We are talking about our travels, so I mostly listen to Gabrielle T. as she lists all the places she visited, and all the things she did managing to be a mother of three children and, as she says, a famous politician in France. "I am actually very well known in my country" she tells me, like I wouldn't believe it. "You would be surprised."
She doesn't know I can believe everything anyway, because I am always a toy in the hands of my imagination. Looking at her, it however seems possible.

We are sitting in a restaurant in Zagreb, under a pergola. From inside the restaurant comes the usual dull keyboard sound and all around us customers sit at their tables eating in silence. The risotto with mixed seafood we ordered takes us occupied for a while.

"I've been in the United States once," I say to her, trying to look interesting. "You know, for a few months, traveling around..."
"I would never go to the United States!" She says. "Never!" She stresses her point with a ironic gesture of her fist, shaken up and down.
"Yeah, my mother says the same thing. Not attracted at all. But it is a beautiful country."
"Oh, I can imagine." she says, meaning that there is no way she can be convinced to go there, and that the giving up is worthed anyway.
"You may not like many things of them, but sure they have a beautiful land," I propose. I know I am slightly annoying her with this, but I think that she can take it. "They have a beautiful language too," I add.
"I hate English language. American especially. For me it's just work."
"I like it, and I like their literature. And just think about their music. Well, you can't see everything under a political light, do you?"
"Everything is political."

Oh, how I hate that phrase. I've heard it too many times. And so we are going to talk politics. After all a part of me wants to, more than she does probably, because I need to challenge a communist whenever I find one, not that it makes me happy. I just have to.

"So do you believe in a upcoming global revolution?" I ask her.
"Yes, I do. I think it is going to happen."
"Yeah, maybe islamists will do it, 'cause they're the only ones who are opposing western nations, but not to build communism, you know? They have quite fascist states in mind."
"Communism it's an idea, it can live longer"
"The problem with communists is that they want everybody to think just like them," I'm saying at a certain point. "You know, it might be a commonplace, but there must be something into it after all. I wish communists took into consideration individual freedom more."
"Do you think that the world you live in is free?" Gabrielle T. asks. "Are the cities free or in the hands of global brands, banks and corporations? Are the people really free to travel, or just to be tourists or immigrants? Are we free to think or are we manipulated by the global media?"
"You can't use others' flaws to justify your own. Global market and capitalism are flawed, evil, but this doesn't justify the alternatives to be flawed as well, at least in theory. Otherwise I don't see what the alternative is. Just like it was no excuse to Stalin if Hitler and Mussolini also sized Poland or deported people and used a network of spies against their own citizens."
"That was not the real communism!" Gabrielle T. says. "I am not here to defend Stalin, I have a different idea of what communism must be!"
"Yet it is written that communism is a dictatorship! Either you rewrite Marx, or you change the name of your ideology, because as it is communism is meant as a dictatorship!"

We go on like this for a while, people from nearby tables turn to look at us as we raise our voices, and then the argument settles down. We haven't lost our good humor while arguing, and the evening remains pleasant, but it suddenly becomes clear that going on like this would move us away one from the other without a good reason. That's just another evidence of how much politics divide people, whereas disregard for politics does no harm.

Walking away from the restaurant and down to her place, we look at the city preparing for the night. In the main square downtown, a set of majorettes makes us smile of the sweet silliness, the useless and elegant, provincial skills of their choreography. I drop casual remarks about how all the city centers look identical because of the presence of brands all around. Gabrielle T. nods in assent, but she's obviously wondering why in the hell I am saying this now. As a matter of fact I don't know, because although I am certain of what I don't want politically or socially (almost anything) I have no idea of what I want instead, and so I can understand all positions and no position at the same time. I can challenge everyone's position and I can't propose any alternative.

