¹ you can't be away from home without having your falling country still falling in the background. Either this tragic truth comes with you wherever you go or its consequences expect you when you come back.

² whoever you talk to will try to discourage you. Whether they are slow-food-organic farmers, hotel-agriturismo-pensione managers, restaurant-bar tenders or plants nursery technicians they'll tell you how escaping to the countryside won't save you from getting strangled by bureaucracy and the stupidity of the apparatus. All the contrary. And everybody will sing the same song, which goes:
we fight everyday against one hundred seventy thousand laws and rules
we succumb to china because our sclerotic state is a sinking ship of fools

me: "It's amazing how, with the corrupted apparatus of the communist system on its shoulders, the Chinese manages to engage in new industrial or commercial activities better than we do. I guess their average bureaucrat is easier to bribe"
the hotel manager: "On the contrary, I bet they are less corrupted. I believe it's all in the seven thousand people a year they send to death. We should learn from them."
me: "..."
the hotel manager: "don't get me wrong, I believe in democracy. But we just shouldn't misuse it."
me: "right. We really must be going now. Nice hotel and everything."

³ sex in foreign beds can be better, if it keeps the imagination going. Especially when you are charged with the unsound Italian prices (cf. "unsound methods", Heart of darkness). This fuels the customer/whore fantasy when you're still climbing the stairs to your room.