Lo Zombie politico

What is it about Silvio Berlusconi and Italy?  The former prime minister, leader of one of the country's two largest political parties, and member of the Senate, has been convicted of tax fraud.  Finally, it's an unappealable conviction.  Meanwhile, he faces charges in at least two other proceedings.  One involves buying votes and the other underage prostitution.  Political commentators repeatedly point out that in any other Western democracy he'd be gone; he'd have quietly disappeared to Arcore, his villa near Milan, to spend more time with his family and maybe his football club, A.C. Milan (which could use some help at the moment).  Instead, like some political zombi, he's still very much a part of the scene, showing his fangs most days on the front page of most newspapers.

Tim Parks has a good piece (subscription required for full access) in a recent (maybe the latest) New York Review that talks about all of this.  Parks is originally from England, but lives in Italy, is married to an Italian woman, and they have been raising their family there.  Still, it sounds like he might be losing patience.  Describing recent media coverage, he says that "it was almost unheard of for anyone to suggest that regardless of moral concern or the desire to uphold the rule of law, Berlusconi simply cannot be of any use to his country politically . . ."  He also has some interesting things to say about the country's "vocation for factionalism."

I don't live there.  I'm in Washington, D.C., several thousand miles and six time zones away.  I've never had to struggle through the glue-y bureaucracy or been required to ally with an influential patron to protect my job and career, things which Parks (and others) see as a normal part of Italian society.  So why do I care that the country finds it so hard to address, let alone deal with, its collective problems, things like youth unemployment, the environment, and, of course, organized crime?

I'm not sure.  I'm not Italian-American and, so far as I know, I don't have any Italian ancestors.  The one's I'm aware of are all from further north -- Germany, Ireland, and Scotland, in particular.  But I have Italian friends and I've gotten to know some of their teenage children.  And this, I think, is the emotional connection.  These are remarkable kids with enormous talent and so much promise.  They deserve a better country.  They could contribute so much, but they're likely to leave and make their contributions elsewhere -- in England, in Australia, or, if we're lucky, the U.S.  There are other reasons to care about Italian politics, but right now that's probably the most important.

John McPhee talks about writing

In the past few years, John McPhee, who’s now 82, has been talking about his writing, not the articles and books so much as the writing itself.  This is remarkable for someone who has almost never referred to himself in his earlier writing.  Several of these articles on his craft were published in the New Yorker, where he’s been a staff writer since the mid-1960s.  These are available on-line in the magazine’s archives, but I’m pretty sure the full versions are only available to subscribers.  In 2010, he also gave a long interview to Peter Hessler (another New Yorker writer) covering some of the same ground and this is freely available on The Paris Review's site.  I just came across it the other day and I highly recommend it to any non-New Yorker subscriber who’s ever enjoyed McPhee’s writing and/or is curious about how he does it.

A new deal for cyclists in Italian cities?

Positive news from Italy this time.  The association representing Italian cities is proposing some really interesting ideas to make life easier for urban cyclists.  Earlier this week, the Associazione Nazionale Comuni Italiani (ANCI; National Association of Italian Municipalities) presented a set of draft ideas to the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Maurizio Lupi.

© Agence France Presse

Maybe the most remarkable of their proposals would be a change in the burden of proof in case of accidents.  In legal disputes. the "less vulnerable" vehicle would need to show that it was not responsible for damage to the "more vulnerable" vehicle, or injury to the latter's driver.  As a cyclist, it's amazing to think that if I was hit --god forbid! -- by a car in, say, Milan, the legal focus would be on the driver to show that he or she wasn't at fault.  What better way to get motorists pay more attention to cyclists.

Some other ANCI proposals would:

• Allow for bike lanes along the right side of each direction of roadways;

• Require, in certain cases, an additional light on traffic signals for cyclists giving them a head start in making right turns;

• Allow cyclists to travel in both directions on one-way streets; and

• Require apartment building owners to provide bicycle parking areas.

The city officials are taking advantage of the fact that the transportation committee in the Chamber of Deputies is preparing to revise the national traffic code (Codice della strada) and that the Minister will be submitting his ideas for revisions sometime before the end of the year.

