I am not a big fan of newspaper editorials, most of which are underreported and worth even less of your time than regular newspaper copy. And I am not a big fan of the regular newspaper copy of The New York Times, which I think is overrated by people who think The New York Times must be good cos it’s the NYT (notwithstanding occasional brilliance). Yet I am a fan of the editorial content of The New York Times. Strange? Here is a reasonable example of what their columnists do well, week-in and week-out. It’s a nice wrap, and a nice rap, about Our Silvio as opposed to Dear Obama. But before you Fedex Obama a cigarette, read Clive Crook in The FT who fears, as I have since long before he was elected, that Obama is destined to do what the left does best: disappoint. It might make you think that shagging a teenager or somesuch is the sensible middle road. Or not… (Apologies if you require a subscription to access the FT article; I have one and so cannot tell you.)
Go and wait for me in the big bed
June 30, 2009De-briefed
June 26, 2009To the lawyer’s office for a post mortem on the case against James Stephens, Leonardo Petturiti and the building firm now calling itself Lacos. Laura, the lawyer, tots up the numbers. We first issued lawyers letters in the hope of getting our roof fixed without the need for a case in 2001, after non-lawyerly pleading had been ignored. A case was initiated in 2002 and accepted by the court in October 2002. It effectively ended in June 2009, with a settlement but no judicial decision, though there will be a final hearing to celebrate the archivazione of the case on 7 July.
It total, there will have been 15 hearings over eight years of pre-trial and trial activity. However three of these are from recent weeks under the dashing Dr. Cenci (who, having resolved almost all of Citta di Castello’s outstanding legal issues in less than a year of tenure, is to move on this summer). If one subtracts the Cenci hearings and the period before the first hearing, then the core case averaged one ‘audience’ every seven months for something over six years. A good rule for a hearing, I think, is two hours of standing around followed by something over an hour of achieving not much, followed by lunch.
With respect to our standing at the end of the case, the numbers give the following reckoning:
Incoming
Fat Boy pays us: Euro3,000
Petturiti pays us: Euro3,000
LAME/LACOS pays us: Euro3,000
Total Euro9,000
Outgoing
Lawyer, court fees, etc Euro4,500
Initial survey by new geometra
to substantiate our case Euro1,000
Court-mandated roof survey by
geometra who won’t go on roof * Euro2,300
Total Euro7,800
*(The submission of this survey took 18 months, or three times the stipulated norm.)
So the difference is Euro1,200. That covers some of the cost of the materials required to fix the roof (including a replacement terrace flooring). But the majority of the expense on external repairs was in the form of labour. After Petturiti and the building firm had come back for a joke, one-day intervention in 2001, when they threw down some sealant borrowed from another site, I was so concerned with being ripped off again (and I think at the time also broke) that I worked myself as the labourer/operaio for a retired builder from Pietralunga in order to sort out the roof; it was he who taught me something about building and with whom I have enjoyed working ever since. In some places we laid new roofing felt and in others we variously used sealant and added a new line of tiles to cover a water run-off where felt had not been laid properly. It was not at every leaking point a perfect solution, but we worked carefully, and the roof has not leaked since. Frankly, once a roof has been screwed up, it is a difficult thing to remedy completely, which is why in many places (including northern Italy) roofing is a specialist job. In all, including the refinishing of a terrace, it probably took the two of us two weeks each.
In addition to this, the single biggest expense would be (if we had done them) repairs to internal damage – including discoloured oak steps on the staircase, which were damaged by leaking water before they were sealed, and streaks, stains and mould on painted walls. The latter is the most problematic because in our house, as in successive apartments we have had in Citta di Castello, we used a time-consuming and expensive painting technique involving a base of white calce, layers of calce-based natural colour, and a finishing layer of wax mixed with natural oils. The aesthetic possibilities of this technique are considerable, and the wax finish makes the walls cleanable, but if you get water coming in behind the surface, the wax means it has nowhere to go, hence mould. Given the cost, and the reality of three small kids in the house, we have redecorated only the room that was worst affected.
So what were the lessons from the case? The first, I think, is that if you have a problem with building work, take lots and lots of photographs of physical evidence yourself. I foolishly left most of this to the geometras who came to survey the damage. When I was covering one part of the roof in plastic to stop water coming in, and particularly while we were repairing different parts of the roof, there were ample opportunities to take more photographs to show exactly how roofing felt had been mis-applied. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems very silly not to have done this. I think that once we began to fix the roof I was just so relieved that something was being done that I lost my focus on the case. (I am not certain that photos taken while we did the repairs, when the case was already running, would be admissible; but they should still have been taken.) I also thought that another builder, who was then running his own firm, and who came up and saw (indeed explained) much of what had been done wrong, would provide clear testimony in the case.
