What are they saying about the war in Italy this August?
As some readers of these pages and as the interview team at Press TV (Iran) are aware, these ten days up to 26 August I am ‘on vacation’ in Italy and my online activities are curtailed accordingly.
Nonetheless, one keeps an eye out for developments in the Russian-Ukraine war. Of course, hotel television in Italy is 99% broadcasts of old Italian movies or on air sales of clothing and cheap jewelry. Forget about Euronews or the BBC. But smotrim.ru travels with me everywhere. From that, I understand that there is not much to report from the field of battle at the moment.
What is being reported by Western media, including the Italian print media, is the destruction of a musical-drama theater in the city of Chernigov, Ukraine by a Russian missile a day ago. At least seven civilian deaths are mentioned and thirty or more persons have been hospitalized. These facts from Ukrainian official sources have made it onto the front pages today of the national dailies Corriere della sera and Repubblica. The latter features a large photo of the badly damaged theater with the heading “Theater of War.” A caption below tells us that “peace now seems farther away than ever.”
Russian official sources have been largely silent about this attack. However, one social media news portal does give some highly relevant information.
This relates that the theater was putting on a publicly advertised exhibition of latest developments in Ukrainian drone technology and commanders of the Ukrainian drone operations were known to be present in the building. If this was indeed the case, then, of course the rules of war would justify the Russian attack, for which an Iskander rocket was used.
The newspapers I have mentioned are sitting untouched on the newsstand. On the beach, Italians are reading other papers which feature local scandals and the very controversial issue of how to deal with illegal immigrants.
But this is the height of the summer vacation time in Italy and from what I saw around me on the Lido di Venezia a few days ago and these couple of days at the beach and culture resort of Pesaro, home to the ongoing Rossini Festival, people’s minds are directed to life’s pleasures, especially, what the French call the art of the table, for which Italy has outstanding merits. It is the season for sybarites, not for worriers.
In my notes on my travels in Russia, I often share what I call the vox populi, by which I mean the stories I hear from taxi drivers and people in the hospitality industry, who are good conduits of thinking in the lower and middle classes. Now I will do the same with what I heard from an acquaintance at a 4 star Lido hotel where he is the front desk manager. We know him for years and years, so he is fairly open with his thoughts.
His main concern these days is the rising cost of living, especially food and petrol, in the context of stagnant salaries and punishing taxes, currently including an income tax of 43% from a low base. He insists that the Italian middle class has disappeared, that the gulf between the rich and the poor has grown immensely. Nonetheless, though he admits to having no affection for Rightist politicians, he is ready to give Meloni a chance to do something in office and prove her worth.
“Big picture” concerns about the state of the world do not figure in his thinking. His main preoccupation is how he will cope with the full house in the hotel for the ten days or so when the Venice Film Festival opens at the end of the month. This will be his 33rd season managing the hotel relations with Film Festival guests, and as he acknowledges they are an often weird and contentious crowd.
I have shared these thoughts of one man on the Lido di Venezia because he is fairly shrewd and well-balanced in his thinking, and he sees and hears a lot by virtue of his job. Note that the war in no way figures in his mind as a cause of his daily life challenges making ends meet. Note, too, that his remarks about the disappearance of an Italian middle class are contradicted by the greater presence of Italian guests in his hotel this season at the expense of British and American guests, who in years past, before Covid and before Brexit, were preponderant.
Here in Pesaro, in a four star hotel by the sea, where room prices have doubled from normal during the duration of the Festival, the guests are almost all Italian, and they match every age category. The several couples who shared a long table near us at breakfast this morning must be shop owners or similar upstanding members of the Italian middle classes. They have the money to spend on their sybaritic preferences. But they are not super wealthy, or they would be living in their own villas, not renting rooms in a hotel by the day.
By all of the foregoing, I conclude, at least as a working hypothesis, that la dolce vita in small letters is still enjoyed by a large swathe of Italians, who are not spending much time fretting over NATO’s woes in Ukraine.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023