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I'm not sure I can put into words what I feel after having looked at the photos I am going to link here.

I'm putting the link under a cut, because I don't want people to click by mistake, they are pretty disturbing.

( Disturbing content, autopsy photos )

Stefano Cucchi was arrested on October 15 because he was found smoking a joint. He was escorted home, where he lived with his parents (this is Italy), and then arrested. He asked for his family lawyer, but his request was ignored. When he appeared at the fast-track hearing in front of a judge, he was given a court-appointed lawyer. He already was walking painfully and his face was puffy. He was examined and found to have two broken vertebrae, apparently because he had "fallen down the stairs".
The judge decided that he was homeless and therefore could not get home arrests. He was sent to jail, and he spent a night there, before being transferred to the prison ward at the hospital.

He has had problems with drugs in the past, but he is relatively well-adjusted, he works and lead a normal life.

His family tries to see him while he is detained at the hospital, but even a request to speak with the doctors is turned down. The doctors later will declare that "they were unaware he had a family". Stefano Cucchi was very thin when he went into the prison ward, at only 43 kg.

When he dies, on October 22, he weighs 37 kg. The cause of death is ruled "natural causes". The autopsy, in addition to the two broken vertebrae, also finds a broken eye socket, various contusions and a broken jaw.

I know this will not surprised anybody who remembers Genoa in 2001. It does not surprise me.

But it still makes me too angry for words.

Veronica Lario, the long-suffering wife of Silvio Berlusconi, denounced her husband in the press this week - for the second time in two years. Aida Edemariam on the marital saga that has Italy hooked

Although you know, she could just divorce him. Apparently parting with his money is harder than swallowing his "indiscretions" AND his treatment of women in general, though.

What I found saddest about all this is that in one interview I read she reported being touched by the fact that Berlusconi is, apparently, really in love with his grandchild, "He plays with her a lot" Veronica said. "Sometimes even when he's alone."

Sigh.

oursin attracts my attention to this article in the TLS.

Now, I have spent the last few hours fuming at the mouth for the awfulness that is the Wikipedia page about the Venetian language. I won't go into the alternate history depicted there, where there existed at one point an entity called Venettia of which I, with my rather good education and a native of the place, have never been aware.

But the article itself calls for a response.

Let's go point by point:

Venetian spoken here
The language of Venice is older, less artificial and more influential than Italian itself

Well, older, depends what you mean by "Italian", but yeah. Less artificial, that calls for defining "artificial". Italian is now a thriving language spoken by almost 60 million people. Hardly an artificial language. More influential? That is just laughable. Sure, some of Italy's greatest writers wrote in some kind of Venetan language, although it is unfair to lump Ruzante, who wrote in Paduan, with "Venetian", which is properly the language of Venice. But even Goldoni, Ruzante, Casanova, Biagio Marin and the Pitura Freska can compete with Danta, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Guicciardini, Machiavelli, Galileo, Leonardo, Manzoni, Pavese, Verga, Pirandello, Calvino, Eco, Quasimodo, Montale, Foscolo, Leopardi, just to name a few.

Although Venetian is routinely referred to as a “dialetto” in Italy, this has become misleading in that it is now widely and unthinkingly interpreted as implying that Venetian is a dialect of Italian.

Says who? I notice the impersonal "has become misleading". I don't know who is misled, but they have only themselves to blame. Anybody who has reached the end of high school in Italy, if they have been paying attention, knows exactly where dialects and the national language come from. No, wait - anybody who had been paying attention is eight grade knows that. Of course, part of the problem is that "dialect" in English means something different than it does in Italian. Nobody in Italy believes that any dialect is derived from Italian. We all know that the process has gone the other way around.

In fact Venetian predates Italian by hundreds of years.

And so does every other dialect in Italy. So what?

It grew naturally and autonomously out of the late Latin spoken in the north-east of the peninsula.

And did every other language in Italy.

Italian, on the other hand, was an artifically created language, based primarily on vernacular Tuscan and the works of Tuscan writers, notably Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio, and forged by scholars and humanists of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in an attempt to found a national language, written and spoken, for the entire population of the yet to be unified country.

