Who said that Milano was a nice place? Once again, the middle class has won and we all got five more years with a new reactionary phony mayor, the slimy former Berlusconi's Minister of Education Letizia Moratti.
Another mayor who will have no problem in cutting down trees, I guess, or financing more ugly housing projects, encouraging the fashion & design mafia as long as it is not concerned with the ugly city itself, but just with the money, and so on. One mayor that will, for five more years, encourage her citizens to just keep on working hard, head down, be a little greedy, be a little racist, be a little acquiescent, and coward for the rest. Most important, another mayor that will encourage every social category, of every creed, color, political idea, to be even more sealed within its own borders and to look conspicuously to everyone else from there. Good.

Good ol' Milano. Sometimes I wonder why its citizens want it this way. I guess it is because of the extreme prgamatism of the milanese tradition, where money and houses and cars and the like are the only solid stuff we all can think of.
Well, amen. Not that I thought there were actual alternatives to this picture, I'd only love to see some new approach at it, just for the boredom it causes me.

-- In picture: the new mayor cheers us from her pit

The old jingle went, "italiani brava gente", "italians good folks". I think it may be still true.
Just like for any people in the world probably.
What was peculiar with italians was the point they used to make of not overestimating their own cultural condition compared to others. I mean, they always considered they own local culture as the only one reasonable on earth but still, they mostly admitted all the other cultural mistakes to peacefully exists. I guess this can be called a sort of basic toleration of other's presence in one's land. This apparently came to italians by the prolonged story of occupation by foreign nations in the peninsula since the fall of the roman empire.
With some exceptions Italy tolerated or put up with other cultures, lifestyles and methods for a long time, under the most different circumstances.
The exceptions, roughly counted, being: the great cultural explosion that lasted from 1200 to 1600 that popularized italian culture and arts all over the known world; the opposition against post-napoleonic nations and the Vatican state that ended with the glorious days of Risorgimento and the unification of Italy; finally, the (almost¹) heroic fight against the Austro-Hungarian empire and Germany during the two world wars.
Those were the high points of our "national pride", if something like this can be actually named. All the rest is a long story of adaption to any situation: a total mistrust and suspicion for any form of government; diversification of all the local traditions, dialects and lifestyles without any homeland to be attached to; sporadic friendship with the enemy and substantial despise; "campanilistiche" rivalries (rivalries of different bell towers); political opportunism; mafia as a form of local self-government.
Then the first forms of globalization arrived, fridge, television and stuff and the rest is recent history. You may check the authors Pier Paolo Pasolini, Goffredo Parise et al. on the last 50 years of transformation of Italy from the rural country that the fascism wanted and froze, into the industrialized nation that co-founded the European Union and invented the Vespa, the Ferrari and some other cool stuff.
Already, as you my reader already know, Italy is falling.
These days italians, still mistrusting their own State and always trying to fraud the laws, while the State always tryies to fraud them, are pushed to face the "immigrants" as the mother of all their problems.
Bigot parties, neo-fascist and local parties point out how the immigrants, from east europe and africa fill our prisions way much more than italians do. Immigration is constrained in a belt of strict rules that make out of them B,C,D-citizens; most of them living and working out of the law only hoping to get legal and bring here their families. But believe it or not, only few are so lucky to see their families live with them after YEARS, even if they get legal, and pay taxes, being not allowed to vote and everything, and always having to renew their permission of stay any six months (just think of the beurocracy hell that this means).
So, no surprise, a lot slip into criminality. (But in Italy criminality it's the second name of many. We don't need immigrants to make criminality. There are entire neighbours where police is not allowed to enter. No immigrants there, only funny italian mafiosi who sometimes kill each other in the hundrends.)
Now the funny italians, so gentle and good-hearted as they are, on one hand deprecate the presence of immigrants in any situation and under any political color; on the other hand enjoy having servants at home even if they are not exactly rich, just because the servants are willing to work for them at ridiculous wages.
Sometimes they marry their servants, or relatives' servants, as this neighbour of mine did. The unions are rarely happy, for one or both the memebrs of the couple. In this particolar case, my neighbour mistreat his wife without even noticing, still treats her as a servant (nothing new) and is ashamed by her presence in front of his relatives.
He plays the keyboards every night on the notes of italian pop songs. Once I heard him stopping to play and sing; he asked to his wife, "what, you cry?" and than start playing again.
Good italian folks.

_{1. Italians during WWI proved both their courage and their cowardice. You can check on this the description of the defeat of Caporetto by Hemingway, Farewell to the Arms, where the Carabinieri shot all the officials coming back from the defeat, showing a coward uselss mercilessness. Worthless to mention the countless acts of cowardice and braveness during the civil war against fascism.}