domenica 14 novembre 2010

Draquila

I've just been to the cinema to see Draquila and, as with most things concerning Italy, the experience left me with an irrepressible urge to blog.

The film is a documentary which tells the story of Berlusconi's involvement in the aftermath of the earthquake in L'Aquila in April 2009. It's central claim is that, as well as using the tragedy as a useful way of distracting the public from the more dubious aspects of his personal and political life, Berlusconi also exploited the situation to further the construction industry interests of himself and his cronies. According to the film, instead of efforts being directed towards restoring the centre, letting people back into their homes and saving the numerous architectural and artistic treasures of the town, the earthquake was used as an excuse for massive building projects which included both hotels along the coast of Abruzzo which were used as temporary accommodation and hundreds and hundreds of new apartment blocks which will eventually have to be "given back" in the pristine state in which they were provided. The authorities did everything in their power to convince, cajole or force people to move into these apartments instead of back into their own homes.The documentary also shows how Berlusconi manipulates the public into believing that he is a hero and a miracle-worker who has nothing but their best interests at heart.

The L'Aquila earthquake happened when I was living in Italy and but, 19 months later and living in a foreign country, I find myself shocked by my lack of reaction to the disaster at the time. But at the time, I suppose what I saw was what the Berlusconi government wanted me to see - that something terrible had happened but that everything was being taken care of. Given that I used to avoid Berlusconi TV like the plague and take everything I read his newspapers with a pinch of salt large enough to give the entire population a heart attack, that's a scary thought.

domenica 5 settembre 2010

Unravelling the Confusion

One night in Italy as we sat down for dinner, we had a little bit of trouble remembering whose napkin was whose. At the inside dinner table, we all had a different colour of napkin rings, but the night before we had eaten outside using different napkins in different rings and had not necessarily all taken the same colour. As we tried to sort out the situation, my friend and hostess remarked, “Gli italiani amano fare confusione” (“Italians love to create confusion”). As anyone who has lived in Italy will testify, this is absolutely true. Confusion is an excuse for lots of talking and hand gestures, and Italians love those.

Around the same time, I discovered that the Italian word for “to develop”, sviluppare, also means "to untie" or "to extricate." In other words, the complete opposite of fare confusione!

Put these two facts together and you can see how progress in Italy rarely comes quickly. To compensate, however, there are at least plenty of opportunities for social interaction along the way!

The Dark Heart of Italy

For a long time, I’ve been meaning to write about a book that I read a while ago called The Dark Heart of Italy. The author, Tobias Jones, is a reporter who went to Italy hoping to investigate and explain the country’s politics and the various scandals that were going on at the time. However, he eventually realized that the truth in Italy is difficult to find, never mind unravel, and instead wrote a book explaining why everything in Italy is so difficult to explain. The book tackles corruption in various areas of Italian life, from football to the building industry, but for me the most interesting part was finding out more about how Italian politics came to be in the state that it is today, which in turn explains, at least to some extent, why Italians keep voting for Berlusconi in the face of total incomprehension from most of the rest of Western Europe.

I gave the book to an Italian friend who also wanted an explanation of Italian politics, so unfortunately I can’t check up on the details, but what I learned, in a very, very simplified way, was this:

After World War Two, politics in Italy was divided between Communists and Fascists, and well into the 1970s, these were very much two warring factions, split, of course, into many smaller parties. There were terrorist attacks, there were cover-ups, and somebody was even pushed from a window in an attempt to stop an investigation. In the face of all of this, Berlusconi seems like quite a reasonable man. He might spend much of his life getting parliament to pass laws that protect him for the rest of his life from being tried for doing pretty much anything, but at least he doesn’t blow people up or push them out of windows. As a politician, he may be corrupt but his politics do at least belong to today’s world and not to the warring ideologies of last century. He has convinced Italians that their country can be modern and successful and they (or many of them) like him for it.