That was lesson number two. Never expect a builder to provide testimony against another builder, never expect a geometra to provide clear testimony against another geometra. Lesson three is the biggest one of all. Don’t ever pay for anything until you are absolutely sure that you are getting what you are supposed to be getting. In many respects, deferred payment is the local solution to the absence of a functioning civil court system. Foreigners tend to hang themselves because they want to settle their accounts promptly. It would be better to take on board the local saying that: ‘For paying and for dying, there is always time.’ I, I’m afraid, fell into James Stephens’ trap of signing a delega to give him access to our Italian bank account. So by the time we actually came to live in Italy, and discovered our roof leaked, the builders, Petturiti and Fat Boy had long since taken their money and run.
Was the case worth it? In the sense that we could not get a decision, and the settlement barely covers the costs, clearly not. It is really the first of these things that is most depressing. When I started the case, and lots of people said it was a waste of time, my argument was that the justice system is slow, but in the end it functions (perhaps I meant that in the end surely it must function, ho, ho). I told friends that slow justice is not necessarily a bad thing if it discourages the kind of ambulance chasing you get in Anglo-Saxon societies. But in this case the justice system did not function at all. It was pretty unpleasant to see the studied inefficiency of the system at work. How magistrates arrived at a place where they do an hour’s work on a case every seven months I cannot imagine. It is as if management consultants had been called in and told the objective of the system is to achieve nothing.
I spent a lot of time during the case, especially when I had to go to the tribunale, thinking about how much decent people must be suffering because of this system. There is in fact some reasonably hard evidence that this is the case. Contrary to popular opinion, Italians score close to the bottom of the list in European surveys about happiness and satisfaction with their lives. What is particularly interesting is that when researchers attempt to figure out why this is – most often using questionnaires structured by psychologists – the clearest pattern that emerges is that there is some broad link between the level of trust in institutions in a society and aggregate levels of happiness. The latest iteration of a European survey project run by Cambridge University, published in April, had Italy right down at the bottom of the happiness table, the UK somewhere in the middle, and Scandinavian countries up at the top. One of those running the project remarks:
‘The survey shows that trust in society is very important. The countries that scored highest for happiness also reported the highest levels of trust in their governments, laws and each other…
Many of the happiest countries in the survey – the Scandinavian members, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – also come top of the World Bank Governance Indicators, which seek to assess the quality of a country’s government. Likewise those EU 15 countries that scored worst in terms of governance (Italy, Portugal and Greece) tended to come bottom in the happiness survey as well.’
Happiness surveys are notoriously difficult to do well, and one should not place too much credence in a single project. But for me, the findings are in line with arguments that have been made by people like Amartya Sen, and which I have come to find quite convincing. I used to think that important institutions – like a functioning legal system – were essential to economic development and hence, by logical extension, a developed country like Italy must have a functioning legal system (just a slow one). This line of argument is associated with some of the economists who practise what is known as New Institutional Economics, which has become quite fashionable in the past 10 years or so. However, after spending a decade in China, and almost a decade in Italy, I no longer believe in this reasoning. I think economic development can occur despite a highly inefficient legal system; indeed I think there are cases in China where the weakness of legal institutions has even (temporarily) contributed to economic growth by allowing narrow economic interests to trump social considerations. So instead of the ‘precondition of development’ argument about institutions, I now prefer an extension of Sen’s one about democracy. Sen has long argued that the debate about whether democracy is necessary to development is a sterile one, based on a false distinction. Democracy, he says, is a part of development, and so it is pointless debating whether it is also a condition for it. I suspect the same thing is true of some other institutions, including a civil legal system. A legal system in which people can trust makes for a more contented society; all societies seek to develop in the direction of greater contentment; what Italy confronts is in essence a developmental problem.
Anyhow, that seems to have taken us quite a long way from James Stephens and Leo Petturiti, but perhaps someone will follow my drift.
Housekeeping. I hope there will not be too many of these… A comment has been submitted which I am not going to post. The sender: Emilia Maccioni (the wife of Leonardo Petturiti). Reasons for not posting: 1. absence of any substantive content. 2. remarks likely to cause offence to anybody who has suffered, or who has friends or family who have suffered, from any form of mental illness. I don’t mind what people say about me, but general bigotry is off-limits.
