AUSTERITY FOIL?

Does anyone else remember when what we used to call "silver paper" was difficult to remove from a Kit Kat bar? It used to stick to the chocolate and you'd get a metallic taste in your mouth.

Well, I'm beginning to think that Italian manufacturers of kitchen foil have used the old-style silver paper as their inspiration, as their product has become noticeably thinner and sometimes sticks to the food - "austerity foil", perhaps?

Cling film [plastic wrap] went the way of all flesh years ago but I'd be interested to know if anyone else has noticed a deterioration in the quality of kitchen foil, either in Italy or elsewhere.

Some of you may remember that I've had an issue with kitchen foil before and no doubt the hapless Mr Letta, charged with the task of forming a new government for Italy yesterday, has other matters on his mind, just as Mr Monti did before him.  On the other hand, I'm sure that Mr Letta, like his compatriots, will wish to continue to eat well, crisis or no crisis, so what could be more important than turning his attention to the problem of l'alluminio della sobrietà?

THE MORNING AFTER

If ever a country needed a morning-after pill, it was Italy this morning. As Italians went to bed last night - those who did bother to turn in, that is - there was no clear general election result and things weren't any better when they woke up this morning.  As I write, the number of seats allotted to each group in both parliamentary chambers is still changing and this is everybody's nightmare scenario here; an outcome so close that no one will be capable of governing, or at least, not for long.

You can see the results for yourself on the Ministero dell'Interno site and at the moment the centre-left coalition led by Pier Luigi Bersani has 340 seats in the Camera dei Deputati or lower chamber, Beppe Grillo's anti-corruption M5S [Five-Star Movement] has 108, Mr Berlusconi's centre-right coalition has 124 seats and Mario Monti's Scelta Civica coalition just 45 seats.  This makes Beppe Grillo's party - but not group because it is not part of one - the most popular in Italy.  In the Senate, the upper chamber, where seats are allocated according to regional voting, Mr Berlusconi's coalition has 116 seats, Mr Bersani's 113, Mr Grillo's party 54 and Mr Monti's group 18.  [I repeat - the situation is constantly changing and both the ANSA news agency and Corriere della Sera are now giving the figures as 119 for Mr Bersani and 117 for Mr Berlusconi in the Senate.]

In the Senate elections, Sicily went with the Berlusconi coalition, with Beppe Grillo's party coming a close second and Mr Bersani's coalition third.  In the Camera, however, Sicily favoured the Grillo Movement, with  the Berlusconi coalition coming second and the Bersani group third [with almost 50% less votes than the Berlusconi group]. The difference in this region's results for the two chambers may be explained by the fact that you have to be over 25 years of age to vote for the Senate.

In this election young people have had their say and what they have said is that they are fed up with corruption and do not want more of the same. They want jobs and hope and in my opinion it is the lack of hope offered by the undoubtedly sincere Mr Monti that has lost him the vote. You cannot tell people who were not even old enough to vote when the crisis began that, because of a situation which could not possibly have been their fault, they have to accept ever-increasing austerity measures with no end in sight and no dream to follow.  

As for Mr Berlusconi, as usual it is difficult to find anyone who will admit to having voted for him and some people will tell you that they are voting not for him, but for his coalition [which is technically true]. "I wouldn't vote for him but as a celebrity he's fantastic", remarked a friend of mine after one of Mr Berlusconi's recent  television interviews.  "That's just the trouble", I replied. "He's not a celebrity but your former Prime Minister" ["and", I might have added had the conversation taken place tonight, "possibly a future one."] I'm willing to bet that this friend did vote for Mr Berlusconi! Why?  Because "everybody's Silvio" represents Italians as some would like to see themselves, because they admire his business audacity and because, many would say, "Who else is there?"

"Grillo", we might answer. The Left's criticisms of Mr Grillo have been levelled at the fact that he and his party members do not have governmental experience and certainly, this makes many Italians doubt his ability to really carry through.  But who, among those elected previously, has done so?  Mr Grillo is so suspicious of Italy's political establishment and institutions that at one point on Sunday he was urging voters to "lick their pencils" in order to make it harder for an unscrupulous vote-counter to erase their mark.  If I might venture a personal opinion here I would like to tell Beppe that, much as I have always admired him, his scant attention to hygiene in this instance would not give me confidence in a member of his party as Minister of Health. But I always was a fussy soul and anyway, do not have the right to vote in Italian national elections [only local and EU ones].

