Food for False Promises

In a way it doesn’t matter, you expect to get offered rubbish in a motorway service station café don’t you? Well, yes, but in 21st-century Europe I would like to think that you expect an accurate description of the rubbish you are being fed. And it seems an especially British failing, to be expected to gladly accept something different from what it says on the label. Charnock Richard Services on the M6 in Lancashire, 7 October 2013

The label said ‘Cheese and Onion Toastie’. Subtitle: ‘Cheese and onion in thick-sliced bloomer bread’.

And it wasn’t what it said. The sandwich filling was a milky vinegary substance with a small amount of cheese mixed in, and an even more minuscule amount of onion. Where’s that trading standards officer? What’s he doing, sitting on his backside in an office somewhere. Is he being paid for that?

 

Looks like vomit. Tastes not a million miles from what you might imagine vomit tastes like if you think about it. Which I couldn’t help but do, as I drove away up the M6. Couldn’t get the sickly taste of the little that I ate of it from assaulting my nostrils.

The bigger yukkier picture.

Collecting Signatures in Support of a Bizarre Idea

The idea that Silvio Berlusconi might make a suitable president of Italy after the present one, Giorgio Napolitano, retires. Signatures being gathered, in Red Bologna, of all places. 7 September 2013.

 

Preparing the table for the collection of signatures from passers by. A somewhat thuggish-looking man in purple shirt and grey gilet; a frowning man in dark glasses and dark-grey sports shirt with white fringe on the collar and cuffs; and a bespectacled youth with loo-brush hair and wearing two-tone trainers. And whose is that expensive BMW? In the pedestrian-only area.

 

 

A few people come by to offer their name and address such as the blond woman with red-framed glasses. The youth duly logs her details.

I stood watching this near to a man who was sitting on the street flagstones begging, with his dog on a string. Some people stopped to give him a few coins, and sometimes offer his dog a biscuit or a piece of chocolate. The begging man looked puzzled by what it was I was so interested in. Looked at me quizzically.

I was not going to get into explaining to the begging man that from a foreigner’s perspective, the idea of a man who is recently convicted of tax fraud and who is notorious for putting his own needs above those of his nation, while loudly protesting his innocence and his devotion to his beloved country above all else, gaining support for mediating matters of state objectively – as Giorgio Napolitano has consistently and impressively shown his ability to do in a very statesmanlike manner; indeed the very concept of Silvio Berlusconi acting in a statesmanlike way – just seems so absurd that it challenges belief that anyone would even consider lending their support.

But in Italy there are people prepared to do that, clearly. People who believe that Berlusconi will work to uphold the moral fibre of the nation and will behave in a fair and balanced manner. The blond woman with red-rimmed glasses for example.

Civitavecchia, Flashpoint between Church and Local Council

Eviction of immigrants from a church refuge in Civitavecchia. A very Italian story, in so many ways. From Corriere della Sera, 13 August 2013, article:

http://roma.corriere.it/roma/notizie/cronaca/13_agosto_13/civitavecchia-vescovo-senzatetto-2222607258545.shtml

Civitavecchia is a port about seventy kilometres north-west of Rome. Cruise ships pull in there and people are taken by coach to see Rome from behind the bus windows. The town has a beach and lungomare with cafés and an old centre. Aside from the port area it is not too bad a place.

In what is called the suburbs of the town, though little more than a kilometre from the old town centre, is a church dedicated to Padre Pio, or San Pio as he now is. Writeup on who Padre Pio was:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-big-question-who-was-padre-pio-and-why-is-he-the-cause-of-such-controversy-815377.html.

The parish church of San Pio is quite a modern building, photo at http://www.asiweb.biz/popian/.

The church of San Pio has been giving shelter to immigrants from north Africa, for as the bishop, Monsignor Luigi Marrucci, says, remembering the bitter story of San Pio: ‘A point of reference, a place of welcome, a refuge.’

Which is all very well, when you have a few people seeking refuge, but when more arrive almost daily, then the refuge has a distinct tendency to become overcrowded and insanitary, which is what has happened at San Pio. It is called by Corriere della Sera a ‘lager’, the newspaper uses the German word for a camp, I find on the Dictionary pages of Corriere della Sera that by extension from a concentration camp, the word lager is used in Italian to mean an institution or community managed in ways that are inhuman. That is the first time I have come across the word used in that way in Italian, but seeing as it is in the Corriere dell Sera dictionary, I assume it is fairly widely understood like that.

