Articles by: Judith Harris

Desperate to save money, in a Senate debate over the 2009 budget last Friday the Italian government revealed plans to slash its E 537 million ($692 million) annual subsidy to the country’s 13,000 private schools, of which roughly half are Catholic with over half a million students—especially in elementary schools—and 41,000 teachers. The planned cut was to be of E 134 million ($172.6 million) distributed over the coming three years..


During the past three years about one-third of the subsidy had already been eliminated.


The Church reaction was uncommonly swift. That same morning Monsignor Bruno Stenco, who heads the Italian bishops conference (CEI) schools sector, said that already state subsidies pay for less than half their teachers, and warned that, should these new cuts go through, “the federations of Catholic schools will mobilize countrywide.” The possibility that the clergy would circulate petitions was also aired.


Pope Benedict XVI moved with similar rapidity; speaking Friday the pontiff pointedly urged “the adoption of measures in aid of parents in their inalienable right to educate their children according to their own ethical and religious convictions.”


No less swiftly, budget hatchet man Giulio Tremonti, 61, who is Minister of the Economy and Finance, backed down, announcing that an amendment to the schools budget would restore some E. 120 million ($155 million). Supposedly, the amendment had been written before the loud Catholic protest, but this did little to silence Government critics.


“When the Vatican whistles, Tremonti comes running,” sneered Paolo Ferrero, 48, a former cabinet minister under Romano Prodi and head of Rifondazione Comunista.


Watching on the sidelines were irate public school and university students and teachers, fresh from huge piazza demonstrations all over Italy, themselves battling (and losing) similarly radical cuts in the budgets for public schools, from elementary up to and including university research institutes.    


In an interview with the daily La Repubblica, Rome University Physics Professor Carlo Bernardini complained that, while Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini will chat with students on Youtube, she has been deaf to their requests for a real discussion even as she “opens a dialogue with the bishops.”


The students themselves seem to be floundering, frustrated at their failure to score their own points, and with few organizational skills. (On this, Italian readers see Sabina Guzzanti’s blog report from Senigallia) At a Rome dinner party last week an Italian professor was shouting at a graduate student over what is to be done.


It is plain that the government headed by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, already looking ahead to his campaign to become Italian President to succeed Giorgio Napolitano, has no interest in clashing with the Vatican, no matter how bleak the Italian economy and the Government’s budget loom.


In addition, 300,000 Italian children attend Catholic elementary schools, the Church’s strongest educational card in Italy. Public school facilities, whose income is being hacked away by Tremonti, could simply not handle the arrival of hundreds of thousands of young children whose parents could not afford to pay higher school fees for religious school. 


Yet the situation is not altogether clear, for commentators here say that the details of the restoration of the budget cuts have been left vague, and that whether it will go to private or to public schools is not yet clear.


What is clear is that, when the reaction against Berlusconi Government measures arrives with sufficient authority, the Government reacts. In the same way, when Culture Minister Sandro Bondi appointed businessman Mario Resca to head a new development office that would oversee all Italian public museums, historic buildings, libraries and archaeological sites, some 6,000 worldwide museum directors and prestigious art historians signed an on-line petitition. Spearheading the protest was University of Pisa archaeologist Salvatore Settis, who is chairman of an advisory council for the Culture Ministry. Resca’s appointment, mocked as “cultural mcNuggets” because he had headed McDonalds Italia for twelve years, is certain to go through at this point, but his purview appears significantly reduced, and he will have little authority over museums and their programs of loans, a sensitive issue.

ROME – Italians cringed this evening as news reports arrived from Moscow, where Premier Silvio Berlusconi said in a press conference today that the U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is “handsome, youthful and also suntanned.” When reporters gasped, he reportedly said, “But it’s totally nice [una carineria assoluta], a big compliment.” 

Already Berlusconi had volunteered, presumably half in jest, that as an older man, he was ready and willing to give helpful hints to Obama.

The compliments are more comprehensible in consideration of the fire storm unleashed by Senator Maurizio Gasparri of Berlusconi’s own Partito della Liberta‘ after Gasparri told a reporter on Rai’s GR 3 radio at 8:45 yesterday morning, “many questions weigh upon” Obama’s position on the efforts to combat international terrorism, “the real testing ground for Obama.” The implication was that Obama was somehow soft on terrorism, and a swift reaction came from Anna Finocchiaro, leader in the Senate of the Partito Democratico (PD) group. “People do grasp that these are words that risk undermining relations between Italy and its foremost ally, and that the government, with such affirmations, puts itself into a very serious situation.”