Then I am into bed in a room at the end of a long corridor. A huge wardrobe makes the room smaller. Gabrielle T., on the other side of the apartment, is working on her papers for a presentation. I try to sleep without conviction. The real question is why do I get passionate about politics, communism and all that stuff? I know why. It's all personal. It's all because communism was the name behind the authority my father used against me, since when I was a little kid. That's all. This isn't something you can explain easily, but I wish I could.

Funny coincidence today on the first page of corriere.it.
Main news, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi declares that Chinese communists used to boil little children at the time of revolution. Which may even be true as far as I'm concerned, although it's hardly an issue for a Prime Minister of the third millennium.
Just below it, questioned about import-export duties, the Minister of finance indicates: "Beijing is eating us alive."

Funny. Is this a subtle way to tell us they want at least to be boiled? That China should at least boil Italy before eating it? Or that we should accommodate ourselves to the fact that it is good and right if we let our politicians to boil us?

My boss gave up on me, because I am not a "comrade".
Everybody is a communist here along the canal. I mean among the storekeepers and the managers, everybody is recognizably from the left or the extreme left. Even if they don't call themselves "communists", it's the same, Berlusconi-wise. As many communists and former-closet communists do, they all secretly admire the shit-eater thief Berlusconi, and they just think and act like a big clan. I can spot them by a mile. For exaggerated this may sound, it's easy to say in Italy, with little margin of error, when someone who looks or talks in a certain way belongs to a certain political area. Or better, when this someone pretends to belong to a certain political area.
Well, it's incredible, considered how the traditional retailers here in Milan had always been the most bigot ones, the core of conservatism of our local society.
Now, here around in the navigli neighborhood, if you hang about bodegas and stores you just meet these non-conformist, hipsters, apparently cool and never formal shopkeepers and managers and employees who make a show of their political convictions as often as they can. Their customers, mostly making a show of their being hipsters and cool too, are so enthusiast to find "comrades" everywhere they go in the area, they can't believe it how lucky they are.

It's such a general consent of attitudes and looks it makes you sick, in a little while. When two of these fellows meet, the third or the second phrase will undoubtedly be something about Berlusconi, or the good ol' times corrupted by capitalism, or how the food it's not the same (because capitalism corrupted food), or something they both heard on Radio Popolare, and so forth.
If you have the misfortune to talk with them about politics, they will take you on the longest route to draw this big circle where everything fits into place logically: anti-capitalism, business, anarchism, individualism, communism, environmentalism, to avoid paying taxes, to make little or no difference among political parties because they're all criminals, to never pay taxes for the employees, to fire anybody whenever they feel like it because life is a struggle, because capitalism ruined society etc. To work sixteen hours a day and become greedy and crabby and stingy and addicted to work is normal too, it all fits into the big picture of how capitalism ruined everybody's life and so, shit, they are so obliged to this.

It is left to say about the employees. Are they in the same bunch, too? Well, some. But the ones that worked in the area for a little longer, they inevitably turned into disillusioned individualist, luckily only focused to look into the short supply of good-hearted or exceptional people, regardless any creed or color.

I think I already told somewhere in the blog about when Gisa worked at the pub on the other side of the canal, and got pregnant, and her boss first kept her working after late at night until the sixth month and then, when she barely could resist standing in the smoke-filled room for more than half a hour a time, he fired her, later claiming he didn't owed her any payoff money. This guy, an expert of wines, calls himself a "communist guevarist".

Now my boss. She's addicted as everybody else here to her work, since the unlucky day she found out that the more she worked the more money flew in. And she's addicted to the infamous Radio Popolare, obviously, and she makes a face every time I say something negative about someone from the extreme left, or the "real left" as she calls it. But I can't help it. I am from the left, but I also think with my own head.
So she gave up on me. Well, she gave up also because I let her down twice, when she needed me after my shift and I really didn't feel like it.

