The Overloaded Ark

I had some spare time after I had finished work in Siracusa and so I decided to visit the Archaeological Museum. The historical centre of the city is one of the closest approximations to "a rose-red city, half as old as time". The archaeological remains of Magna Graecia appear suffused with the Mediterranean sun, especially the faces of the terracotta maidens, perpetually fresh and young.

The Museum was full of teenage girls in dark blue suits. Apparently, they had some custodial role, but what it was could only be guessed: a dozen of them patrolled the museum's corridors and I was the only visitor, hopelessly outnumbered. Made up like juvenile filmstars, very much in the Southern manner, they simpered at me and followed ma around with their eyes, wistfully. Romantic notions of a rich foreigner ready to bear the lucky winner away to a new life of luxury and experience--definitely not me!

Industry and commerce are at a low ebb, unemployment is rife, and so public institutions are stuffed with employees until they appear like an overloaded ark. Nowadays, the fashion is for temporary contracts and starvation wages--the precariato. The teenage employees of the museum were too young and inexperienced to have realised the irony of their situation, but that cannot be said for their older counterparts who have weathered the temporary contracts and achieved the miracle of being taken on as 'proper' employees, not mere "collaborators". Perpetual job security and unattractive salaries have left many of them with a "world-owes-me-a-living" mentality and a marked reluctance to change anything for the better, even human relations, or perhaps especially that. These are the people who turn their backs and pretend to be busy as soon as you walk into their office. A book that purported to explain Italian culture to foreigners stated that in every office in Italy there are six people. Five of them do absolutely nothing and the sixth does the work of all of them combined and is referred to by his compatriots as "il fanatico".

If there is not enough to do--and how could there be with so much overstaffing?--then shear boredom dictates that some form of work must be invented: self-justifying work, that creates its own raison d'etre. Recently, I did a day's teaching. A modest sum will be paid to me after a majority of my earnings have been taken away in tax and social security deductions. When preparation and travel time are included, the remuneration is far from generous. To obtain it, I had to fill in eight forms. On these, I stated my date and place of birth four times. I signed eight times. I wrote my address four times and I gave my taxpayer identification number four times. I wrote my bank details three times on one form alone. I filled in an extra form on a government web site, and, strictly following instructions, I repeated my bank account details three times on the same form. Given my qualifications, in terms of labour costs the whole exercise was worth something more than a third of my net earnings. I also had to purchase and affix an administrative stamp--the cherry on top of the bureaucratic cake.

A Tuscan who went to work in the USA once said to me, I think with some justification, that "in American one works well and lives badly; in Italy one lives well and works badly". A Swiss pathologist whom I met at a conference opined that Italy is the country where genius is closest to madness. "In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed--they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce...? The cuckoo clock." Orson Welles was wrong about the cuckoo clock, a German invention, but what sort of Renaissance would modern Italian bureaucracy produce?