Tags
AC Milan, Berlusconi, Civilisation, Defend the modern world, Enjoying myself, Inter Milan, Italy, Juventus, Lega Nord, Milan, Milano, Northern italy, Padania, Summer, Sunshine, Vacation
I’ve been in Italy for five days. A late summer holiday. (I’ll of course be back to writing next week.)
I must admit it has been nice to have a break from thinking about doom-laden things. It’s also a great pleasure to return to Italian soil.
One can hardly overstate the beauty of this country. Every nook and cranny is worthy of a painting or a poem. Streets are glamorously narrow (the kind you see on those posters in Caffe Nero). Houses are artworks in themselves. Even the poorer-seeming buildings, marked with age and sour in colour, retain a strange and ancient dignity, unlike any equivalent on England’s threadbare estates.
I’ve been travelling mainly around the Northern cities this time; a region quite remarkable on its own two feet. The area is referred to as ‘Padania’ by its more nationalistic residents and there is a well-established movement to make it independent. This movement (spearheaded by the Lega Nord – Northern League) is stupid, but its motivating logic is not difficult to grasp.
Padania (Northern Italy) is one of the most productive regions of the European Union. Every Italian carmaker you’ve ever heard of has its base or construction centre here; Maserati, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo being some of the largest and most well known. ‘Padanian’ cities include the historic splendours of Milan, Venice, Turin and Genoa. (Milan incidentally is every inch as beautiful as Rome). The people of Padania are said to be ethnically Celtic and are resented for a snobbish attitude towards their southern countrymen, much like the English North-South divide in reverse.
Despite this affluence, and though I’ve tried to keep politics out of my mind, the signs of the European times are visible even here. Young people seem in a different (lower) mood than the last time I was in Milan. Though the employment rate is better than in the South, there are still many sad and bored looking faces to be found in the afternoon. The Piazza del Duomo is fuller in the daytime than before. There are more drunk people than before. There are more unused buildings than before.
Still, for a comfortable resident or tourist, the life here is almost faultless. The time goes by too quickly. Europe has never seemed so precious.
D, LDN.
Defend the Modern World 
Well, Greece and Rome are the founts of Western Civilization and hence, in a way, World Civilization, as most of the (civilized) world, whether they like it or not, whether they accept it or not, have in many ways internalized certain ‘Western’ values that had made the West so successful in innovation and quality of life.
Viva Italia!
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I’d love to go to Greece sometime. Very attractive.
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Here’s an irony: I’ve just come back from a three-week visit to the UK, and I had the same reaction that you’re having to Italy. Every place we went, with few exceptions, seemed drenched in history, dignity, beauty and cultural significance. We visited centuries-old libraries and cathedrals, as well as museums and theatres, and were deeply moved by the feeling of connecting with the roots of our English-speaking civilization. I felt so passionately that the UK must be saved from the Islamist threat, I can hardly express it. (I also felt that the UK must be saved from Americanization, but that’s a different matter.) I saw hijabs and more than a few niqabs everywhere, but also spoke with more than a few English people who pretty much all said that the problem is severe and that the immigrants need to be shipped out. I was heartened by these small signs that the English people haven’t resigned themselves to defeat yet. If you could see the UK through the eyes of a visiting American Anglophile, you might be surprised at how much it too seems like a precious jewel of Western Civilization that simply cannot be lost.
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That’s interesting. I suppose when you’ve lived here for years, it loses its sparkle. Where in Britain did you visit?
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A lot of places — ones that come to mind immediately are the Bodleian Library at Oxford where we spent most of a day, Winchester Cathedral, Winchester Castle and Great Hall — the figures in the stained glass are like a who’s who of history, the Winston Churchill War Rooms in London (intensely inspiring), the National Portrait Gallery, the Mayflower steps in Plymouth (a small monument but it was nice to see it for the way it describes the founding of America as the spreading of a light from England), the Globe Theatre in London — there was a moment in “Comedy of Errors” when the actors performed a dance to what sounded like Renaissance music, and I suddenly felt transported back in time and was deeply moved by the thought that people have been reading and performing Shakespeare for 400 years, the John Rylands library in Manchester (my friend called it “a cathedral for books”), and a lot of places we saw only from the outside — Houses of Parliament, Westminster Cathedral, the Tower of London, and so forth. We also spent a lot of time in the more rural and green parts of England, and there too there was a sense of a great civilization, but in a different way — the cultural values of a people are expressed not just in large historic events but in the way they build their houses and their towns, and you could see a sense of a civilized and thoughtful society with a kind of gentle orderliness and beauty in the layout of the villages and fields and hedgerows, the stone buildings, the flowers that were in evidence almost everywhere (you may not notice them, if you’re used to the way England looks, but there are a lot more flowers about than I think we tend to have in the US), the green lawns, and so forth. Even the road system — you take it for granted, but the road markings and signage are very organized and thorough and by and large very good, and that right there expresses cultural values. Of course we also saw signs of decline — youths in Glastonbury had recently been on a rampage trashing their downtown, for instance — but there was still often a strong feeling of what to me felt like “what England is all about” in the centuries-old buildings and towns and the signs of civic pride and community cohesion that are still there: things like the flowers, the groups of church-bell ringers in villages (including a lot of young people, from what I saw), and people who take pride in knowing and sharing the history of their area — there were lots of docents and tour guides who were volunteers. I saw a lot that worried me about the future of England, as you can imagine, but I also saw a lot that made me feel strongly about the history and civilization that’s worthy of cherishing.
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Wow. I couldn’t help feel a twinge of pride reading that. You’re a very vivid writer. I’ve been to Oxford a couple of times. It does have a cerebral charm to it and not completely to do with the university.
If you come again and want a sort of anti-tour – an insight into British decay – I would recommend such places as Stoke, Bradford and Slough. There’s not much marbled renown there unfortunately.
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PS: I actually think some Americanisation could be beneficial. We sorely need a libertarian capitalist movement like the Tea Party. American religiosity is also something I admire.
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That could be. The part of Americanisation that I didn’t like was the spread of chain stores. How many Starbucks and Banana Republic outlets does this world actually need?
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p.s. I also agree about the religiosity — the decline of Christianity in Britain may just prepare the ground for Islamization. Here in the US, we worry about what we call “religious nuts,” but at least they’re usually Christian religious nuts. And there are lots and lots of non-nutty Christians too.
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Indeed. Our nutters tend either to be Muslim or some rabid disciple of Richard Dawkins. It’s not a nice choice to be faced with.
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p.s. It was interesting to hear the views of these English people because I wasn’t in the slightest leading things along or suggesting any particular solution to the problems — I was just listening to what they had to say, and they had plenty to say. People I heard from were not advocating violence, but they were in favor of legal, political remedies that would greatly reduce the Islamic presence.
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I always spent my half an hour to read this weblog’s content every
day along with a mug of coffee.
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