorities. I have, however, written more than once (even recently about the lady falsely declared dead) about how difficult it is to correct a bureaucratic mistake in Italy. It might even lead to a worse situation!!

Italian Justice System – Possible Additional Explanation for Its Troubles

I have often written about the shortcomings of the Italian judicial system. Sometimes I have proposed explanations for its poor performance. Here is another possible one: since 1990 the number of lawyers in Italy has grown from 90,000 to 240,000.

Winter Weather

 When people ask me about the climate in Pistoia, I usually tell them the summers are similar to what I knew in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but the winters are much milder. This week we have the coldest temperatures in the last 27 years in Tuscany. Meanwhile while listening (on my computer) to a radio station from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (near Gettysburg) I heard the announcer say “unseasonably warm temperatures tomorrow with a high of 55°.” Do I need to start spending the winters in the USA to avoid the cold?

No Gold Teeth –What Else Can We Find?

We have all heard stories (true or not) of funeral directors removing the gold teeth from a corpse in order to sell the gold. Makes even more sense with the high gold prices today. In Italy, an ambulance driver (He also works in a funeral business.) who picked up the body of a dead person removed his heart pacemaker with the hope of reselling it. Unfortunately there is no booming resale market for such devices.

A Little Snow, A Little Cold ….

… and the trains in Italy run as if Italy had suddenly become Siberia. We had a dusting of snow that did not even stay on the ground. (The mere prediction of snow caused a two day closure of the schools.) I had to go to Florence. In the morning, the trains were so delayed, that I ended up taking a bus. In the evening I ended up sitting on three different trains at the Florence train station that were announced to be about to depart; none did. The game in Italy is to announce a 15 minute delay, that grows to 30, then 45, and finally the train is cancelled. I took a bus back. There probably was more snow in the mountains (where trains don’t run) where some train employees may live, and thus they had trouble getting to work. The snow and cold had been predicted for days. Perhaps some special efforts might have been needed to get the trains to run on time. In Italy if there is a situation where the choice is some inconvenience or extra effort for the employees versus inconvenience (however great) for the customers, the customers come last.

 Can Italy Change – An Article by Tim Parks

Tim Parks has lived in Italy for 30 years and written a number of books about the country. The item below is from the New York Review of Books blog, and an excellent summary of the challenges that Italy faces today.

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What would it mean for a country to change profoundly? What real news would we get of that and how would it feel to its citizens? Would it necessarily be a good thing? A few months ago, when the Greek crisis made it clear that being a member of the eurozone did not mean having access to unlimited credit on equal terms with countries like Germany and France, Italy was suddenly in trouble. Snoozing for years in a debt-funded decadence, all at once the country found lenders demanding unsustainable interest rates, as if this were some shaky third-world economy trying to borrow in a foreign currency.

Very soon something would have to give. The consequent change of government and drastic budgetary measures have been described well enough in any number of newspapers. What interests me more than the numbers or the markets is the question of how these developments might actually change, over the long term, the way Italians relate to each other and to the state.

When I first came to Italy thirty years ago, there was a lot of talk about change. It was always located in the very near future, but never quite in the present. The paradigm almost everybody accepted was that of an “abnormal” and in some respects archaic society on the brink of becoming normal and modern, falling into line, that is, with the powerful democracies of Northern Europe—as if there were something natural about their models. We can list some of the qualities that made and still make Italy seem “special”: a tradition of regional rather than national loyalties (exacerbated by the fact that government is actually strongly centralized); a high level of organized (but not ordinary) crime; the power of the family in every sphere of life, but notably the economy; the melodramatically assertive tone of the labor force in all professional, commercial, and unionized sectors, whether they be taxi drivers, pharmacists, or steelworkers; a flare for making life complicated through bureaucracy and then for overcoming complication through evasion and petty corruption; a multitude of political parties with strong ideological or regional leanings; a Church with a propensity to undermine rather than reinforce people’s loyalty to the state; a tendency in general to foment and then thrive on a gap between the official version of events and their actual course, between rules and practice, appearance and reality: a foreigner seeking to participate in Italian life—buying a house, starting a career at the university, bringing up children in the state school system—soon appreciates that this is a country for initiates. It is never enough to read the instructions on a form to understand how it should be filled in.

You need someone with inside knowledge beside you. Looking at our list as a whole, it’s not hard to spot an underlying pattern and appreciate the sort of difficulties it creates. Circumscribed collective identities (families, political parties, work associations, local pride, religious groups), while admirable in themselves, undermine the nation’s capacity to establish a hierarchy of priorities for the common good, if only because government itself is rarely more than a patchwork of factions. It is never easy to legislate against vested interests; in Italy it is well nigh impossible: there are simply so many groups whose existence depends on things remaining as they are. To a greater extent than in other countries, individual Italians feel diminished and despondent if those groups are put in jeopardy. All the same, the world is constantly changing and sooner or later we have to change with it. For the Italians, then, the anxious question is, how can we accommodate change in such a way that everything remains essentially the same, in other words, in such a way that my community of reference continues to survive? In macroeconomic terms, the pattern in Italy over recent decades has been as follows: restrictive practices, red tape, and generous but by no means uniform or fair social policies (notably pensions), led to low productivity, rising public debt, and trade imbalances, negative effects that were then “corrected” throughout the 1970s and 80s by regular devaluation combined with inflation-indexed wages and pensions; in this way exports were given a boost while all major trade associations maintained their respective positions. Then came European Monetary Union and eventually the Euro.

To remain at the heart of a privileged group of European trading partners, Italy would have to accept a currency over which it had no sovereignty, a currency that could not be devalued. Some new way of squaring the circle would have to be found. In the early 2000s labor laws were reformed in such a way that all acquired privileges were left intact, above all rock-solid job security for employees with regular contracts, while employers were now free to offer short-term contracts and very low wages (or none at all) to the young entering the market. The new arrivals, that is, would offer the flexibility and productivity that the status quo were not willing to accept. The consequence, ten years later, is 30 percent youth unemployment and a generation whose experience of the workplace has been one of constant frustration if not humiliation. Even so, their sacrifice wasn’t enough. No sooner had the international credit crunch begun than Italy was identified as a risky borrower, with a stagnating, low-productivity economy, and above all as a nation that had lost its way. In November 2011, with things looking increasingly desperate, the aging ex-Communist president, Giorgio Napolitano, called in the Jesuit-schooled economics professor Mario Monti and a great experiment began: a government supported by cross-party votes but whose ministers are not politicians or members of parliament but simply experts in their fields—and who hopefully, since not seeking reelection, are immune to the lobbies.

