This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of society. In a Society where there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity of gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

-- George Orwell, Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels, 1946

"Create new post" says the blogging interface. Yeah, it's been a long time since I have last discussed the Italian politics and I would love to reopen that scary box. It's not like there aren't things to talk about, since the departure of Berlusconi and the advent of Prodi. The funny verminy stories about the Vicenza U.S. military base being the more juicy of them. I just want to clarify that my avoidance of said subjects does not depends on a major sympathy felt for the new rulers. In fact, if possible, my sympathy is even less for Prodi's government than for Berlusconi's, because I know this sort of guys better, and I recognize better the indulgence of which they enjoy, and the lies that they spread. Even if they're more honest, if a concept like honesty would ever be possible in politics and particularly in the Italian politics. Besides it would be much more interesting and useful to criticize the "friend" than the "enemy", if one would still believe in criticizing politicians.
The thing is, after having hoped for so long for the fall of Berlusconi, everything still seems so hopeless in the Italian panorama that one doesn't really finds a reason to sweat for how rotten things are. They are just rotten, that's all. What's worse, they are rotten while having more energy or initiative. And I always felt that the little that was left of good in Italy was so because of a lack of initiative and energy.

Another issue that I would love to bash on everyday, sort of like aioros does, is the one of the childish and ludicrous and hypocrite and mafia-like ways of the Italian journalism, which, every single hour of the day and almost without exceptions proves itself to be composed of individuals well-intentioned to dumb their fellow citizens down --a inch more every year until they'll touch the rock bottom and below, into total unconsciousness.
It's hard to find the necessity of all the everyday collections of naked women aside of the news titles, of all the collections of commonplaces and condensed knowledge without anything left of intelligent --or of all the news item like this one, that are totally irrelevant even under a sociological aspect, and only are there for morbid insensitivity.
But everything falls into place when one simply realizes that the global project is seriously the one of total unconsciousness, so there's really nothing new or special about the Italian journalism. It just is journalism. Tiredly dragging us all towards a future when the only arbiters will be the empty words of taste and not the written laws.

So where the occasional political observer goes these days, when he feels all the tiredness of the worn out scenario he knows already? It probably goes to the blogs, the last throes to be felt by the dying collective body -- thanks God and the CIA and the NSA for inventing them.

Italian translations on the web suck big time. It is time someone does something about it. I am already having my occasional moments of disgust for the Italian dubbing of movies and for certain italian translations of books. But that's a hard job anyway, not a science or anything, and the evaluation of it is often subjective so I'll mercifully live it at that.
But when you browse the web and you have the disgrace of using a localized Italian Operating System, it's another story. The excerpts of Italian translation you bump into are revolting. Like certain ugly translations of software, particularly Linux software, but worse: The Internet examples are so disgraceful they cease to be laughable the second time you read them.

One good example is MySpace. Incidentally, I hate MySpace: it is ugly, morbid, exposing and hypocrite (all those phony "friends" that only want to be reciprocally "added" or whatever, ugh). Anyway.
You are driven to myspace occasionally when bloggers you are interested into drives you there for one reason or another-- and there you bump into the "italian version" of it.

To begin with, the word "visualizza" is all over the place. Congratulations, because it is the ugliest word on the planet. I don't know who invented it (probably some Microsoft or MacOS translator years ago) anyway there is no reason to use it, when the world "vedi" or "leggi" are perfectly good and meaningful. Aside of the fact that using the imperative form is disturbing and rude. And where are the articles anyway? Italian wants the articles, even if someone thinks it's a redundant habit. "Visualizza amici" is grammatically wrong, the equivalent of saying "usciamo a mangiare pizza?", but "visualizza tutti giovanni: amici" is just total nonsense. No moron could utter that in his real life.

On the web is OK, I guess.

..."Visualizza altro": I hate that thing. It is just not Italian. Ironically if it was, it would mean "view something else": certainly it can't mean "view more" as they suppose. Same happens on other translated interfaces where the horrible "leggi ancora" is used to translate "read more". Funny thing is, "leggi ancora" sounds very much like "still reading?" as in: "still reading? Go outside and get yourself a life!!"

And hybrids? Hybrids of English and Italian language can be nice when they are a product of a rich imagination (like writer Beppe Fenoglio did in his books), not when they are used because of a serious lack of imagination. Blogger:

"Iscriviti al Post (Atom)": what is that supposed to mean? What someone who is not aware of the moronic jargon of the web should make of that? I'm wondering, was it so hard to invent some other kind of expression? And, "Post più vecchi"? Please. Wasn't there in the fucking italian vocabulary any reasonable word to replace "post" with? brano, messaggio, considerazione, pensiero, pagina, foglio, scritto are all usable words as far as I know.

Then, onto the background of a blogger blog, settings page ("global impositions" part):

"Visualizzare i link Post per email?". What a lazy translator can come up with that? First of all, you can't use that disgusting verb "visualizzare" to translate both "show" and "view", that's just a perversion.
Also, even if the original is a ugly "Show Email Post links", there's always a way to better the world a little. It's a sin to fail the occasion.
And "modalità stesura"? That's just sad. Is that supposed to translate "Compose Mode"? Why? How? "Stesura" means "drawing up" or something and is usually referred to either the act of hanging outside the laundry or the act of flatting the pasta or the act of writing something. A page can be written or can be "drawn up". It has nothing to do with the fact that you have access to an advanced editor to edit the page.