Questione della Lingua: liquidated in one sentence. Where to start?

This makes it sound like Italian was created a bit like Esperanto - somebody (probably Petrarca, Dante and Boccaccio, and we'll get to this order later) sat around a table and wrote a bunch of rules and compiled a lexicon. If only. It would be a much easier language to learn if it had gone that way.

Dante took the first step when he chose to write the Divine Comedy in his vernacular. The novelty was not that he wrote in vernacular - several other people had done so as far back as the thirteen century, and Dante himself had written poetry in vernacular. This wasn't remarkable - plenty of people were doing the same around him. (Well, it was indeed remarkable, but not as new).

Dante's act of defiance was to write a philosophical treatise in verse, that dealt with the highest matter concievable, the nature of the universe and his idea of theology, philosophy and government, and he did not chose Latin. Dante had already written very influential books in Latin, including a treatise on the necessity of a new language. But using the language of the riff-raff to talk about God? That was revolutionary.

His success was so overwhelming that nobody after him seriously questioned that whatever language this mostly theoretical nation, Italy, was going to speak, it was going to start from him. He was popular among learned people, and he was popular among the riff-raff. His poem was read aloud to adoring crowds, and memorized.

What Petrarca and Boccaccio did was born of another age, in which the democracy Dante had so hard fought for had eclipsed. Petrarca and Boccaccio were courtesans, who lived by producing art for the courts. Petrarca looked at Dante's fierce, vulgar language, and with an affectionate tut-tut proceeded to cleanse if of all that was popular and unrefined. The language he produced was beautiful, elegant, and his vocabulary much reduced. Boccaccio, who for his great popularity was also influential, took a look and decided to follow Petrarca. They were all from Tuscany, but they didn't write for Florence. They wrote for the courts of Italy, and the language they produced became the language of art and poetry. Not for the humble, of course.

There are many other steps along the way. One pivotal moment is the one in which Alessandro Manzoni, probably the real father of Italian language, decided that the great novel he had already written and published with some success could not become the springboard for a new language if it remained written in his Milanese Italian. He therefore rewrote it in a heavily Florentine accent, and created a monster, but a viable one: a language that could be taken seriously as a literary language because it had the authority of Dante and Petrarca and Boccaccio behind it.

More or less universal knowledge of Italian was only achieved in the second half of the twentieth century.

This much is true. At least if we are talking numbers. Learned people could, of course, communicate in Italian long before then. What language would Foscolo, born to a Greek-speaking mother in the Adriatic, and educated in Venice, write in, if there hadn't been a universal language recognized as "Italian"?

The robustness of Venetian in the face of the exclusive use of Italian in the media, education system, bureaucracy and the Church,

I sniff Northern League propaganda here. Ah the poor downtrodden Venetians, oppressed by Rome! There are less than 50,000 people currently living in Venice. They can hardly lament the fact that the ballot papers are written in Italian.

Oh wait - unless the author of the article thinks that "Venetian" is spoke all around Veneto. That is not so. Venetian is one of several strands of the language of Veneto, called "Veneto" in Italian and I have no idea how in English.

and in a country where other “dialects” are in more rapid decline, is remarkable. The Venetian language remains central to the Venetian identity, but is seldom mentioned other than in the most cursory fashion in the thousands of books and articles about the city and its lagoon. Venetian, which is in many respects as different from Italian as Italian is from French and Spanish, and can be impenetrable for Italians from elsewhere, is still spoken by the majority of Venetians living in the lagoon and also in the Mestre-Marghera conurbation on its western shores.

Well, I doubt it. First of all, as I said, Venice has less than 50,000 inhabitants nowadays. In Mestre and Marghera, methinks there are indeed a lot of speakers of several different Venetan languages, but to speak of "Venetian identity" for them is to overlook the unrooting, disruption and alienation of the Venetian population following the creation of Marghera. Also, Marghera was created as an industrial development centre during Fascism, and was a centre of immigration. From all over Italy. Today... it is mostly a wasteland.