In short, the plan is to do something for the public good. None of this is new. One of the pleasures of spending all your adult life in a country you hardly knew on arrival is the slow accumulation of history and culture necessary to get a handle on the world you are seeking to adapt to. Reading, translating, teaching, writing, you begin to sense of how it all links up; at the same time you become so involved yourself that you can no longer pretend to be an objective outsider. Doing the research to write Medici Money (2006), a book about the Medici bank in the 15th century, I discovered how many of the patterns in contemporary Italian society were already present in Republican Florence: brief and divided governments, extreme ambiguity as to the real centre of power, an obsession with sharing out patronage equally between different trade guilds and geographical areas, extreme difficulty collecting taxes, and so on. Later, translating Machiavelli, I came across the principle that unity in Italy is only be achieved when the country as a whole faces a serious threat from without. In August 1480, the Papal States, Naples, Florence, and others, broke off their internal wars to face a Turkish attack on the southeast coast of the country that left 12,000 dead and 10,000 in slavery. Such unity, however, is always understood as short term and must not be exploited by one group to assert power over others after the emergency is over. Many of Italy’s politicians have demanded that ministers in the present government of experts pledge not to stand at forthcoming general elections.

 Will the trick work this time? Monti has about a year and a half before the end of the current legislature’s term and an enormous amount to do. He began with the kind of cuts and fiscal action that might calm the markets: robust pension reform and a tax on home ownership. Now he is seeking to break down a score of cartels—needless to say, lawyers, doctors, truck drivers, taxi drivers, and pharmacies are all announcing strikes. Then there will be the more radical and deeper reforms: labor law, the electoral system. All this is to be accompanied, we are told, by a serious attempt to make people pay their taxes. At present huge numbers of the self-employed are clearly declaring less than a third of their income; so evident is the gap between lifestyle and declared earnings that the situation could only have developed with a certain official collusion. Monti seems determined to do something about that. What all this amounts to is an invitation to Italians to change mentality, to commit to the state.

In Io ti assolvo (I Absolve You) published in 1993, Giordano Bruno Guerri collected the responses of priests to his confession of a wide variety of sins, including tax evasion. On more than one occasion priests suggested that he could make up for his crime by donating some money to the Church. This perception that if I keep my money from the state to give it to some other good collective—my political party, my trade association, my family (though evidently much just goes into the individual’s pocket)—then I am not in the wrong is one of the core beliefs that the government is seeking to change. Could that happen? Is it possible, for example, that a meritocracy could develop in Italy? That one might begin to a believe that a colleague has been employed because he or she is good at his or her job, that the whole process of trying to figure out who each person’s “protector” is might one day come to an end? I’m fascinated. And even if that doesn’t occur, an equally fascinating question arises: how can Italy compete in the increasingly open world if it remains attached to these patterns of relation?

Those who have read my recent articles on world literature and translation may think that this piece is entirely unconnected. Not so. In a work of literary criticism, Romanzo mondo (The World Novel), published in 2010, Professor Vittorio Coletti speaks of a homogenization of the novel across Europe in the second half of the twentieth century coming as a consequence of the fact that “the similarities between many nations gradually became greater than their differences”; he goes on to claim that “the moment was approaching when a story told in Berlin wouldn’t be very different from one set in Lisbon.”

 My own suspicion is that such homogenization as has occurred arises more from the authors’ desire to address an international public than because events and personalities in the Parliament in Rome, for example, are truly similar to those in Paris or London. Italians have their own form of individuality and their own ways of relating to each other and to the groups they move in.

The revelations just keep getting more bizarre. The cook on the ship said that the captain ate a full dinner after the collision with “a lady friend.” Well, food and sex do come ahead of safety for the Italian male.

Meanwhile the captain says, perhaps quite rightly, that the cruise company likes its ships to pass close to land to show their elegance. What the captain forgot to mention is that other captains commanding the ships were able to meet this request without running aground.

At the Cinema

I went to a movie theater in Germany (to see The Muppet Movie in German) where the tickets were reserved for particular seats. Not only that, but the cost of the ticket varied according to how far your row was from the screen. In the USA in 2011 the sales of tickets to films declined noticeably. I would not be surprised to see differential pricing by seat location spread to the USA as a way to get more profits from fewer spectators.

At the Coffee Shop

An espresso or a cappuccino costs about twice as much in Germany as in Italy. So here is a minor advantage of living in Italy. The trains in Germany (despite my recent complaints) are still generally better than in Italy, but cost a lot more. The more expensive coffee is Germany is not better.

At Church

I went to an American Lutheran Church in Frankfurt. In Florence I am a member of an American Episcopal Church. The church in Frankfurt was very well attended. There appeared to be more parishioners where the whole family is German than in Florence where most Italian members are part of a bi-national family. I met a couple who are German but speak English at home so their four year old daughter will learn English. Such an arrangement would be very rare in Italy because few Italian couples both speak English well enough to do it, and there would be a fear that the child would be behind in learning Italian.

At the Bank

In Italy you cannot take out more than 250 Euro for each withdrawal from a cash machine. I am told this may change with the new reforms in Italy. We will see. This costs me money because I have to pay a fee at my bank for every withdrawal made abroad. So If I need over 250 Euro, I incur one or more extra fees.
In Germany this 250 limit does not apply. Perhaps there is some higher limit, but I took out 400 Euro in one withdrawal with no problem.

Joe Paterno

His death was noted in Italian press in a story about his career and the recent scandal at Pennsylvania State University. American college football gets almost no coverage in the Italian sports’ sections. So the death of a college coach, even a famous one, ordinarily would not be news here. Paterno, however, was an Italian American. This gives his story value in Italy.

American professional football gets some coverage in Italy, but not a lot. You can bet, however, that when legendary Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi died this story was in the Italian media.

Greetings from Germany

 I am in Germany visiting my son and his family.  I have noted on my recent visits here the decline in efficency in Germany, al least so far as the train system goes. This time my train was 40 minutes late.  It costs twice as much as a train in Italy.

My impression, far from scientific, is that as Italy in fact becomes more efficient each year I am there, Germany is going in the opposite direction. 

 Empty Threat

A city in Tuscany proposed putting a “pillow tax” from 50 cents to 3 Euro and 50 cents per night on hotel bills within the city. The difference in the tax depends upon how many stars the Hotel has. For a one star hotel the tax is 50 cents; for a five star one it is 3 Euro and 50 cents. The hotel owners in the city are threatening to lower the number of stars for their hotels in order to pay a lower tax.  Now if a hotel goes from, let’s say, 3 stars to two stars, it has to lower its room rate to that appropriate for a two star hotel.   Probably this is a reduction of about 30 euro per night.  Now what hotel is going to take a 30 Euro reduction in its room rate in order to reduce a tax by one Euro?  One would hope that the reporter writing the article about this threat in the newspaper might point out this simple calculation, but that assumes more independence of thought than is usually shown in Italian journalism.

