Christina Patterson: Ah, Italy - sunshine, olive oil, blatant racism
Headlines in the local and national papers screamed about the crime wave unleashed by the 'immigranti'Saturday, 21 June 2008
It all started with gunfire. A cannon, in fact. The entire assembled company, including the huge panel of dignitaries lined up at a long, long table in front of us, leapt out of their skins. It continued, rather less dramatically, with speeches. Long, rambling speeches, all in punctilious prose, full of rhetorical flourishes and peppered with praise for the gentili signori and eminent officials packed into the room.
We were there, in a magnificent Gothic palazzo which used to be an Anglican church, to celebrate a "paradise for exiles" – and two of the most eminent ones, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The "paradise for exiles" was the Tuscan spa town of Bagni di Lucca. Known as "the Switzerland of Tuscany", it was once a green and more than pleasant hillside haven for Byron and Shelley as well as the Brownings, and for Strauss, Listz, Puccini, politicians, saints and popes.
The biggest moment of excitement, perhaps, was when a meandering treatise on "The Brownings' friends at Bagni di Lucca" was interrupted by an extremely loud and wacky ring-tone. A bored-looking man dressed as a medieval peasant fumbled around in his pocket and nipped behind the giant flag he was holding to answer it. The second was when somebody unearthed a recording, made at a dinner party in 1889, of Browning reciting his poem "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix". "And into the midnight we galloped abreast," he intones, in an alarmingly high voice, before breaking off and declaring, "I'm sorry, but I can't remember me own verses." The other guests join in with a rousing "Bravo! Hip, hip, hooray!".
If Italy was ever a "paradise for exiles", it certainly isn't now. Well, perhaps for the Brits who still pursue their olive-growing on Tuscan hillside fantasies (if they can stomach the bureaucracy) and for those, like me, who still find an annual dose of food, frescoes and sun-drenched fields and cypresses a balm for the soul. For the Africans selling their fake bags and sunglasses in Pisa and Florence, often living 10 to a room, and who spend their working day being swatted away like flies, it isn't, or for the eastern Europeans who have come seeking work, or for the Romany population that has lived there for centuries.
On the first day of my holiday, headlines in local and national papers screamed about the crime wave unleashed by the immigranti. One lone voice, a Roma academic and musician called Santino Spinelli, who survived as a child by begging on the streets, and whose family has lived in Italy for 600 years, was wheeled out to defend his (dirty, thieving, parasitic) community. On the TV chat show I saw (hosted, as always, by a pneumatic young woman with the make-up of a drag queen), he was treated with the kind of contempt you might reserve for, say, a prime minister who bought his way out of trouble by changing the law, or one who monopolised the media as a way into high office. (Later that night, the TV channel dropped its tedious discussion, and clothes, for a relaxing session, with three silicone-breasted women with shaved pubes, in a shower.) .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-ah-italy--sunshine-olive-oil-blatant-racism-851636.html