English words borrowed from Venetian include artichoke, arsenal, ballot, casino, contraband, gazette, ghetto, imbroglio, gondola, lagoon, lido, lotto, marzipan, pantaloon, pistachio, quarantine, regatta, scampi, sequin and zany. “Ciao” – a long-standing contraction of the courteous Venetian salutation “vostro schiavo” (your humble servant) – has now become a global greeting.

That would be "sc'iao vostro" if anything, not "vostro schiavo", which is, my dear, Italian. And also, that does not translate as "Your servant", it translates as "Your slave".

[...]

A major factor in the survival of Venetian against the incoming tide of Italian is that it is spoken with pride by all classes of society. Some of the purest Venetian is spoken by the least educated on the one hand, who have little contact with Italian speakers,

WHAT? Where do you think these "least educated" live, in cellars? With no tv? Are you kidding me? Do you think they never go to the movies? or shopping at Auchan? How the hell do you think they manage to avoid meeting "Italian speakers", i.e. pretty much everybody around them including other Venitians? Because, look, most people in Italy, including Venetian, may also speak their dialect, but they sure as hell by now speak Italian as well.

and the most educated on the other, who are acutely aware of correct Italian (often referred to in Venetian as “Tuscan”) and correct Venetian and carefully avoid contamination between the two.

Not in my experience they don't. They speak in the language they can be understood in. Unless they are engages in some, yes, very artificial exercise of cultural mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I've met the like in Udine regarding our own dialect, Friulano (every bit as ancient and respectable as Venetian thankyouverymuch).

The day-to-day speaking of Italian in Venetian homes, once rare, is unquestionably on the increase (especially where a partner is not Venetian). However, many children who do not speak Venetian at home quickly learn the language from their playmates and school friends. Immigrant workers from Eastern Europe and elsewhere are picking up the language in the workplace, unexpectedly adding to the number of speakers.

Well, color me as one of those who didn't learn the dialect at home, since my parents spoke different varieties, and never learned it from my playmates and school friends either. All of whom spoke Italian. As for immigrant workers, I wonder why the specification that they come from "Eastern Europe". Indeed, I remember with glee the year in which the prize for best composition in Friulano was won by a nice bloke from Africa.

The first examples of written Venetian go back to around 1200, and Ferguson offers a series of varied and well-chosen literary and other texts (with English translations) charting the evolution of the language. Curiously, it was a Venetian, Cardinal Pietro Bembo, with his Prose della volgar lingua, published in 1525, who was the most influential early codifier of the new Italian language. During this period Venice was becoming the epicentre of publishing in Italian. Literate Venetians readily adopted Italian as a written language, which in many ways superseded the role that Latin had previously played (although Latin persisted in the more conservative realms of the chancery and Church). Even as Venetians read increasingly in Italian, written Venetian continued to be used in personal and business correspondence, practical manuals, diaries, histories and wills, while spoken Venetian remained the language of government and the courts, religious, philosophical and scientific discourse.

Wait wait wait... I thought you had told us that Italian was an artificial language only diffused in the twentieth century?

Why am I so irritated by this piece? Well, I am irritated by superficiality and misinformation about my country, and specifically the part of it where I spent all my adult life. I am not myself a native of Veneto - I was born next door in Friuli. Part of the reason I do not speak Friulano, though my dad and all my uncles and cousins do, it that my mom is from Pordenone, and thus spoke a version of Venetan. But mostly she didn't, as she moved to Udine when se was five and was never accepted as one of "them".

I have a very ambiguous relationship with dialect. It is, indeed, a language often more sanguine, more immediate, more cutting, than Italian. For those who speak it is it the language of the heart and of the hearth. But it is also, as is so often in these things, a language that serves as a way to exclude others. Marco Paolini, a great performer of pieces about Veneto, says in his "Marco Polo" that for Venetian there are three classes of people: "Noantri" (Us), "campagne" (Peasants, that is everybody outside the lagoon), and "foresti" (foreigners). Sort of gives you the idea, eh?