The other reason, of course, as the book explains, is that in Italy you can sit in your Berlusconi built house reading Berlusconi magazines and watching Berlusconi TV and, in fact, pretty much live your entire life as a customer of the Berlusconi empire. That might be the other reason so many Italians end up being convinced that voting for Berlusconi is the right thing to do.

I mentioned a while ago that I have never wanted to mock or criticize Italy for the sake of it, but rather to understand where the country and its inhabitants are coming from. For anyone who wants to do the same, reading The Dark Heart of Italy is a great way to start.

sabato 4 settembre 2010

Back to the Veneto


After a week of total relaxation, I was ready for the next stage of my Italian adventure – teaching English at summer camp. This year, the children were not only delightful, adorable and totally charming in the way that Italian children do best, they were also (relatively) calm, attentive and motivated to learn. It was a wonderful two weeks. It's also amazing, when you get away from the lake and the magnet for cultured German tourists that is Verona, how quickly you feel that you are deep in the heart of the “real” Italy. You can cycle for hours along the country lanes between the fields of sunflowers and corn, watching the light change as the hot sun sets on the hazy horizon. You watch chickens hatching from their eggs. You can go for a drink at the bar and, even though you haven't been there for a year, they still remember you. You buy an ice-cream at the gelateria and the owner gives you a personal invitation to sit with the locals on the plastic chairs by the roadside while under a starry sky. And, if that all sounds a bit too idyllic, you can get eaten alive by the hungriest, greediest, most tenacious mosquitoes in Italy.

For better or for worse, the sense of community in these small villages and the speed at which news travels became very evident to us this year. One of my friends received a surprise visit from a friend of hers who didn't know where we were staying. He had found the not very regular bus using the internet but when he arrived, he didn't know where to go, so he told the bus driver he was looking for the house where the English teachers were staying. The driver didn't know, but he quickly got on the phone to all his friends and was able to point my friend's friend in the right direction. The signora across the road showed him the right house and he found us ... as did the many, many men of a certain age who stopped us in the street wherever we went after that to ask us if we were the English girls staying at a certain well-known B and B!

mercoledì 25 agosto 2010

Sirmione: the Good

I know that normally the good is suppose to come before the bad and the ugly, but actually, our horrible experience at the hotel in Sirmione was just a bad beginning to what turned out to be a very good day, so much so as to almost wipe the memory of the morning from our minds. We found a friendly pizza place for lunch where they didn't seem to care that we were dripping wet, although the waitress did raise her eyebrows when my friend ordered a tuna and onion pizza with no mozzarella but with anchovies instead. Even the hoards of Germans who dominate the tourist business in the Veneto and have caused wuerstel to appear on every pizza menu haven't changed the idea that you don't mess with Italian culinary tradition.





After lunch, and feeling relatively dry again, we went to visit the remains of the Roman villa which lie at the very point of the peninsula. According to its name, the villa belonged to the Roman writer Catullus but in fact historians don't believe that he ever lived there. The villa was enormous, with its own baths and olive groves and even if you're not very interested in Roman history, the ruins combine with the views over the lake to make a very scenic place to wander around for an hour or so.



After the villa, we visited the castle. Despite a childhood spent running around endless old Scottish fortresses, I think this is one of the best castles I've ever visited. It has a drawbridge, a moat and interesting parts that stick out into the sea, as well as towers that you can climb to get a fantastic view of the peninsula and the lake. Highly recommended.


Sirmione: The Bad and the Ugly

For most of the week that we spent at Lake Garda, the weather was lovely and so were the people. The day we went to Sirmione, however, there was a terrible thunderstorm and we had an experience that ranks right up there with having my bags stolen at Milano Centrale in terms of nastiness.

Sirmione is tiny town located at the end of an improbably long and skinny peninsula that sticks out into the lake from the southern shore. The old town is guarded by a castle fort and only people who live there are allowed to drive over the bridge that leads inside the ity walls. The town extends the length of the peninsula, however, with houses, hotels, car parks and the odd restaurant lining the road that leads to the historic part. It's always busy, even on a stormy Thursday morning, and we had to park the car quite far from the fortress. As we got out of the car, a strong breeze was stirring in the trees, the sky was darkening and the greyish green waves on the lake were lapping hungrily at the shore. We weren't five minutes from the car when the giant raindrops began to fall.