 Trip to Siena

 I took a day trip to Siena with some visiting American friends.  Siena is always a charming city to visit.  My trip reminded me of one of favorite stories about the Italian character. Siena is the home to the famous horse race, The Palio, that has been run for centuries twice a year around the main plaza. In the 1980s, The New Yorker magazine sent a reporter to Siena to write an article on this spectacle.  The author soon discovered that over the centuries the race had developed a complicated and intricate set of rules.  He also discovered that these rules were almost universally ignored whenever one of the groups with a horse in the race could gain an advantage by doing so.  So the writer asked the mayor of Siena how he could justify the fact that there were so many rules about the Palio when in fact the rules seemed made to be broken.  The mayor’s response was “without rules you have anarchy.”

 Standard and Poor’s Downgrade of Bond Rating for Italy and Other European Nations

As can be easily imagined, this downgrade was poorly received in Europe. Some talk of a conspiracy by the USA and/or some large financial institutions to sabotage the Euro. In general I am less of a fan of conspiracy theories than are the Italians. Ironically, I think the head of the Italian government was not unhappy about this development.  He is proposing, and Parliament is passing, some reforms that are possible now only because Italy faces a serious crisis of confidence. Once this crisis lessens, it will become much more difficult to get Parliament to approve such measures which are opposed by powerful interests.  So those favoring long term reforms want to “keep the heat on.”

 The Cruise Line Catastrophe

The news in Italy has accentuated the contrast between the man who was the hero of the event by saving many passengers even when he suffered a broken leg and the Captain of the ship who emerges as an incompetent coward.  Unfortunately the captain is an Italian, but the people of the island of Giglio redeemed the nation’s reputation by their generous and heroic response to the tragedy.

The theory is that the captain came too close to the island as a way of making more impressive the customary “salute” of the ship’s horn as it passed the land.  In hearing this I was reminded of a scene in Fellini’s film Armacord.  This film is a remembrance of Fellini’s years as a youth in Rimini.  Many of the features in the film are “bigger than life” as they must have appeared to a small boy.  In the scene I recall, all the town goes down to the beach to see the passing of a new, grand, ocean liner.  The ship that passes is in fact two or three times larger than any liner that was ever built.  In height, if not in length, the modern cruise ships are larger than this fictional liner.

 Back from the Dead

Five years ago an elderly lady went to see her ill sister who then died in the hospital.  Somehow the local registry office thought that the woman herself had died, and her death was then reported to government offices. So she lost her pension, health coverage, etc.  Now this seems to be an easily corrected mistake. You simply go down to the registry and show them you are still alive. The woman did this. It took, however, five years for her finally to be restored to the annals of the living.  If records have to be changed in a number of government offices, it takes a long, long time.

Paying for School Days

In Italy the schools are financed nationally.  The government pays the salaries of the employees.  Beyond these salaries, the schools need money for  paper, chalk, soap, mops. etc.  The government does not pay fully for these, the parents do in part.  An article in the newspaper showed that in high schools in selected cities parents pay up to 50% or more of these costs. This is another example of how in Italy the family pays for costs that the government covers elsewhere.

Cortina is a popular ski resort town for the rich and famous. This year over the holidays Scrooge arrived in the uniform of the tax police. They performed a blitz in the town discovering (1) that many luxury cars on the street were registered to persons who declared less than 30,000 Euro per year on their income tax or to businesses or societies that also showed little income and (2) the official sales receipts for the shops rose dramatically if a tax policeman was standing by. Of course, you don’t need to go to Cortina to check the data base for registrations of luxury cars against the income tax data base. This can be done from a computer at the tax agency. If this would be done systematically the result would be a drop in the sales of luxury cars in Italy and/or a precipitous rise of the registration of such cars, owned in fact by Italians, in Switzerland, San Marino, Monaco, etc.

 Italy tries to fight tax evasion by new laws, but the problem is embedded in culture. There are now, in addition, advertisements on TV urging people to pay their taxes. The theme of these ads is that by evading taxes, you are not harming the evil,. corrupt government (the typical rationalization for evasion) ; you are instead robbing your fellow citizens of needed services.

Stores Open 24/7? — A New Controversy

The government has lifted the regulations limiting the hours that stores can be open. Stores can be open all the time if they wish or as much of the time as they want to be. The small merchants are up in arms. They often have no employees other than the owners so it is difficult to extent the hours. They claim the government is favoring the supermarkets, large chain stores, etc. This kind of complaint is typical in Italy. This time it may have a germ of truth. The large stores always give buyers a receipt for purchases which then registers the sale for tax purposes (The cash register is connected to the tax collection system). The small store may or may not provide a receipt. So for the purposes of collecting taxes, sales in the large stores are better for the government.

 Marriage Annulments –Catching Up with the USA

The Vatican has been upset for years about the number and ease of ecclesiastical annulments granted to Catholics in the USA. These are given overwhelmingly to allow divorced Catholics to remarry in the Church. Now the number of annulments in Italy is growing drastically – 3,000 in 2011. Proportionate the number of Catholics, I don’t know how the new, higher rate of annulments in Italy compares to that in the USA; my guess is that the USA is still ahead. For the Catholic Church more annulments is in a way “a no brainer.” The Church rules about marriage have little effect in limiting divorces among Catholics. In the USA the divorce rate among Catholics is not lower than that of Protestants, and divorces are growing rapidly in Italy. If divorced people who remarry outside the Church are not considered married and also can’t take communion , they just leave the Church. A hard line on annulments would not change anyone’s behavior, but would result in a greater loss of members.

 Decline of Horse Racing

In Italy, as in the USA, horse racing has declined in importance as there are now an almost infinite number of ways for gamblers to exercise their passion. In the USA the salvation of some horse racing tracks has been the installation of slot machines at the track. This has not happened in Italy, and the horse racing business seems to be on its last legs. As always in Italy, this business in trouble looks to the government to solve the problem.