And when you welcome people of all sorts, you will get some who may be less than law-abiding by nature, and in the area around San Pio local people have been complaining of ‘violent episodes such as bag-snatching and assaults’.

On the night of 10 August the carabinieri moved in and evicted fifty people housed in the church, handing them over to the local authority, the Comune. This being Italy, the police did not inform the Comune that they were going to do this, so the Comune suddenly found itself with fifty migrants on its hands and was totally unprepared to deal with them.

The Comune found an empty warehouse at the port for the migrants to stay in temporarily, but as deputy major Enrico Luciani says, ‘None has the status of political refugee and many have a permesso di soggiorno. For them the assistance of the Comune is finished. The town has always had a robust and humanitarian approach to those who arrive on the territory in search of help, and the hospitality given to Nigerians near to the diocese is an example – unfortunately however when charity gives way to social disorder, it is in the natural order of things that the primary needs are those of the residents - of putting residents first.’

So the position of the police is clear, the stance of the Comune is clear – the migrants are in the warehouse for now but we’ll have no more to do with them. What about the Church?

Well that is equally as characteristically typical as the police and local authority are typically firm and distant. Typically it is a bit hard to follow. The archbishop is perhaps the clearest in saying that the disinterest being shown by the authorities with regard to people who are clearly vulnerable and in a state of distress is a disgrace and wrong. Though aside from criticism of others he does not appear to be offering much by way of solution himself. That fits. The local diocese – is that the bishop? – formally asked for the evictions to take place on the grounds of sanitation and hygiene, though the bishop himself seems to be going on about how those who follow the teachings of San Pio should welcome anyone who is in need. Meanwhile the Curia, the local management of the church, are suggesting they don’t think there is a problem, they say they have never been approached with complaints by any official – all that is if I have understood what the newspaper article says correctly.

Among the things that make this so Italian are the disinterest of the authorities, the lack of communication between official bodies, the muddled and mixed messages from the Church, and riding above all of that, what Italy is going to do about its immigrants, who grow in number by the day, as do the stories of squalor, riots, lawlessness and distress. Which the politicians in Italy seem to be turning their backs on, apart from the Lega Nord whose pronouncements suggest that they have little idea that there are human beings involved here. For those such as me who take an interest in the future of Italy this is all very poignant, though not very pleasant to watch, as whichever way you look it seems it will only get worse.

Would a Daily Mail Reader Do This?

The 15th of August, the main summer holiday in Italy, called ferragosto, a boat beached in shallow water close to the shore near Syracuse in Sicily. The boat was carrying 160 illegal immigrants, among whom women ‘in stato interessante’', literally ‘in an interesting state’, i.e. in plain English, up the duff, (Italian euphemisms are so quaint!) and about fifty children, most under three-years-old. Someone on the beach called the coastguard and others swam out to help them, the people from the beach formed a human chain to get the migrants safely to shore, assisting the coastguard boat that arrived quite promptly.

http://video.repubblica.it/dossier/emergenza-lampedusa-2010/siracusa-migranti-soccorsi-dai-bagnanti-in-spiaggia/137587/136132?ref=HRER2-1

Giorgio Neapolitano, the president of Italy, has said that this episode gives credit to whole of Italy. While the undersecretary of the xenophobic Lega Nord, Matteo Silvini, has said of Neapolitano’s expressed solidarity with the migrants, ‘What bollocks! Now they are being honoured by Mr Neapolitano?’:

http://www.stranieriinitalia.it/attualita-bagnanti_soccorrono_migranti_napolitano_onorano_italia_17596.html

But I wonder. I wonder what Mr Silvini would have done, had he been on the beach at the time. Would he have let the children drown?

He might have run away, but I don’t think he would stand and watch people die – for migrants have died, even that close to shore, this happened only last week:

http://www.stranieriinitalia.it/attualita-catania._nuova_tragedia_dei_migranti_sei_morti_i_corpi_sulla_spiaggia_17583.html

Words are easy, when you are at the other end of the country.

And yes, I think a Daily Mail reader would do this, if it came to it. Throwing all prejudice aside. But what’s the betting the esteemed bringer of all significant world news don’t report it? The Mail reports tragedies and dramas from around the world, but selectively; people showing human empathy towards immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, and especially especially black illegal immigrants, would be a step too far for that newspaper, would negate so much of what it professes to stand for, so it is understandable, looked at from their point of view, that this event stays unreported. Yes I can quite understand that.

Police Attacked in front of a Holy Shrine

Police attacked in front of a holy shrine – it says in Il Messaggero.