We immediately started to get absolutely soaked and decided to look for shelter. We ducked under the awning of hotel, where several other people were also sheltering. Realising that the rain might be on for a while, we decided to do the polite thing and order coffees, rather than just standing there taking advantage of the hotel's driveway.

Our politeness, however, turned out to be entirely wasted on the hotel staff, who were pretty much the rudest waiters I've ever met (and I've been living in Paris for a year). They communicated in grunts from behind twisted lips and seemed to be entirely incapable of eye contact. We asked if we could sit inside, where we could see an almost empty restaurant with space for at least fifty people, with more spaces in a conservatory that looked out over the lake on the other side of the building. They said no, so we adjusted the position of the tables in an attempt to shelter ourselves from the torrential rain outside and the almost equally torrential drips that were coming through the gaps in the shelter.

By the time they grudgingly brought us our drinks, the puddles in the driveway had amalgamated into a flood that was rapidly encroaching on the ground around our feet. Again we asked if we could go inside. Again the waiter grunted, disappeared and refused to make eye contact. When he reappeared, I pointed out to him that the water was actually lapping at our toes as well as dripping into our coffee and again he disappeared.


A little while later, the kitchen porter appeared brandishing a brush and, to our horror, began to attempt to sweep the water off the driveway and into the road. This was clearly an impossibly task because every time a car went past, even more water would be sprayed from the gutter into the quicky expanding flood. The porter realised this and must have noticed our sympathy, because he turned round and made funny faces to express the hopelessness of the situation.

Unfortunately, this did not impress his evil overlords, who came out and shouted at him several times, grabbing his arms aggressively. I'm sure the fact that they were white and he was black had nothing to do with the fact that they thought this was an acceptable way to behave...Meanwhile me and my friends stood there feeling sick at having to watch this scene but, with the rain pouring down and nowhere to go, we couldn't really leave, so we had no choice but to stand there reformulating every opinion we had ever had about Italian hospitality.

Actually, though, this situation was unlike anything I have ever experienced in Italy and I refuse to revise my ideas based on that one horrible experience. I've had people trick me and lie to me and short change me, but I have never, ever seen anyone be so downright rude and nasty, either to a customer or to a member of staff. Eventually the rain died down and we left. My friend gave the poor kitchen porter a ten euro note as we went away and the few hotel residents who were sitting in the dining room all clapped, but if I were them, I would have been horrified to find myself staying in a place like that. I wish I had the name of the hotel but it was too wet to check as we left, but if you're ever tempted to stay in a peach-coloured hotel on the way to Sirmione with a conservatory at the back, driveway that looks liable to flood at the front and waiting staff who are unable to smile or look you in the eye, make sure that you think again.

venerdì 20 agosto 2010

Proof That I Am Definitely Grown Up (and quite possibly becoming middle aged)



During our holiday at Lake Garda, we went to Gardaland for the day. I did not go on a single scary ride. I didn't feel remotely tempted to go on a scary ride. I didn't berate myself for being too chicken to go on a scary ride. and afterwards, when my friends got off the scary rides, I didn't feel the slightest bit of regret about not having joined them. No, when it came to the rides that went upside down, looped the loop or even just spun around a little too fast, I just said “no”.

To be honest, I've never been a big fan of rollercoasters. It's just that there was a point in my life when I felt that I should try them out, if not for the fun then just to conquer my fears and prove that I could do it. But a little while before I went to Gardaland, I went rock climbing. On my way up the vertical cliff, with a river roaring down beneath me, my legs began to shake like crazy, despite the fact that my mind kept telling them everything was fine. I got them under control, climbed a bit higher and then forced myself to look down. I might easily have fallen off and if I had, it would have been painful, terrifying, difficult to get back up again and entirely my own fault. When I didn't, I knew that I had achieved something. On the Gardaland rides, I would almost certainly have got off at the end with no disasters having happened, but instead of feeling satisfaction, I would probably just have felt sick.

