The Italians are an easy-going lot as a rule. Except when it comes to domestic matters. I do not refer to politics, of course, but to matters pertaining to the household. When my parents owned a house outside Pisa, they employed a cook called Amelia and a maid whose name is now a long-distant memory to me.
What is not a distant memory, however, is how those two scrawny-looking women with skin like Egyptian papyrus fought each other. The maid would clonk Amelia over the chops with a broomstick and Amelia would retaliate with a spaghetti fork. These rows were usually about Amelia’s husband who drove a bakery van.
Amelia was convinced that there was more in the van, which left the house at midnight, than just bread. Someone was buttering it or rather buttering up her husband and she suspected the maid of being the butter knife. Incidentally, it turned out that Amelia was right. The maid became in danger of being forked for life so we were forced to let her go. I had never seen anyone so pleased to be sacked.
All in all, however, the Italians like a quiet life. They don’t usually stick their head over the parapet when it comes to international politics, at least not since Mussolini.
The row which has marked the start of Italy’s six-month presidency of the European Union seemed uncharacteristic. As you will recall, Silvio Berlusconi got up and told a German MEP that he looked like a Nazi prison camp guard. I wondered what the average Italian, the man on the strada, thought of this and decided to find out.
I began my researches on the Alitalia flight to Rome. Four nattily dressed men were downing some red wine near my seat.
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