Category Archives: bio

bio, living in Italy

Smog Days: Italy’s Pollution Problem

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When I was a kid in Pittsburgh and Connecticut, waking up to find snow on the ground was always exciting, because it meant the possibility of a snow day – a day off from school due to dangerous road conditions. I’d crouch over the radio, holding my breath for the longed-for announcement that my school district was closed, so I’d be free to play all day in the wonderful snow.

It snows very rarely here in Milan, never enough to close the schools. But in January we almost had an analogous phenomenon: smog days.

Northern Italy normally gets enough rain in the winter to wash away the poisons belched into the air by oil-burning heating systems and far too many cars. But not this year: we went nearly sixty days with no rain at all. As we enjoyed the sunshine, the poisonous gases and particulates accumulated to dangerous levels. After the air quality had been officially “terrible” for nine days in a row, environmental laws forced many communities to close their streets to traffic. In Milan, we had several Sundays of no cars at all, which was very pleasant; the streets were delightfully quiet. However, this was not likely to have much effect on the smog, because many Milanese go out of town on the weekends anyway and do their driving elsewhere.

The next solution tried was four days of “alternate license plates” – on even-numbered dates, only cars with even-numbered license plates could be on the road, and vice-versa for odd dates. This meant that many more people were forced to take public transport, so, to lighten the load on the buses, trams, and subways, the regional government also decreed that all middle- and high-school students would start school at 10:00 rather than 8:00. (The kids, of course, were heartbroken.) There was even the threat of a no-cars Friday, which would have meant closing all city and state government offices and schools, but then it rained just enough for a last-minute reprieve.

We’ve since had enough wind and rain to clear the air thoroughly, but the lesson gets clearer as the air gets murkier: Italy has a serious, long-term pollution problem that we can’t depend on the weather to solve. Real, long-term solutions in sight? Few. For now, as for so many years, hopes of truly effective change appear to be lost in a sea of political wrangles, while more and more cars continue to squeeze into Italy’s smog-choked cities.

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bio

Car Stories

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I have never yet driven in Europe. We moved to Italy when our daughter was 15 months old. During a trip around the US when she was 3 or 4, we talked about what we would do on the next leg of the trip, when we got to California:

“We’ll rent a car at the airport and I’ll drive us to where we’re staying,” I said.

“You can’t drive,” retorted Ross.

“Yes, I certainly can drive.”

“No, women don’t drive.”

This apparently logical conclusion was drawn from the fact that she had never seen me drive. However, she made this statement while in a car which my friend Sue was driving! Confronted with the fact that Sue was driving and was indubitably female, Ross had to revise her ideas.

When we arrived in California and picked up the rental car, I sat in the parking lot, carefully doing all the things you’re supposed to do when you first get into a new car: check the mirrors, adjust the seat, etc. After several minutes of watching me fiddling around, Ross burst out: “You’re so dumb you don’t even know how to drive a car!”

Thanks, kid – just what I needed to hear when I was in fact feeling a bit nervous, not having driven for a while. But a few days later she graciously told me: “You drive pretty well.”

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bio, travel

Early Tourist in Nepal

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We visited Nepal in 1969 or ’70, when I was about seven years old. The country had only recently been opened to tourism, after a Russian named Boris Lisanevich persuaded the then king that this would be a good source of income for his impoverished country. Boris himself ran the first hotel, called the Palace because it had formerly been one (later, and until his death a few years ago, he ran the famous Yak and Yeti). We were the only guests there in January, so Boris invited us up to his private apartment to celebrate Russian Christmas.

Boris’ apartment was large, with white-uniformed servants everywhere. He had a huge silver artificial Christmas tree loaded with glass ornaments. He also had a snow leopard cub, orphaned by hunters. The cub was small, only about knee-high to me, but well equipped with teeth and claws. It seemed to fear the Nepali servants, perhaps because they reminded it of the hunters who had killed its mother. Because I wasn’t Nepali, or perhaps because I was also small, and generally got along well with cats, it liked me. I spent an ecstatic evening petting and hugging it; it was and probably still is the most beautiful thing I’d ever touched.

The cub only intermittently stayed calmly in my arms, however. At intervals it would go berserk and attack the silver Christmas tree. It would rush up the tree’s skinny metal trunk, so high that the tree would begin to bend under its weight. Then it would knock one of the glass ornaments to the floor, leap down, and eat it. A few minutes later it would vomit up a mess of thin broken glass.

Other memories of Nepal include my first experience of cold weather, and warming up by drinking sweet, milky tea, with arrowroot biscuits dipped in. (Tea seemed to me a very grown-up thing to drink.) And of course I saw Everest – from a distance. I was carsick on the drive up, vomiting out the window all over the side of the black Ambassador car, so I didn’t care very much by the time we got to there. In any case, we could only see a peak like all the others, so far off that it looked disappointingly smaller than many closer peaks.