That's not to say that I didn't have a great time in Gardaland. My favourite ride was Mammut, the runaway mine train, which speeds at an angle around spiralling bends and lets you scream to your heart's content, but never ever turns you upside down or spins you around. That was great. I also liked the water rides, particularly the log flume, the flying island, which gives you a view over the lake and the surrounding countryside and the kiddie caterpillar train, which turned out to be quite a bit faster than any of us expected and was therefore pretty exciting despite the fact that it was really a baby ride. The only ride I didn't like was the one where you go down inside a magic tree where they spin the walls around to make you think you're going upside down. That just messed with my head and made me want to vomit, and it was in the kids section!

If I went back another day though, I'd probably spend the whole time on that runaway mine train. It was awesome.

Camping at Lake Garda


I started my trip to Italy with a week of camping with a group of friends at the wonderful Camping Lido at Pacengo, on the shores of Lake Garda. I went there last year and this year's experience was exactly the relaxing break that I hoped it would be after a week of killer hiking in the Alps. As well as a camping space, we had booked a little bungalow which was basically a little kitchen, four bunk beds and a cupboard, all in one room, with a little terrace outside. The facilities at the campsite are fantastic, so that's pretty much everything you need. As well as the cleanest toilets and showers ever seen in a public place in Italy, there's a swimming pool and bar, a restaurant, a supermarket and a long stretch of lake shore with a pier that you can jump off for a slightly wilder swimming experience. Just along the shore is the port of Pacengo, where there's a market once a week. The port is also home to a lovely restaurant which I think is called the Casa di Giulia. There's an outdoor terrace with views over the lake, they gave us free limoncello at the end and my friend's insalata caprese was so fresh and delicious that I could smell the tomatoes as they passed my nose.

There was also a farmer's market in the town centre the Friday that we were there. At first we were a bit disappointed because it was tiny, but we went round every stall, tried everything and bought most things. At the final fruit stall, my friend L. must have charmed the stallholder because he kept pressing free fruit on us. Even after we had bought everything we wanted and more, he kept cutting slices of melon and handing them to us until we could eat no more. It was fabulous.That weekend was also the Festa dello Sport in Pacengo. In the evening there were different stalls selling local food and wines and a band playing covers of cheesy songs. Many Italians, particularly if they're of a certain age, learned to do proper ballroom dancing when they were kids, so lots of people dance the “official” steps in couples at these kinds of events. My friend J., who is also a really good dancer, was desperate for us all to join in but the rest of us Brits were too uneducated and inhibited so she found an old man to dance with instead and he was delighted with the opportunity. She, on the other hand, was quite relieved when later in the evening she convinced me to dance the uncoordinated British shuffle with her!

Italian Trip Summer 2010

I was looking at my blogging statistics the other day. In one year in Paris, I've written around 70 posts. When I lived in Italy, I wrote 150. As I've said before, Italy is just more bloggable.

Italy is a land of extremes. Extreme beauty and extreme ugliness. Extreme kindness and extreme rudeness. Danger and safety. People who welcome you into their homes with open arms and treat you like royalty and people who would screw you over for your last centime. That's what makes it so interesting to write about, but it also sometimes makes it hard. Every time I criticise something about Italy, I think of all the lovely people that have made me feel so welcome there and I feel guilty. It feels like being given private access to somebody's home and then telling the world about their domestic difficulties. And yet it's impossible to spend time in Italy and not feel strong reactions of all kinds. So before I start my next series of posts about my Italian experiences, I would just like to say to any Italian who may be reading this, and also to the world, that everything I say about Italy comes from a profound interest in and love for the country that has grown so much over the past few years as a result of all the wonderful people who have welcomed me into their Italian lives and given me glimpses of what lies underneath the sunny, sparkly exterior. Thank you for that and please be assured that nothing I write here is intended to cause offence or to judge, but only to document my personal journey into a culture that fascinates, confuses and entrances but is never, ever boring.