The newspaper report, in Italian:

http://www.ilmessaggero.it/articolo.php?id=315380&sez=MARCHE.

This was at the Santuario Madonna dell’Ambro in the Sibillini mountains in the Marche region of Italy. Wednesday 14 August 2013. Madonna dell'Ambro is a large church, or maybe not a church, maybe it just looks like a church, set in a valley in wild, wooded mountain countryside. It gets lots of visitors, coach parties as well as people driving there in their own cars. So . . .

It will attract those people who want to sell something to the visitors, which these days will include migrants from Africa, the so-called ambulanti abusivi, unofficial street traders.

According to the newspaper report, street traders from North Africa turned up, and the sales concession-holders, some of whom have been established there quite a long time, called the police to have them removed, whereupon the unofficial traders attacked the police, it says. Well it is quite a long way from anywhere to get to Madonna dell'Ambro, and we do not know whether these unlicensed traders walked there or got a lift from some minders, quite possibly the second and they will be in trouble if they come back having sold nothing, so perhaps they thought a fight with the police the less painful option.

Anyway, at the request of the concession holders, a patrol of carabinieri from Montemonaco went to the location at about 11 in the morning, following reports of tension between the itinerant traders over the assignation of places, they were occupying spaces that were assigned to the licensed traders. When the patrol arrived the unofficial traders ‘manifesting a strong disappointment’ attacked the police, but were stopped by the other traders who ‘intervened to block the hotheads’.

The police called reinforcements, who came from the carabinieri stations at Comunanza, Force and Amandola – quite a force. Two of the aggressors, both Moroccans living in Francavilla d’Ete – a fair old walk from Madonna dell'Ambro, about thirty miles – were identified and taken to the police barracks in Amandola. They will be arrested for violence to a public official and for aggravated injury and are due to appear before magistrates in Ascoli Piceno on 16 August.

The two policemen who were injured have reported, ‘fortunately’, abrasions that will get better within a few days.

The investigation continues to identfy others who were responsible for the agresssion towards the carabinieri.

Send Them Away, No Ifs No Buts

Gianluca Pini, vice-president of the parliamentarians of the Lega Nord, the xenophobic party of northern Italy, has today repeated that immigrants who are in the country illegally, that is to say unofficially, should be sent away, ‘senza se e senza ma’, or in colloquial English: no ifs, no buts. A new expression in Italian for me to use when occasion calls, thank you Gianluca, for that.

Gianluca does not say how the bloody hell he thinks this is going to be achieved, when there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of ‘clandestini’ in Italy, from a large number of different countries, no one knows where they all are, the only thing that can be said for sure is that they are not all in one place, they are everywhere, so this no if, no but statement is actually pie-in-the-sky, for whatever Gianluca might like to think and say, the reality is: if we can find them and but how are we going to organise and pay for this?

This has been sparked by the refusal of Malta to allow a cargo ship to dock that had picked up some migrants whose boat was in trouble off the coast of Libya. Italy agreed to take the migrants. Gianluca Pini thinks that Italy should be taking an example from Malta and have turned the boat away, though the boat is going to have to dock somewhere at some point, everyone can’t turn it away.

But I suppose if you are a politician for a xenophobic political party you rely upon your supporters not wishing to, or thinking to, ask fundamental questions such as: how?

Greased Thief Pushed Into Sea

Today at Marina di Massa on the coast of Tuscany a member of staff at a beach concession saw a young man rifling through people’s belongings while the customers were at lunch. Seeing that he had been spotted the young man legged it, so the girl who had spotted him phoned another concession along the beach in the direction he was running and two blokes from there went and grabbed him. But the youth had greased his arms and legs so they could not hold him, he slipped out of their grasp. So . . . they pushed him into the sea. I would have thought that would make him even more slippery but somehow, when he got out of the sea, they pinned him down. Being a North African (from an unspecified country) he may have been a bit afraid of the sea, which is how they managed to hold him. In the struggle his rucksack spilled open and lots of wallets, purses and designer sunglasses fell out. The police were called and now he is in custody awaiting an appearance before the magistrates.

Here is the article (in Italian) with a picture of the two ‘heroes’ with a very typical beach concession scene in the background:

http://www.lanazione.it/massa_carrara/cronaca/2013/08/07/930925-caccia-ladro-ombrelloni-spiaggia.shtml

This is one of the daily stories concerning immigrants upsetting the norms in Italy, but I thought this one, unlike many, was quite funny. Well, not funny for the people whose purses had been nicked and not funny for the greasy youth, but funny as a scene.

This one might even make the Mail, possibly?