As this story goes, the Italian polyclinic "Umberto I" in Rome, one of the largest hospitals in Europe, after having outsourced in these shortage years to a bunch of private contractors all its maintenance, today doesn't even know the exact number of its employees anymore. That's why the mythic journalist Fabrizio Gatti posing as a cleaning man managed to easily infiltrate the Hospital.
Every Italian will immediately grasp the reason why to infiltrate a public Hospital in this fashion, especially by a journalist who in the past has infiltrated and documented places like detention camps for illegal aliens and Mafia's slavery fields. The reason is the unbelievable condition of neglect in which Italian hospitals are generally left. Dirtiness, untidiness, broken stuff left around, abandoned toxic material, private files left open, generally run down infrastructures.
Every patient and medic knows that this is the normal background of Italian hospitals, especially in big cities.

Although not worn out at the levels of the Polyclinic Umberto I in Rome, the Polyclinic of Milan is not much better. Old and rotten in most parts, scarce of staff and certainly easy to break in, given that day and night anybody use it as a crossing way from one part of the city to the other, it could make a nice subject for another infiltration documentary.

Fabrizio Gatti has done a good work, as always: documented with loads of videos this time. Everything can be accessed here.
I am not going to translate the entire article, but here's a taste:

The storage facility for cultures of bacteria and viruses of the Department for Infectious and Tropical Diseases has no lock: without surveillance, with test tubes potentially infectious in the open, it is always accessible to anyone. For three days nobody cleans away the excrements that the Night of St. Stefan a stray dog left in the corridor used to move patients from a unit to another. Nurses and stretcher-bearers often smoke even when they move the infirm around with wheelchairs or stretchers. Every time the patients, even the most critically ill ones, are moved from Intensive Care or from the Emergency Room or from the operating rooms, naked under the sheets, intubated or with oxygen, they follow the same path of the garbage. They end between black bags and yellow cardboard boxes amassed in the basement, or lined behind the trash carts. And when the operators wash down the remains of garbage with jets of water, the wheels of the stretchers get soaked with sewage, and then pull the dirtiness along to the wards.

If I have to criticize something of this article, it is only its ending: "Tonight as always the waiting room of the Emergency Room is crowded. They are forced to wait for the work pace of the public health. And to have faith. They are not called Silvio Berlusconi and none of them can afford to be recovered in the United States."
Now, although as an Italian politician Berlusconi is directly responsible for this shame altogether with a bunch of other oligarchs, the polemic against him has not much sense in these terms. He is certainly not the only one who goes to the United States to have a heart-replacement operation. There's enough people in Italy rich enough to be recovered in the United States if they have to, only they probably will recur to it as a last resort, just like he did. We always tend to overlook how much rich people there is here, and how much rich is a western European country in general.
Also, to say "recovered in the United States" like if that means tout-court having a better health care seems optimistic to say the least. Although hospitals are undoubtedly better kept there, as far as I know infections caused by permanence at the hospitals are fairly common, and good infiltration documentaries are or can be certainly done there too.

Trenitalia, the Italian National railway company is a growing nightmare.
Types of connection that were once treated as equal, such as "Eurocity" and "Intercity", are now treated as different: this even though they still come with the same price, speed, quality of wagons and number of stops and are virtually indistinguishable to the traveler (Please note: Trenitalia already offers at least seven different types of trains and tariffs.)
So they told me that "Eurocity" now wants a mandatory reservation on any ticket, but the traveler can avoid to stamp the ticket before boarding the train. Instead if you happen to take the "Intercity" or the "Intercity plus" (same train with new wagons) which would happen because you are taking it, say, at 6PM instead than 5PM, the reservation is optional, but to stamp the ticket is still mandatory with or without reservation.
It must be noted that until a while ago both kind of trains needed a "supplement" with the regular ticket, so that you had two different tickets to stamp: and the fact that the "supplement" has now been abolished, finally gulped by the main ticket, is bragged by Trenitalia as a "simplification". Not at all as the necessary step to be taken for the new 2006 big increase of the tariffs.

"I have to take the intercity," I explain to the man behind the counter at the station of Venice, "should I make the reservation or not?"
"Not really. You can sit at the numbers from 71 to 86 of every coach, we now advice passengers that we never reserve those seats."
This is supposed to make up for the fact that Trenitalia cannot pay anymore for someone to put small paper signs above any seat to indicate whether the seat is reserved or not.
"But this way those compartments will always be crowded even when most of the others are deserted. This is not a good advice. Who write this stuff anyways?"
"Most likely those at the office for the complication of simple affairs" the man answers seriously.