giovedì 8 aprile 2010

The Italian Paradox

I spent my last day in Italy in Monza. To get to Monza from Milan, you take the train from the dreaded Porta Garibaldi train station. The train will probably be filthy and you may well not be able to see out of the graffiti covered windows, but this doesn't actually matter very much because you are about to travel through some of the ugliest parts of Milan's ugly outskirts.

Then you will get off the train and find yourself in the Italian version of Perfectville. The charming cobbled streets are punctuated with flower displays and the occasional water feature and lined with small independent shops selling artisanal products. Monza has its own La Rinascente. It has a cathedral. It has historic columns in the centre. It has an extensive park that is probably the biggest green space in the whole of Greater Milan. Monza is nice.





There isn't acutally a lot to do in Monza, unless you are into Formula 1 and it happens to be a race day. I spent most of my time sitting on a bench in the park soaking up the sunshine, watching the swans glide across the water and wondering what it is about Italy.

What is it about Italy that captures your heart even when you live in one of the ugliest, most polluted industrial cities in Europe? What is it that makes you feel excited to be alive there even as the smog is probably slowly killing you? How can it have the most frustrating bureaucracy and the craziest drivers you will ever encounter and still make you feel more relaxed than you have ever felt before? How can bite you again and again with its corruption and exploitation and still make you feel like you betrayed a little piece of your heart when you left?

I don't know how it does any of these things, but it does.

sabato 27 marzo 2010

Monte Boletto


It's almost one month since I was in Italy, and high time I finished posting about my trip, but I think subconsciously, I've been putting off writing this particular post.

On the Monday morning, as my friends set off for work, I took the train up to Como to do a walk that I had been wanting to do for a long time. You take the funiular to Brunate and follow the signs to the “faro”, the lighthouse that stands a little higher up on the hillside. From the lighthouse, you follow the red and white signs, which lead you further up the hill, through villages and forest and up on to the mountain ridge. You can follow the "Dorsale" path right the way to Bellaggio, but I stopped at the top of Monte Boletto.












I think I've been scared of posting about this hike because words can't do it justice. Even the photos don't do it justice. When I arrived at th top of the mountain, less than two hours' walk from Como, and saw the dark lake at my feet and the snowy mountains stretching out into the distance above it, their summits reaching ever higher, I felt that I might be in the most beautiful place in the world, and the joy that I felt was bittersweet, because when I left Italy last summer, I left all that world and all its adventures so far behind.

sabato 20 marzo 2010

Brunch

After our crazy night out in the hotspots of Milan, my friends and I decided to have a quiet day on Sunday, the highlight of which was trying out the totally not Italian tradition of brunch. Brunch in Milan, from what I could tell, is a very expensive way of buying a high quality version of what in the UK we call pub food. And yes, they call it “brunch.” After failing to get a table at the Californian bakery, we ended up at Exploit, which is near the columns and not at all far from the places we had visited the night before. I made the mistake, when ordering the “hamburger exploit” of assuming that the name of the place had been borrowed from English and not French. Luckily, the snooty waiter quickly corrected me and my pronunciation. Had I been feeling a bit more on the ball, I would have insisted on placing my entire order in French, but unfortunately my brightest ideas only come to me long after the opportunity to use them has passed, so at the time I just smiled sweetly and pretended to be interested.