As laudable as all these efforts at conservation are, they also have a much darker side. It is not for nothing that the Wikipedia page on the Venetan Language is so obviously biased. The whole kaboodle of the Northern League, which resulted from the fusion of the Lombard League and the Venetan League, was that Northern Italy had its own (wholsome, brave, sturdy, genuine, hard-working, right-thinking, masculine) culture, opposed to the wicked, thieving, lazy, corrupted, effete culture of the South, here indicating more or less everything south of Florence. (They can't leave Florence out, since it would mean admitting that a lot of what Italy is great for belongs to the hated Others.)

I hate this appropriation of culture (the Northern League had the gall to choose one of the beloved hymns of Indipendence, the chorus of the Nabucco, as their anthem, the thieving thugs) and invention - stupid invention at that, of a non-existent Northern Culture. I hate it with a passion that burns hotter and fiercer every day, at every corrupting of the national spirit, at every fostering of racial hatred, at every destruction of what was genuinely good and brave and progressive about Italy.

Alex was watching Braveheart the other day. I told him how it became the most beloved movie of the Northern League, with soundtrack and iconography used lavishly in their rallies on so on. I don't think he understood. Back in the day, me and sciamanna explained to our Usenet pals that the Northern League had taken William Wallace as their hero because they maintained that the Northern Italian identity was "celtic", causing some perplexity. Watching the movie again I realized just how well it showcases everything I despise about localism, including the wholesale invention of a mythical past that never existed.

And so, this parading of Venetian as "more genuine", "older" and "more influential" (Of all things!) than Italian, tells something to my ears that I would gladly punch the author over. Although he may not even realize whose fiddle he his playing. Ah, the genuine stock of local people, truer to their spirit, untouched by this corrupting modernity. Ah, the arrogance and oppression of the evil Central State!

Yeah, right. But the Italian Constitution that was born of the war, was not an oppressive or arrogant one. The symbol of the Italian Republic, the gear flanked by laurel, well represents what the people who wrote the Charter wanted - mostly people who had fought, physically, personally, against Fascism - a Republic born of labor, with justice and fairness for all. A nation of equals, with protection for the weak. A nation who had taken arms against the coward King who had given power to Mussolini without a struggle, sent his Jewish subject to the gas chambers and who had deserted his own army. A small nation to tell the truth - the Constitutional Assembly did not represent the vast majority who had acquiesced to Mussolini, who had let him do, who had cheered him, only to protest loudly their antifascism as soon as he fell.

And if not all of those ideals came to life, well, the people who are trying very hard now - and mostly succeeding - to tear them down, are the same who are celebrating the greatness of the ancient Venetian stock, trying to gloss over the Venice that offered (interested) protection to Galileo, the Venice that traded and negotiated with the Turks and the Moors, the Venice that sent traders as far as China, and who fought for Napoleon and for a unified Italy.

No writing since... since the day before I left, that is Thursday. Bummer.
This is probably the worst side effect of travelling here - I have great plans but I never do much. I don't know why - I have managed to write in circumstances that were more difficult.

The weather is lousy as lousy can be, but yesterday, driving back from Padua to Udine, the cloud cover was in disarray, the air had been cleaned by the rain, and I could see the mountains all the way home, which is getting rarer and rarer these days because of pollution in the Padan Plain.

(Back when I was a student, I used to shuttle by train between the two cities and the mountains were visible most of the way almost every time.)

So at one point I glanced to my left, and a particular mountain high was hit by the sun. All around me for 360 of flat country, stripped by winter, it was grey, dark, murky, but that single snowy top was a glorious gold. I had to stop watching because I was driving, but I thought, this is one of those memories of you life you want to store away for, well, a rainy day.

I miss my mountains. I wish I had the time one of these days to take a proper photograph of how they look when you drive towards them in clear weather, but the chances are against me. (And this time I didn't have my camera).

For the rest, being back in Padua has been upsetting. Most of the memories that come back are not good memories, and still going around those familiar places is painful. God knows Padua was not at its best in the flat grey light of the winter - and this kind of weather goes on for weeks and weeks, unlike London were the light cycles from stormy dark to sudden brief sun almost every hour. But I still miss it.