This was an old Italian joke, but outdated. The main sexual drive of Trenitalia isn't complication anymore, it is sadomasochism.
End of the rant, puff.

Railway station of L.
I board the "intercity" train to Milan, exceptionally leaving on time.
I find my seat after the hassle of having to mind for the seat number, which wasn't necessarily until a while ago.
The train leaves quickly and I don't even have the time to watch the platform glide out the way.

In a little while, though, I am reminded by the harassing canned female phony voice of the loudest intercom that the train will indeed "arrive in a few minutes to the station of L."

So what? I live in a country where even when a train isn't late-- it is assumed to be late anyway.

At the flea market I always end up poking among old photos and postcards. Not that I usually buy anything. I just pass by and occasionally stop and look at the old portraits, and wonder: is that the same humanity I am part of?
All the faces and bodies in the pictures seem so different. What was phony back then, and what was sincere, and what was a caricature. Everything seem to be made of another material. Some of the ladies look like my grandma looked like, a little. But she was real. They seem to be invented by someone else. Some of the men seem to have bodies out of proportion, probably due to the unusual fashion.

Few days ago I was at the flea market of Bollate (Milano), located just next certain horrific "modern" projects that plague that lousy part of the town. There, just like in any other italian flea market actually, the pictures of the times of fascism were the majority. And not only pictures: statues, posters, memorabilia.
Mussolini and his acolytes were everywhere, in pictures and on any little thing from those times. Buttons, pins, boxes, the usual. And there were also other pictures, where no "fascist authority" was present but, in small details like a black handkerchief in a pocket, or a military hat, or a certain advertising in the background, or a certain way of the men to pose in front of the camera, everything still spoke about the times of fascism in Italy.

The times of fascism. That was when my miserable falling country manifested the will to make of its typical cowardice and its worse defects an implacable force. It happened that once and we are still thinking about it.
What was that force? it was a gigantic, inevitable, shameless, black Mafia that pervaded the country and screamed itself from the balconies and the bullhorns instead of hiding in the villas or at the outskirts of town. It sung songs, and wrote poems on itself, and celebrated its new order as if people had expected it for long, when in fact nobody had expected it. Like any other mafia, it brought injustice disguised by justice, and ferocious illegality by peace and order, lies by adamant truths. It got rid of all the other mafias because there ought to be only One-National-Mafia.
Then it faded away, leaving behind    the bare bones of a raided country,    starving, deadly wounded and corrupted forever and covered with shame.

And evidently it also left behind a stubborn army of nostalgic individuals that went on sharing the shreds of that propaganda for decades, passing on the mania to sons and nephews, until today.
Such were the memorabilia at the flea market: in the end, a nauseating collection of phony poses, of silly objects, of unintelligible dialogs of mysterious faces ornamented with propaganda chasing you away from the stalls, able to extend their rule over the past memories for absence of concurrence.

-- in picture, above: one of the few glorious almost-non-fascist pictures found at the flea market. Unless the little boy's hat is in fact the very fascist military d'annunziano alpine hat of his father.

Fortified with a small tower, marked in solitude by two tufts of palms standing out of the inside courtyard exceeding the roof, some beautiful, of Arabic kind: such are the houses where landholders resort, only for short periods, for the vintage or the sowing. Many don't bring the families with them anymore. From the simple dinettes, among unpretentious 19th-century furniture, between servants or peasants turned into servants, seems to be emanating a patriarchal affability like there was one in Veneto half a century ago. One senses though that the Idyll is treacherous... There's a great ambiguity that could be defined double sincerity, caused by belonging to two masters¹ at the same time: You witness the ritual effusions between the peasant and the master, like they were father and son. Right after that, the master drops his voice so that the peasant does not hear what he has to tell you.
If you pass in the morning, the peasants meet you joyously; one thinks: "here people leaves like in the ancient times." But if you pass at night, in the hours of bad encounters, nobody recognizes you anymore; women look down or sideways and they cover their faces to say that they haven't seen anyone if they were to be called upon to testify. Beneath the patriarchal vest are invincible silences.

(...) This part of Sicily is all a swinging between morose moods and human sufferings and sublime landscapes. Between arabic houses, former feuds, stony grounds and villages of Mafia solitary stands the greek temple of Segesta. With the surrounding nature it makes one of the highest landscapes humanity have. (...)

Sicily, like Greece, puts in chain who wants to watch at it from its human side, and brings instead a great lightness of spirit to whom is content to watch its beauty.