Obviously there are dozens of other examples out there. Now, I know what you're thinking: it's the automatic translators, they're robots, what do you expect? But this is just not true.
They have teams of people, with degrees of experience and my nationality on their passports who are paid to translate those interfaces and throw them at my face when I browse.
I hate them.

Regardless, I guess they think it is better to make up some inexistent, mistaken, sluggish, insulting language instead that just giving the English language to everybody.
Well, guess what: they're wrong. It is better if they just throw the English language at everybody. At least one could imagine another world where his or her original language still lives, decaying but still a good tool --even if one is obviously into a sorry dream.

It is with amounts of dizziness, shame and a little pride that I can announce that I "cured a day" at Dennis Cooper's blog today.
I did so by achieving what a long time ago was called "make yourself beautiful with another bird's feathers", basically presenting and translating a number of great Italian pieces of modern poetry in the english language (please note: The poems are distributed on seven different posts, for seven different poets).
For my italian readers, and probably also for most of the others, some of the names will be known and possibly slightly nauseating classics of our history, like Montale or Ungaretti or Pasolini. There are others that aren't equally known anyway, so it can be interesting anyway, or so I hope.

The same battery of translations and introductions is also available here on my blog on a special page called 7 italian poets. I opened this replica only because I plan to periodically expand it with new names and poems (the poets here are already eight, actually).

Anyway, I recently learned that I enjoy translating poetry very much. It really puts me inside the poem, in the words and the music of it, it puts me under the illusion of being for a little while partially good as the poet, only for mounting on his shoulders, and it is very exciting (yep, and you pretty much can figure out the standards of the excitement I get in my life by this).

--in picture above: with another bird's feathers, etc.

I hadn't noticed that the Guardian, and probably others, had covered the killings of Erba that recently where all over the place on the italian newspapers. The gist of it according to the Guardian seem to be that the couple murdered their neighbors because they were too loud (so also reports Italy Logue, where I first learned of the Guardian cover of the thing, and pretty much all the other media sources here in Italy).

Of course as always the truth is more complex, less absurd, and the real fun is not to simplify it. The truest things always come out if you look closely.

For example details of the story say that Rosa Bazzi, the killer from upstairs who apparently started the massacre dragging her husband into it, was raped when she was ten years old (if you can imagine that). Because forms of violence so often morph into similar or specular forms of violence later on, I see easily the same kind of brutal ignorance of the Italian province behind the two connected events: and the typical reserved and very-decent, extremely repressed behavior (that suddenly explodes) of the people of northern Lombardia in particular.

It's true anyway that "too loud neighbors" was the explanation the couple of murderers alleged for their "insane act".

Yet I think that everyone who wants to know knows, and particularly those who live in the same area or region of the event (a region where the infamous racist & powerful party "Northern alliance" was born), that a great deal of the reasons for this crime must be searched within the fact that one of the two murdered women, the main target of the attack, lived with a man from Tunisia.
And Rosa from upstairs cut the throat of a two years old little boy ("who was crying, and I suffer of headache" she said) who was the mixed-blood son of the said couple.
Not to recognize this simple fact, that they felt entitled to destroy that family because it was a racially mixed family, means to once again censorship one essential flavor of the Italian and European life of this century, losing yet another occasion to look directly at ourselves, our fading Italian world, what we really are.

-- First part of the disclaimer (Italy-oriented):

According to some stupid Italian law, call it law of mafia or law of hypocrisy, it seems that I should post somewhere on this website the following disclaimer:

I corpodibacco, author of this darning blog, am not a journalist, and this blog is not a newspaper or nothing of the sort.

So, there, I just did it.

Why? I have no idea. Must have something to do with freedom of expression. But, what's wrong with being a journalist in Italy?
For example, I can write: "Silvio Berlusconi is a mafioso", or "the Italian banking system is a criminal association", or "the pope is a miserable crook", or "Italian pop music isn't even good for my dogs": These are opinions I have, and I can express them, at least according to the Italian Constitution, article 21: "Everyone has the right to freely express thoughts in speech, writing, and by other communication."

But, if I understand it well, if I was a journalist I could not write "the pope is a miserable crook" without being able to prove that the pope is a miserable crook, which isn't easy. Not being able to do so would cost me the expulsion from the Mafia of Journalists (which in Italy goes under the funny name of "Order of journalists", where all the journalists are put in order), because I'd be just offending the poor guy. Of course this thing makes no sense whatsoever. Why is the miserable crook offended only if I speak as a journalist and not if I speak as a citizen? And why should a journalist be part of a Mafia of Journalists anyway?
Oh, my country.

In the end, it all comes down to this: how do you prove your opinions? How do you demonstrate that you feel that a banking system is a criminal association? I am not speaking of actual criminal acts (there must be plenty of them though), but just of the opinion one might have on the matter, that the simple way by which our banking system is conceived makes it de facto a criminal association.

