All posts by Deirdre Straughan

Getting Connected – Frustrations with Internet Service in Italy

July 31, 2003 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Two months back, I wrote about the pleasant surprise of finding Telecom Italia easier to deal with than they’d ever been before. Well, “easier” is a relative term. The phone line did get turned on immediately and all the plugs are working. The first bill also arrived immediately, and was twice what it should have been; they had forgotten to give us the discount for rolling over service from Milan to Lecco. So I had to call and straighten that out – strike one for Telecom.

I had also ordered “Alice Flash Mega,” Telecom’s top of the line ADSL Internet service, which would include a wireless router to network the family laptops to my big Dell desktop machine, so we could all be online simultaneously (increasingly an issue in this family). Obviously, this couldn’t be done until the phone line was installed, and I wasn’t in a hurry since I would be travelling; what little time I was home, I could limp along with a dial-up connection (these are offered free in Italy, since we pay by the minute even for local calls).

I planned to call Telecom and remind them once I got home, but, to my surprise, the modem was waiting for me when I arrived. The first part of the instructions actually reflected reality, so I was able to get the hardware and software working very easily. I stalled where the instructions referred to a username and password that I would need to connect; none were included in the box. I figured I would have to call Telecom on Monday.

However, when I fired up the Dell on Sunday to do some non-Internet things, Windows XP informed me that my modem was connected at 831 kbps. I supposed it had to be connected to something, so I opened Internet Explorer, and was taken immediately to a sign-up page for Alice, where I was able to make up my own username and password. I was then presented with “Alice’s Room,” where I could get into some cute services like online TV, or just go straight onto the ‘net.

This Dell had never been online before (I long ago gave up the struggle to get my previous service’s ADSL modem to work under Windows XP), so I spent the rest of Sunday preparing it to face the Internet. The steps included:

An hour or so of Windows XP security updates.
AVG Anti-Virus; I’ve been using the free edition for over a year, and it seems to be effective.
Zone Alarm (Basic edition, also free); this is a basic, fairly simply to use firewall. Once installed, you’ll be amazed (and probably alarmed) at just how often strangers come knocking at the “door,” looking for something left open so they can come in and mess up your computer home. Or steal your data. If you keep sensitive personal data on an Internet-connected computer, especially financial data such as credit card numbers, you should be paranoid, and you should have a firewall.
Ad-Aware. Cleans out the tracking software installed (silently) by many websites – it’s nobody’s business what I’m doing online, least of all the advertisers’.
The Google toolbar, which adds Google search right into the Internet Explorer toolbar (I can’t live without this now). The new 2.0 version is currently in beta testing, and includes pop-up blocking.
After installing everything, I went to <http://www.grc.com/> and used Steve Gibson’s Shields Up! to see whether my computer was leaking anything to the outside world. So far, it doesn’t seem to be. NB: The GRC site is somewhat intimidating and confusing, but worth the effort to understand what’s going on, so that you can ensure that your computer (and all the data in it) is closed off to hackers.

I called Telecom Italia on Tuesday to find out when to expect the network router. Turns out they had screwed up the order and given me the most basic ADSL service, which doesn’t include networking. Strike two for Telecom. So I had to put in an upgrade request, and am now awaiting a call (“within 10 days”) from the technician who is supposed to bring the network router and install it. Installation is included in the price, otherwise I’d just tell them to bring the router and let me deal with it. I have a feeling that the technician will do no better than I could myself, and a stronger feeling that I will have to upgrade the two laptops to Windows XP in order to get all the machines to talk to each other; I had a terrible time trying to do it with a regular, wired network, and gave up in the end.

I’m also waiting for another technician to come and check the line, which is very noisy when the modem’s attached, even with the ADSL filters on the phone plugs. Not supposed to be that way. Strike three for Telecom. Oh, well. At least so far I haven’t needed a bottle of whiskey.

(later on, I needed it. Read the full Telecom Italia saga)

living in Italy

Changing Bars

July 31, 2003 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

We always bought coffee on a “subscription,” a punch-card system, where you pay in advance for ten coffees and get a slight discount. During our last week in Milan, I finished my last card and began paying for each coffee individually. Around the third coffee, Italo said to me: “You can still get a new subscription; it will be honored after I leave.”

I was massively confused. “I’m not buying the subscription because I’m leaving,” I said, “We’re moving.”

“You’re leaving?! But so am I!”

It turned out that he had sold his bar, and would be leaving it to the new proprietors on July 15th. His explanation was that the neighborhood had changed, many of his old clients had moved (or died), and he just didn’t know how to do business in the new climate: “There’s always tension, always arguments.” The neighborhood is now multi-ethnic, with recent immigrants from South America, North Africa, and China, and Italo’s clientele was becoming noticeably more mixed. Maybe there is tension between the groups, or between immigrants and Italians. I had never noticed anything particular going on, but of course I wasn’t in there 14 hours a day like he was. It was disconcerting to realize that this neighborhood fixture was leaving just as we were. You can’t go “home” again; if you do, it will have changed out from under you.

Italian culture

Summer Lovin’ – An Italian Tradition of Infidelity

July 31, 2003 Deirdre Straughan 5 Comments

Summer in Italy is traditionally a time of marital infidelity. Not that Italians are terribly faithful to begin with; depending whose statistics you believe, many or most have betrayed their husbands or wives, and some do it regularly, at any time of year. (For the record: NOT speaking from experience here.)

But, when everyone’s away from home, things get even wilder. There’s a saying: “Ferragosto, moglie mia, non ti conosco,” which requires some explanation.

Ferragosto, on and around August 15th, is the big summer holiday, when you can confidently expect that EVERYTHING will be closed and almost everyone will be away from home. August 15th is the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, but having a holiday at this time reflects the long-standing Christian tradition of co-opting the older pagan festivals, in this case the month-long Roman feriae Augusti (feast in honor of Augustus, the deified emperor). Nowadays, “Ferragosto” refers to the week or so around the 15th, as well as the day itself, much as Americans would refer to the “4th of July weekend” (note that Italians take a week, while Americans only get a weekend!).

So the translation would be: “[On] Ferragosto, wife of mine, I don’t know you.”

I perceive a dual meaning in this that I’m not sure was originally intended. Obviously the husband is speaking, so it could mean: “Wife, I’m pretending I don’t know you because I’m with my lover.” Or it could be the man taken aback by his wife’s behavior: “I’ve never seen you like this.”

Either case apparently applies. Every summer there are stories in the paper about people being caught out by mischances. Some years ago the police, in an effort to curb street prostitution, published the license plate numbers of men caught in flagrante in their cars with prostitutes. There were loud complaints about the invasion of privacy, and several cases which probably ended up in divorce court: the men had been ostensibly working hard back in the cities while their families were on vacation at the seaside. Their wives were not pleased at what hubby was doing for recreation, outside of all that hard work.

Today there’s a tongue-in-cheek editorial in Il Corriere della Sera about the dangers of cellphones during the summer vacation: how do you stay in touch with your lover, while spending intensive time with your family? A call at an inopportune moment will require a level of acting improvisation that most of us simply aren’t up to, and your spouse will be watching like a hawk for the opportunity to grab your cellphone and review its list of calls made and received (erasing the list is an admission of guilt). The article concludes: “If you have nothing to hide, you can have fun watching others. Every time a cellphone rings on the beach, in a restaurant, or in an alpine refuge, look around you: you’ll see terrified husbands and wives.”