Lost in Translation

I often watch the David Letterman show on Italian TV which, unlike almost all other American shows, is not dubbed into Italian but has instead Italian subtitles. In reading the subtitles, you can see how much is lost in translation. A lot of humorous dialog depends upon the selection of just the right work to convey a subtle point. It may be that there is no Italian word that has the same connotation. At best you would have to explain in a sentence or two of Italian the meaning of the English word. Of course this is impossible when you have subtitles. When I note this phenomenon, I am amazed at authors like Conrad and Nabokov who wrote beautifully in a foreign language that was not their native tongue.

When RAI, the Italian public TV network, shows a film that it produced itself, you can view it, using the text function on the remote, with either Italian or English subtitles. The English subtitles are generally good, but every once in while a big error occurs. In a recent film, one character said to another that he saved her from being hanged at the gallows. The word for gallows in Italian is forca. The subtitle read “I saved you from the fork.”

A Trip to Lucca

I went to Lucca with a friend to see two art exhibits – one of works from the modern art collection of Peggy Guggenheim (whose personal museum is in Venice) and another about the silk trade between Lucca and China over the centuries. The first was in the Contemporary Art Museum of Lucca which is a very impressive museum space. The second was in the City Museum of Lucca. This exhibit also was very well presented with only one problem – no heat in the building. I don’t know if this was a temporary problem or if the building (an old palazzo) has no central heating. It was warmer outside than inside.

 By the way, the museum in Lucca of the house of the opera composer Puccini, which managed to be closed for renovations in 2008 while all of Italy was celebrating the 150th anniversary of his birth (See newsletter 303, January 10, 2009), is now open again for visitors.

Cultural Conflict

This time between Danish and Italian cultures, but many nations would be like Denmark in this story. The Breda works in Pistoia makes train cars, subways cars, streetcars, etc. It often has big contracts, but it is always on the verge of bankruptcy. Recently it completed a big order of cars for Denmark which are piling up outside of the factory rather than being delivered to Denmark. Why? Well before taking delivery the Danes sent some personnel down to inspect the new cars. They did not just look at them; they tore a car apart to determine if it had been assembled according to the specifications. They discovered items such as the use of an 18 mm bolt when the specifications called for a 20 mm bolt. Were such substitutions made as an attempt to cut the costs by Breda or was it just carelessness in following the specifications? Regardless of the reasons, the Danes refused to take delivery without a substantial adjustment in price. The Italians probably said “the cars look and work all right; what’s the big deal”? The Danes said “we contracted for cars built to our specifications.”

Some Praise for Italian Train System

What I am going to describe may be standard practice in some countries, but it is the first time I have seen it in Italy. I was on a train in the evening from Florence to Pistoia. It left Florence 18 minutes late. It was scheduled to get to Pistoia 10 minutes before the last train of the evening left Pistoia on the route going north to Porretta Terme. The conductor came through the cars asking if anyone planned to transfer in Pistoia to the Porretta train. If so, she would call ahead and hold the Porretta train until our train came into Pistoia. In fact they did hold the Porretta train.

Sharing the Grief

The government has instituted tax increases to deal with the short term problem of getting Italy’s debt under control. Of course, there is a lot of discussion as to whether the sacrifices of the new program are equitably spread among various economic classes. It would be both politically and mathematically impossible to place all the burden for the needed revenues upon the rich. So any plan will touch all segments of Italian society. I can’t say whether the current plan is the best balance among competing interests. Here, however, is the political reality – it is impossible to come up with a plan for which some substantial segment of Italians will not say “ I’m paying too much and the others guys are paying too little.” (I’m sure this is true in similar situations in other nations t0o.)

Ten Years Under the Euro – The Effective Purchasing Power of the Average Italian Family

In the last 10 years, since the Euro was introduced, the purchasing power of the average family has declined almost 40%. At the introduction of the Euro in 2002, there was an immediate inflation as merchants raised prices in the conversion process. After 2002, however, the decline in purchasing power has had nothing particularly to do with the Euro. There has been steady low level inflation and no increase in income. Of course all nations using the Euro formerly had the control of their own currency including how much to print and possible changes in valuation. Such tools for economic adjustment were lost when they adopted a common currency.

New Years Eve –Bang, Bang

New Years Eve is the evening for BIG firecrackers – the kind that set off car alarms throughout the neighborhood. This year, however, these items were banned in many cities with police seizing large amounts of illegal ones. The reasons for the ban are (1) danger – of course every year some people blown off fingers if not more, (2) In Milan because they add more dust to the already polluted air (a bit of a stretch for a rationale) , and (3) because of the panic reaction they induce in some cats and dogs.

Pistoia was one of the cities banning firecrackers. When I went down to the main plaza at midnight, however, it sounded like WWII. Throughout Italy two people were killed and 500 injured by firecrackers on New Year’s Eve. In short, the police seized a lot of illegal fireworks, but did little to stop the public from igniting them. When a fireworks factory explodes (as happens at times in Italy), it is easy to understand how there are fatalities, but how does someone kill himself lighting ordinary firecrackers? In one fatality case this year, the guy had a stash of fireworks in his apartment, probably to sell illegally. He had a criminal record. He set off one in the apartment and this caused a chain reaction and they all ignited. You can view this as a tragedy and/or the deceased’s Holiday Gift to the human gene pool.

Gospel Choir Concert

Gospel choirs are very popular in Tuscany –perhaps in all of Italy. I went to a concert of two local ones. One was called the Black and White Gospel Choir; we expected a mixed racial group but the name referred to the colors of their choir robes. The Catholic tradition does not really include enthusiastic, highly rhythmic, singing. So the gospel choir provides an outlet for those who enjoy such music.

Now, For Sure, the Old Italian Lira is Worthless

After the conversion to the Euro in 2002, one could take old Lira to the Bank of Italy and redeem them for Euro at the fixed rate of the date of conversion. I had about five Euro worth of old Lira that somebody sent me, but by the time I got around to trying to redeem them, the Bank of Italy branch in Pistoia had closed. The closest one is in Florence, and for five Euro it was not worth making a trip to that bank while in Florence. Recently I discovered that a friend who has a clothing shop, as a promotional item, was allowing people to pay in old Lira for his goods. (He was not the only merchant in Italy to try this scheme.) So I thought I would give him my old Lira to add to those people had used to buy things from him. I then discovered from him that in December the new government had terminated all redemptions of Lira for Euro. So he is left with Lira equal to about 150 Euro with which he can do nothing.

Revisiting a Patriotic Film

In newsletter 398, January 7, 2011, I wrote about the film We Believe, a film based upon the Italian independence movement that was released to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Italian independence. I saw the film in Italian. I noted that it was not heroic in nature – giving a lot of emphasis to the conflicts and betrayals within the movement. I recently watched it again on TV, this time with Italian subtitles which gave me a better understanding of the dialog. Still it was not all clear because there were references to historical figures without any explanation of their role and philosophy in the events. I was like an Italian watching a film about the American Revolution in which there were cryptic references to John Adams, Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, etc. Actually my knowledge of this part of Italian history, far from extensive, is probably more acute than that of many Italians. So a lot of Italians too viewing this film may not have fully understood all the subtle points.