Le tre vaselle (Torgiano, Umbria)
June 22, 2009This restaurant is part of a small hotel in the centre of the village/small town of Torgiano, headquarters of the Lungarotti wine group, located south-east of Perugia, just off the E45. From Citta di Castello it is something under an hour by car…
I am not in a period of my life when I am much taken with expensive restaurants. I seem to get cheaper as I get older, or at least I place ever more value on things that are good and at a price that puts them within reach of (almost) everyody. Nonetheless, we had a good lunch at Le Tre Vaselle, which is quite pricey (though not, of course, by London or other big city standards). I can’t tell you what it actually cost because a Sicilian friend snuck out and paid for everybody, offering the lame excuse that as the only person born in Italy he was constrained to do this. Antipasti and primi are around Euro10-12, secondi more like Euro16-26. We didn’t drink wine, apart from a nice half glass of prosecco which they gave us unsolicited.
The portions are made so that some people will want to eat three courses and a dessert. We started with zucchini flowers stuffed with a light mix of lake Trasimeno freshwater prawns, passed momentarily under the grill; these and the accompanying sauce were pretty good. Then I went for pastry-wrapped veal (not had this in Italy before) with three types of pepper, while others had topinambour-stuffed half-moon ravioli with a truffle sauce, and bavette pasta (like tagliatelle, but thinner) with tiny prawns. Topinambour is what the English call Jerusalem artichoke; according to the wife, the Italians named it after a Brazilian dance troupe that was popular in the country when the root vegetable was introduced; whereas the English name Jerusalem is here believed to be a perversion — as a result of mishearing — of girasole (sunflower plant), to which family topinambour is related. Anyhow, everyone was happy, especially the consumer of the seafood bavette, which I always think is tempting but very hard to do well (the ‘amatriciana dilemma’ if you like). To finish we ate some cherries and shared a plate of cinammon ice-cream.
What can I say? We hadn’t seen each other for a long time and there was a new baby, so it was always going to be a good lunch. The restaurant has a somewhat institutional feel, but it was actually rather nice to be somewhere quiet and a little formal. And the food fits with the modest formality. The deal sort of reminds me of the Taverna del Lupo at Gubbio. We will, at some judicious moment, return.
Not so hip
June 19, 2009A sad story gets sadder. Our friend Claudia calls to say that Roberta’s funeral is to be held this afternoon. Roberta was one of the many Italian hippies who live in the area between our house and Pietralunga. She died from liver failure related to hepatitis, and complicated by drinking — not least after doctors told her she mustn’t. She was Neapolitan, born to a well-to-do family and she chose the hippy life; she died in her forties. Her octogenarian mother, a quiet, diligent and practical woman who to many seemed indestructible, passed away in March. In October 2007, Roberta’s husband Aldo Bianzino (or perhaps partner, I never asked) died in prison custody after being arrested by police for growing marijuana; he was also in his 40s; a homicide case is, needless to say, outstanding. (There is an outline in Italian on this site and a short letter to the Italian government in English from a pro-legalisation group here.)
So in a beautiful, tiny and now rarely used cemetery in the nearby hills three graves in a row have been dug and filled in the past 18 months for the same small family. Of those living locally, only Aldo and Roberta’s son Rudra (lots of Indian names in Pietralunga…), still of school age, survives.
Not being partial to a chillum before breakfast and doubting the power of their sacred fire statues, I didn’t know Aldo and Roberta intimately. But Aldo was a more than competent carpenter who made most of the doors and the very fine and very heavy kitchen table in our house. Indeed I wonder what he might have achieved if he hadn’t been so stoned: I once spent five minutes watching him trying to hang a door that he was holding the wrong way up; on another occasion he cut through both a piece of wood and the tape measure he had laid out next to it with a circular saw, paused for several seconds, and then said: ‘Ooooooooooogh’. While Aldo was anorexically skinny and diffident, Roberta was frenetic, endlessly talkative and a lethal driver in the finest Neapolitan tradition. The two of them were capable of spectacular arguments. Our friend Lele recalls the first time he met them, when they came round to his house to talk about carpentry work. Earlier that day, Aldo had suggested to Roberta that she talked too much. So Roberta had cursed him and sworn that she would never in her life speak again. Lele opened the door to find Aldo, who then sported a mat of long dreadlocks and a bushy beard on top of his tiny frame, dressed in his modified Indian garb and covered from head to foot in sawdust. He said nothing. Next to him, a wild-eyed Roberta produced sounds but no words, and made zipping gestures across her mouth interspersed with occasional gestures towards Aldo. As I recall, they got the job.