She made a scene one day.
"I consider your behavior hallucinating"
"Why, what?"
She looked at me like she wanted to send me at the stake. Then she started mocking my voice, making it the voice of someone very spoiled and lazy:
"No I don't feel like working, I can't come"
"Listen, you don't have to mock my vo--"
"I don't feel like working, I don't need it"
"All right. Go on."
"I can't stand you. You are so haughty. You obviously don't have any belief in it"
"Belief in what?"
"The thing, the bookstore. You just don't have any faith in it, it's obvious."
"Wha- You can't expect me to have faith in your own assets, do you?"
"Oh! You're so haughty!"

Everybody is a communist here along the canal, but I can't take it anymore.
I had my share of milanese communism all my childhood and adolescence, I had plenty of it, I could write entire books about this very crafted way they have to turn everything into a moral problem, in order to force you to be just like they want.
I am not like them, and I want to be as much different as I can.
I reckon this bookstore thing is really not going anywhere. I kind of have no faith into it.

Saturday I was at home, sleeping. I slept all morning through part the afternoon. I tried to make it as peacefully as I could.
Just as I was working on it, dreaming I guess, grinding my teeth probably as I often do, on the other side of the city, near where I lived with Leni few years ago, actions of guerrilla were going on.
Remarkably for me, It's not the first time I am sleeping while somewhere outside in the city a battle goes on. I might say it happens every time: Me snoring, them fighting. Maybe I dream those battles, who knows.

When finally I woke up, I learned the news, thought of my brother. This also always happens when there's a battle. Because he would have been out there battling, wearing an helmet and throwing stones and looking for fascists or policemen to beat, it's impossible for me not to picture him, earning his grades this way. He would have been there, but he doesn't live in Italy anymore, which is better for me so that my thoughts toward this kind of fighting in the streets can be more detached. Otherwise there would be sheer intolerance without any further rational thought. I don't get along with my brother very much.

What happened is that there was an electoral masquerade going on, the neo-fascist nearly-governative party "Fiamma tricolore" (Three-colored flame) marching the streets with the usual show of celtic crosses, roman salutes, skinheads, moronic chants.
Not having better things to do, organizations of the extreme left, social centers, neo-communists and anarchists organized a march against them. (In the pictures below, from Repubblica.it and corriere.it: the mentioned fascists, with hair uncertainties and roman salutes, all coming from families of immigrants or half-immigrants, marching behind a banner saying: "no more immigrants")

Not with the same intensity (everything is less intense in Milan), things went as in Genova during the G8 few years ago. Groups of demonstrators from the left-wing march, forced by the police to continuous stops, started their acts of "political" vandalism.
At the end of the morning (me always sleeping), Corriere.it recounted: Four car burned down, more damaged, a local shop used for electoral propaganda by AN (right-wing government party originated by the same party as "Three-colored Flame") burned down, a paper-bomb detonated near a Mac Do already rampaged by some of the protesters, scaring away customers with kids and all, a motorbike, garbage cans, a news stand, all burned down, windows and flower pots destroyed in the numbers, etc. (In the following pictures, from Corriere.it and Repubblica.it, scenes from the battle)

You must understand that, although not clearly visible by this selection of pictures, the battle went on between some groups of demonstrators and the police. Fascist marchers and communist marchers never actually met.
Too bad. Maybe that way we would have gotten rid of both, once and for all. Eliminating each other.

Instead, every now and then we are forced to watch this shameful idiocy going on. On one side, unharmed fascists with their roman salutes and racist chants going around the streets like it is a normal day; on the other, the childish nonsensical vandalism of this so-called rebels who give their best hand to right-wing governments, proving once again that the alternative to the moderate right-wing non-idea is disorder, anarchy, and disrespect of the peaceful indifference of middle-class lifestyle.
Well, the middle-class is the third character in this story not coming out very well. According to many news sources, the police had to save some of the protesters from the hands of passersby who wanted to lynch them. Or, more cowardly, who wanted the police to lynch them before their eyes. "Destroy them!" the enraged mob of peaceful citizens allegedly screamed. Of course only when the battle was finished.
The peaceful middle-class fathers wanting to lynch their sons, both parts high on confusion and hatred and boredom, and ignorance. What a nice, beautiful picture. Who wanted to take it, just a month before the elections, I wonder.