Invited to back down, Gasparri said that he was simply referring press reports. Interior Minister Roberto Maroni of the Northern League contradicted Gasparri flatly, saying that both Senators McCain and Obama had, in their campaigns, guaranteed “total continuity in the struggle against international terrorism.”

Center-right majority figures have also accused the left of exploiting the Obama victory for their own political purposes.

Speaking for that left was PD leader Walter Veltroni, who called the Obama victory “a choice of hope over fear.” He added that, “The Bush values will be replaced in the world by new values of solidarity, multilateralism, equal opportunities, the environment—all things that we haven’t heard about in years,” and which will leave their mark on European politics. To an excited crowd celebrating at dawn in Piazza del Pantheon, he said that an era of American history is ended—the Bush presidency, "eight difficult years. I think of this in exactly the opposite way from the President of the Council of Ministers, who has said that the Bush administration has been the best in recent years.”

Elsewhere, the discussion down at Remo’s bar in our piazza came with an edge. Usually at Remo’s no one talks of anything but il football, but the crowd yesterday and today buzzed with excited, even thrilled election talk. Only Remo himself, a notorious conservative, was terse, keeping to himself and saying, “I’m not saying anything.” The most eloquent shouted: “Welcome back, American dream!” “Why can’t we have an Obama here in Italy?” asked another of the denizens. “It could only happen in America, think of it!” said our local PD group. “This is exciting! The U.S. has a young person in charge, and we’ve got these old fogies we can’t get rid of.”

Results were clear by 4 am in Italy, and Obama’s election seemed certain by 6 am. Democrats Abroad had registered some 5,000 voters in Italy, and through dawn of that morning hundreds of its members had remained jammed into Rome’s Stazione Termini, at a lively spot called Roadhouse Grill run by a Pakistan-Brit everyone calls “Mo,” short for Mohammed. Five big TV screens and a pancake breakfast with sausages and orange juice gave food for thought and survival. One Obama backer showed up with his dog, so that every time the crowd burst into applause (“We’re taking Ohio! Yeaahhh!”), the dog barked.

Two photographs in the dailies deserve mention. The best was the election day cover in L’Unità, showing a lonely President George W. Bush walking down an empty corridor. The headline: “One thing is clear: Bush is out.”

Worst: a nastily manipulated drawing of Obama’s face covering the front page of the daily Libero, with an accompanying sly editorial under the headline, “Strano ma nero,” strange but black. This was intended as a play on words for Strano ma vero (strange but true).

ROME – It is arguably the finest Baroque fountain in all Rome, if not the world—the most complex, the most beautiful, and the most thrilling. The monumental centerpiece of the finest piazza in the Eternal City, Piazza Navona, was constructed in1651for the Pamphilj family pope Innocent X, whose hereditary palace was in that piazza. Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his highly qualified sculptor assistants hacked, twisted and polished white marble and travertine from the quarries north of Rome into the Fountain of the Four Rivers. This amazing, four-legged confection—a quadripod rather than a tripod—resembles nothing so much as a mammoth candlestick supporting, instead of a candle, an ancient Egyptian red granite obelisk 16.54 m tall. Bernini’s conceit was that, beneath all the weight of the obelisk, the fountain structure would be transparent, permitting viewers to see right through the fountain, past splashing stone horses and drinking lions, from one end of the piazza all the way to the other.

Such artistry comes at a price. For a fountain to function, water must run through a labyrinth of hidden pipes—and Rome’s water is notoriously dense with calcium, which can accumulate and block the flow. The stone itself is drenched with that water, but also with brilliant sunlight on summer days, alternating with mid-winter chills, when the occasional snowfall and not infrequent night-time freeze brings ice. Add traffic, and the result is cracks and fissures in the stone, erosion from particle pollution and smog, blocked water spouts, and, above all, risk to the supoprt system of the fountain itself.


An ongoing restoration project costing over Euro 621,000.00 was begun in 2006 by the City of Rome together with the city’s prestigious conservation and restoration institute, the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione e il Restauro. Speaking in the auditorium of the Ara Pacis in Rome on October 24 at an international conference on monumental fountain conservation, architect Annamaria Pandolfi of the institute described the problem of the Four Rivers fountain and the challenge of the restoration of a monument which had reached “an advanced state of deterioration.”


