VicenzaPiù - Notizie, Inchieste, Analisi su Vicenza e provincia

The GDV has dedicated much space this week to the vexed question of Dal Molin. First of all the curious puddles emerging in the Peace Park due to a lack of foresight in planning. A harbinger of worse to come, as some fear real damage to our town's water supply. It is not impossible that they could have been avoided if the environmental checks sought by Variati, and refused by ‘Commissario' Costa had been carried out.

Costa has done the Government's dirty work with ruthless efficiency.
In light of the puddles, one wonders why the American ambassador, and Zaia, the disgraced Northern League's president of the Regione were grinning like Cheshire cats in the GDV photo the following day. Indeed, the Ambassador expressed his pride in the base, and Zaia said - yes, he really did! - that Vicenza should be proud of it in the same way it is proud of Palladio! Bossi's man then added that we have everything to gain from the base, because property prices will soar. In other words, young working people will find it even more difficult to buy their first house. Of course, with a politician's salary, and whatever other benefits he gets, he's probably unworried by such a thought.
As those old enough to remember how American soldiers beat to death Ghanaian immigrant Johnny Boateng outside a local discotheque will know, our new inhabitants also create a daily security risk, rarely mentioned by Sorrentino and company. The American ambassador tells us many will be arriving from Afghanistan, where one of them recently massacred fifteen Afghan villagers.
May I add how much I welcome the presence of the young Americans from the University of Florida, who come here in admiration of the Italian renaissance. They have a small section near what was once the Roman amphitheatre (I believe) near Porton Del Luzzo. Many years ago I was able to organise a student exchange programme with them, allowing them to gain knowledge of how we live here, and my students the chance to speak English with them.
Campo Marzo is in the news as usual, and I was present at the last big police operation there on Tuesday. It's not often I agree with a member of the PDL, but one Arrigo Abalti rightly accuses Variati of doing little to encourage it to develop into a leisure area. There were few people around once the cops got into action on Tuesday, as I sat reading a novel before chatting to an English guy who passed by. Another teacher. A police car sidled past, and apparently astonished that any law-abiding citizen should have the temerity to use the place, they demanded our documents, and kept us there for the best part of half an hour before returning them. Hardly an invitation to return. And yet, when the cops are not there, people urinate in public - still no public toilets as far as I can see - and appear to deal in drugs. As Abalti says, the place needs to be used for sport and theatre and more, as apparently proposed in a plan provided by a well-known designer from Vicenza, now in Milan, Aldo Cibic. I would be really curious to see this plan, to which Abalti says, Variati has shown the white flag.
The Banca Intesa have changed the temporary mini-exhibition in Contrà Monti. There is now a series of pictures by Valerio Adami called Corpi in Ascolto - ‘Listening Bodies'. Like the last exhibition, the pictures seem to point at the incapacity of modern man to come really alive. Marilena Pasquali's article places Adami's work as focused on his contemporaries. Certainly, as we look around us at the growing Europe-wide disillusionment with politics in the post-industrial area, we can see it as contemporary. And yet, at the same time, we are celebrating Easter, which is the resolution of the human dilemma over millennia. To a believer, the shortcomings of modern man are the shortcomings of man, but we need not despair. Well, I've said my tuppence worth, but I recommend readers to give them the once-over.
A family group of adults were walking past at the same time, and one of the men said, "At least there's some work in them." A reflection perhaps of the Veneto mindset that work is an end in itself. I remember many years ago, when in San Bortolo, my elderly ward-mate saying, with reverberating pride, that he had worked thirty-seven years for the same company selling men's wear near Piazza dei Signori. I don't know if it was in that moment that he realised he was dying. His voice suddenly changed, and he looked sadly into the middle distance, and added in a low voice, almost to himself, "thirty-seven years is such a long time". A sudden realisation, perhaps, that the long years had somehow been wasted, as some essential element of life had passed him by. As in the disintegrated figures of Adami's paintings.
A Happy Easter to any Orthodox readers, who celebrate on 15th April in the Serb Church, former Capella della Misericordia and the Moldavian Church at Santa Croce.

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