As the night wears on, desperate attempts are being made to form a coalition capable of governing but I am not hopeful: this is a country in which getting to the point is not regarded as a virtue and anyone asking a question at a public meeting or conference embeds it in the middle of so much flowery rhetoric that often the addressee has no idea what is being asked; writers do not use paragraphs, a contract is treated much like a used bus ticket and an appointment is a vague arrangement which probably means, "I'll call you if I remember to think about it."  What we should be wondering at, then, is not that the political system doesn't work but that anything, ever, works at all. When it does, it works beautifully and stuns the rest of the world and I wish this could be the case with this election result.

As I close my post, there is still no clear winner but I fear that there is a clear loser; its name is Italy.

HANDS OFF THE HOLS!

It is a sad but undeniable fact that Italy, if it wishes to compete in the 21st century, has to change. The question is not so much whether it will do so, but whether it actually wants to compete. A foreigner observing the current immobile economy could be forgiven for believing that it does not but a five-minute conversation with any member of the country's young, educated, cultured but unemployed masses would lead him to reconsider, for these young people are clearly frustrated beyond endurance.

Change is often unpleasant, especially when thrust upon us by outside forces and an Italy ready to change most of its habits would not be the Italy that so many of us love so dearly, for the very things that exasperate us about the country are also those which we admire:  seemingly endless summer holidays, long lunchtime closures which always begin just as we have arrived at some tourist spot, the ability to "worry about it tomorrow", the shop assistant who holds up the queue [or what passes for a queue] by chatting to the customer for too long but at the same time shows that she cares.... aren't these the characteristics that make us all wish we were Italian?

British schoolchildren wish they were Italian too when they hear about the three-month holiday that their contemporaries enjoy here and I'm sure that they would, had they known about it, have empathised with Italian students' dismay when Mr Monti announced on Monday that a plan to curtail the school summer break was under consideration. A quick look at the Twitter feed on the subject revealed that the idea had not gone down well, to say the least, with teachers taking the news personally and working mothers, who in another country might have welcomed the proposal, up in arms. Most of the commenters seemed to be of the opinion that Italy has more urgent problems than the length of school holidays to solve.

Yet the beleaguered Mr Monti may have been on to something:  could this have been the beginning of a move to bring Italian working practices into a form which would at least be recognisable to the rest of Europe? Something to stop the British, for instance, smirking in that superior way of theirs and remarking that they "are not paying taxes to Europe so that people in the Mediterranean area can lie on the beach for three months"?

When an Italian politician suggested shortening the lunch break a few years ago there was an  outcry, particularly in the South, but those who criticise the long, leisurely family lunch forget that it is too hot down here to do anything anyway and the importance of this time for family cohesion [which, let's face it, countries like my own lack to a tragic degree]. Opening hours, however, are another matter, particularly in areas that are more than ever dependent on tourism to survive.

Yes, there is something wonderful about a country that can look disaster in the eye and then point out that it was here long before the technological age and will be here long after it but even a defender of Italy like me has to admit that the country does have a tendency to go a sunbed too far in summer.

I am able to reassure you, though, that the mothers, teachers and hard done-by schoolchildren of Italy are resting serenely in their beds tonight, for, within hours of Mr Monti's announcement, candidates on his Scelta Civica electoral list acted in unison to deny the existence of any plans to curtail the school summer holidays.  Now if only they could take such decisive action on the economy.....

AFTERWORD

Well, Barack, of all the honours you've received today I'm sure you'll be glad to know that your book made our timely display at the school. 

Sorry, Mitt, but I don't have one of yours. That may be just as well because your remark six days ago about not wanting the USA to "end up like Italy" went down about as well here as your pre-Olympics gaffe in London, though it did have the unexpected effect of uniting politicians from two warring parties [Italy's Pd and Pdl] in indignation.  Minister Gianfranco Polillo, meanwhile, shrugged his shoulders as only an Italian can, concluding that you already have economic problems similar to those of Italy but lack the compensations of the Italian quality of life.

Everyone I've spoken to here seems pleased at the outcome in the US and Mr Monti sent amicable and  restrained congratulations to President Obama today, in marked contrast to those of his predecessor Mr Berlusconi four years ago when the gaffeur par excellence emphasised the then President-elect's "suntan".  Mr Monti added that President Obama is "nice" to work with.

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I feel worn out even though I haven't fought a campaign or cast a vote! Perhaps this is because just two weeks ago we had our own very exciting Sicilian regional elections, in which Beppe Grillo's new M5S party won 47% of the vote. So hold on to your hat, Barack, because we may have real change coming over here!

