Italian Women

We are noticing on the beaches – and elsewhere though you notice it more when people have little on by way of clothes – how fat many Italians are. This may be a new thing, the diet has not changed but the levels of exercise have. Italians seldom walk anywhere. That’s not entirely true, some walk in the hills and some, predominantly men, cycle enthusiastically complete with all the fancy gear, but many on the beaches are overweight. Yet the diet is essentially quite good, apart from all that salt, it is probably just that they eat too much of everything. Hilary also comments on how big the boobs of many of the women are and wonders whether this is an Italian characteristic. Before she mentioned it I hadn’t noticed.

For the most part I do not find Italian women very attractive. Brits, Germans, Dutch and Nordic women – and Poles certainly – appeal to me enormously more. Maybe I just like the natural look. Less pose. And maybe I am not alone in that predilection, the birthrate in Italy, excepting immigrants, is low and falling, though there is also the abortion pill, which seems to be widely available if the periodic reports calling for its tighter control are to be believed, though countering that argument are the frequent ads on the television and in the newspapers for pills that are supposed to help with erectile dysfunction, which if the reports are half true is especially a problem in Italy.

And there is another thing that might help in putting me off Italian woman. We were sitting on one of our favourite beaches on Friday afternoon and I looked around. There were Italians, Dutch and Brits, one British group very rough-and-ready, a man and three women, London accents and with the man’s arms covered in tattoos and they had arrived in an rather battered old orange Ford van, but they, like all the Brits and the Dutch and unlike every Italian woman that I was able to see and detect were not doing something that all the Italians were: smoking. Every single one of them.