I had been waiting for the Italian election to be decided before I wrote about it, and as of Saturday afternoon it appears the deadlock has been broken. Silvio Berlusconi has said that he will resign and Romano Prodi has his speaker of the senate, Franco Marini. This was only after 4 parliamentary votes that gave the Prodi coalition its first real test. But let’s go back a few weeks to the election itself.

I was in Italy during the election with the HB. We had travelled by train from Vienna and arrived in time for the election. It was an exciting time. There were election pamphlets everywhere. No windshield wiper or rear window was free of them. We were in Tuscano, in Firenze specifically. There were no Berlusconi supporters to be found in Toscano. Everyone from the taxi drivers to the hotel staff were Prodi supporters.

If Toscano had been reflective of all of Italy, Romano Prodi would have won by a landslide. Italy, however, is a fractious country. Italians have never really ever believed that it is anything more than the city-states that for so long defined it. That is why, when you tell someone from Villareggio that you had good lasagne in Pisa he will reply quizzically, “You had good lasagne in Pisa?!?” It may seem minor, but it is emblematic of the Italian psyche.

So, we knew better than to hope for a landslide; that would never happen in Italy. But, we had never expected the election to be as close as it was. Prodi’s coalition won by an incredibly narrow margin. To give Silvio credit, the outcome was in doubt for several days. That said, he really should have given it up a lot sooner. But then, Silvio has never been known for having a keen sense of logic, or irony.

This is the man who said that he was giving up sex for the election period. He also compared himself to Christ in the travails he’s had to face. He went on to state that anyone who didn’t vote for him was an unprintable Italian scatological word for a part of the human anatomy (yes, that’s redundant). (more…)

I’ve been away for a few weeks. I was in Vienna (Wien) and then Florence (Firenze). I had always said that I wouldn’t go to Austria as long as Jörge Haider was still drawing a breath, but I had a need to see Klimt and Schiele. So, off I went to Wien.

Wien was decimated during the Second World War (see: The Third Man) and it didn’t profit by its reconstruction. There are rows upon rows of ugly concrete apartment blocks. As I looked out of my hotel window, I realized once again that many people don’t care where they live. Or perhaps it’s that they can’t afford to care. We don’t all have a real choice as to our living arrangements.

Wien has its charms. Stadt Park and the Hofburg Quarter are two. It certainly has good food and lots of it. It has some of the most dramatic skies in the world. It’s exciting to watch the weather move through. Yet, somehow I kept thinking of that saying, “How clever those Austrians, they’ve made the world think that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.”

There is a lively art scene in Wien, and the museums are top notch; but I kept wanting to stop old men and ask them what they did in the war. I had this same desire in Spain every time I saw an old man wearing a beret. “Whose side were you on?” In Spain no one would ever own up to having heard of Franco, so I couldn’t engage anyone in a discussion about him. This is why I should never go to places like Austria, Germany, Poland, or anyplace that capitulated or conspired with the Nazis. Of course, that would put most of Europe off limits for me. So, it’s best I don’t think about it. (more…)