It’s not even the middle of winter yet, but things are looking somewhat bleak here in Italy.  It’s all doom and gloom.

Honestly, trying to find a little good news originating from within Italy in Italy’s online press is only marginally easier than finding one of those proverbial hen’s teeth.

On the glum news front, there are hints coming from various directions that the season to be jolly won’t be all that merry at all.  Tax rises may be coming to stifle any merriment.

Still, at the end of the day, I did find one piece of good news.  First, though, the hints.

The Italian Economy Minister Who Shouldn’t be

Italy’s Economy Minister shouldn’t be Italy’s Economy Minister. Well, that’s what was hinted at by another member of Berlusconi’s government, Renato Brunetta, who is Italy’s Minister for Public Administration and Innovation.

Brunetta does have a point, as Giulio Tremonti is basically a lawyer, albeit a senior one who is also a law professor at the University of Pavia, but he is not an economist.  On the other hand, Public Sector and Innovation minister, Renato Brunetta, is an economist.

Is Brunetta hinting in a roundabout sort of way that he could do a better job at managing Italy’s economy than Italy’s current Economy Minister?  Some ears may interpret Brunetta’s hints in this way.

On the subject of Giulio Tremonti, it was interesting to hear him hint that Italy’s funny little IRAP tax is likely to keep Italy’s tax advisors in business for a good few years to come, especially as his boss Berlusconi had hinted rather strongly, that the IRAP tax might well be abolished.

Today, Tremonti hinted that IRAP is to stay and the only way taxes were likely to go was up.  Tax rises would be a lovely ‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’ to Italians, if it happens.  And Tremonti seems to be hinting, strongly, that tax increases could well be on the (Christmas) cards in Italy.  Pass me that Grappa fire-water, I want to become prematurely merry.

Perhaps Berlusconi could, merrily, hand the Economy Minister job to champing-at-the-bit Brunetta before Tremonti’s hinting turns to bitter reality and goes and renders the festive season about as merry as a wet weekend in Washington.

And now, the good news, what little there is of it.

United Nations refugee agency Praises Bravery of Italian Fishermen

It’s not all skullduggery, political intrigue, back biting, back scratching, disembowelled transsexuals, and hinting in wintry Italy.  The UNHCR recently praised the actions of a group of selfless Italian sailors who risked their own lives to save a group of immigrants who had got caught up in the middle of a storm.

To hear just how decent, many, real Italians can be, I urge you to read more:

ANSA 25 November 2009 – in English UNHCR honours Italian fishing crew

Hint, hint, the story should have made prime time news in Italy.  Pretty sure it did not though.  Please correct me if I am wrong.

End of hints.

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Martha and I came to an agreement on Thanksgiving many years ago. We don’t do turkey. A turkey is too much for two people, especially the way US industrial turkeys have had their beasts bloated by “science” into the big and tasteless tits real ‘mericans secretly enjoy wrapping their lips around (but are hell, of course, for the turkeys to carry around, on account of they drag on the ground and such).

Anyway, our tradition is this: rich or poor, we will always have a no-holds-barred, blow-out Thanksgiving feast. Often this meal consisted of things you didn’t see very often in the supermarkets—yummy natural things that allow us to really give thanks for the animals that had given their lives for our pleasure and sustenance. We might target guinea fowl, pheasant, rabbit—and throw in a crustacean or two, for which we’d make a pilgrimage to the sea for of course.

As you can imagine if you’re American, all this required a sacco di soldi, or s**tload of cash, not to mention many long pilgrimages, mostly because the industrialists haven’t yet gotten around to making cheap and tasteless white meat out of quail, or give them enormous breasts, so they’re rare enough in the market that you pay dearly for them.

Problem is, this year we’re spending Thanksgiving in Tuscany. All of the foods I’ve mentioned, the exotic “game” birds, the crustaceans fresh from the sea, and other comestibles like truffles, porcini mushrooms, and good wine, are all normal foods here. You don’t hunt them down in specialty stores, they practically come to you!