ARRIVEDERCI, RAGUSA

Under measures agreed by the Italian government last week, the administrative map of Italy will, by 2014, look very different from the one we see today and the main casualties of this reorganisation are many of the country's provinces.  

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Italian administrative system, the country is divided into 20 regions, five of which, including Sicily, have special statutes which give them a greater degree of autonomy. The regions are subdivided into provinces, made up of various comuni or town councils. The main responsibilities of the provincial tier of government have hitherto been local planning, policing, fire services and transport [the health service being administrated at regional level] but under the new measures provincial government will only be responsible for environmental planning, transport and road systems.

Any proposed change to the number or responsibilities of the provinces has always been deeply controversial and of course there are a lot of vested interests here.  There are those who worry about the possibility of government becoming too "big" and impersonal, just as there are those who worry about what happens when it is too "small" and there are also many who believe that the entire provincial tier of government is wasteful and useless.

A desire on the part of central governmment to reform the system is not new and the last government had also proposed sweeping changes.  The Monti government, with its spending review, has decided that change there must be and that it must take place in what, for Italy, is a remarkably short time scale.

It has been agreed that a province must have a minimum of 350,000 inhabitants and cover a minimum area of 2,500 sq. kilometres. The population requirement was at first set at 300,000 and for this reason it was thought that Ragusa, with 308,103 inhabitants, would be saved.  Then the goalposts were moved.  The area requirement, though, has gone down rather than up - it was originally 3,000 sq. kilometres - and this change has saved the mainland provinces of Bergamo and Pavia [ Lombardy], Vicenza [Veneto] Modena [Emilia-Romagna] and Lecce [Puglia] among others.  Sicily will lose five of its nine provinces, namely Caltanissetta, Enna, Ragusa, Siracusa and Trapani.  Palermo, Agrigento, Catania and Messina remain and Ragusa will be incorporated into the Province of Catania.

Sicily, as a region with special statute, has six months to "prepare" but in yet another of those Italian omissions which may or may not be just an oversight, no one has any idea what sanctions will be applied by central government if the region fails to do so.

Ten mainland "metropolitan areas" will become new provinces called "metropolitan cities" by 1st January 2014 and these are: Rome, Turin, Milan, Venice, Genova, Bologna, Firenze, Bari, Napoli and Reggio Calabria.

In its wisdom the govenment has decided to leave local festivals and saints' days that constitute a local holiday alone so the "new" and bigger provincial administrations will not be able to order town councils to cut these holidays.  This is not a concession made out of a "live and let live" attitude but a carefully researched austerity measure:  quite simply, not enough money would be saved by doing otherwise.

In all, 64 of Italy's 107 provinces are scheduled to disappear in order to "make Italy more efficient and give it a more modern administrative system".

Hmm.....  "Pazienza... vediamo"  ["Patience - we shall see"] as the Sicilians say.

A QUESTION OF PRIORITIES

It was nice to see that Mr Monti's staff had their priorities right as a cheer for Italy's goal in the Euro Championships yesterday interrupted the Premier's news conference with French President François Hollande in Rome. The genial Monsieur Hollande, who this week found himself in the middle of a spectacular cat fight, looked as if he longed to be enjoying simple boys' stuff at a football match!

At around the same time, I was on my way to call at a certain office with a friend.  Suddenly there was a screech of brakes as my friend  turned his car round in the middle of a main road, then started for home at a terrific speed, saying, "They won't be open - the match is on."

AN ASTral ANALOGY

As rumours spread that Italy will be the next roof tile to fall off the Eurozone house of cards, in Sicily we are worried about our local and inter-city bus company, AST, which is reported to be in trouble.

AST services, we are told, are currently operating only with the forbearance of the company's creditors and it has become public knowledge that, as in institutions all over Italy from small businesses to government itself, high-ranking officials of the company have been enjoying considerable luxury whilst carrying out their duties.

Few outside Italy know that parliamentarians, for instance, enjoy privileges unheard of in other countries, from free rail tickets for personal travel to ridiculously cheap meals whilst working and these are among anomalies that the Monti government has been doing its best to correct.  But ask the man in the street what else the Monti government is doing and he will answer, "Taxation" for the popular perception is that everyone is being taxed out of existence and there is little to cheer them up whilst this is happening. Tax evasion on an enormous scale has long been a way of life in Italy and now, rightly, you may imagine, everyone is afraid of a raid by the Financial Police.  However, the average Italian businessman will say that he has to pay so many taxes - and not just once a year - that he hardly deems the effort of continuing worthwhile.