As always, I am finding new good places to eat in Pistoia. The latest is a sandwich shop. Sandwiches are a weak point of the Italian cuisine—often just a piece of meat on dry bread. In Germany the sandwiches are much better as I have noted before. This new shop is owned by an German man and an Italian man. It has sandwiches of originality and variety using excellent Italian ingredients.

The day after Christmas I stopped for a meal at my favorite pizza place where the pizza maker and half owner is an American. He is a sports nut so I stop in often (even when not eating there) to talk a little about sports with him. After an excellent meal, I went to the counter to pay, but was told the meal was a Christmas present to me. In Italy, regular customers get excellent service.

Hotel News

The big hotel building under construction close to the center of town, near the train station, will be a Hilton Hotel. There is only one large hotel now in Pistoia and it is not centrally located. In the center of town there are a few small, prosaic hotels. So the Hilton will be a step forward.

Meanwhile the number of bed and breakfast places grows steadily. When I came to Pistoia in 2002, there were one or two of these in the center of town. Now there are 11. Of course, more tourism is good for the economy of Pistoia, but ironically what makes Pistoia an especially nice place to live is that it is not overrun with tourists and businesses catering primarily to tourists.

Short Answers to Two Seemingly Complex Questions

As the new government wages the umpteenth crusade in Italy against tax evasion, the answer why these efforts never bear fruit was succinctly stated last week by an Italian politician — “because the tax evaders also vote.”

As the crew of one Italian merchant ship was released this week by Somali pirates, another such ship with an Italian crew was seized by pirates. Why the popularity of seizing ships with Italian crews ? Italy always pays a ransom.

Concert in the Cold

 I went to a Christmas choral concert at a church close to my house. I just wore a sport jacket without an outer coat because it was only a short walk, and I did not want to deal with finding a place to put the outer coat at the concert. When I arrived, however, it was colder in the church than outside. So I went back home and got a coat to wear. When I returned, four large heating units had been turned on, but it was still cold. The first half of the concert was a Psalm set to music in five movements. It was polyphonic in form. In the middle of the piece, the group lost its pitch, and the director had to stop the piece and get the organist to get the singers back in tune. In the second half of the concert another polyphonic piece was scheduled. The group did not perform it. I think the temperature in the church was so cold that it made singing in tune difficult.

Divorce Italian Style

This is the title of my favorite Italian comedy film from the 1960s before divorce was legal in Italy. If you haven’t seen it, do so. If a sequel is in order, the plot line could come from a story in the news this week. A 99 year old man had filed for divorce from his 97 year old wife to whom he has been married 77 years. In 2002 he discovered hidden in a drawer a set of love letters from 50 years earlier between her and her lover. Apparently the almost 10 years since this discovery was not long enough for him to forgive and forget, and he has filed for divorce on grounds of adultery. Now this divorce will never happen because it takes about five years for a divorce process to be completed in Italy – the chances that both will be alive at that point are infinitesimal.

 Discussion Concerning the Differently-Abled

I wrote recently about how you encounter in Italy persons with disabilities who have been placed in a job for which they cannot perform efficiently all the duties of the position. A friend told me that in Italy the goal is to integrate these persons into society. (Thus something like a sheltered workshop would not meet this goal.) Unfortunately in a modern, rapid, economy, the number of positions for which such persons  are fully competent are fewer than in the past. He said that Italians tolerate the increased inefficiency they may encounter from some persons as a price to be paid for the goal of integration. An important point here is that efficiency itself is not a high value in Italy so Italians are accustomed to encountering inefficiency. Their attitude in this regard is different than that of Americans.

This situation is one of very many where the culture of Italy is at odds with the ideal functioning of the economy. The government now is proposing a plan to modernize elements of the economy. Laws may well be passed to accomplish this. Still when the law butts heads with the culture, the culture often wins. This is not to say that laws are totally ineffective in modifying culture, but the probable outcome of the reforms in Italy will be some minor improvements that keep Italy from economic collapse but do not lead to a new, vibrant, economy.

The Prestige of Journalists in Italy and the USA

 Prominent journalists are much more important public figures in Italy than in the USA. When a famous journalist died at age 91 this week, it was on the national news for two or three days about him, his career, and his funeral. If George Will or David Brooks, two prominent journalists in the USA, died, the news coverage would certainly not be so extensive in the United States. As in the USA, a lot of Italians now get the news simply from TV, but the percentage who read newspapers is still higher than in America.

 Italian Love of American Movies

I’ve written before how the death of even a minor actor or actress from Hollywood is news in Italy. This week there was another prime example of this phenomenon. The death of Cheetah, Tarzan’s chimp from the 1930s, was front page news in Italy. By the way I don’t know how well animals used in films and TV are ordinarily treated, but Cheetah, at age 80, lived twice as long as the typical chimp.

I wrote a few years ago about the coverage in Italian media of the case where the police handcuffed a five year old girl who was out of control at school. (newsletter 130 dated  November 18, 2005)  To Italians this was like a story from the planet Mars.  This week I saw the film clip on Italian TV of a policeman in Pennsylvania using a Taser gun on a 14 year old girl. She was charged with failure to obey a policeman but found not guilty at her hearing.  I don’t know the details of the case; it did not appear from the film clip that she was threatening the policeman with harm.  In any case in Italy, in this situation, the policeman would never use that level of force.  As I’ve noted before, police use much less force here in general, and this general attitude would certain be accentuated in dealing with children.

Turning the Tables

There is no doubt that the financial meltdown in the USA a few years back had negative effects in Europe and elsewhere in the world.  Now it seems there are some preliminary signs that the US economy may perk up, but this trend may be blunted by the ongoing financial crisis in the Euro zone.  The idea that sovereign nations have very much control over their own economic destiny may be outdated by the effects of the new interdependent world economy.

Italy, as the USA and other nations with high debt and economic stagnation, faces a dilemma. The measures to be taken to balance the budget quickly and the steps to be taken to stimulate long-term growth are different ones that pull in opposite directions.  Hard to move toward both goals at the same time.

The Ups and Downs of Living In Italy

As promised I did get a notice, on my cell phone, that my new Permesso is available at the local immigration office and an appointment to pick it up.  Very impressive performance by the Italian bureaucracy.