The site of the cemetery is below the house of Raidas, which is the nom de paix (or whatever hippy sobriquets are called) of one of the senior members of the group. In a previous life, he was Mario from Bologna. The house was a priest’s house, attached to a tiny church, and bought from the curia around 20 years ago. If Hollywood was scouting for a setting for a new movie called Love Children of the Appennines, the director could do worse than this place. Outside the little church is a shaded seating area with the biggest cherry tree I know, and below that a simple but elegant garden. There’s also an Indian temple thingy, all very tastefully done.
In reality, from what I have seen, however, the story of the group has not been Hollywood fare. Instead there have been suicides, other premature deaths, and pervasive depression. Of course one can’t make clear judgements, because one doesn’t know what experiences and what predispositions led individuals into the group in the first place. But it hasn’t been an easy ride.
We follow the coffin from the house down to the cemetery. Although I would have thought that few of those present would claim to be Christian, one of the Pietralunga priests presides and most people participate in the Roman Catholic gesticulations. Roberta is laid to rest by the gate of the cemetery, which is walled. She is separated from Aldo by her mother which, while they undoubtedly loved one another, may be a sensible arrangement. Flowers, mostly those of ginestra, and candles are set out on the grave. It is swelteringly hot, but people take their time to say goodbye. And then they wander, in ones and twos, back up to the house. I talk with people I haven’t seen for some time. Lele chats with the lawyer in the Aldo homicide case. And then I make my excuses and leave.
The situation with respect to Rudra is potentially a huge mess, not least because of Italy’s patchy and idiosyncratic welfare state. But I suspect that it is one of those situations that is so horrible that somebody in the system will do something. Roberta’s brother is willing to move down permanently from Munich, where he has lived for many years, to look after Rudra while he finishes his schooling. But he needs a steady job in order to do so. My guess is that the Pietralunga Commune, which knows all about the case, will find him one.
Light blues
June 18, 2009There is a not entirely satisfactory end to the Cambridge academic year. Rooting around the main University Library I receive a call from the director of the PhD programme in the Business School. He needs to see me as a matter of urgency. So I grab a yard of books, make it half a yard through an hour-and-a-half’s diligent photocopying, cut short a meeting with a nice teacher in East Asian Studies, cycle at speed and arrive panting at the director’s door. I enter to find the director, the deputy director and the administrator seated around a conference table with stern faces. Uh oh.
The issue at hand is mandatory work I was required to do on ‘quantitative research methodologies’ (in essence, turning life into numbers and asking a computer programme to tell you what is going on and what to do next; this more or less caused the current global financial crisis and is deemed to be an essential competence in contemporary academia). If you don’t pass Quants, you can’t stay in the Business School. And as I look down at the unhappy faces, I am failing because my submission is short of two exercises.
It is a minute to execution time as I pull out my aging lap-top. On it we find one of the two missing exercises. We look under properties and see that the last date on which the file was changed pre-dates the submission deadline. ‘Don’t resave,’ comes the cry; this would overwrite today’s date and leave me with no hard evidence to put before the PhD degree committee, which will have to rule on my case. At this point it looks like I can plead to have one of two missing exercises considered; but this might not be enough to save me. The three officials witness the saving of the first exercise onto a memory stick, soon to become Exhibit A at a formal hearing. I am then accompanied by the PhD administrator (lest I quickly bang out the missing exercise on the fly – hardly likely for someone who says things like ‘Remind me which one is the x-axis’) while we see if I can strengthen my defence.
Looking through my files I am relieved to see that I printed a back-up copy of the material I handed in. This is interesting because it contains missing exercise one. And this puts into play that most embarrassing of university possibilities – that work was handed in and the examiner, or (less likely) an admin person, lost it. Perhaps sensing an interesting outcome, the PhD administrator adds the back-up hard copy to the memory stick, and now has Exhibit B and Exhibit A.
But what of missing exercise two? On that I am surely bang to rights. Since I have no electronic copy of the exercise, it must have been one where I missed the class, because otherwise I would have done the exercise during the class. The exercises for which I missed classes (through teaching, so a reasonable excuse) were done at Easter. I took them off the university intranet where all coursework and materials are supposed to be posted.