I am the last person who should advise anyone on handling money, let alone a whole country, but what Italy needs is [a] liberalisation of its economy and [b] cheering up.  I personally had much hope of the Monti government but take one look at the sombre faces of its ministers and you would not be inclined to think that they were about to brighten your day. As I remarked when the government took office, the trouble with a government of "experts" is that experts tend to have comfortable, upper middle class lives so they cannot really imagine what it is like to be totally dependent on a meagre wage which is often simply NOT PAID.  Yes, in Italy it is quite common for an employer, even a public one, to pay late or not at all and it is considered,  if not exactly OK, perfectly normal.

And here we come to another "barrier" to a mobile economy:  it is the Italians' ability to tolerate the intolerable.  Is it because almost everyone has a family to help out with the bills when salaries are not paid that they put up with such nonsense from employers?  To go back to our beloved AST, is it because everyone has a car or, if they are elderly, has a relative with a car that they put up with an abysmal local service, at least in Modica?  Why, I have often wondered, does no one complain?

"Only old people use the buses", a student of mine informed me when I first arrived here.

"Thanks very much", said I.

This brings me to another element which I observe creeping into the situation, not just in Italy but all over Europe:  it is an idea that in order to stimulate the economy for the young, something must be taken away from the old.  This idea is dangerous and pernicious and I would hate to see Italy, where the elderly are certainly more respected and better looked after by their families than in the UK, embrace it.  Dear ministers, dear youth, dear friends, old people need to live too and your own old age will be upon you quite suddenly one day and you won't know where it came from.

Of course, that old Italian paradox also comes into play in this crisis:  the very characteristics that I have mentioned above and those that the rest of the world criticises in Italians are those that we most love in them in better times:  their tolerance, their ability to throw their hands up in the air and say, "That's how life is", their determination to spend time with their families and enjoy the sun while the world crumbles around them....  Let us hope, then, that the situation brings out the best in them for no one can better Italy at its best.

Thus it is that Modica's inner city AST buses do not run on time and your driver may well stop off en route to purchase a sack of potatoes or take refreshment.  But let us be tolerant - the potatoes were a bargain and the vegetable seller will go home at 1.30 pm.  On top of that, it's bloody hot today!  Besides, such antics brighten your day in a way that politicians will never be able to do. Let us also cross our fingers - for I am sick of the expression "crosshairs" -  for Sicily's AST company.  After all, as another student of mine charmingly said last year,

"I'm so proud of those buses.  They're almost punctual."

"ALL THE WORLD'S A SMALL TOWN"

Tax evasion is rife at all levels in Italy and the current government believes it is the cause of many of the country's problems.  In recent weeks the Financial Police have carried out several much publicised raids on businesses in various parts of Italy but it will take a sea change in habits to put a stop to day to day, small -scale evasion.

Hats off, then, to enterprising Palermo restaurant owner Filippo Lucchese, who is offering a 20% discount  to any customer in possession of a fiscal receipt issued on the same day or the day before for a service or purchase costing at least €40.00.  Mr Lucchese explains that his idea is simple - to raise awareness and involve all citizens and consumers in his town in the fight against tax evasion.

Talking of receipts, Mr Fargione of Modica  - who likes to write wry comments in dialect on his - has some advice for his customers and this wise counsel can be roughly translated as "Watch out for your short and curlies ", the implication being that everything is now being taxed to the hilt.

However, there is also solace for Mr Monti, whose image has been sellotaped to the side of one of Mr Fargione's serviette holders, thus according the Prime Minister true fame at last!

Tuttu 'u munnu è paisi - All the world's a small town.

- Sicilian proverb

LITTLE LIBERATION FRONT

I like this notice in the Sisley shop window.  It tells us that, in the new year, all the dwarves will be set free in the woods - one less problem for Mr Monti, then.

A SUGGESTION FOR MR MONTI

Dear Mr Monti,

I'm sure that, in this situation, you deplore waste so before you tackle the economy, could you please do something about the cooking foil in this country?  Whatever brand I buy, it tears in the middle when I take off the stupid tape - which, I regret to say, only a man would have put there in the first place - and, unless I am cooking portions for elves, this renders the stuff virtually useless.

After all, you did say that we need "cohesion" today!

Love,

Pat and Simi in Sicily 

Woof!