The flattening effect of time makes only the most vivid memories, which mostly means the worst, stand out. I thought a lot about my ex lover, the one I spent six incredibly miserable years pining after.

The news is still its mixture of outrage and outrageous stupidity (some of it from the side I am supposedly on, for example a brief "comic" editorial today by one commentator who, reflecting on the possible genetic origin of political affiliation said "[Italian politician] has a hybrid gene, NOT SIMPLY THE DOUBLE HELIX", whose idiocy is of difficult untangling.)

There is the parade of "celebrity" women whose chief claim to fame is to be the Brunette Beautiful assistant (there is a Blonde Beautiful Assistant, I kid you not) at the yearly Italian Festival of Pop Song. Makes you re-evaluate Amy Winehouse, poor thing, as a role model.

There are the usual deeply depressing news about the Church, in this case not really from Italy directly but a piece about an Argentinian military chaplain who has just been sentenced as guilty for complicity in, well, you can imagine what, which the Church did not think necessary to suspend, and so on.

I wish I could say I saw good old friends, but my good old friends I can see in London, because they are either living there or they care enough to come visit. Still, it was good to be with Riccardo, who was immensely proud of his spick and span house which I proceeded to muck up immediately.

Paolo's party was a sight to behold, with all his relatives and friends who had hired real Venetian 18 century costumes. His sister Chiara in particular, whose figure is somewhat humiliated by contemporary fashion, was thouroughly splendid and showed off a cleavage that women pay really, really good money to achieve with surgical means. My own tits, popping out a corset that is quickly becoming too small for me, didn't so much as spill out as jump off to have adventures of their own. This was much appreciated, although in a way that made me feel a tad uncomfortable.

(The Italian contingent mostly said, WOW, where did you find that costume? The English contingent mostly said, Ah, I see you're part of the BDSM scene.)

I was rather proud of my costume, which was achieved by adding a frilly semitransparent blouse, a home made milkmaid's cap, and a white piece of cloth pushed through the corset's ties like an apron, to my usual black corset and black multilayered skirt. I chose some white stockings 'cos they are 18th century, and voila', goth milkmaid. I was the only working class denizen of the 18th century in there and easily slipped into the role of Chiara's slothful and slutful servant.

The Little Black Cat is now perfectly well, and back to her usual Silouhette cat routine (you can see the contour and the yellow eyes), and she purrs with incredible volume.

sciamanna informs me that one Italian Senator assaulted the other Senator of his (very large, obviously) party in the Senate chamber shouting "traitor, piece of shit, fucking faggot". He spit on him, too. You people think you've got it bad... (pauses to think). Ok, you Americans really have it bad. The rest of you, trust me on this, there is worse than Gordon Brown, hard as it is to believe.

I am not going to delve into this. Really. Let us say that those of us who live abroad are really, really glad we live abroad, and those of us who don't desperately try to tell the expats all the gruesome details.

Sample conversation with my mom:
"Like the goverment, you know?"
"No I don't. And I don't want to."
"The governament will fall, you see?"
"La la la la."
"Because Mastella went to see Cardinal Bagnasco and he told him that this governament does not protect the Church's interests and has to fall."
"LA LA LA LA, LALA LA LA."
"And you know what Prodi did?"
"Look, please, really. I don't want to know."

Sigh.

Ah well, there is the other funny bit. Riccardo told me about it but I didn't believe it, so I had to read for myself. Well, one of Italy's online movie sites just ran an obituary for Heath Ledger. They mentioned 101 I hate about you, the Patriot, A Knight's Tale, and every other little bit part Heath Ledger has ever played, and they concluded with Candy.

Skipping Brokeback Mountain.

Several people have explained to me regarding my last post that asking people to categorize themselves regarding their ethnicity is done to assess and address the possibility of discrimination.

To be honest, that was the conclusion I had come too, which is why I have answered the question.

But one commenter told me that this is actually required by law, and this spooked me not a little.

