Out and about in Italy

Could we be witnessing a ’sea change’ (sorry but we use the phrase the way Shakespeare and Prospero intended) in Italian corporate responsibility? Over the last weeks the leasing company Banca Italease went from bank to junk bank as its shares plummeted following a disastrous foray into derivatives bets that didn’t pay off. Untangling itself from the fiasco has cost Italease €610m. Now the Bank of Italy (Italy’s central bank, based in Milan) has ordered all the directors to resign. If this were the US there would be a very long trial, if it were Japan, the suits would probably opt for hara kiri, as it’s Italy they’ll probably ignore it and carry on regardless … but we wait with interest.

Italy isn’t the only European country prone to scare stories about overwhelming numbers of migrants. Rightly or wrongly, many Italians fear the dilution of their distinctive culture by new arrivals. An unarguable statistic is that the Italians just aren’t having many children – the birthrate for arrivals from Eastern Europe, for example, tends to be higher per couple. But wait … amid all the racist rhetoric from the right wing parties (one scarcely believable demand was that the Italian Navy be employed to sink immigrants’ boats in the Adriatic before they could make landfall), there is one uncomfortable statistic … the number of immigrants into Italy this year actually FELL. Could it be that the Bel Paese doesn’t look so Bel to incomers after all?

A lovely town Cortona. Some basics first – it’s in the region of Tuscany (Toscana) in central Italy, and within Arezzo province (all Italian regions are subdivided into provinces). It has a population of some 22,000, of which a small but significant number are settling expats from Britain, Germany and the US. Its patron saint is St Margaret of Cortona and it’s very old. How old is lost in anquity and myth, like so many Italian towns. It’s definitely Etruscan at some point, but as the Etruscan civilisation (roots with Etruria and the word ‘Tuscany’) has been pretty much totally absorbed and lost, swept away by the monolith that was Roman civilisation, it’s hard to pin down … there are no written Etruscan histories, for example.

To add to the confusion, the histories of the town, already rather obscured by the swirling mists of myth and legend, were rewritten at the behest of Cosimo I de Medici in the late Middle Ages. The Medicis, rulers of the region at this point, wanted to big up their power, portraying their modern Tuscany as analogous with ancient Etruria – this was the process Mussolini was later to use, equating his Italian Fascist Republic of the early mid twentieth century with Ancient Rome. There’s some good stuff on the ancient Cortona foundation legend at Wikipedia, should you wish for more. Miss Jean Brodie may have fallen for it, but it’s a distraction for the serious historian. So what do we know? Precious little and we can discount the idea that Cortona gave birth to both Rome AND Troy (thanks Cosimo).

Cortona was ruled by the Medicis and thus Florence during the Renaissance. Its architecture today is mainly medieval. Steep narrow streets high (600asl) on the Tuscan hills, gazing down upon the valley of Valdichiana. Look from central Piazza Garibaldi onto Lake Trasimeno. Here myth doesn’t serve us wrong – it was on this plane that Hannibal ambushed the Romans, in 217BC’s Battle of Lake Trasimeno. Once in the town check out the fragments of Etruscan city wall incorporated in the current medieval wall. Learn more on the history at the Palazzo Pretorio with its Museo dell’Accademia Etrusca. We have the Arezzo Museum, two panels by Fra Angelico in the Diocesan Museum, plus works by Crespi.

So, Taormina, and we arrive with the thermometer topping 38 degrees. This doesn’t sound too bad … isn’t 50 a cool spring day? Ah, that’s fahrenheit, this is Celsius. Flying in from Gatwick this is scorchingly hot on our pasty English skins but once the non-existent 12.45 bus has been dismissed from our memory and we’re comfortably ensconced on the 1.45 (with air conditioning) things start to look up a lot. We’d arrived with romantic notions of ‘doing’ Sicily in four days – Etna, the Aeolian Islands, Siracusa, Noto, Palermo and Marsala. This, we soon realise, is ridiculous. Sicily is big – at some 150km across (East to West, Catania to Marsala) and totalling some 25,000 square kms – there is simply too much to see.

The first thing you do notice coming out of Catania (and its very slick new Fontanarossa airport) is like so many Italian cities – the sheer squalor and mess. You may have untold historic beauties in the ‘centro storico’ but get out of town and the sides of the motorway are little with discarded concrete piping, bales of wire and and forgotten bits of machinery. Tatty billboards, no landscaping (apart from the ubiquitous azaleas that we are told are planted by the roadside as they are enthusiastic consumers of diesel fumes), and what tumbledown farmers’ sheds amidst scrubby patches of smallholding. Drive Spaghetti Junction through the local allotments with a side order of local tip and you get the idea.

Most of us now know DH Lawrence for his novels, rather fewer for his poetry. But his journalism and travel writing too are worth rediscovering – the Nottinghamshire boy wrote some superb travelogues on his journeys through Italy in the first half of the 20th century. Great on Lake Garda and around.

You can buy a very good collected Italian works from Amazon or, as the stuff is out of copyright now, the cheapskates among you can read Lawrence on Italy online!

Just back from five days in Taormina, having caught the end of a heatwave that had even Sicilians mopping their brows in distress. 38 degrees of dry heat on touching down at Catania’s Fontanarossa airport, of the type that makes you lean onto and then very swiftly lean away from the metal stanchions on the bus stop. Fontanarossa itself is a contemporary marvel of grey concrete, marble and tinted glass, a pleasantly uncrowded and slick little airport.

What had been a seamless journey from south London, through Gatwick, via the much-missed BA (why does anyone ever travel with Ryanair … ah yes, it’s because it’s a fraction of the price), and a matter of minutes through passport control and customs, then ground to a halt in the face of Sicilian public transport. Anybody who says the Italians are noisy gesticulating moaners should have seen the stoic and ever-growing band clustered in the limited shade of the bus shelter as the 12:45 to Taormina resolutely refused to arrive. And we could tell them from the English as they weren’t the pink sweaty ones wearing socks with their trainers.

And here is where foreigners come up against that very Italian habit of trying to keep you happy by saying … well pretty much anything. ‘The bus is on its way’; ‘the driver was sick’ and ‘it will be here in five minutes’, then became ‘there has been a crash which held up the bus’. At 13:45 a bus arrived – the 13.45 – leading experienced travellers in Italy to infer that there probably never had been a 12.45.