Years later, in Mussoorie, I met Sir Edmund Hillary, then New Zealand’s Ambassador to India. He had come to see Everest House, a ruin a few kilometers out of town. The house had previously had a different name, but was renamed in honor of George Everest, because he had been living there when he finished the triangulations and calculations to determine that Chomolungma was the world’s highest peak – presumably he then modestly christened it with his own name.

Mar 24, 2004

I later learned that I had unjustly accused George Everest. John Keay’s The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named, explains that the British government named the mountain Everest to honor George Everest’s achievement in completing the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. The data from this survey made it possible to identify the mountain as the world’s highest, but it also made many other things possible – and I highly recommend the book.

(Note: I don’t remember when this post was originally published on my old website – given the additional note at the end, it was clearly before 2004. I’m arbitrarily selecting today’s date in 2002, because it’s definitely one of my earliest posts. If there are any surviving photos of this trip, I don’t have them. Definitely none of the snow leopard, sadly.)

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bio, parenting

When the Mom’s Away…

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I began travelling for work when my daughter Rossella was in preschool. Sometimes I went for extended periods, and took her with me; she attended daycare in several different parts of the US, which was good for her English, and gave her exposure to American culture. For shorter trips, she stayed home in Milan with Enrico, who is a very good father and fully competent to take care of his daughter.

The mothers of Ross’ preschool classmates weren’t convinced of this, however.

“I’m off to California for two weeks,” I would announce.

Collective gasp:”Who will take care of Rossella?”

“She does have a father,” I would respond, amused.

One of Ross’ teachers told me a story to illustrate just how incompetent fathers could be: a father one morning had to get his daughter up and dressed for school. She arrived neat, clean, and nicely dressed in a blouse and skirt. But, to the teachers’ shock, lacking underwear.

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bio, opinion

National Self-Esteem

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Can a country have an inferiority complex? Certainly the US strongly feels its own superiority, and this is reflected in its media. As pointed out in a Doonesbury cartoon years ago, a lot of American advertising uses the word “America” to sell products that have nothing to do with nationality. Mike Doonesbury asks: “Why are Americans so insecure about themselves? Do any other countries make ads that are so relentlessly chauvinistic?”

As a matter of fact, they don’t – at least not that I’ve seen. But Mike had the wrong end of the stick: the driving force here is not insecurity, but pride. Americans have a strong sense of what it means to be American, and it’s the kind of warm, fuzzy feeling that makes advertisers want to create a link (in the public mind) between their product and “being American.”

Watching American TV, you might get the idea that American is not only the best thing to be, it’s the only thing to be. The American media tends to ignore the rest of the world, at least until forced by events to sit up and take notice.

To a point, this is understandable; most news organizations report to a local/national audience whose interest in faraway events is limited. In reports of, say, an airline disaster, the local news will say that “x number of people from our country were involved, x others;” I’ve seen this in both the UK and Italy. The disasters that no one local is likely to be involved in get short shrift indeed: “x thousand people killed in floods in Bangladesh. End of story.”

But the United States is the leading player on the world stage, so other countries’ news media report extensively on America’s affairs, both internal and external. What happens in America affects the world. (This, by the way, is a huge responsibility, but one that most Americans seem unaware that they carry.)

Italy, on the other hand, seems to have an inferiority complex. It’s the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy, yet Italians seem to feel that Italy doesn’t really deserve much of a position on the world stage. Maybe I’m just imagining things, but I get this impression most strongly from the Italian news media.

The US public probably would not have noticed that Italy sent troops to the Gulf War, but the Italian TV news gave “our boys” lots of coverage, partly, I suppose, because it was easier and cheaper to interview them than soldiers of other nationalities. But sometimes it felt as if the Italian journalists were like the nerdy kid who tries too hard to get noticed by the rest of the class: “See, see! We’re there, too!”

A couple of Italian pilots managed to do something newsworthy: they were shot down, captured, and beat up by the Iraqis. The Italian press was delirious: finally, we have something momentous to say about Italy’s participation in the war.

Italy’s lack of national self-esteem shows in other ways. There are some things that everyone acknowledges the Italians are good at: food, design, leather. But beyond that, many Italians are convinced that the Americans do it better. Back when I was with Incat Systems, a small Italian company bent on conquering the global CD-R software market, we had trouble selling our software to Italians; some thought that software from Italy couldn’t possibly be any good. When half of the company moved to California and the same Easy CD software had an American address on it, more Italians were eager to buy it: it’s American, it must be good. (Whether Italian or American, Easy CD went on to take the lion’s share of the worldwide CD-R market; that’s why Adaptec bought it.)

As far as American customers knew, Easy CD was always an American product. Years later, when Easy CD Creator 4 was released, the suggested retail price (SRP) was $99 in the US, with a $20 rebate. In Europe SRP was set at the after-rebate price of $79. I got vitriolic email from an American: “How dare you give a lower price to foreigners on an American product?”

My response was: “The original Easy CD Creator was the offspring of Easy CD, developed in Italy, and CD Creator, developed in Canada. Even today, of the engineering staff in California, at least half were not born in America. So what exactly is an ‘American’ product?”

Never heard from him again.

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