I guess this goes back to a time when I was young and innocent and kept wondering how Jews could be rounded up and sent to camps. Jewishness, after all, was a matter of religion, so how could somebody tell if you didn't divulge the information, and why would you be so stupid as to tell, say, your passing SS that you were Jewish? I mean, if I sniffed the air and knew that atheists were about to be rounded up and killed, I'd be ready to piously intone my Ave Maria at the earliest opportunity.

As I said, back then I was an innocent.

I've carried an ID card around my whole life, and I've usually considered it a jolly useful piece of kit - although, curiously, I've never been asked to prove my identity, age or address as often as since I've come here. So the whole introduction of ID cards thing leaves me totally cold. On the other hand, an official person asking for me race, no matter how obvious it is to me that the purpose is not sinister, spookes the hell out of me.

As I also have explained in comments, there is a precedent for me in this.

Not a lot of people know, but we have our own little Northern Ireland in Italy. Back in 1918, when the war ended, Italy (who had managed to choose the winning party this time by sheer luck - our royals not having done their usual trick of switching sides two or three times and managing to end up on the losing side anyway, because not only they were opportunistic and amoral they were also dumb as posts) was handed a largish piece of Germany, namely the southern bit of Tyrol.

In a move that many here will recognize, that bit of land was re-christened Higher Adige, Adige being the river flowing way way far downhill, and never having existed before as a name for a region. (There is, as far as I know and I should know because I basically lived there, no Lower Adige).

This didn't change things enormously for the local residents until the advent of Fascism, which, as you know Bob, was big big big on national identity. Ethnic Germans are unlikely targets for discrimination but there you go - back then in Europe no excuse was too flimsy. Mussolini started picking up people, certified Italian stock, from the poorer regions of the South, and sent them up to colonise South Tyrol.

Those people were, of course, abundantly discriminated in favour of - jobs in the civil service went to them, schools were supposed to teach in Italian only, and so on and so forth.

(Not a lot of people know it, but there was a hell of a lot of tension between Mussolini and Hitler to start with, and this was one of the contentious issues. Mussolini could very easily have picked another ally, and he'd have died in his bed and Jimmy Carter and Prince Charles would have been dispatched to attend his funeral. This was, after all, what happened to Franco. Thankfully for all concerned, it wasn't only our royals who had this knack for choosing the losing side. Regretfully for all concerned, Mussolini stuck with his first choice of allies to the end. Unlike our royals, who switched sides in the nick of time and for good measure did it from a safe distance, but that's another story).

After the second world war, the Germans in South Tyrol found themselves to be the only Germans in Europe who were recognised as having actually been ethnically persecuted. There were special provisions in the Constitution and all, bi-linguism was instituted, a system of quotas devised, and everybody was more or less happy, apart from a small minority of discontents who kept on bombining things (fortunately, not people), mainly power trellises. Higher Adige, as it is still called, was mostly ruled by the local ethnic German party, the SudTyrolenVolkpartei (sp, sorry).

Now the Italians weren't exactly persecuted, but let's say that there was not a lot of loving-kindness between the two groups. Bilinguism meant that Germans, especially in rural areas, ignored or pretended to ignore Italian, but you had to speak German to hold some offices, and sometimes no matter how good your German was you just never seemed to pass the official language test. Schools were segregated and there was a non-official policy of keeping the two groupings separate, so that Germans were not taught Italian, for example, and Italians often didn't speak German.

And so on and so forth. Nothing real major, but a lot of people were inconvenienced.

Comes around the 1981 census (I think). To better determine demographic trends, people are asked to declare their ethnicity. However, there are at this point, despite concerted efforts on all sides, lots of mixed ethnicity people. People who have a German father and an Italian mother, people who have an Italian father and a Ladin (yes, because there is a third ethnic group to complicate matters) mother, and so on. And people who just don't hold with this separation business and speak both languages perfectly and have friends on both sides and frankly have had enough of this nationalism nonsense.

All of these people are asked to choose one, and only one, ethnicity. A lot of them refuse to do so.

For the following ten, or event twenty years (I'm not sure when the issue was resolved -iguana_jo can correct me on most of this since he was born and lived there for a long time) these people were basically refused a whole lot of civil rights by the local governament, on the grounds that they hadn't completed the census questionnaire. Partly this was reasonable - if there are quotas, where do you put the people who belong to no group? Partly it was simply hassle.