Luckily the food, when it came, was actually very nice.

lunedì 15 marzo 2010

Nightlife in Milan

After our exhausting day strolling around Pavia, taking photos and relaxing in cafés in its quiet piazzas, we headed out in Milan for well-earned aperitivo. J had reserved a table at Cheese on Via Lupetta, opposite the church of Sant'Alessandro...or so she thought, until we turned out and they had no idea who she was. Luckily it turned out that the table was actually booked at Yguana, the bar next door which has the same phone number. It also provides the same food, which was the best of Italian aperitivo – lots of salad and lots of pasta to make you feel full without having eaten a huge amount – and serves very nice cocktails. It was absolutely packed and they kept trying to convince us to give away seats at our table for ten, but eventually everyone arrived and we were so squashed in that there was no way anybody was moving anywhere. After that we moved on to La Toscana, a relaxed bar on the Corsa di Porta Ticinese, which has nice squishy seats and had a bit more room to breathe. At 2 am, we still weren't quite ready to go home, so we spent an hour or so in Cuore, a bar around the corner(ish) which had very bright lights, bad music and a tiny and overstuffed dancefloor but had the advantage of being open late and having some extremely good-humoured bar staff. The night ended with a long search for a taxi. We walked up to the Duomo, where there were none, and ended up calling one of the companies after about half an hour. Our friends who walked down to the Navigli, where it's usually easier to find a taxi, ended up breaking up a fight on the way though, so we probably did choose the right direction!

sabato 13 marzo 2010

Pavia

After going out for an enormous pizza and my first limoncello of the year on Friday night, I stayed with my friends J and L in Milan and we got up early enough on Saturday morning to go to Pavia. Pavia turned out to be another one of the places that I couldn't believe I hadn't discovered in a whole year of living in Italy. For anyone in Milan who feels as if they are missing out on the experience of living in a proper little Italian town, Pavia, only half an hour away on the train, is the perfect escape. It had a busy market, but the rest of the town was quiet, even on a Saturday afternoon. It does have a university though, and there were hints of some lively student life going on. It also has lots of beautiful churches, some of which were very different from any I had seen in Italy before, and is famous for its towers, which stretch up tall and straight to look out over the plains that surround the town.




The church of San Michele Maggiore. It was built of sandstone and a lot of the detail of the carving has been eroded, but it still looks amazing.


Sunken church. Unfortunately it was closed, so we couldn't go inside.


Santa Maria del Carmine. Lots of the old buildings in Pavia are built from these red bricks, often arranged so that they stick out in funny ways from the facades of the buildings.



The Torre Civico. It collapsed in 1989 and, tragically, several people were killed.




Towers


Towers and the university gate. I would have happily studied here!

giovedì 11 marzo 2010

Canzo in the Snow



Much as I enjoyed my first day in Milan, one day was enough. I had found all the maps I needed to head to the mountains and I was feeling inspired, so I caught the train to Canzo, the friendliest place in Italy, and set off for a hike.

Despite the smog and the rain in Milan, I was still optimistically hoping for stunning views of snow-capped mountains. Unfortunately, it was raining in Canzo too and as I walked up through the village, I stopped to add waterproof layers as often as I tried to take pictures of the rapidly disappearing mountains.

I started off on the path that Mum and I took last summer, following the signs for the 3 Alpi. After the first alp, however, I left that path and headed steeply up hill on the walker's path to the Corni di Canzo. (There are two paths, but one of them involves a via ferrata, and it wasn't the day for experimenting with that.) As well as being over optimistic about the weather, I was hoping to do the 5 hour walk in 4 hours in order to catch the train back to Milan in time for aperitivo with my former colleagues, so I pushed myself hard to get up the mountain in the snow in record time. As a result, I was slightly breathless and this, combined with being surrounded by bare black trees, fog and a thick blanket of snow, contributed to a very other-worldly impression. I did want to arrive “somewhere” before going back down the mountain, however, so I struggled onwards and upwards, stopping every so often to try to figure out how far I had gone and whether I was going to make it or not, which was tricky given the snow underfoot and the total lack of visibility.


I didn't make it right to the Corni themselves, but I reached the rifugio, which made a satisfactory end point to the climb, and let myself rest for an inadequate two and a half minutes before turning round and heading back down the path.