Now something less impressive. I drove with a friend to a Friday evening event in Florence at my church. It was the day of a train strike, a bus strike and lots of rain (so folks could not travel by scooter).   Perhaps for all these reasons there were traffic jams between Pistoia and Florence. Fortunately we avoided these until we got into the city of Florence where we found ourselves in an absolute gridlock. We tried an alternative street  with no success. Although we were close to our destination, there seemed to be no way to get there.  No sign of policemen on the streets directing traffic. So we took a chance and parked in a private lot whose gate was open.  We did finally see two policemen directing traffic – hours after the traffic problem started. 

When we got back to the car, the gate was locked.  This was the risk we knowingly took. There was the name of a security firm on the gate that apparently opened and closed it at prescribed hours. We called them, and were told that the gate would be opened at 5:30 the next morning. So we slept in a guest room at the parsonage of the church.  My friend had to get up early on Saturday to get to work.  The gate, however, was still not open at 6:15.  A call to the security company reached the answering machine there.  Now one would think a security company, if anyone,  would have 24 hour phone coverage.  Fortunately an employee came to work early and was able to open the gate.

Dealing with Burglars

I wrote last week about criminals who break into homes at night while the owner is there, and make him or her open the home safe.  This happened again near Pistoia this week, but with a little different scenario.

The burglars noticed a painting in the owner’s bedroom of the Shroud of Turin. One of them asked about it, and the owner then began an evangelistic talk with them. He asked them to pray with him, and hugged one of them saying he forgave him. The thief thanked him.  The owner said this was his attempt to break the cycle of violence with Christian love.  Unfortunately for the thieves, he had no safe or valuable property in his home.  Unfortunately for the owner, the religious conversion of the criminals was not complete; they did take the guy’s Porsche.

The Friends of the Library – American and Italian Style

I remember once attending an event, perhaps the annual meeting, of the Friends of the Library in Gettysburg.  I can’t recall if we had a speaker or there were just reports on the status of the library. We had a meal which probably was chicken, potatoes, a green vegetable, salad, and dessert. I don’t remember the price – probably $15.

In Pistoia I went to an evening  sponsored by the Friends of the Library.  It was in one of the most fancy restaurants that has a beautiful view of the Basilica.  The speaker was a contemporary art expert from Bologna who talked about the current status of contemporary art and the recent history of the field.  While she spoke we were served prosecco.  After her talk there was a dinner of tapas.  Along with white or red wine, I recall the following items (1) Neapolitan style pizza, (2) bread with new olive oil, (3) deep fried vegetables tempura , (4) marinated shrimp, (5) patè of cod, (6) octopus in a potato puree, (7) octopus with spaghetti of soya, (8) marinated raw tuna, (9) risotto in a pumpkin/ginger sauce, (10) coconut cheese cake, and (11) American style brownies.  There were one or two other items.  It cost $33.

Guess which event I preferred.

American vs. Italian Universities

Within a 24 hour period I spoke with an Italian scholar who taught as a visiting professor at Brown and Yale and with an Italian graduate student in his first semester at an American university.  I asked them both about their experiences at an American university.  The first thing they both said is the universities they experienced were “very well organized.”  They had other complimentary things to say because American universities have far more resources than Italian ones, but it is obvious that the shortage of educational resources in Italy is aggravated by the lack of organization within the system.

Dressing for Christmas

At a semi-formal Christmas event I attended, I wore a tuxedo for which I had modified the trousers (in the holiday spirit) by having a red stripe sewn down one leg  (covering the formal black satin stripe) and a green stripe down the other.  When people saw the red stripe they asked if I had borrowed the pants from a member of the Carabinieri (Italy’s national police) whose uniform includes black pants with a red stripe. After seeing both legs, a saucy tongued lady friend said “I see you got one leg of the trousers from the Carabinieri; where did you got the other leg –from the bellhop?”

Congratulations,  Silvio Berlusconi

Since he resigned as political leader of Italy, Berlusconi has been generally moderate and helpful in his comments. Since the government of technicians  in power is not a political one, it is not made up of the political enemies of Silvio.  So absent a political adversary, he is taking a constructive role in these difficult times.

This crime is in the news all the time in Italy. It is the crime of manipulating the assets and income of a company so that the owners get rich while the company fails. I assume a similar crime exists in the USA, but is not in the news so often. I think in general in Italy bankruptcy is more often seen as the result of moral failure or delinquent acts rather than as caused by difficult economic times or overly ambitious plans.

Studying Italian in the USA

I have a friend who was a Ph.D. student in Italian Language and Literature at the University of Wisconsin. She told me that not only were many of her professors from Italy, but also many of her fellow students were Italians. Why would a student go to a foreign country to study his or her own nation’s language and literature? First, there is the matter of cost. The Ph.D. students in the USA, however, get teaching assistantships which cover the costs. The main reason they come from Italy, quite simply, is that the doctoral education programs are better in the USA than in Italy.

 Killers Released from Prison

 I’ve noted before that prison sentences are shorter in Italy than in the USA, and with good behavior the time served is even less. This seems to be even more true of young offenders. A girl and her boyfriend killed her brother and mother and seriously injured her father. At this time the girl was 16. She was sentenced to 16 years in prison but has been released, at age 27, after serving 10 years. She is reconciled with her father. The Italian criminal system is aimed much more at rehabilitation than in the USA. My guess is that a young person, who is not a career criminal at the time of the crime, is seen as a prime candidate for rehabilitation. If the person appears rehabilitated, there is no reason not to release him or her for a productive life.

 This general attitude was reflected also in a recent case of a man released around age 30 after he was convicted of killing a fellow university student and served 10 years in prison. He then completed his university degree and became a high school teacher. (There does not appear to be any vocation in Italy forbidden for ex felons.) A problem arose, however, when the education system, unknowingly, assigned him to teach in the very school where his victim had been a student. The victim’s family objected, and he is being moved to a different school.

The Perils of Buying a House (Apartment) in Italy

In Italy all changes to a habitation, even little ones like adding a window, must be approved by the local government. When you buy a house, you have an expert go through it with the building plans on file with the local government to see that the building conforms to the plans. If there are “illegal” modifications, you can request that they be either removed or brought into conformance before you complete the purchase. At the actual transfer of title, the seller does declare that the house is fully in conformance with code, but if this declaration is false, your recourse is to sue the seller. Given the high cost and length of time to sue in Italy, this recourse is not very good. The local government does not go around inspecting units for illegal alterations so unless a neighbor complains to the government, the “defect” is not likely to be discovered. When you come to sell the unit, however, the prospective buyer may, upon inspection, discover the problem and refuse to buy until it is resolved.