Comparative photographs taken in 1970 of the single figures representing the four rivers—the Platta, the Ganges, the Tiber and the Nile—demonstrated the extent of the damage.


The cafe, restaurant and shop owners at Piazza Navona did not oppose the conservation project for the fountain even though it required unsightly scaffolding. However, they lobbied intensely for it to be completed within six months, she said, “But that sort of speed was impossible for the restorers in charge of the work, which we knew would take at least two years.


“In fact, a certain amount of time was spent on arranging financing. But above all, a restoration or conservation building site on this scale can be an even more complex project than a new construction. When the restorers come upon a problem, they must stop and consider carefully the various solutions. This takes time and the contribution of a host of skilled specialists: architects, biologists, restorers, photographers, chemists for mineral analysis, hydraulic specialists.” In addition, all past restoration and conservation attempts must be examined and analyzed; even restorations that are not bungled or did not utilize materials no longer acceptable may need restoration.


For the carved portions of the Bernini fountain, sophisticated tools were put to use, such as a colorimeter and a video microscope. The extent of the erosion, and the depth of the fissures and elongated cracks in the four carved figures representing the rivers, were analyzed using ultrasound and laser scanning.


The hydraulic system was studied via endoscopy. In the portion where a figure represents the Ganges, photographs showed that in 1970 water emerged, as if over an invisible umbrella, from two narrow spouts and from two broad fissures that ejected sheets of water. “By 2006, water was escaping from the wrong place. The fountain was almost entirely blocked, and the mechanical action of the water then damaged an oar that was part of the group,” said Pandolfi (see photo above).


To analyze possible calcium damage that would block pipes, black marble disks were placed strategically at different depths within the water basin, so as to measure the amount of calcium deposited over a specific time period.


Once restoration is complete, smog, however, continues as a threat to the Four Rivers Fountain, as well as the numerous other recently restored monumental fountains in Rome, according to art historian Luisa Cardilli, speaking for the Rome city administration. Those recently restored include the Trevi Fountain (in 1999), the Fountain of the Turtles in Piazza Mattei, the Acqua Paola Fountain on the Janiculum and the twin basin fountains placed in Piazza Farnese by Michelangelo. One at particular risk is the Fountain of the Triton in Piazza Barberini, which has been restored four times in the past three decades. Even the few fountains outfitted with closed-circuit water systems require constant, careful monitoring and maintenance, said Cardilli.

 

ROME - Little represents American city life better than the painting—you know it well—of a grimly illuminated diner. In it a lone and lonely man wearing a hat, like the one my father always wore, sits wretchedly on a stool as he nurses a midnight cup of coffee.

This is not Italy. Italy is the café, and what is consumed there. For me, this is the Italian cappuccino. Calculating a minimum of 320 daily presences in Italy per year, with one cappuccino at 8 o’clock in the morning and another at 11, in the past six years or so I have sipped, and occasionally spat out, 2,560 cappuccini.
 
To make a proper cappuccino is a tricky business. The foam cap must have precisely the right, creamy consistency, for it keeps the cappuccino warm. A foam overdose—where you can actually see bubbles—will cool down the cappuccino. And at any self-respecting café, the barman or woman lets the steamed milk rest a moment, then bangs the metal pan on the counter to remove the unwanted big bubbles.
I begin the day with a cornetto as well (alas, increasingly, made from mass-produced frozen dough). A few at the café will dip the cornetto into the cappuccino; in the Sixties a popular Italian version of candid camera TV had an entertainer dip his into the cappuccino of another man, unaware of being filmed.
As everyone knows, ordering a cappuccino at the end of a meal, or, heaven forbid, in the middle of the afternoon, is un’americanata, pronounced with a sneeringly nasal “ata” at the end. This refers to a style or action so vulgar that only us Americans will do it. Needless to say, the word is often spoken by an Italian decked out in blue jeans, dock shoes, oxford-cloth button-down and loafers made in Italy.
 