There's the stupid Book Fair this morning, and I have to be loading boxes at seven thirty. But I'd so get back to sleep just to give this dream another plot, if possible.

On the eve of the Olympic games, a former U.S. ambassador to Italy, Richard N. Gardner, discussed with Newsweek Italian politics and Italy's ties to the United States.
The interview is the usual blah-blah, except when the ambassador comes to the argument of the Red Brigades group and the 'revolutionary' left-wing terrorism that plagued Italy during the seventies.

What was the reaction when the group kidnapped and murdered former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978?
Moro was certianly going to be the next president of the republic. That was such a horrofic event that all the political parties closed ranks, including the Communist Party. It was the doctrine of communists that animated these people, but the Communist Party quickly saw that this kind of violence was leading nowhere and stood firmly with other parties in opposing it. And they stood firmly in support of the police. I give credit to a number of courageous members of government and courageous police work and the people who ran the antiterror efforts in those days. There are still some people who call themselves Red Brigades, and they killed a leading member of the government recently who was advocating for labor reform. But the Red Brigades as a threat to the state doesn’t exist today as it did at the time when I was there.

Right mr. Richard N. Gardner. The time when you were there. Too bad many political analysts and historians, who wanted to see the truth behind the masquerade, found many, too many hints that the Red Brigades were left unharmed by the italian police during those years. They let them grow stronger. They infiltrated them up to the highest level but never crushed the organization as they could. They arrested or killed the less aggressive hystorical leaders of the organization and let the rest of the Red Brigades develop into a way more bloodthirsty, more hierarchic militarized organization¹.

After that and only after that came the Moro case. Moro, who wanted the communist party to enter into the government after thirty years of loyalty to italian democratic principles. And when Moro corpse was found, following 55 days of imprisionment in the city of Rome where thousands of policemen and investigators were supposed to go around searching for him, it was pretty clear to everybody that the Communist Party was out of the games and far from getting into the government as Moro had wanted.
Plus, because of the shock for the murder of Moro, the political experience of many Italian idealists, that believed in democracy and fought to make Italy a better place during the sixties & seventies, ended that day. Too bad for the country.

It's not that I really care for the Italian Communist Party or its legacy, but... Why the whole thing happened, mr. former Ambassador? I think you give the best explanation yourself, in the same interview:

There were fears at the time you were ambassador to Italy that the Communist Party could take control of the Italian government. How would the course of history been changed had they taken power?
When I arrived in Italy, the expectation was that they would enter into the government in a historic compromise with the Christian Democrats. That would have changed Italy’s foreign policy. We would never have been able to deploy the cruise missiles in Italy [to maintain a counterweight against the Soviet missiles that had been targeted at Western Europe]. I have quotes from several members of the Communist Party who said, categorically, we are against this and would never have permitted it if we were in government. Deploying those cruise missiles in Italy was the precursor to having them in Germany. And according to [former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev, that was a factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union—though not the only one, of course … The cruise-missile decision in Italy turned out to be a turning point though.

As the journalist Pecorelli, misteriously murdered after the death of Moro, wrote: Yalta decided via Fani [via Fani is the street of Rome where the Red Brigades ambushed and kidnapped Moro]. Meaning that someone was firmly against a possible change of italian foreign policy, by the hands of the communists. And it was this someone, determined to keep the Yalta order, who decided to stop Moro. The Red Brigades, in this case, being just the right, obtuse, well-prepared tool at hand.

I have only one more curiosity about this interview. Why saying this things now? It doesn't seem to be in tune with the eve of the Olympics 2006 in Turin. It's definitely more in tune with the eve of the next general elections, to be held in spring 2006 in Italy, when some of the heirs of that communist tradition, united with some of the heirs of Moro tradition, will likely come into power in Italy after the friendly Berlusconi disaster.

