Where was I?

It's been so long since I've blogged here that it's pointless picking up from where I left off. It's been more than eight months since our move to Cagliari, so I'm going to jump straight in and try to give you a feel for the place over the next few posts.

Titles

There's something that I've come to understand after years of moving around: it's easy to like a place enough to want to live in it; it's quite another matter liking it enough to want to die there. There's a cemetery not far from where we live, and absurd as it may sound to some, it's a beautiful place to take a walk. They don't bury folks there any more - it's more of a monument than a functional graveyard - but it contains enough generations of cagliaritani to be considered a museum of personal histories.

The trees and tombs form orderly ranks and files stretching away from the main gate, and upwards along the slopes to the right. In the lower terraces, simple plaques set into uniform walls mark the final resting place of most of Bonaria Cemetary's residents. Further up the south-facing slopes, above the tree line and warmed by the year-round sun, mausoleums and miniature chapels hoist important surnames high above the hoi-polloi.

Italy is considered by many to be a nation of individualists, and I think this is more or less correct. The general disdain in which Italians (as a group) hold other Italians (as a group) is evident in everything from the polemic nature of public discourse to the no-prisoners-taken attitude on the roads here. But Italy is also a place where deference to one's social 'superiors' is evident. Titles and positions are not only prominently on display on letterboxes, business cards - and gravestones - but almost piously observed in communications. It's practically an insult to refer to somebody simply as signore (sir) when you know damn well he's a lawyer and should be addressed as avvocato. The titles can get humourously out-of-hand. Onorevole, meaning honourable, is used to refer to members of the lower house of parliament and is used regularly on TV and in public without any irony whatsoever. My personal favourite, which I discovered only recently, is the title accorded to the dean of a university: rettore magnifico - Magnificent Rector. If you write to the head of your university, it is with this absurdity that you must begin your letter.

Deference and individualism might seem like opposites at first glance, but they can co-exist quite easily when you remember that deference only requires the appearance of respect. Geert Hofstede (hat-tip to Dale Wyttenbach) has compiled country-by-country values of something called a Power Distance Index, which attempts to measure the degree to which people at the bottom of the social heap accept and expect that power is not shared equally. In other words, it is an indication of how willingly those with little power accept their lot.

(In fact if I do a comparison between my own native culture in Ireland, and that of Italy, I find that we are not terribly well suited from the point of view of risk aversion or deference to authority.)

Però

I've had countless animated conversations with Italians in general, and Sardinians in particular, about the many and varied problems facing this region and this county. The dynamics of such conversations follow a consistent pattern. My Italian friends begin by slamming complaints on top of each other, books of evidence piled up against the criminal state of affairs here. Then the pace quickens and the anger deepens into a downward spiral that can sometime end up in absurd or paranoid claims about how this is the worst place in the world to live and how it will never change. And then, in the end and when you least expect it, the diatribe pivots on a single word: però. (But. However. All the same.)

"Però ci si sta bene". (It's a nice place to live all the same.)

I don't know if Bonaria Cemetary (Cimitero di Bonaria) appears on any guide books, but if you find yourself in Cagliari and in need of some respite - and a great view of the city - then you could do worse than to spend some time here. Me, I could happily spend an eternity there.

Però...

Learn Italian (then read my wife's blog)

The folks who have helped me learn Chinese have now started a similar service to learn Italian. It's Europe's most beautiful language, all the more pleasing as it offers no commercial advantage whatsoever. So check it out, and then check out Letizia's blog to see how much you've learned!

Been There, Done That.

I've just spend an excellent evening with a good friend and her family (the pretext of which was to celebrate the 2nd birthday of her daughter). I love this house (and the people in it). My first memory of the house was when I woke up in it one morning some time back in my college years with very little recollection of having got there. This established something of a pattern for many occasions to come.

The conversation turned, as it inevitably does these days, to the upcoming trip. I'm trying my very best not to be a bore on the matter. After all, there are so many other things that I can be a bore on, and besides, the idea of this blog was that anyone who was interested could come and see how we were getting on. No need for me to personally inflict the details on captive audiences.

But in this house, travel is nothing new. Both my friend (hi Aoife!) and her two brothers have covered a lot of terrain between them, and this evening I got an insight as to why. 1950 was proclaimed by pope Pius XII to be a Holy Year. Aoife's father was 17 that year, and being an Irish Catholic - and wearing a pioneer pin at that - he decided to travel to Rome, along with a 16-year-old school friend, during the 3-month school summer holidays. On bicycle.

I've never been to 1950s Cork. I've never been to 1950s anywhere in fact. But I can just about picture this man's parents' reaction to his plans. They thought he was start raving mad. Nowadays there is a direct Cork-Rome flight that takes about 2.5 hours to cross the two bodies of water and one major mountain range that lie between. Back then, there wasn't even an airport in Cork. The route was pretty much like this, just less direct. About 2600 kilometers. These two boys got up on their High Nellys and took off with no money in their pockets!!!

A High Nelly, for those who don't come from these parts, is an Irish term for a particular style of bike. Here's an example I found:

No gears or alloy wheels here.

They camped on train tracks, got arrested by the Italian army on suspicion of arms importation, broke their pioneer pledges on two bottles of alter wine provided by a Italian parish priest in lieu of food and were presented with medals bearing Stalin's profile by an unknown, presumeably ex-partisan, peasant. There is, I'm sure of this, a book's worth of anecdotes on this trip alone.

I had barely caught my breath after learning all this, when I found out that the family penchant for travel was inherited from both sides of the family. In 1954, Aoife's mother and another female friend from Cork left Ireland to go hitch-hiking around Spain, travelling on the Mauritania II to get there, and eventually making their way as far as Morocco. Two Irish girls on their own in 1954 Morocco!!

Who do we think we are kidding with our little squirt around the globe?

Prodi - You must be joking!?

This is off-topic somewhat, but the government of my adopted second home is planning something which I find deeply disturbing, disheartening, but somehow typical. A law is being tabled to provide for the Registration of Blogs.

I'm no peddler of 'bloggers rights' - it simply appears to me that the current Italian government, having taken a blog-based hammering from Beppe Grillo (who in my opinion is nothing more than another example of a long Italian tradition of opportunistic polemicists) now thinks that discouraging bloggers will solve their problems. Italian politicians are (again in my opinion) amongst the most far-removed from the people they serve: they know little of ordinary life, floating along as they do on cushions of state-paid benefits ("feeding from the public trough", as I have heard such things described), enjoying some of the highest political salaries in Europe, offering (often cynically) some of the more absurd policies, demonstrating time and again a level of ignorance and indifference that shocks even the likes of myself who lives in the quirky peripheral European state of Bertieland.

In the finest Berlusconi tradition, they are embarrassing the entire country by their actions. Public servants doing their usual disservice to their public. Sorry for the bitterness in my tone. I watched Le Iene last night (entertaining political exposé show on Mediaset) and it always leaves me feeling particularly angry with the Italian ruling class.

As they (apparently) say in Rome er più pulito c'ha la rogna (even the cleanest of them has scabies).