Touring the Neighborhood

 A group of merchants in my neighborhood is sponsoring tours of the historic sites close to my house. I visited among other places (1) a small museum dedicated to the businesses that produced musical instruments in Pistoia, especially organs, (2) a contemporary art gallery, (3) a small plaza that is named after a Pistoia native who was the personal secretary of Garibaldi, and (4) a monastery of cloistered nuns. The latter in centuries past produced herbal medicines from plants grown on the premises and operated a pharmacy. Now they have only wild orange trees and produce a medieval liquor called Rosolio and orange marmalade. I bought a little bottle of the liquor – I can say it is VERY sweet. There are only eight nuns remaining.

 I’ve mentioned that there are lots of closed churches in Pistoia. Some are converted to modern uses, some are simply storage buildings, and some are vacant and falling into ever more disrepair. On these tours I discovered buildings I did not even know were formerly churches. My guess is that within a 300 yard radius of my apartment building, there are around 15 buildings that are or were churches and monasteries.

 Racial Violence Flares Up

In Turin a 16 year old girl had sex with her boyfriend – hardly a novel occasion. The girl, however, had promised her extended family (which I think was from the more conservative South of Italy) that she would remain a virgin until marriage. As a story for her loss of virginity, she told the police she had been raped by two foreigners whom she described in a way that they seemed to be Gypsies. Now how she thought her family would find out about her sexual encounter was not at all clear; rationality is not a prime teen age virtue. Her story collapsed under questioning, and she admitted it was a lie. By this time, however, a group of vigilantes had set fire to a nearby Gypsy camp in retaliation for the rape. Reporting a false crime is itself a crime in Italy, but you can be sure no judicial action will be taken against the 16 year old. She did publish a long apology in the newspapers.

A week later a Pistoia native went to two outdoor markets in Florence and shot at Senegalese merchants there. He killed two and serious wounded three. When surrounded by the police, he committed suicide. He was a member of extreme right wing groups.

 These kinds of incidents arouse soul searching discussions about the extent of racism in Italy. My own view is that in all nations there are extreme political groups of both the right and left. There are also mentally deranged persons who may or may not be legally insane. When these persons belong to extreme groups, they sometimes become violent. These isolated incidents in themselves say little about the overall attitudes and beliefs of the population. The mass killer in Norway certainly did not represent the average Norwegian. To assess levels of racist thought in a country you need much more sophisticated and complete measures than these isolated episodes.

 Do You Believe What You Read in the Papers?

I wrote last year about the death of Italian TV personality Mike Bongiorno who was raised in the USA. After his burial, his casket was stolen from the grave site (See newsletter 402, Feb. 4, 2011) . Last week the casket was discovered in a field along a road by a jogger who was running by. The discovery was presented as a happy accident. The family expressed joy at the return of the body, but said nothing more about its discovery or who might have done the crime. All such statements were left to the police. Most people think that some payment was made to the criminals in return for which they left the casket in a place it would soon be discovered. In “kidnapping” situations in Italy a ransom is usually paid but never admitted.

 I’ve also written about criminals who break into a house while the family is there (This is usually the home of a businessman.) and require the owner to open the safe (which is common in such homes). Recently this happened near Pistoia, and the owner reported the loss of 5000 Euro in cash, his Mercedes car, and some jewelry. I doubt that one can insure for the loss of a lot of cash (obvious problems of proof of loss) so there is little reason to inflate the amount of cash that was taken. On the other hand, there can be a reason to understate the amount of cash stolen. Let’s say 70,000 Euro was taken. If the owner states this amount, the tax authorities might become interested as to where that 70,000 Euro came from.

I wrote recently about being surprised to find the US program “Dr. House” in English on my TV. I thought someone had made a mistake. Later, however, I discovered two other programs on this channel broadcast in English. Then I did a little experiment. I went to my neighbor’s apartment when one of these shows was on. On his TV the dialog was in Italian. When I recently hooked up the decoder to my TV to allow it to receive digital signals, I had to choose a language for the decoder. I chose English. (This is the same as the language choice you have to make when you set up your cell phone or your digital camera.) So the on-screen menus for the TV are in English. This language choice had another effect. Apparently the channel with the English dialog transmits simultaneously two sound tracks for these programs – the original American one and the dubbed Italian one. My decoder, having been set to English, then sends the English soundtrack to my TV.

Depressing Repetitive News Coverage

Whenever a large company closes or lays off workers in Italy, the same story appears on the news. There is a demonstration in the streets demanding that the workers not be laid off and interviews with individual workers who lament that they will not be able to find new work and feed their families. Some are covered by unemployment insurance in Italy, but for a laid off worker the future is not bright. This is true in all counties where the economy not growing and international competition is always more severe. In Italy the government cannot force the companies to continue to hire these workers. A true communist government does provide “work” for all but at a terrible price. Italians have a hard time understanding that the rules from the old economic boom times no longer apply in Italy or anywhere else in capitalist countries.

 Mafia Moves North

The Mafia type organizations are powerful in the south of Italy and Sicily, but the news recently has been the activities of these groups in the north of Italy, especially the region of Lombardy. After all, there is more money and wealth in the north. The Mafia is not culturally imbedded in the north as it is in parts of the south. This should give law enforcement agencies a better chance to counter Mafia activities in the north. We will see.

 First Banquet of the Christmas Season

I went to a meal for the students of a friend of mine who gives English lessons. It was at the restaurant where I had my first meal in Pistoia when I visited as a tourist in 2001. We started with a antipasto plate of three types of cold meat, beans cooked with slivers of beef and bread with a liver pate. The came a lentil soup followed by linguine with porcini mushrooms. Grilled lamb was next accompanied by a salad of various lettuce greens. For dessert there was a pastry with a vanilla sauce. Of course the meal included red and white wine, water, and bread. We finished with coffee. The cost of $40. As always you can eat well in Italy.

Tourism in Italy

 I watched a documentary about how tourism is managed in Italy with special emphasis on the maintenance of the historical and cultural heritage. Let me draw this analogy with a soccer team. For tourism the resources to attract tourists are the landscape, culture, historic sites, etc. The main asset of a soccer team is its players. Italian tourism as a soccer team would have the best players in the world. The problem would be first that the players are not paid what they are worth. So they don’t work hard to do their best or to stay in shape. They also don’t cooperate with each other on the field. Instead of one coach, they have a bunch of coaches who do not coordinate their strategy. Because of the quality of its players, the team still wins many games, but if it were managed properly, the team would be number 1 without a doubt.