The whole effort became worth it, though, because just at that moment, the mist and clouds began to lift and suddenly gorgeous views of the Lago di Lecco and the Triangolo Lariano began to appear through the trees. In the distance, I could even see the snow-capped mountains.


I caught the train back with minutes to spare after jogging gently down a large section of the track. and arrived at the bar in plenty of time. I peered through the window, but couldn't see anybody I knew inside. Three of my friends were already there, however, and my loud friend Rachel must have said something loudly because just as I was turning to cross the road and check at the other bar, the Chinese bar girl came running out, calling my nickname after me in her very Chinese Italian. And once again, I felt back at home in Milan!

lunedì 8 marzo 2010

Italia mon amour

Just over a week ago, I got on a train in the Gare de Lyon. We sped across France, the Alps and the plains of northern Italy, and seven hours and fifteen minutes later, I stepped off the train at Milano Centrale and back into my old life.

And for one week, I lived that life again (in fact, it was better than my old life, because I was on holiday and didn't have to go to work) and I remembered how much I loved it. Then, seven days later, I got back on the train, and seven hours later, was back in my French life again.

The trip was amazing. Sad, in some ways, because it reminded me of things that I had left behind, but satisfying too, because it showed me that many of these things are there, no further than a train journey away.

I spent the first day walking around Milan, reminding myself of all the familiar places and discovering the coffee shop in the Mondadori bookshop on the Piazza del Duomo, which has delicious hot chocolate, comfortable chairs and a great view of the square and the cathedral. Then I walked down to the Navigli, caught the metro back to the castle and the Parco Sempione, wandered around some of my favourite shops, and went back for more coffee in Mondadori. Here are some of the more picturesque things that I saw:



martedì 2 febbraio 2010

FAQ Italia

For a long time, I was fascinated by Italian bookshops. I used to go into them and wander around, dreaming of the time when my Italian would be good enough to read and fully understand the works that lined their shelves.

Many of the books I saw were translations. Italians, like most non-Anglophone Europeans, seem far happier to read foreign books than Brits are. (The same applies to music, films and pretty much everything else, but all of that is another rant for another day.) These were not the books, however, that I wanted to read.

The ones I wanted to read were written by Italians, in Italian, and they were all about Italy. Not tourism and travel books, but books about politics, books about the mafia and books about recent Italian history. The section of the shop devoted to these books always seemed to be disproportionately large. I wanted to understand Italy and I wanted to understand it from an Italian point of view, so eventually, with a long summer holiday and lots of travelling ahead of me, I bought one of these books.

I bought FAQ Italia, by Francesco Merlo. It comes from a series called “FAQ Books: domande che danno risposte” (questions which provide answers). Examples of the “questions” range from “Are we the land of the Mafia?” to “Are Italians mummy's boys?” These were questions to which I wanted not just any answer, but the Italian answer.

At first I quite enjoyed the book. Gradually, however, it wore me down. The “answers” to the questions were too short, too unbalanced and too irrelevant. After a while, I put FAQ Italia down and started on something else. I was staying with Italian friends at the time, and when I showed my friend the book and explained my disappointment, she sighed and said, “Yes, everything in Italy is polemical.”

For a long time I thought that the fact that Italian bookshops were so full of critical works on the country was to do with the fact that all the newspapers and television channels were under the control of Berlusconi and his ilk. Such writing was much less evident in the Mondadori bookshops, owned by the Berlusconi family, than in others. Books, I thought, were perhaps the last remaining outlet for free (or free-er) speech. There were certainly more politically oriented works in the Feltrinelli shop, which was my Mondadori's closest rival.

Recently, however, I discovered from Tobias' Jones' The Dark Heart of Italy (which is an incredibly gripping book in itself) that the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, owner of the aforementioned publishing house, was a communist and the founder of GAP, one of Italy's main terrorist organisations of the anni di piombo.

And so I learned that in Italy, not only does everyone in the media have an axe to grind, but they are heavy and destructive axes indeed.