Take that prawny thing you see over there to the right trying to get you to look left. You go to the Fivizzano market to get your turnips and such, and there’s always the nice man inside the fish van just waiting. There is no stench of rotting fish. There are no Styrofoam trays, each with exactly the same number of shrimp in them, marinating away in a bacterial slime that came with them last week when they were trapped in their little Styrofoam coffins by a judicious encasement of saran wrap blithely applied by a snot-nosed kid fresh out of high school. No, they’re fresh from the sea, they’re on ice, and you can order as few as 1 of them. What a concept! And if you don’t know what something is or how to cook it, the fish guy actually knows!

We may make a pilgrimage today to Lunigiana Naturalmente. But it’s not the same. We’re not forced to go there by the lack of demand for good food by the population at large.

So Italy, shame on you. You’ve ruined our Thanksgiving ritual. Good food ought to be rare enough to be enjoyed only by the industrial elite and a couple of crazy people who’ve saved over the year to see what the rich could eat if they had taste. It’s cathartic, you know?

Otherwise, Thanksgiving is just no fun at all.

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I leave you with a photo of the grilled prawns. Well, not really the prawns, the aftermath of shells. This kind of picture is what I always think of when I think of Italy, the remains of the meal doused in endless sunlight.

And this was in November. You know, the off season.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving. Don’t eat too much.

A few weeks ago we made a discovery while doing some shopping in Fivizzano’s Tuesday open air market. It was noon. Folks were buzzing around a pizzeria opposite the bus yard with the unlikely name of Vladimir, where cooks had evidently been spending the morning churning out pizza, foccaccia, and other delights from their forno a legno or wood oven. On market day they also produced a rather amazing farinata, a chick-pea pancake-like deal. Farinata can taste a bit like compacted sawdust if you don’t make it right, but Vladimir evidently knew all the secrets. We bought some. It was the best.

Today we got to Vlad’s at just after 11. The nice lady said the farinata wasn’t done—come back in 10 minutes. So we walked around Fivizzano a bit and returned. There was a crowd. Gray haired old ladies were walking out with packages cradled in bony arms, faces aglow with pride as if their packages contained stacks of freshly printed Euros won in the lotto.

Yes, food is like that in Italy. We had come across a farinata frenzy. We had lost. By the time Martha had inched up to the counter there was no more.

“You can wait ten minutes…”

Ah, well, no thanks. Hunger knows not the clock.

Vlad is evidently as much from the old school as he is from the old country. He makes the best farinata in the land. He charges a reasonable price for it. People flock to his store. He sells out in a matter of minutes.

It used to be this way in America. Things have changed. Now ten million dollar a year industry executives sit around a big table discussing the best ways to water down their product, or, in the case of airlines, devising ways to make such a complicated mess of pricing that folks can no longer compare the cost of different airlines running the same route and so can be tricked into paying too much.

But alas, I am on the verge of losing the point. Here it is: Italians take their midday meal seriously. It is the backbone of the modern Italian culture.

And the government wants them to stop. Eating lunch I mean.

Lunch breaks are a wrench in the workday gears, according to Government Programme Minister Gianfranco Rotondi on Monday who asked Italians to keep them short or skip them entirely. ~ Minister tells Italians to skip lunch

Can you imagine? Don’t eat, just work? The gears of industry want all of you. Who gives big biz a pass on such blasphemy? In the old days there’d be blood in the streets—or at least a sciopero of several weeks. Italians would be mad even if told other people do it—er _especially if told other people are idiotic enough to do it:

The minister gave Germany as a good example, where he said employees working nine hours a day took 45 minutes at most.

Let me tell you a story. We were sitting in a restaurant we like very much called Dal Mi’ Cocco in Perugia, just outside the Etruscan wall. It’s near the University. Next to us was a German researcher working with Italians on a University project. We struck up a conversation. He said he found it hard to break away from the project.

“Italians are nuts! They work all night! They never take a dinner!” he lamented. “I had to sneak out and eat something.”