We have a look on the system. Sure enough, there is no template for the missing exercise on it, at least not where it should be. There is one unexplained folder in the relevant part of the system, but it proves unopenable. Images of the intranet file directory are printed off as Exhibit C. It rather begins to look like missing exercise two may be the result of a departmental cock-up, and I subsequently hear that investigations are being launched.
So what will the degree committee decide? To throw me out anyway? To issue a groveling apology for what appear, on balance, to be university mistakes? Or to do a bit of coughing, give me a pass, and pretend the whole thing never happened? I know which one Slumdog Millionaire would go for.
The brush with the Inquisition aside, Cambridge is far from an upleasing experience. The weather is fine, it is May Ball week
(don’t ask me why it is in June) and lots of slightly plump girls are wearing those deeply unflattering English ball gowns. 
My eldest daughter, six, is with me to meet her granny and, seeing a fleshy young lady in a shocking pink outfit outside Trinity, demands: ‘What does she think she’s wearing?’
We take granny and my stepfather out in a college punt down the river and past the main colleges. My stepfather, with broad Yorkshire accent, makes the same weak joke about being promised galley slaves half a dozen times to people on the banks and in other punts. The southern bourgeois intelligentsia, however, has dealt with far worse, and shrugs off this provocation from the Barbarian Northerner. 
Meanwhile, in the queues for the balls, one suspects there must be the next generation’s David Cameron, perhaps about to have that embarrassing photograph taken which will haunt his political career (the photo can no longer be published, but here is a painting of the photo, with Our Dave second left, back row). 
The only crumb of comfort for the young Tory who is about have that photo taken is that the opposition is likely to be an even bigger titty, like Tony ‘Harry Potter’ Blair (seen here in a 1970s colour photo of his Oxford dining club, third from right, back row, possibly making a childish gesture with his right hand).
Big and small boys’ toys
June 12, 2009Pestered with the usual impressive application by my four-year-old son, we stop at a bar next to the Cerbarra petrol station for a pasta, and there meet Mario and Carlo from nearby Agrisystem, out on a coffee break. Of all the people I know who run businesses in the area, I think I like Mario and Carlo the best.
Why? Because they take responsibility for the stuff they sell. When you buy something from them, you know that if something goes wrong they will sort it out.
We pop over to get a can of pre-mix for the strimmer; it costs more but I find the petrol/oil mix from petrol stations highly corrosive of the plastic tank and tubes on my strimmer. The machine doesn’t consume much fuel, even with our large garden, and it starts first time with the stuff Mario sells. Since we are there, he invites Luca, 4, to select a tractor-mower he would like to drive from the large assemblage outside. Moments later, Luca cruises by in the biggest tractor there is. I get to stand around pretending I wouldn’t be interested in driving it myself.
Luca pronounces himself impressed with the number of buttons on the machine, which far exceeds the complexity of our own ten-year-old bottom of the range affair; focusing, as ever, on the critical issue, he informs Mario that we need a tractor with headlights for ‘night-time work’. Mario agrees that his father is indeed a fool for not having one.
A couple of days later, I get a reminder of why Mario and Carlo (the mechanic) are people who make life easier. The tractor-mower’s ignition is broken. The grass is long, and growing. Mario would come out if asked, but we can get the machine on the back of the pick-up truck (tied up, with the back door open). So I call him. He says he has every part that could go wrong with an ignition in the warehouse and he will put a new battery, which I have been avoiding buying (by jump starting when it is cold) for a year, on charge. I say I’m in a hurry and he says that if I come down the next morning, they will do the work while I wait. In the event, it isn’t necessary as I have other things to do in town. So I leave the tractor and pick it up in the afternoon. Carlo, as a matter of course, has sharpened the cutting blades and set the tire pressures.
Before we leave, there’s just one more thing: ‘Luca — which tractor?’ He goes for a mid-size yellow one, again with a lot of knobs and headlights, and loads of gears. I try to do my not-interested face.