Falling Off the Wagon

I noted last week that I was controlling well my addiction to buying unneeded clothes at the bi-weekly market in Pistoia. This week my discipline fell apart. I went to the Christmas Bazaar of a large charitable organization in Florence. First there was the brand new Italian suit made of especially fine Tasmanian wool and finished with hand tailored features. Then there was the (slightly) used Lavin of Paris suit (made in Italy) with wool that feels more like silk. At $33 each my resistance crumbled.

I have an alibi for my weakness in buying the new suit. A gay guy was working at the Bazaar in the clothing area. He touted this suit to me as a particularly fine bargain. It is an established fact that gay men in general have a fine fashion sense. So let’s say I was coerced by the advice of an expert.

A Return of the Ridiculous

All nations have practices and customs that probably seem silly to outsiders. In Italy for me one of these is the one day (or less than a day) strike. It accomplishes nothing except perhaps giving a little extra vacation time to the workers. You can have strike in a specific industry or company or a general strike of all union workers. There are three major national federations of labor unions in Italy. They often do not agree with each other. All three oppose some of the provisions of the new austerity package presented by the government to allay the financial crisis. Everyone in the government and Parliament is well aware of their opposition and the reasons for it. Nevertheless, originally two of these federations opted for a two-hour general strike to protest these provisions. The third federation thought this was not strong enough; it called for a four-hour general strike. Eventually all three settled on a three-hour general strike.

At the Book Store

About three years ago one of the large book store chains in Italy opened a branch in Pistoia. Now its main competitor has opened a store directly across the street. It is hard to believe that Pistoia, which survived without a major bookstore until recently, now has the need of two big ones. In Italy in general stores are opening up in locations and/or with limited inventories (selling only a few special items) that seem to make little economic sense. There are things about business in Italy that I simply don’t understand.

At an American bookstore there is a big section on self-help/self-improvement books that often emphasize positive thinking. Such books certainly exist in Italy, but are less of a staple here. The idea that you can transform yourself through your own efforts into a new person reflects a kind of (American) optimism (justified or not) that is far less common in Italy.

Silvio Belusconi is not at all fully retired, but at least he is retired for now from his role as political head of the nation. One of his first jobs as a youth was as a singer on cruise ships. He has returned to his love of music by issuing a CD on which a well known Italian singer performs 11 new love songs written by Silvio himself. Upon hearing this some might wonder if the songs in fact are the work of a ghost writer. I doubt it very much. Berlusconi certainly thinks that he can write songs as well as anyone else. In fact, the songs might be quite good.

Anti-Death Penalty Film

Italy does not have the death penalty, but there are groups in Italy who work for the abolition of the death penalty in other nations. One of these groups is sponsoring a film series at the local library. I went to see the 2003 Italian film Porte Aperte, “Open Doors”. (It is available on a DVD with English subtitles.) What struck me was how different this film was than an American film that would have questioned the death penalty. In the American film the accused would have been innocent or there would have been clear mitigating circumstances that made capital punishment inappropriate in this case. In the Italian film, based on a true story, the accused was clearly guilty. The film explained the anger that caused him to kill three people, but this anger would not have been sufficient to negate the death penalty in the USA. It appears that even under Mussolini (The film took place in 1937.), some criminal circumstances that qualified for the death penalty in the USA would not have done so in Italy. What the film made clear to me is that the unease with the death penalty (which led to its abolition) in Italy was and is clearly more evident in Italy than in the USA.

 A New Wonder of Digital TV?

In rare occasions when I am watching an American film on Italian TV, there might be a short segment in which the sound track reverts to English rather than Italian. I experienced, however, something new this week. I happened across the American show, Dr. House, that is popular in Italy. It was in English, not just a segment – the whole episode. I wonder if this was a glitch caused by the recent conversion to digital TV. The next nights, however, the show was on in English again. I’ll see how long this continues. Putting a show in English in prime time makes little sense in Italy.

 Serving as a Model

Recently I have been more disciplined in my visits to the bi-weekly market in Pistoia and have refrained from buying things unless I really need them (which means I haven’t bought anything). Still one of my recent market excursions was useful. At a stand where all the used items were 1 Euro, a woman was looking at a very nice Burberry men’s sports coat. She could not find the label with the size on it. I found it for her, but the size indicated was a German size, not the Italian one. I asked her what size she was looking for which turned out to be the same as my size. So I tried on the coat for her. It fit fine, and she bought it.

Score One for Italian Bureaucracy

When I mailed my form to renew my Permesso di Soggiorno in June, I did not notice that the receipt I got at post office included also the date and time for an appointment at the local immigration office to present some necessary documents. (This is a change in procedure from prior years.) As a result I showed up on December 1 for an appointment that was set for the end of June. At the immigration office they could not find my file (In public offices in Italy files are spread out everywhere.) , but this was not a problem. They quickly processed the documents I brought and told me that I would get a message within three weeks to come to get my new Permesso. So far so good.

Hiring the Differently Abled

I think I have the correct current phrase for what we used to call the handicapped or disabled. In Italy public agencies and companies over a certain size are required by law to hire a certain percentage of such persons. A state agency certifies which such persons are suitable for employment. This practice reflects the general laudable Italian concern with fairness toward persons who are less fortunate in life. This practice, however, sometimes intersects with another Italian trait – the lack of concern for efficiency or customer service. So, especially in a public agency, you may find yourself being served by a person who simply cannot function well in the role assigned to him or her. (You could find a job in a hospital that I could perform, but you don’t want me as your surgeon.) The obvious answer to this problem is to use all employees in ways that are appropriate for their abilities and training, but in Italy at times the obvious doesn’t get done.

The European (Dis) Union

For a Europe devastated by two major wars in the 20th century, the idea of a European Union in which the nations cooperated was obviously very attractive. I always believed that a subsidiary reason for the establishment of the Union was to control the power of Germany which is the naturally dominate nation in Europe. As the latest developments show, Germany is still number one. There can be no plan to rescue nations in difficulty or to save the Euro as a single currency that does not have the approval of Germany. Only Germany has both the resources and the reputation for stability that are essential for any rescue plan to resolve the crisis of confidence in Europe.

 Did Many Italians Get the Humor of This Photograph ?

On the front page of an Italian newspaper was a photo from the general strike of public employees in Great Britain opposing changes in the pension system. A woman was holding up a sign that said “I Am Really Not Happy About This.” The caption probably translated this into Italian, but I don’t know how many Italians realized that the sign was a classic example of the British penchant for polite understatement.