VicenzaPiù - Notizie, Inchieste, Analisi su Vicenza e provincia

Welcome to our new reader, Ms. Lazzari, boss of the council's Culture Department, who has complained about my last article. Italian speakers can read her complaint and my answer in the Italian part of the site. I confess to feeling flattered at being read and complained about in the corridors of power! If such they be ...
These corridors were unable to stop the Dal Molin military base, and, despite depriving beggars of what alms we choose to give them, seem unable to provide basic law and order in Campo Marzo, judging by the GDV posters I see on my way to the library in the morning.

Such urban violence, unfortunately, is a sign of the times rather than a fault on the part of the myriad of law enforcers. I say myriad, because in Great Britain there is just one police force, whereas here, we have Vigili, Polizia Provinciale, Guardia di Finanza, Carabinieri, and god knows what else. But society throughout Europe is becoming more violent. I was brought up in a lovely seaside town in England, and as in Vicenza, levels of violence have inexorably increased. British premier Harold Wilson said politics was the art of the possible, and sad to say, there is a certain inevitability of nocturnal violence in a large open area in front of the station. Let's be happy it's safe during the day.
One smiles ironically at Mr. Sorrentino of the opposition complaining about the breakdown of law and order, as former premier and party leader Berlusconi party heaves a sigh of relief, as the law he passed allowed him to avoid being found guilty of corrupting my compatriot Mills. Mr. Sorrentino's great contribution was to prevent our African and Asian citizens from telephoning their loved ones on Sundays, if I remember rightly.
I wonder if he share's his successor's love of dogs. Mr. Dalla Pozza was crowing in the local press not, for once, at the zeal the local police show in expropriating money from beggars, but that they caught a non EU immigrant who had injured a dog near Centro Palladio. I don't think this particular non EU immigrant would have incurred Mr. Sorrentino's wrath, because he was an American soldier. And I suppose the cosmopolitan Mr. Sorrentino also has a soft spot for southerners...
Well, anyway, enough of my pokes. Who am I to judge? Perhaps if GDV offered me some money to write an Anglosaxon eulogy of the mayor I might be....don't worry Mr. Coviello, it hasn't happened yet, and who knows, I might bide by the biblical exhortation: ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
Let's speak positively, and thank the long-suffering staff of the Bertoliana and its suburban branches. These are our unsung heroes. Courteous and efficient, they seem always ready to walk the extra mile, or at least ten metres to the shelf where that elusive book one was seeking lies. And as the crisis bites, they end up as de facto social workers. The cloakroom under San Giacomo, Palazzo Costantini on cold winter nights attract the city's lost and homeless. And the suburban branches offer a haven to those lonely elderly, lost in the frenetic ups and downs of the post-industrial age. And a safe place for teenagers and secondary school children to do their homework, and, why not, flirt. It's springtime after all.
And as public spending decreases, the Bertoliana finds itself in a constant dilemma as to whether to finance expensive exhibitions in the newly restored Palazzo Cordellina, or to maintain a complete service in the suburbs. You can't have your cake and eat it. Readers can imagine which option I go for.
Speaking of culture, whilst walking up Contrà del Monte, I noticed some pictures in the windows of the Intesa San Paolo bank. Banks have much to answer for in the current economic climate, but this series of paintings with the theme ‘Alfabeto di un naufragio'(Alphabet of a shipwreck) by a certain Gastone Novelli is worth looking at. As anyone who has visited the Tate Modern in my native London will know, one is torn between scepticism and the thought that one has missed the meaning. The explanatory panel does little to help the uninitiated. And yet, I came away feeling that they did have something, even if I couldn't express what. I hazard a guess that it may represent man's lost innocence, perhaps, as the work is from the late fifties and early sixties, a sombre reflection of the second world war. Let me know what you think.
Turning back towards Piazza dei Signori, one has a quintessential Palladian panorama, which must have seemed pretty futuristic and way out to visiting Englishmen half a millennium ago, with the Monte di Pietà to the left, the east side of Palazzo del Capitanato to the right, framed in by part of the basilica across the square.