_{1. Two masters: Tradition and Mafia}

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

Compared to today's, 1953 italian Mafia was a joke. Piovene even imagined, in the optimism of the post-war dreams, that the Mafia was about to disappear, substituted by a more modern partitioning of people: "the deathblow will be the diffusion of political opinions in Sicily. When all Sicilians will be divided according to political beliefs and not according to Mafia groups, the bonds between politics and Mafia will be severed."
Instead, starting right in those years was of course the contrary process, so that politics could turn themselves entirely into mafia to survive and prosper in the falling country.

-- In picture, above: Ralph Steadman, Tempio di Segesta, thanks to the wondrous blog "Il giornale nuovo"

Entirely by chance, only because sometimes I browse for fun search sites to find blogs dealing in english with Italy and Italian topics, I bumped into this. It is a regular touristic blog report, like many. The person who wrote it seem to be a nice, curious traveler, not necessarily conventional. To economize on lunch she makes sandwiches out of hotel breakfasts, just as I do. So the present post, which is going to scrutinize certain wrong impressions Rome left on her, is not *against* her, at all.

Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the totally misleading impressions people get from my country. It's the undying misunderstanding that Italy is a country where even the ugly has a romantic beautiful reason to be although it makes everyone's life miserable.

As a disclaimer, I put beforehand that obviously my impressions of foreign countries are probably equally fascinating in their being totally wrong. So, there's nothing personal here. For me it's just an occasion to further bash my country, that's all. I love it when travelers are innocent and when they innocently notice everything that is different, convinced to make discoveries out of the oldest crap, hopefully feeling there must be something behind they don't grasp.
We should create a website and call it something like editedcommonplaces.com. There we could share and correct our wrong impressions as travelers.

1.alimentary impressions:

"...when I saw the sign saying 'Spizzico' I didn't just dismiss it as crappy fast food... I got a quarter of a margerita pizza - and I mean like a quarter of a very very large pizza... Possibly the most exciting fast food discovery of my life - and I pride myself on being a fast food authority"

Spizzico. The insulting birth and spreading of the Spizzico chain dates back to more than 10 years ago. I remember it. Our amazement in seeing pizzas sold in a fast-food set. Depressing. What must be known of spizzico's pizzas and alike is that they are considered toxic on a sanitary level after just ~30 minutes they have been served. That's because they are congealed pieces of half-cooked pasta that pass from below zero to 350 centigrades oven temperature in a jiffy. So not only they are served fast, but they must be consumed fast. Also, they may give the wrong impression of being tasty but their ingredients are an enigma. What kind of cheese decorates them? Certainly not mozzarella. Thus, they are not pizzas and should be avoided without afterthoughts. Even if you're a fast-food authority.

2.vehicle impressions:

"Their love of scooters, for every one motorbike there must have been 50 vespas... Their love of tiny tiny cars,"

Scooters and tiny cars are not used in Rome because people love them. Scooters are incredibly popular because Rome is not only a gigantic garage, the most crowded garage of Italy, but it is also one of the most congested, disorganized and risky garages in the world. Therefore moving from point A to point B is not fun at all and can go on from minutes to hours out of schedule. To park a vehicle is not fun but the most frustrating and suicidal task ever conceived by human beings. Scooters are not repositories of love, but means of subsistence. They can grant up to two hours more of life each day to their bearers. They are a sign of the end of times and the end of civilization and as that they must be looked at, with horror and respect.

3. archaeological impressions:

"Their inability to destroy any old historical stuff."

Right. I am not even going into this. Post ends here. Busy sobbing.

But the best of Taranto's life is outdoor, at the wharfs, between the old bulwark and Mare Piccolo, Little Sea. It's one of the liveliest places of southern Italy, and I could not compare it with any other. It seems to be illustrating an oriental tale, one of those where fishes talk and precious rings pops up. Possibly because the goods are exposed and sold according to the old ways, there is here a communion between the port, the yelling folks and the depths of the sea. Seafood, oysters, mussels, dates, nuts squirting water, real walnuts from which is sticking out a strip of coral, and the fishes, rock-fishes, flatfishes, sea breams, other tapering fishes, emerald green with ruby-colored blazes and with a popular name which cannot be repeated, get humanized, become individuals, take on precious lights and colors... This small oriental harbor, this population of fishes and clams, it's one of my best Italian memories. And so, by and large, is the memory of Taranto, terse and light sea town, so much that walking into it seems like breathing in time with the music.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

The thing about the Italian food is that it used to be an excuse to be creative and to represent oneself. When the sea is sterile and the cities are turned into garages, the creativity isn't but an excuse to sell something to eat. And when everyone is convinced to be finally rich, it's the most irreparable sign of poverty disclosing itself.