It might seem all very minor to you, but bear in mind that, while nobody was killed in South Tyrol if I remember correctly, the situation was not that different from what was at the time going on in the Basque region, Corsica, or Northern Ireland.

People now can joke in Northern Ireland ("but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?"). But for a long long time it wasn't a very funny joke.

So, well, long winded way to say: cherish and celebrate the "other, other" box. It is the mark of a liberal society.

Which I suppose is why I should have been asked, too, what gender I felt I belonged to: M, F, TG, TS, Other?

Opening Italian papers this morning is the news that Berlusconi's wife has written to one of the two major Italian dailies to ask her husband for a public apology.

Now, while I can gloat as much as the next person, I am also a little baffled. Berlusconi apparently appeared at a media event and did his usual lewd loony show, exuberantly telling unfunny jokes and being showered with the attention of various minor female celebrities, to which he responsed effusively. What I mean is, he said to one well-constructed tv person "With you I would go anywhere", and to another "If I wasn't married already I would marry you in an instant." I mean, his usual self - but pretty innocuous stuff.

God knows that he's done worse - even worse specifically as far as having respect for women goes. I remember one official lunch at the time of Italy's presidency of the EU when he said something along the lines of "We can talk dirty now, we're between men". And there was the time when he told one prime minister (Denmark's?) that he was so handsome that he should introduce him to his (Berlusconi's) wife, since he would be a better lover than the one she was rumored to have (a prominent leftist philosopher).

I like Veronica (actually, Miriam is her real name) Berlusconi a whole lot. Her letter is also very dignified and, well, how can you fail to love somebody who can embarrass Berlusconi in public so well? I mean, he's had it coming for so long.

But I can't understand what got to her now. I also can't understand what she ever saw in the pathetic little dwarf. Love is blind, but in a woman of obvious culture and class as she's always shown herself to be, it also has to be deaf and stupid. Of course, she did get hooked up with him when she was a) very young; b) a well-constructed actress and c) he was married. Seems to me she ought to have known what she was getting herself into.

So we join the elect club of nations that have incarcerated their monarch. Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia, son of the last king of Italy, has been arrested.

Of course, other nations get to arrest their monarch for serious stuff like high treason and consorting with the enemy. This being an Italian member of House Savoia, he got arrested for corruption and aiding and abetting prostituttion.

During the night, a small group of agitators gathered under Berlusconi's house in Rome and chanted sweetly "Dickheads, dickheads, we're all dickheads!"

Amazingly, the overseas vote was overwhelmingly for the center-left.

And, even more amazingly, after 43 (forty-three) years in hiding (sometimes in plain sight), the recognized, operative chief of the Mafia Bernardo Provenzano has been apprehended this morning near Corleone. This is almost worth a second champagne bottle, especially for me, who counted Palermo as a second home for a long time.

Well, I need to get drunk and I have no beer in the house. I think I'll go out and buy myself some.

Four years and six months before I can ask British naturalisation. Can't happen one day too soon.

As of now, I'm not going to post quite yet. I am just vaguely sorry it's raining, because the great partying in the town centre with flags and confetti is not nearly so nice under the freezing rain.

And, you know, decline is one thing, but Berlusconi can't possibly have fucked up even the weather, right? This is no April. Hmph.

I've thought about writing a post about Italy for quite some time now but whenever I get around to it I'm always not in the mood. Today I bought a book called "Come ti sei ridotto: modesta proposta di sopravvivenza al declino della nazione" ("Look what you've done to yourself: a modest proposal for surviving the decline of the nation) by a gifted writer-journalist called Curzio Maltese, one of those people whose prose is always so effortlessly brilliant that you want to weep.