Shitty ending
May 19, 2009My premonitions about Dr. Cenci’s determination to reduce the number of outstanding court cases in Citta di Castello prove to be somewhat accurate. On the morning of May 19, 2009, our case against James Fat Boy Stephens, his geometra Leonardo Petturiti, and the building firm once known as LAME (boy does that look like a warning in hindsight, even though it means ‘blades’ in Italian) ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
It is at least fitting that Giorgio Merli, the frequently drunken builder who was probably most responsible for leaving gaps on our roof where water-proof roofing felt would more normally be applied, is present on the part of the now-defunct LAME (reborn as LACOS, in case they are on your roof as you read). On the other hand Giorgio is perhaps just one of life’s sad people; it is his brother who is studiously unpleasant and who perjured himself unashamedly in court. To Giorgio’s left is Fat Boy and to Fat Boy’s left is his bouffant court jester, little Leo Petturiti.
Cenci begins the way he means to continue: ‘Is it possible for the parties to arrive at an agreement? This case has been going on for nine years.’ He says this as if it is the fault of an organisation other than the one he works for.
Fat Boy’s Perugia lawyer offers Euro7,000. This is against an estimate (based on standardised, state-approved costs) of something over Euro13,000 that was calculated for the cost of repairs (most of them now done) to the roof. I say no, for two reasons. The first is that the Italian legal system being what it is we only brought one case against Fat Boy, when in fact we were unhappy about all sorts of things that happened at our house before we sacked him. This leads to the second, key reason, that what I really want is a decision by the court that says that what these people have done is wrong, legally wrong, and that ultimately we have a judicial system that establishes that. The defendants haven’t been conciliatory for the past eight years, they didn’t give a toss when the roof leaked in 12 places and my wife was pregnant (Petturiti finds this remarkably funny), they have sought at every turn to prolong the case, and it is not really a question of money, it is a question of principle and of being able to say that dishonesty does catch up with you.
Unfortunately, Dr. Cenci and I don’t seem to be on quite the same wavelength. His overriding concern appears to me to be to get the case closed — at least I don’t like the faces he makes when I suggest the court moves to a ruling, which would involve reading all the files (it is quite clear he has not read anything so far). Fat Boy’s Perugia lawyer ups the offer a bit, Cenci talks about the case going on for many more years, my lawyer points out that if Cenci allows the other side to send the court-appointed geometra to our house a third time — as has been requested — it will likely be two more years before we get even an initial decision which, of course, they can then appeal.
Numbers are discussed in the background. I am fairly sure that at one point Fat Boy offered more than I actually accepted. I am not really concentrating. I am thinking that I can’t face more of this when we now have estate ageent Davide Leonardi of Leonardi SRL to deal with (more anon). After nine years I have all the evidence I need that the local court system is everything that caricature books about Italy indicate. I have what I need for anecdotal purposes and it is time to start doing something useful. For nine years I respected the court, waited for it to do its job, and did not publicise what Fat Boy and his crew get up to. The few preparatory entries on this blog have not been publicised and they have not, according to the blog software, been viewed. Now that can change.
I accept Euro9,000 and ask Cenci a question: ‘Why is it that with a system like this there isn’t more crime in Italy? Why doesn’t every thief in Europe come here?’ It is a cheap parting shot, but it is also a reasonably serious question. Luckily for Italy, the predictions of mathematised models beloved of contemporary social science rarely stand up to empirical tests — if it were the case, this place would truly be an anarchic hell.
Finally, the farcical addendum. There is, of course, inevitably, a farcical addendum. After we leave, our lawyer recommends that we apply for state compensation that exists for people whose legal cases exceed the current duration ‘norm’ (around three or four years). My immediate response is that there is no way that I am taking taxpayers’ money to compensate me for the incompetence and inefficiency of the state. The lawyer’s argument, however, is that this is one’s only available form of legal protest against a system that does not work. We discuss, and eventually agree to go ahead, on the basis that if we get the money we will not keep it. The compensation is around Euro1,500 for every ‘excessive’ year in court. If you would like to recommend a deserving local charity, please do so…
Conclusion? No, intermezzo.
May 4, 2009Well, let’s hope, after just the eight years, that it is a little more than mezzo. At 9.50am on the appointed day I arrive at the tribunale for the ‘conciliation’ intervention by Citta di Castello’s brand new, and only, fully toga’d (as opposed to honorary) magistrate, Dr. Cenci.
Our lawyer has a stand-in because she has an ’emergency’ in Perugia. At 10am both the lawyer of James Fat Boy Stephens, shared with his scrofulous geometra, and the lawyer of the builders are present. It appears to be a fortuitious beginning. But where are their foul charges?