(Opinions are for definition not provable. That's the reason why it is said that "math is not a matter of opinion". Because any mathematical sentence must be proved, contrary to what my lousy teachers at school generally maintained. This disclaimer is straying off the point.)

From the mentioned article 21, the most funny of all subsections is the subsection 2, which reads: "The press may not be controlled by authorization or submitted to censorship."
True. Instead, in this sad falling country, is apparently normal practice to intimidate journalists and political adversaries suing them for defamation or calumny whenever they express strong opinions on someone or something. Example:

journalist Y: "Sir, you have many friends who are in the Mafia. You have many interests in territories controlled by the Mafia. You get most of your votes out of those territories. As soon as you seized power, you made many favors to your friends inside the territories from which you were elected. What would you answer to those who call you mafioso?"
politician X: "Are you saying I am a mafioso? Are you implying that? OK. That's it. You're done. I am suing you for calumny."
journalist Y: "aren't you going to answer to my question?"
politician X: "No, I'll see you in court. Arrivederci" (exit)
journalist Y: (sobs)
(the following day, to put a nice gravestone on journalist Y's career, if there isn't a strike for some other unrelated journalist-category issue, most Italian newspapers would title: "outrageous attack against politicians X. Enough with this punk journalism!")

Settlements for calumny trials in Italy can pay hundreds of thousands of euros or more. And yet I never heard anyone questioning these events as mafia-style intimidations, which would be the textbook definition of what this use of the law is about.

Self-censorship seem to be the only way out in Italy. Or things like this disgraceful disclaimer: which basically states that the world is divided between journalists whose opinions must be controlled and regulated, and normal citizens whose opinions don't count and so can remain under the impression of enjoying freedoms that don't exist.

-- Second part of the disclaimer (U.S.-oriented):

Italyisfalling.com is hosted on an U.S. server, and I am well aware that in a near future, down there in the happy police state that seems to be incrementally built in place of a once great republic, someone could certainly find a reason, if only felt like it, to close down this blog along others for any vague 'threat' it suddenly might represent, according to some phony propaganda to set some new paranoid set of strict rules against the bad guys.

Thus (as a disclaimer) I assure the NSA, or the "homeland security", or any other of the agencies that could be interested, that my personal opinion of the U.S. government and its policies, both inside and abroad, is that such policies are despicable, outrageous, shameful and very often at any rate criminal.
I also want to stress the fact that I am a non-violent individual who --although being a citizen of another country-- has a great respect for the U.S. Constitution and the ideas and acts of its founding fathers (that the mentioned agencies/governments are disgracing everyday with their acts and words). I therefore assure them that my dissent (and any others' for that matter) isn't in any way assimilable to an act of terrorism or to a threat to the security of any nation in the world, let alone the most powerful of them.

Finally, I want to add (always as a disclaimer) that to equate opinions with acts of terrorism shows a logic which isn't worthy of a very stupid monkey, let alone the very evolute primate we all supposedly represent.

And this was the end of my disclaimer. Sorry it took so long, but you know how it goes with this lawyerish mumbo-jumbo.

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.

As you probably noticed already, one of the sources we use the most blogging italian news is ANSA, the first news agency in Italy.

They have a page of English news for us (and Italy Magazine) so that we don't have to translate everything.
Strangely enough though, their English news section do NOT originate from the italian one. They offer two entirely different sets of news for the two corresponding languages.

Both news section are heavily or lightly self-censored, according to the political situation, as always happens in Italy especially with relevant or public media sources: but the english stock of news is even more censored. As we say in Italy, the dirty laundry must be cleansed in the Family (and yet we get pissed when they still compare us to the cliche of Corleone's family).

Usually in the ANSA english news the voice of the left-wing opposition is rarely mentioned; any news that may hint to big or shameful problems of our country is avoided; trite useless news about food, wine, arts and italian lifestyle are favoured, like we were still in an era were the news agency have to supply a propaganda job (and anyway those kind of news do not belong to a general "news" section! Other and more important crucial things take place in our country, people!).

Today, as we write, the ANSA italian general news section offers a certain choice: the political debates on the "Cirielli" law; some tragic chronicle reports, like the guy killed for a parking place in Rome; the "emergency" of one million of young cannabis consumers (sic); the critics of the spokesman of Iran against our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and so forth.
It could be better, but, on the other hand, the english news offers: Sudnay's entertainment guide; Arts guide; MotoGP and Melandri victory; risk of asthma for italian children according to a scientific study.
And that's it.

But, what was I saying? Of course it's all a propaganda job. It's not so old-school, so it looks like news.
But wearing their worse italian provincialism, our so-called journalists tend not to care about how the things are: just how they should look. Plus nobody wants those foreign folks to meddle into our dirty business, isn't it.

I know ANSA folks do read me: Hey guys! Nothing personal! Keep up the good work! And, no offense, but... are you ready for the change of government next April? You better go and look for that other red-green colored badge you closed in the drawer some nine years ago...