Com'é bello far l'amore da Trieste in giú?

Lots of southern love to everybody. Italy is so strikingly diverse country that I have enjoyed travelling everywhere here, but since it after all was the Mezzogiorno I most wanted from this year I'm feeling now quite ready to move on. The last two weeks were awesome and about them I'll brief later, first let's have a look on the elections -also to understand why a one-way ticket to Albania next month starts to get quite symbolic dimensions. It's sometimes hard to grasp whether Italy indeed is the kitchen, or the open-air art gallery, of Europe...or rather a mix of a madhouse, a retirement home and a kindergarten.

Financial Times has covered the elections well so check here if you need further information; to put it simply, it went pretty much as many predicted and the center-left platform won, although even with a majority smaller than expected/feared. Italy has a two-chamber system and in the lower one the Union is well off -but in the upper one, with 158 senators against 156, much less so. Therefore Prodi's coalition will be too weak and too dependent on the extreme-left (that were one of the biggest winners) to push through anything useful.

That's sad. If Italy's problems were only today's problems and without any external hazards it might be able to muddle through with mere reforms, but they are not. To survive it needs a throughout change and that is something that neither Prodi nor Berlusconi, nor any other senile old man, is ready or willing or able to deliver -simply because people who elect them are even less.

I know many Italians, most of them young and educated and thus (supposedly) the most dynamic and open-minded guys of the playground, and they just either don't want to see change, don't want to see enough of it, or -as it's most common- just don't want to be told what it means in practice. I guess their logic, no matter how bad their job prospects, goes that this stagnation is just due to one more global recession that will eventually go away and bring the old dolce vita back. That's not anymore sad but fatal, because the framework in which Italian policy-making takes place doesn't allow too much breathing space:

Italian economy is structurally out of date -firms are too small and doing wrong things. Which means that Italy must finally let its declining industries, and their workforce, to shrink. That will be painful since Italy's unemployment benefits tend to, on case-by-case basis, cover only workers in big companies -that Italy doesn't have. The pain their government can't ease by creating new safety nets because its public debt is already 107 per cent of GDP and growing -whereas the Maastricht criteria has it that 60% is still considered 'manageable'.

Ruined public finances don't provide very bright prospects for a country that also happens to has one of the world's lowest fertility rates -something which in Italy then has more to do with the 'prolonged adolescence' than things that could be maybe sorted out with money (that Italy doesn't have), like children daycare and cheaper housing.

Add Italy's hilarious, even if slightly reformed, pension system -of which I don't have and am too amused to search data now- and you get exactly a sort of cycle that presently is just too viciously invisible to be broken. It might be done somewhere else, but definitely not here, not with these people.

Berlusconi may be a cunt but he's not a cunt because he sounds like one. Most of all he's a cunt because he's a criminal. He's also a little bit of cunt because he didn't start tackling Italy's problems -and thus for example jeopardized the future of my currency- but for fuck's sake, may no one claim that he was the one who created them. You just can't do things wrong -päin hevonvittua, like we say in Finnish, or in fica al cavallo, for some 30 years and then think you can get away with it so easily.

The Italian job -whatever it was- got done, in the first place, quite badly.