It's a love-hate thing

Rome, the Eternal City. You’ll love it when you’re strolling along hand in hand with some sun-kissed honey, sucking on a dreamy home-made ice-cream whilst knowingly checking out the architectural wonders of the city centre. Life is good, your threads are cool and the climate, ahhh, the climate. The next second, when you’re somehow flying through the air having slipped on one of the millions of smoking merdaccia left by some dog bang smack in the middle of the pavement (while its owner looked on oblivious to the connotations), you’ll hate it with a drooling, rabid, sometimes spitting passione that Italians themselves smugly understand so well. Ah, so you’ve become one of us finally! And you dared ask yourself why they, the natives, spend some of their time screaming blue murder at each other in the street or why their stress threshold appears to be so dangerously low. They can’t take it any more either. Join the club sonny boy.

Of the merry crew I used to know, years back, I’m the last man standing. Wooed over here initially on the dizzy promise of lusty romance and simplicity, I longed too to return to the 1970s, those halcyon days of childhood before the brutal dismantling of British society in the cold but necessary 80s. I yearned for long lazy summers, sideburns, simple pleasures, touchy-feely relationships. Which I got. I guess. Together with the inefficiencies, the strikes, the broken pavements, the defective streetlights, the blackouts, the hanging on the phone for hours at the mercy of public offices, the cliquey corrupt police force, the miscarriages of justice, the woeful supermarkets, the grisly standard of service, the potholed roads, the monopolised services screwing the consumer, the voiceless citizen, the extreme right-wing rumblings of discontent, the football violence.

Be careful what you wish for, right? What in God’s name was I thinking?

So you’ll occasionally hear me drooling over some gorgeous detail of Italian life (ahh, the sweet hills around Siena) like some pretentious Chianti-loving sap but for the most part you’ll hear me rage to high heaven. The wonder years are long gone. A day doesn’t go by without some aspect of life here popping up and taking a violent tweak at one of my nipples. And that hurts, take it from me.

It’s not what I want, believe me, I’d love to be ranting and raving about how great for example Italian TV is, how it’s full of ugly old female presenters with their mute half-naked toyboy sidekicks (not too convinced about this bit really), how you can’t get to see a good cabaret programme for love nor money, how it’s a shame that some old housewives’ favourites are phased out too early to make way for talented young people (did you see the Gianni Morandi Speciale on Rai Uno the other night with him singing inside a huddle of youngsters who were singing along in playback? – I was reaching for me sick bag, knowing full well that in 10 years time they’ll be digging him up for another Speciale paid for with our licence fees), how efficient the parliament is and how great it is that Italian politicians not only look out for the interests of ordinary citizens thereby risking the wrath of the grandi interessi but they also accept a pittance of a salary that is also taxed (cute this, the biggest legalized evaders of tax in Italy are Italian MPs themselves) and which they wouldn’t dream of spending on prostitutes and coke, how fast and effective the legal system is (if your life expectancy is like 250 years), how smooth and hole-free the roads are and blah di blah di blah. I really would be a happy man to be banging on about how other countries should be following Italy’s lead in things, that Italians really do do it better.

Italians do it better? What exactly, la focazz? (Barese focaccia is fabulous).

Before you start booing, you’re right of course. If I don’t like it, I can just bugger off back home, right? But I’m fighting the good fight for everyone, you too. And, believe me, I’m fighting, every damn day of the week.

Not that the grass is greener over the Manica. Watching British telly and reading the Guardian can be misleading. Their wit, intelligence and eloquence aren’t necessarily a reflection of real Britishness, far from it. When you listen to the foul-mouthed senseless rantings of Celebrity Big Brother, when you see someone puking up outside a pub, when you see someone coming at you with a knife, you think: oh now this lot could do with a dose of Italian bella figura. They, we, whoever, could do with being at least a tad worried about what their parents are gonna say if they come home minkered or with puke or blood splattered all over them. In the total absence of the law in Italy, the bella figura and family control is the only thing keeping the fabric of society together. But then again, come to think of it, Italians could do with letting go every now and again. Have a few beers, piss up a wall for Christssake! And when I say letting go I don’t mean having panna with your gelato or going out without a vest, let’s be clear. Don’t you, they get tired of having to behave themselves all the time?

It’s a no-win situation, for which the only solution would be a nice via di mezzo. A country called Itland or Engaly. We are beasts but our State isn’t. Here it’s the opposite, it’s the State that behaves like a beast, a drunken, drugged up Hollywood superstar that is above the law and couldn’t give two flying forks about anyone or anything. Flying fork – what a cool name for a restaurant.

The venom in my blood has subsided somewhat on the back of this damn dirty swine flu. But it’ll be back. It’s just a question of time before I pay 3 times as much for something here than I would in England, before I can’t go for a walk with my daughter in her pushchair without going into the middle of the road because the parked cars are blocking the pavement, before I tread in some dog shit, before I come across a merry band of piss-drenched tramps and their leashless dogs, before I destroy my bikes suspension on Rome’s roads, before I have my next dealing with Italian bureaucracy, before I next have to pay tax, before I next have to go to the dentist, before I next look into the window of a local estate agents.

But the moment I’m cool. I’m cool with Rome. We’re cool.

It won’t last though. It’s inevitable. When the Pope dies, up pops another. There’s nothing you or I can do about it.

Notte.