It's thought that the bicycle measures stand a good chance of being included in the code revisions since the same officials proposing the ideas would be responsible for their implementation.

Ilva Steelworks (again)

Italy doesn't need another long-running saga of corruption.  And my reporting on one doesn't say much of anything new.  But I came in early on this one.  And I've had a kind of morbid fascination to follow the story as it develops.  (See four earlier posts.)

This has to do with the Ilva steelworks, the largest steel producer in Europe.  The facility is located right next to the southern Italian city of Taranto in Puglia.  Last year, faced with hard-to-deny evidence that the facility was poisoning the air and the residents of Taranto, and that governmental authorities were unable or unwilling to stop it, judicial authorities stepped in.  They seized the entire facility and removed Emilio Riva and his two sons Nicola and Fabio.  The sons are under house arrest and the father has decided to live in England for a while.  

Taranto with the Ilva works in the background.

The authorities also began several criminal investigations.  The most interesting character to emerge so far appears to be a Girolamo Archinà, Ilva's director of "institutional relations."  In this position he developed and maintained relationships with individuals in all levels of government, the press, and the church.  He aim was always to allow the company to keep making steel and to avoid any constraining environmental or health rules.  As he would make his case, it must certainly have made a difference that Ilva is the region's largest employer with about 5,000 employees.  Even so, it appears Archinà may have been ready to use other means of persuasion.  He is suspected of paying 10,000 euros to a consultant to the prosecutor's office to have him tone down findings in a study of the sources of pollution in Taranto.

Ilva and Taranto are back in the news because new information from one of the investigations involves several political figures, the best-known of whom is Nichi Vendola, the governor of Puglia, an on-again, off-again national political figure, and subject of a mostly-complimentary Washington Post profile a couple of years ago.

Nichi Vendola, President of Puglia.

Apparently, telephone recordings indicate that Vendola tried to persuade the regional environmental protection agency (Agenzia regionale per la protezione ambientale) to go easy on Ilva so that it could stay open.  Vendola has denied any wrong-doing and says he hopes to meet with investigators as soon as possible.  

Meanwhile, thanks to two governmental decrees, the plant is still open, operating under a receiver.  But there are no signs the air in Taranto is any cleaner.

Following the Loire: Day One

Day One from Saint-Étienne to Feurs (24 July 2013)

I started with a short detour to Cycles Marcon on the rue Bergson; the street is a major thoroughfare running north in the middle of the city.  I'd forgotten to pack my cycling gloves.  The evening before, I'd found a nearly new store near the hotel called Cyclable specializing in "city bicycle riding."  I'm pleased to see new stores like this, and hope it's part of a successful trend (I came across another Cyclable branch in Orléans.)  But apparently city bicycle riders don't bother with gloves.  Cycles Marcon was a real bicycle store and I found what I needed.

Leaving Saint-Étienne, I'd planned to ride to Aurec-sur-Loire.  This was where I'd left off riding two years ago when I'd started at the source of the Loire at le Gerbier de Jonc and rode the first 200 kilometers.  But I should have studied the map better; and it should have been a topo map.  Saint-Étienne is set in a kind of bowl of hills.  A few, more or less flat routes lead out but they're mostly heavily-traveled roadways.  Probably for this reason Google maps directs a cyclist to take to the hills.  But Google maps may not know the cyclist is carrying 20 pounds of baggage.

Hills just outside of Saint-Étienne

I'd planned on averaging roughly 22 -- 25 kph.  As it turned out, between the hills and a couple of wrong turns, I probably averaged half of that for the first couple of hours.  I was getting worried that it could end up being a very long day.  At a point just west of Firminy, a town known for a le Corbusier project, Google Maps brought me to La Côte Martin.  I was facing a barely-paved pathway, way too steep to ride.  I wondered who devises these routes?  Was it some kid back at Google headquarters in Mountain View, who had no idea of the roads in this part of the world, who wanted to send me up this hill?  This wasn't going to work.  Looking at the map again, I could see there wasn't really any alternative; If I was going to go to Aurec-sur-Loire, I would have to do a lot of climbing.  At that point, it was nearly 1 p.m. and I still had about 50 km to go.  I decided I'd have to compromise a little in my commitment to ride the full length of the river.  Just ahead, along a nice, flat road, was Le Pertuiset.  It was on the river.  I could pick up my Loire route there.  It would only be 7 km downstream from Aurec.

