More random stuff about Italia

1. Shortly before I left England I flicked through the TV channels and caught a Hits TV session entitled "Forgotten Hits of the 90s", which I had on in the background for a while, provoking mingled enjoyment and frustration. But these hits are not forgotten here, and I have heard a large number of exactly the same songs on the kitchen radio since moving into this flat. Most recently there has been: that annoying nasal Canadian one that goes Henh henh henh or mmm mmm mmm mmm, I forget which, but with an air of importing some vast significant truth about Life; Offspring's Pretty Fly (for a White Guy). I have bought the latter for my ipod cos actually I quite like it. Also I have been listening to old Adam and Joe show podcasts, which are good.

2. The other day Federica saw that I had bought a copy of La Repubblica and this perturbed her strangely. She spent some time telling me that it's a paper of the left, and saying that some other paper was more central and less political. (I think it was Corriere della Sera, or some such, I forget.) Anyway I had only bought it because I wanted to buy a book that was being published with it. They have this thing here that a friend told me about before I left, where newspapers publish books and you can buy it with the newspaper on the right day for less money than it will be in the shops. It was a book called I Segreti di Roma and I thought it sounded interesting. But I was impressed at how La Repubblica's front page was mostly about things in the wider world, not just in Italy, in a way totally untypical of British stuff. I bought it again today for the sake of reading Italian, and it has this fantastic column on the front, which is basically about how there's a conference going on in Rome at the moment about the Spanish Inquisition; this has made the writer think of more recent examples of torture, and he mentions a film about the use of torture in Eastern Europe in the 90s, and then goes on to talk about current complicity in torture in the "war on terror", and public opinion about it in European countries. Just when I was losing the thread a bit he threw in a quote from Jeremy Bentham! How can you not love a paper that picks up on an academic conference and goes from that to our moral duties to human rights in the world, on the front page? Possibly it could get a bit dull over time, like Tom Paulin in the Newsnight Review always interpreting every play, book or film as a metaphor for the Troubles. But at the moment I am disposed to like this left-wing newspaper.

3. I am still impressed by the bookshops here. On the tables where English bookshops have piles of Shopaholic goes to Manhattan or some such, here they have facing page translations of the letters of Sallust or works by banned Turkish writers. I went to a supermarket last night, and they had a sale on, selling books for 5 euros per kilogram. I bought a book about Nineveh with lots of pictures; a catalogue of an exhibition of the collections of Queen Christina of Sweden, which I haven't read properly yet but which should be interesting because she was an amazing and odd person (and owned one of the most satisfying manuscripts in the world, the Bury Psalter); and for just a few euros a much better facing-page translation of Shakespeare's sonnets. It translate the marriage of true minds as "matrimonio di due animi fideli", which is less annoying, though I would still prefer "menti", I think. Anyway, Francesca tells me that Federica is more or less right about literary culture being engaged in on a higher level here because engaged in by fewer people. There are no tabloids, apparently; if you want a paper you have to read a serious one.

4. Figaro! Polpetta! Actually here he is doing his best Bond villain cat stare.