The lawyers for the opposition announce that they ‘interpreted’ the magistrate’s letter as not requiring the presence of their clients. In other words, that a conciliation would be conducted without the presence of those to be conciliated.
So does Fat Boy’s lawyer have a conciliation offer? Not really. He too is a stand-in lawyer and has not read the file. He starts to read it. The builders’ lawyer suggests that his clients could come up to our house and do a piccolo lavoretto (a nice use of the double diminutive: a little small piece of work — perhaps adjusting the position of a plant pot, or somesuch). I suggest to him that having builders who left you with a roof that leaked in 12 places, who then came back for just half a day under threat of litigation and still left a roof that leaked in 12 places, come back again is not powerfully appealing. ‘Ho capito,’ he says.
I divert myself watching a male, 40-something lawyer whose gait, suit and shoes mean you simply know he would deflower your 14-year-old daughter (should you have one) given one-tenth of a chance. Does he like adolescents to call him papi, like someone else we know? He has already had his uninvited arm around two women in the magistrate’s ante-chamber in half an hour. I ponder whether he lives with his mum and decide probably not, though I would refuse a significant wager on the matter.
At 11.24 by the watch of the tall and curly-haired Dr. Cenci, we enter his studio. He kicks off with a pleasantry about it ‘not being like this in England’. I agree that it is not quite like this in England and immediately wish that I had not. It seems to indicate I have something against Italy or Italians. I don’t. I like where I live and I like most of the people. I just, increasingly, don’t like the self-important, state-maintained professional classes: lawyers, geometras, notaries, a large sub-set of doctors, and possibly a significant sub-set of magistrates. Italians moan about their political class. I suspect their politicians are merely a reflection of a more common cancer: the well-dressed, self-serving, indolent, amoral and unprofessional ‘professional’.
Inevitably, Dr. Cenci isn’t fazed that the others have ‘interpreted’ no need to show up. I suppose it is only like a state surveyor who spends three times the stipulated maximum time to do a court-mandated survey or a lawyer who fails to show for a trial: we mustn’t be judgemental, especially in court.
The builders’ lawyer asks that the surveyor be sent back to the house for a third time. Having not got what his clients wanted from the second visit, which the builders also requested and then failed to show up for, this is only logical. We point out, however, that it is also an absurd request. Fat Boy’s lawyer, from a (presumably expensive by local standards) Perugia firm, is a little more subtle. Although a stand-in, he seems to have read enough of the file in the hour-and-a-half waiting time to be concerned for his clients in the event of a final decision. So he suggests, in efficaciously unctuous terms, that if the magistrate deems it sensible and appropriate that all parties come before him, then perhaps we should do exactly that.
In normal times, this would probably buy another year and keep the lawyerly clock ticking happily round. But these are not normal times. The mercurial Dr. Cenci opens his diary and responds that he’ll see us all in a week. Mamma mia! Not since a pope was last found to be the father of multiple children has such a shocker been laid before central Italy. After a moment, the first lawyer responds that he cannot possibly do next week. Then the week after! The other lawyer responds that he cannot do that. Then the week after that!. They have nowhere to run. The date is fixed for just three weeks hence, a fraction of a nanosecond in Italian legal time. The sheer audaciousness of the diary entry sends an electric buzz through the building.
But what will happen? My cynical self says not much that is good. As usual, I leave the tribunale feeling physically sick. I spend the afternoon gardening.
Justice has a lovely coat
April 22, 2009Italians in central Italy, I have been thinking, look ever more tawdry, even dowdy in their fashion choices.
Is this because current, ‘youth’ fashion is tawdry? Trousers hanging off one’s arse; shirts with gormless, nonsensical English words on them – as I write I am looking at someone with ‘wool’ emblazoned on one side of his chest and ‘rich’ on the other; all set off with ridiculous gold or silver trainers.
Or is it that I have become aware of the tendency of Italians, with their reflexive herd instinct in matters superficial (as opposed to wars), to fall off the edge of the fashion cliff? The example par excellence of recent years is their collective capacity to wear more and more stupid sunglasses. Look at me, cara! I look like an ant. And it only cost me Euro200! No, look at me! I have one-piece wrap-around shades the width of a small road. No, no, look at me! I have the name of a company written in diamante down both sides of my head and it only cost me Euro300!
Or is it that after 20 years of on-again-off-again economic crisis and negligible productivity gains, Italians look more crappy because they are simply running out of money?