So you see, if this comes to pass, not only will the hard working folks who run restaurants and provide worker’s lunches to hungry working folks be out of a living, but the Italians who aren’t eating lunch or dinner will obviously die out—the first culture ever to die from voluntarily never eating in order to grease the gears of industry.

I’m not trying to be a Negative Nelly here. There is a bright side. Property values will go down.

Then you can go to Italy and buy a house and not eat, too.

If you want to minimise or extinguish your tax liability, engage an Italian tax advisor.  Italy’s income tax advisors must be some of the best in the world and Italy’s tax advisors are real ‘value for money’ professionals too.

Expert Italian tax advisors will have you declaring either nothing or next to nothing while you live in a ten bedroom mansion, employ a few Indian (Indians seem to be popular as domestic staff in Italy) servants and cruise the streets of Italy in a gleaming red Ferrari, when you are not cruising the Mediterranean in your luxury motor cruiser, that is.

The activities of Italy’s effective tax advisors mean that every year something like 100 billion Euros never ends up in Italian state coffers.

Cash strapped Italy with its huge national debt and crisis related problems, has started to wake up to the fact that Italians do not pay as much tax as they really should do.  Measures are being taken.

It’s taken Italy long enough to wake up, it has to be said.

You’ve probably heard of the well-heeled, the self-made, the nouveau riche, well, Italy has a new group to add to the list – the pseudo-riche.

The ‘pseudo-riche’ are only rich because their tax advisors ensure they pay the absolute minimum in taxes in Italy.   In some respects though, bringing Italians to heel tax-wise may not be such a good thing.

Does Tax Evasion Fuel the Sales of Luxury Goods in Italy?

One does wonder whether things really would be any better in Italy if everyone did pay their tax dues.  For one thing, sales of €100,000 plus cars and boats, as well as lots of other luxury goods, would take a nose dive.   At the end of the day though, it would be fairer to those who do actually bother to pay taxes in Italy – all three of them.

The Joy of Databases

Sometime back I wrote that Italy’s financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, had stated playing with those new-fangled computer things, and had discovered the joys of databases.

As part of their computer games the Guardia di Finanza is now getting better and better at putting 2 and 2 together to find out if taxes are actually being paid.

Flash Car Drivers Stopped

Owners of flash cars can be stopped, their details taken, and then these details can be cross referenced with tax declarations.  So, if someone is driving a €100,000 car, but only declared a taxable income of around €10,000 (or zero – which often happens in Italy), Italy’s tax police will start asking awkward questions.  This will probably cause Italy’s pseudo-riche to start driving around in 10 year old Fiat Unos.

This is now happening.  Italy’s tax police are also looking at well-heeled Italian cities – the streets of which are crammed full of Maseratis, BMWs and Porsches, and then checking out the average tax declarations in the area.  Not sure if the sales of ancient Unos are on the rise though.

Prosperity being Investigated

In those prosperous looking Italian cities when investigations show that only three people in the city are declaring annual incomes of more than €100,000, but investigators can count 50 odd €100,000 plus cars buzzing though the streets on the average night, conclusions are reached that something may well be amiss tax-declaration wise, and that awkward questions really ought to be asked.

You would have thought that such checks could have been carried out even before computers came on the scene.  Telephones have been around for quite some time, but then so have computers really.  Now, at least there can be no excuses.

Times may start becoming tough for Italy’s pseudo-riche, and sales of 10 year old Fiat Unos will probably rocket.

The demand for clever tax advisors is likely to increase too.

Source:

My memory of RAI 1’s 22nd November Furbi o Ladri? (Crafty or Criminals?) documentary.

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We spent some time this November on the ferry plying Lake Como. This picture came up. There’s some PhotoShop in it to be sure. I’ve cranked the “clarity” controls way down. The wrong way in other words.

I’m trying to define “romantic” in a picture. Perhaps clarity is the opposite of romantic. I think so.

(Click the picture to see it a decent size).