A cappuccino is relished most in the right café. Too much shiny marble is the café equivalent of bling and in certain cases can intimate dodgy ownership, as in money recycling. The bling cafés have their place, but the most interesting cafés come in unexpected places, and are often dark. During my six years of work at the U.S. Embassy, just off Via Veneto in Rome, I would steal away from its august halls to sip a cappuccino in the bleakly serious in-house coffee bar of the Communist-dominated General Confederation of Italian Labor (CGIL), where my Marxist cappuccino was antidote to a certain narrowness of perspective. I have also found hospitable cafés inside hospital lobbies, where patients toss a raincoat or bathrobe over their gowns and stand by the counter to chat with anyone who will listen about their operation or new baby.
 
By contrast, the Italian café, especially in the morning fray, is a scene of wild movement. As the crush of customers heaves and shoves and elbows toward the front of the bar, jockeying for space and attention, the barman (still usually a man, for this is man’s work, though encroached by women, these days from East Europe) must somehow remember the orders and then, out of the chaos, create order by matching the fare to be served with the face he may see for the first time. Many before me have made the list of orders:
 
“Un caffè.” (Don’t fool with it. This is serious.)
“Un caffè macchiato.” (Dash of milk. I’m the fancy type.)
“Un caffè corretto.” (Corrected with a good strong dollop of brandy. Favored by street people and serious blue-collar workers.)
“Un ristretto.” (Especially concentrated, for those with strong appetites.)
“All’americano.” (Thinned down with water into a timid broth.)
“Doppio.” (Double dose, for those in dire morning distress.)
“Freddo.” (Cold.)
“Scecherato. (“Shakered,” or coffee-milk in a blender with ice.) And so on.
 
The cappuccino variations begin with whether it is to be served the old-fashioned way, in a glass (nel bicchiere or in vetro), or in a thick pottery cup (in tazza). From there the consumer proceeds to specify how much or little foam is desirable (poco schiuma, senza schiuma).
Over the noise the barman in his black cummerbund shouts the order down the counter to his colleague manning the coffee machine, then slams a saucer in front of each customer—larger if for cappuccino, smaller if for caffè—and places a spoon onto the saucer in a specific position: one o’clock, three o’clock, six o’clock. Like the knots in strings made by the Incas, each spoon position tells a story, as I learned when I once absently shifted my spoon and found myself being shouted at.
 
Other conventions must be respected. When a customer requested a glob of whipped cream for his cappuccino in a seaside coffee bar last August, the barman objected. The whipped cream was there and visible, a luscious Mount Everest in a glass bowl. But the barman pointed out that this was high summer, the whipped cream was for gelato cones only, and anyway the morning too hot to think about adding whipped cream to a cappuccino. Instead of stammering a lame apology, the customer said stubbornly that in his cappuccino he liked whipped cream all year round, every day.
From the little knot of habitués came snickers. They knew what the barman’s response would be. They watched as, performing for his audience, the barman scornfully filled the cappuccino to the brim and topped it with a giant dollop of whipped cream—filled it until it spilled over, making a brown puddle in the saucer of the poor customer, who had no choice but to drink it all up while ignoring the guffaws, even as dribbles from the cup slopped down the front of his nicely ironed shirt with its fancy label.
 
I sympathized, for as a connoisseur I too have special requirements, which are in fact demands. No matter how hot the temperature outdoors or in, I order my cappuccino bollente (boiling), although many Italians prefer theirs tepid. For the barman to steam the milk until it is hot takes him extra time. He gives in, but sometimes with a grumbled, “Me, I couldn’t drink it that hot.” Occasionally a die-hard fixes me with a spiteful stare that says, “I’ll fix her,” and then makes it as fiery hot as he can—a foretaste of hell.
These are the same barmen, needless to say, who ignore their customers to trot out from behind the counter to feed a customer’s dog a tasty morsel from one of the sandwiches behind the glass counter.
 
A special challenge is to get a look, for free, at the morning newspaper. Usually found atop an ice cream freezer, it is usually stained, with the sports pages curled up and scarred brown from others’ beverages. In Rome, the paper is usually Il Messaggero, and getting at it requires ingenuity in the daily battle with the regulars, who want to pour endlessly over the soccer reports. Few tifosi (fans) are about to be put off by a woman, uninterested in sports and a foreigner to boot.
The trick, then, is to walk inside, and immediately check to see if the paper is free, then pin it down, set up your beachhead, and, while simultaneously ordering, start reading; otherwise someone else will arrive and grab the paper, and there it goes, for ten minutes you hear nothing but disgust at what la Juve did to la Roma or il Lazio.
Still, three days out of four, I get to the newspaper first—though not without a fight. And perhaps that is part of the fun.