VicenzaPiù - Notizie, Inchieste, Analisi su Vicenza e provincia

Dear Readers, so why does VicenzaPiù have a column in English? The simple answer is because more and more people use the language. Italians who communicate with foreigners, American soldiers, African immigrants, ex-pat English teachers, and so on. We are not sure who our readers will be, so please identify yourselves! And tell us what you would like us to write about. As to me, I'm an ex-pat English teacher, who has observed the city's vagaries of fortune over the last three decades. When I came here, I knew little about the place. ‘Somewhere near Venice', my girlfriend had told me.

I did know the word Palladian - in English it usually implies any building with columns and arches. And over the years, the city's prestige has grown in my country, with the more upper class Sunday newspapers carrying articles about an idyllic town of Palladian monuments in a pleasant backwater of the Serenissima.
As I often go to Serbia, I can say this image is not reflected there. To Serbs, Vicenza is an industrial town where they have a cousin or an uncle, mostly working in the building trade, and living in Arzignano or Montegalda rather than under the basilica, though some of the less fortunate ones do end up sleeping under bridges. Few Serbs know of Palladio, and when they have a little free time, take one of the frequent buses plying between Vicenza and Pozarevac, an unremarkable Serbian town near the Romanian border, famous for spawning Milosevic, from where many of them come. Vicenza has the largest Serb population in Italy with the possible exception of Triest, with its own Church in the town centre. You are unlikely to walk past a building site without hearing Serbian spoken. It's also the place they associate with the bombs that fell on them in 1999.
Because Vicenza has also been home to a large American (not NATO) base for several decades, a base which is now being developed in the surrounding countryside. Having worked for the American servicemen many years ago, I noticed that most are from a rural background, and are here either to escape unemployment in small villages in Carolina and other similar places - the majority - or else as tough patriots with a mission - a mentality prevalent amongst paratroops. So, Vicenza, the town across the Atlantic you'll never see, where you might have a brother or nowadays a sister, serving the stars and stripes.
Of course, anyone remotely connected to jewellery or precious metals knows Vicenza for what is doubtlessly the biggest Gold fair in Europe, a tri-annual event pulling in operators from the entire planet. Gold has been the leitmotif of the Vicenza economy for centuries, and perhaps this, rather than Palladio has forged the city's presence on the world stage, with its state of the art fair area outside the centre. Magnates from Saudia Arabia jostle along with local goldsmiths who speaking local dialect.
I've mentioned just a small part of the spectrum - like anywhere else, Vicenza is many things to many people. And like anywhere else, it needs voices, many and varied, to comment on what goes on. And hence the existence of VicenzaPiù. Over the thirty years I've lived here, there has been only one real voice that has persisted: ‘The Giornale di Vicenza'. In some ways it does a good job - sports coverage, murders, reviews of concerts and plays, but.....
Well, the GDV, as we call it, has always suffered from the patronage of power. Vicenza, for years one of the strongholds of the Christian Democrat party, fell into the usual syndrome of embedded power of any political colour. Favours behind the scenes, blind eyes bought from the appropriate authorities - you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. The current mayor belonged to this party during his first mayorship, and when the party disbanded after the clean hands enquiries of the 1990's which the bribing system, he somehow managed to convince the former Communist party that the leopard had changed its spots, and that with this support from the Roman Catholic Church, still a major powerbroker in the city, that he was their best candidate. And he won, on a platform, amongst other things, of increased transparency. We supported him, and are disappointed that the much vaunted transparency has never come to be. We ask him questions - he doesn't answer. The GDV stays silent.
Hoping that you will comment, and perhaps contribute to the next column of English News.
Robert "Bob" Lambert

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