Category Archives: living in Italy

bio, living in Italy

Italian Winter Weather

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The first time we visited Milan, in January of 1991, there were about four inches of snow on the ground. It melted the next day, and in the 12 years we lived in Milan after that I only saw snow falling once or twice a year, some years not at all, and rarely enough to stick. For the last few years, February has been mild, April cold and rainy, and everyone complained about how the seasons weren’t what they used to be (a lament that has probably been heard since the australopithecines).

Today it’s snowing in Lecco. A lot. Just like it did the week before last, and the week before that, and I lose count before that. A few weeks ago we took in “refugees,” six of Ross’ classmates who had commuted up to an hour to get to school, only to find it cancelled because snow was falling and the heating system wasn’t working.

The kids weren’t a problem, but I’ve had enough of winter. I never liked cold weather in the first place. I was born in New Orleans, subsequently lived in Texas, Hawaii, and Thailand. I never saw snow actually falling out of the sky until we got to Pittsburgh, when I was 11. I hate having to dress up in layers and layers of clothing to go outside, then when you go into a shop or come home again you’re too hot and have to undress. I have no circulation in my hands and feet, so they’re always icy cold (cold hands, warm heart – I’d settle for the reverse). I even have chilblains on my toes this year, probably from wearing wimpy shoes in a misguided attempt to be fashionable, before I found a pair of decent-looking fur-lined boots in England.

One problem specific to Italian winters is that most of us have no control over home heating – condominium buildings are usually centrally-heated, and the thermostat is set according to government regulations. Heating goes on October 15th and off April 15th, regardless of actual outside temperatures. And it’s turned way down during hours that most people are out of the house, e.g. 10 am to noon, which happen to be my peak working hours in my home office. So I’m sitting at my desk wearing ski socks and fleece slippers (still going strong – thanks, Laura and Larry!), a turtleneck, corduroy trousers, and a Kashimiri shawl.

Heating also gets turned off at night when we’re all supposed to be in bed. There are few things more miserable than being wide awake at 4 am with jetlag, and you can’t even read in bed because it’s too cold to put your arms outside the covers (yes, there is another activity which could warm you up in bed, but that only works at 4 am when both of you have jetlag).

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bio, living in Italy

The Post Office: An Italian Tradition of Bureaucracy

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I hope that my friends and relatives have forgiven me for the fact that I have never mailed presents to them from Italy. I either have something shipped directly from a company in the US, or I wait til I’m in the US myself, preferably actually visiting the person in question, to give gifts.

This is because I hate the Italian post office, which symbolizes all the worst of Italian bureaucracy: poorly organized, sluggish, and completely uninterested in self-improvement.

Part of the problem is that it tries to do too many things. As in other European countries, in Italy the post office functions as a kind of government bank, where pensions are withdrawn and some types of payments to the government are made, e.g. the annual television tax, and fees for school lunches. It is also possible to make payments to third parties, such as utilities, via the post office.

As you can imagine, this banking function leads to long lines, especially during the early part of the month when all the retirees show up to collect their pensions. And, in the early years, it somehow never occurred to anybody in authority to separate postal functions from banking functions: same line, same window, whether you were paying a bill, collecting a pension, or just trying to mail a letter.

If you only needed to mail a letter, you could always buy stamps at a tabacconist. But registered letters could only be registered at the post office, and, given the unreliability of the delivery service, it was necessary to register anything whose delivery you actually cared about. Once, after standing in line for half an hour behind little old ladies carefully counting their coins, I asked the man why they didn’t have a separate window for just plain post. He gave a bored shrug. “This is the way it’s done.”

Yet, six months later, they started doing it differently: suddenly we had one window for any kind of mailing, one for stamps only, and three for banking. At first I heaved a big sigh of relief, but I soon realized that they had assigned the dimmest bulb in the office to the post window. It would take him ten minutes to figure out postage (they were still doing it by hand then) and fill in (again by hand) his part of the registration form. Sometimes he gave me the wrong form, so I would have to fill things out twice. Once, on a very urgent item, he called me when I had returned home and told me I’d have to come back and pay more, because HE had made a mistake on the postage. And he wouldn’t send this urgent letter until I’d come back and paid.

The banking function didn’t work so well, either. Each payment slip had three portions: one that vanished into the system (although the transaction was also recorded on a computer somewhere), one that you gave to the payee to prove you had paid, and one that you were supposed to keep. Unfortunately, I did not realize how critical it was to keep these receipts for the rest of your natural life. We were dunned for payment, three years after the fact, for three months of Rossella‘s 5th grade school lunches. I had entered into our home accounting system the date that these had been paid, in a single transaction, but had not kept the receipt to prove it. Enrico spent days in postal administrative offices all over Milan – the system was centralized enough to accept payment from anywhere, but not enough to allow the local branch to trace a payment that they had taken. The amount of money was not huge, but Enrico got stubborn about it, and eventually prevailed.

Another fun thing about banking in the post office is that it means that, during the early part of the month, a relatively insecure office is holding enormous amounts of cash, and doling it out to tottery old ladies. This leads to regularly-scheduled muggings and fleecings of old people just outside the post office, and to the national sport of post office robbery. I once arrived at our local PO in Milan to find a robbery underway, with a huge crowd milling outside to see what was going on. I hightailed it in the other direction.