Despite the general modish malaise, there is in Citta di Castello (and doubtless in every other central Italian town of similar scale) one place where you will still see people dressed beautifully. It is the Tribunale, as I was reminded on a recent visit.
The local magistracy has moved to refurbished premises between Castello’s twin central squares. The improved setting only serves to point up the exquisite sartorial choices of the assembled lawyers and their magistrate peers: behold the delightfully tailored skirts; wonder at the aggressively fashionable yet sufficiently formal trousers; marvel at the cleverly-fitted, nipped-and-tucked jackets; the shoes, of course, go without saying.
It is all too easy to forget amid the sartorial ecstasy that one does not only go to a courtroom for a fashion show. Indeed I did not on this occasion. I was there for the latest round in our epic (just the eight years so far) case against James Fat Boy Stephens, his scrofulous geometra sidekick, and their Neapolitan builder friends, who at the end of the decade before this one left us with a roof that leaked in 12 places. A naïve person might think it a relatively straightforward case. As I said, a naïve person…
For those who have not had the pleasure, the experience of an Italian court is not unlike an Italian church service. People wander in and out at will, talking somewhat quietly and respectfully, but without – if truth be told – ever really quite believing in the institution.
On arrival on this occasion, it looked like standard fare. The magistrate dealing with whoever pushed themselves gently to the front of the queue. The magistrate wholly unable to remember details of specific cases — not surprising when hearings last about an hour and the gap between them is about a year. The lawyer of one of the counterparties failing to show up. Our lawyer regarding this as entirely reasonable – the other lawyer is, after all, ‘a colleague’. And lots and lots and lots of hanging around.
But it was not standard fare this time. Just when the presiding (honorary) magistrate was expected to say that she was accepting no further evidence and would now make a decision in the case, it was announced that Castello’s senior magistrate – the one who is togato (who’s got, at least rhetorically, the ‘toga’ of the career judge) – is personally taking over all cases dating from 2002 and earlier in order to clear them up. This has a strong whiff, in the contemporary political climate, of Berlusconi-goes-to-Naples-and-sorts-out-the-rubbish-in-five-minutes about it. And it’s a bit bizarre coming just when the sitting magistrate was (in theory) about to be forced to make up her mind anyway. But there is nothing we can do. We must go with the spettacolo, return in a couple of weeks and see what the beautifully-dressed ones have in store for us.
Living the caricature
April 6, 2009The time of great garden busy-ness is upon us. In the space of a couple of weeks, the garden has switched from winter deadness to a condition in which one suspects that plants – particularly grass – can be seen to be growing. The full range of weaponry, led by strimmer and tractor-lawn mower, are mobilised to beat back nature’s onslaught.
It is a bunch of work. The last week was particularly full-on. Fortunately, Italy offered up a couple of her exquisite absurdities to remind one that in the end ‘Why bother?’ is the most rational approach to life.
First, the postwoman arrived with one of those threatening, pale green, registered-post envelopes. It was a demand for payment of a parking fine from Pisa that was written on 23 February 2000.
A quick trawl through my files revealed that the Commune di Pisa already demanded payment of this fine in June 2004. At that point, the Pisa municipal police demanded I pay them Euro135,77 to reflect the original fine of just over Euro56, plus four years of late payment. Today, I am delighted to discover, they are offering to settle the whole thing for Euro111, 55 — a reduction of almost 20 percent on the 2004 figure.
This is most welcome, but leaves a difficult choice: should I settle now, or should I wait another five years in the hope of paying Euro90? A momentary reflection on the fiscal condition of the nation convinces me to cough up. I will, at least, hold my chin high about town, sure in the knowledge that I have both been dealt a bargain and that I have done my civic duty.
Unfortunately, I now remember why I never paid the 2004 demand. Neither of us was even in the country. But the wife suddenly figures out the answer. In 2000, we had just bought — brand new — the car that incurred the fine and, for some bizarre reason, decided to leave the keys with our hippy neighbour. The hippy’s family, we subsequently learned, comes from Pisa. So, it seems, the hippy borrowed our car and took a trip home. (What was wrong with his own wreck?). When he got a parking fine, the hippy presumably ate it, smoked it, or tore it up into decorative shreds and tried to sell it to a tourist.
I had been thinking that the lesson of the demand from Pisa was that one should only pay Italian parking fines when fully convenient, if at all. But that is only the smaller of two, separate lessons. The second, bigger lesson is to never, ever, ever leave your car keys with a hippy.