I think this was all just a little, polite, warning to them. Nobody's better than a former Ambassador to bring a friendly warning notice.

1. It is all too well documented, unfortunately. If you can read italian and are interested in this old stories, you want to read by Sergio Flamigni: La tela del ragno, Trame atlantiche and Convergenze Parallele; by Leonardo Sciascia: L'affaire Moro; by Girogio Galli, Il partito Armato

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This post is inspired by this emigrant 2005 stories (in italian) by pubblico di merda.
This short emigrants stories are about having bad working/living experiences in Italy and finally making it out of the country. As previously stated, we are not interested in any "breaking out" myth as a general promoted rule. Everybody wants to break out from any rich or poor country and overall the theme bears no real truth in itself, and it is boring.
But job stories are important. Pubblico di merda is a good teller and we are inspired. We also have our stories in the sack and are eager to share them.

Brief introduction to the "Italian job" nightmare:
The Constitution of the Italian Republic recites at the first article: "The italian Republic is founded on labour."
Yeah, right. Real and canned laughters are heard everywhere since this phrase has been written. The usual joke is: "...foundered on labour".
The sorry situation of jobs in Italy is an endless source for squalid stories. They all are about low wages, too long shifts, no security, plain exploitations at every level. Immigrants and not specialized workers are exploited as slaves (So that you know, more often the term "slave" is meant literally).
The illegal hiring of farm and aedile labourers for very low wages through an agent (called "caporalato", something like "corporaling", because the agent is like a corporal that moves small troops of workers for the mafia) is widespread all along the peninsula, and the results in terms of quality of life for this people, constantly blackmailed and underpaid, are devastating.
For us lucky ones "educated" people, coming from middle-class families and experiencing professional jobs in wealthy cities, the situation is obviously different. But looking closely, it is the same too.
Any young wannabe professional hired in any studio or society in Milan or Rome has to work for ridiculous pay and endless hours, living in a city where house-rents eat off half or more of the salary. No security is given, possibly no real career. Everything is worse for women (even more absurd!)
When any given studio has squeezed the wannabe as a lemon, the dead trainee is dropped for a new enthusiast one.
I am positive that a lot of crucial architecture projects of big firms in Milan are entirely followed by apprentices. Entirely. When lucky, the studio sends at the building sites also experienced architects. But this doesn't means the experienced architects are actually hired by the studio. They are more often demotivated professionals underpaid, employed on a single-project basis and with no social security, that got stuck in the mechanism. Studios of 30+ persons usually host not more than 4-5 individuals actually hired.
On the "human" side, the professionals that remain in the mechanism too long, working ten or more hours a day, having affairs, friends, holidays and dinners always among colleagues, become extraterrestrials unable to deal normally with the world outside.
A lot of smart sensitive people drop out of the professional world exactly for that, and start looking for more simpler, trivial jobs where they don't have to show off enthusiasm for the f---ing profession.
But they end up underpaid and demotivated too.
First story follows. More to come.

F. dropped out of the university many years ago, and worked for seven years as a waitress in a series of café and restaurants in the area of "Navigli" in Milan (where the canals are, and nightlife), moving from one to the other business according to the situation, the sympathy of the bosses and the pay.
She shared apartments with friends in the meantime. She was finally independent.
Early this year she got pregnant. The café where she worked, and where she was well known since she had been working there for different periods in the past years, put her in condition of quitting, since she was getting slower due to the pregnancy.
They could actually do that, because, as it is the general rule in Italy, they had employed her "in black" (meaning that no security or taxes are paid, and no hiring contract is given. No signatures, no blah blah. Just weekly money).
And now, not only they were sending her away, well knowing that nobody would give her a job at that point with the inflated belly and everything, but she had to struggle to get herself a payoff. She had to threaten to call the unions. To call the Financial police. She finally got 700€ as a 16 months payoff (which is ridiculous). Right after that she had to leave the apartment where she lived and get back to her parents' house.
Remarkably, her boss used to define himself a "communist".