He points out that most of the greatest and finest of Italy's catalogue of intellectuals down the ages (not a particularly short list) loved the place and because of that couldn't help loathing it. Dante wrote Woe slaving Italy, of such pain a hostel, no sovereign of provinces, but brothel. Petrarca whined (as was his wont): Italy mine, though speaking is in vain. Machiavelli used to just note in passing that "We owe it [to the presence in Italy of the Catholic Church Seat] that we are godless and evil", but couldn't help himself and penned a long, passionate vision of an utopian dream of a united Italy at the close of the Prince. And I could go on. For, like, long.

This is not a country that one loves to hate. This is mostly a country that one hates to love. So many of us would like to say, oh enough already, I've had it with the place, it can go hang. Were it not for the fact that the inescapable knowledge of how large a part of it does so not deserve it hits us when we think we're out of it for good. Curzio Maltese notices the ridicolous number of martyrs this place has had down the ages. Among a majority of conformists, cowards, amoral likeable scoundrels, some people just couldn't help be decent, upright, to the point of a totally pointless heroism. Justices who would go on doing their job knowing that they were going to be gunned down. Journalists who did the same. Young girls shuttling from mountaintop to mountaintop on a bycicle carrying messages between partisan bands. Professors who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist Party. And so on and so forth, down to the workers who stopped the factories during the Nazi occupation, when going on strike was even worse than it was under Thatcher.

So yeah. We produce Prime Ministers who declare, in what was probably a totally candid outburst he's still wondering why was taken so badly, that people who don't vote for him are dickheads. This made the rounds of the international press, who almost universally went for the easy way out - the English language press release said he had called them "testicles", which is literally true but a somewhat puzzling translation on the receiving end. I wonder if the substance of the remark, that whoever votes against their own interest is a moron, elicited as much outrage, which in my opinion would be the right reaction.

We also have a Prime Minister who accused the "communists" (I remind the inattentive that, according to Berlusconi, the famous and, how can I put it, not generally thought to be socially progressive "The Economist" is part of the international communist conspiracy against him) of "Wanting to redistribute wealth so that the children of workers are on the same level as the children of professionals".

However, we are also the country were people gleefully took to the streets waving placards with "I'm a dickhead (lit.: a testicle)!" on them, and carrying around colored balloons tied in pairs. Where people greeted each other happily with "Hello, pleased to meet you, I'm a dickehead (lit.: testicle)". (And in the case of my father, then turning to a third person innocently wandering nearby and addressing him with "Careful stepping this way, else you'll become a dick").

With lightning speed, the joke began circulating that Berlusconi was going to lose because, after all, for every prick voting for him there would be two testicles voting against.

So this morning I bought a magazine, and the first page bore a nice bold title: THE BIG WAIT.
"And so," was the subtitle, "these neverending five years have finally gone. We would have titled this issue From monday we'll all be a little freer, but we wouldn't want to jinx it at this stage. So, good voting, you bunch of merry dickheads!"

I woulnd't want to jinx it either, but he's been getting increasingly livid, angry, spiteful and nakedly hateful in the last few days, which makes me thing he's not seeing good numbers, not even in his own rosy tinted polls.

However it goes, I'm heading to Padua to do my dickhead's duty tomorrow.

The snow is coming down so think and fast and dense that it makes a noise over the skylight in my roof like a dangerous out-of-control static.

Being a clever gal, I left the chains for my car's tyres back in Padua.

My aunt left behind when she went back home a box of pine nuts meringues, a box of candied orange peel and almond sweets, several sticks of caramel-coated fruit. My mom still has the creams she prepared for pandoro, and the little cubes of torrone, and dates and kumqaats.

I have had an achy tummy this last few days. I wonder why.

Back in Italy. Zip royally pissed off at me, pretended not to recognize me for a good ten minutes, hiding under the bed and meowing piteously towards Riccardo. Unthawed but still standofffish now.

Great scenery on the way. Wrote long lyrical post about it on plane, now too tired to actually writing it down.

Bloody freezing in Italy.

gadarene told me about this: if you want to listen to some truly astounding Italian music, click here.

The playlist is downright touching for me. I'm not so crazy about Battiato (but many of the songs attributed to him in the playlist are actually De Andrè's), but it's worth it just for the De Andre'.

Do yourself a favor and check this out.