The good news is that global competition has affected even the Italian postal system. Mail now arrives more quickly and reliably than it ever has in the past, and many post offices have become sleek, computerized, and almost a pleasure to be in. It’s no longer necessary to register everything; priority mail seems to be fast and trustworthy.

Now I’m making a real test of the system: I mailed my first-ever package from Italy, to my mother, a few weeks ago. It was a heavy book, so I didn’t send it priority, and I’m therefore not surprised that it hasn’t arrived yet. If it eventually gets there, I’ll be pleased, and maybe not even too surprised.

Feb 22, 2004 – I am happy to report that my mother received her book a day or two after the above went out.

Feb 23, 2006

I must say, the Poste Italiane are really modernizing. You can do a lot of stuff online now (such as track a registered letter), and their site even has an English version.

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Strikes and More Strikes

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Italy’s 155,000 public medical employees are on strike today, led, with unusual unanimity, by all 42 of their unions. The major issue is that their contracts were due to be renewed two years ago (I suppose that implies cost-of-living increases, at least), and have not been, due to disagreements between the federal and regional governments over who should pay. The medics have also issued a multi-point protest document demanding the de-politicization of hospital appointments and more control by the medical personnel of their shifts and how their work is organized, which seem reasonable demands.

Alitalia is also on strike, protesting a restructuring plan for the struggling airline which would cut at least 1500 jobs. I don’t sympathize with this one. The entire airline industry is in trouble; why should we taxpayers pay to keep an ill-managed national airline afloat when better and/or cheaper flights are widely available? I fly low-cost airlines so I can go more places, more often, but I lose that advantage if I also have to pay more taxes to benefit Alitalia employees.

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Scenes from the Fashion World

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Milan, as someone is sure to tell you when you go there, is one of the fashion capitals of the world. This never affected my life there in any direct way (and I sometimes wonder about fashion’s real effects on everyday Milanese), but, during the spring and fall fashion weeks, the city is suddenly full of tall, skinny people, walking around purposefully with big binders under their arms. Some of them are indeed remarkably beautiful, but it’s surprising how ordinary many of them look, without the makeup. Except for being impossibly tall and skinny.

Some years ago, on the Milan metro, I witnessed the following scene:

Three young Italian men boarded the train. They were reasonably good-looking and stylishly dressed, buttoned up for warmth in their trendy new black leather jackets, their hair artfully combed and gelled. They talked loudly, clearly wanting to draw attention to their own utter coolness. A couple of stops later, the doors slid open, and in glided two more young men. Not Italian, possibly American – they didn’t say a word, so I couldn’t guess by the language. They weren’t extremely tall, but they were built. Their scuffed-up leather jackets were draped negligently, hanging half off their muscular shoulders. Their jeans were casually torn and maybe a bit grimy. Their manes of dark blond hair were tousled. They flung themselves across four seats, sprawling elegantly, every movement and body angle exuding: “We’re so gorgeous, we don’t have to do anything to attract your attention but just BE here.”

The three young Italians got very quiet and very small. At the next stop, they slunk off the train without a word.

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living in Italy

Service With(out) a Smile

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I’ve bitched at length about Telecom Italia and Tiscali (my current and past Internet service providers), and the lack of customer service nous shown by both. Foreigners in Italy often complain that Italians generally don’t have a concept of customer service, and I’d have to say that’s a fair assessment, amply demonstrated in most chain stores, supermarkets, Ikea, etc.

If you want good customer service, go to the backbone of the Italian economy: the family-owned business. For 12 years in Milan I bought bread, meat, fruit & veg., cleaning supplies, school supplies, ice cream and coffee from our neighborhood shops. All of these were owned by individuals or families, though some had a few non-family employees, and some changed hands over time. We built up relationships with the shopowners. They saw us move into the neighborhood as a young couple. Some used to call us the sposini – newlyweds – because we shopped together, which they found terribly cute. They saw our daughter grow up. Every one had an onboard “database” of customer information, knew our tastes and preferences, and could therefore serve us faster and better.

I shopped at supermarkets only rarely, mostly for things I couldn’t get at the smaller shops. Supermarkets are often cheaper, but to me they were not worth the standing in line and the impersonality (some smaller supermarkets do manage to be friendlier).

I was afraid I’d feel lost when we moved to Lecco, having to re-establish my network of suppliers, but it hasn’t been a problem. I’ve become a regular at some shops, albeit a new regular, and the owners already know me, or at least they act as if they do. And, even if they don’t know me, they are courteous; as owners, they have a direct and compelling interest in my return.

What Italians have yet to develop is a sense of ownership in “mere” employees, especially of large and chain stores. I’ve had some terrible experiences at Ikea,Upim, and Coin (the latter two are chain department stores). American stores are almost all chains, but they have customer service down to a fine art: everyone smiles and greets you in every store you enter; in some grocery stores I’ve been positively spooked by the number of employees offering to help me (maybe I look lost). You could say that this is false friendliness designed to get more money out of you, but that’s what a store is all about, isn’t it?

update: Customer service at Ikea in Italy has vastly improved

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