Spectator letters: Richard Ingrams defends Joan Littlewood, and the truth about Napoleon’s poisonous wallpaper

The state of Italy…

Sir: Ambassador Terracciano’s letter (Letters, 1 November) about Nicholas Farrell’s article (‘The dying man of Europe’, 25 October) seems to me to be ill-researched and not thought through.

Nicholas Farrell is spot on. The Ambassador is not. In another forum the Ambassador, on being asked what Italian nationals contribute to Britain, claimed that: ‘There is no area in which they don’t excel. Not only finance and management but also culture and the scientific and medical world, from professorship at Oxford to the chorus director of the Royal Opera, from the Science Festival at Cambridge to the director of the Tate Gallery in Liverpool.’ Has he ever stopped to think why this talent is in England, and not in Italy? More careful perusal of Nicholas Farrell’s article might help him. Or perhaps he should himself try running any activity, even the least significant, in Italy today.

I could add hundreds of specific cases to bolster Farrell’s claims, of constant disorganisation, time wasting, obstruction, procrastination and worse, all of which make it impossible for anyone who wishes to achieve anything at all to work in Italy. Even if we agree that there are many in Italy today who are trying to tackle these problems it seems to me that they cannot be trying very hard, and are certainly not doing very well.
Odile Taliani
Vienna, Austria

…and how to fix it

Sir: Nicholas Farrell sums up well what many people, including Italians, think about the state of the country today; an unacceptable level of public debt, recession turning to deflation, high unemployment, inefficient public administration, and the alarming fact that over the past five years the economy has shrunk by 9 per cent. But before writing Italy off as ‘a basket case’, we need to look at some of the more positive aspects, such as good export performance of many Italian companies, a primary surplus, a high level of private savings, and an attempt to rationalise local administration where the provinces are to be dismantled.