Vacation homes at Le Pertuiset on the Lac de Grangent

But on the bridge at Le Pertuiset I saw that the road was going up again.  The Grangent Dam is about 6 km downstream from the bridge and has flooded any possible route down close to the river banks.  To go north towards Feurs I needed to climb up the D108 above the west side of the Lac de Grangent, the lake behind the dam.  Sometimes, after all the fretting, a climb can turn out actually to be fun.  From Le Pertuiset to the top of the climb at Chambles is about 7 km.  Over that distance the road rises about 200 meters (about 650 feet), which means a gradient of a little less than 3 percent.  But I didn't know that when I was riding.  All the way up I worried that the road would get steeper around the next bend.  And, at the same time, I was continually relieved that it didn't.  Most of France was suffering from a heat wave that week, including the areas around Saint-Étienne.  But long stretches of this road were shaded; I don't recall ever breaking into much of a sweat.  I also don't recall encountering more than one or two cars; several other cyclists, yes, but few, if any, cars.  At the top I felt great.  Coming to France I believed I was in decent shape.  But I wouldn't know for sure until I started riding.  The steep roads out of Saint-Étienne and the decision to turn away from La Côte Martin had made me nervous.  Here, though, I rode without any real strain.  I could handle this.

After the descent from Chambles, most of the rest of route to Feurs followed flat, straight roads.  Between the Monts du Lyonais off to the east and the Monts du Forez to the west, the Loire has created a wide, rich valley for agriculture.  I rode through fields of wheat and corn and felt for a moment like I was back in Iowa where I grew up.

Flooding in Italy

Two years ago today, heavy mountain rains caused flash flooding in Cinque Terre and other parts of Liguria in Italy. Lynda and I visited the area in 2006 and spent a wonderful day walking the narrow trail above the Tyrrhenian Sea from Riomaggiore to Monterosso. Vernazza (below) was about the mid-point of the 10 km walk.  We never thought of anything like this.  The flood waters rushing down the narrow canyons from the mountains to the ocean directly and indirectly 13 killed people and destroyed homes and businesses.  The area is still getting back on its feet.

Flash flood waters emptying into the harbor at Vernazza. © Tom Wallace

So, along with news about Berlusconi's latest legal problems and the Letta government's new budget proposals, flooding has been on Italian minds lately, at least some Italian minds.

Gian Vito Graziano, president of the National Geologists Council (il Consiglio nazionale dei geologi) warned recently of the likelihood of more such flooding and likely deaths. Everywhere in Italy, he said, misuse of land -- urbanization of agricultural fields, in-fill of wetlands, dikes along rivers -- has reduced its ability to absorb heavy rains like those that hit Liguria.

Unfortunately, the country’s creaky political institutions and sputtering economy (to say the least in both cases) probably mean that heads will be nodded sincerely, but little will change and the flooding risks will remain. (I recognize one could say the much the same thing about this country’s Republican-sabotaged politics and precarious economy and their effects on environmental policies.)

"No Tav": Turin-Lyon train line

Certainly lots of environmental issues are more significant than the high-speed rail line between Turin, in Italy, and Lyon, in France.  But an article on the project in today's Corriere della sera caught my eye.  I have a personal interest in the line having once followed the route on a train from Milan to Paris.  I'd paid for a ticket on a high-speed train, but in fact very little of it was high-speed until after we passed through the mountains and got into France.

For years, the French and Italian rail companies, backed by political authorities, have wanted to modernize the rail connection between the two cities.  The most dramatic engineering feature of the line is a planned 57 km long tunnel from the Susa Valley in Italy to the Maurienne Valley in France.  (Several famous Tour de France climbs, like the Col du Télégraphe, the Col du Croix de Fer, and the Col de la Madeleine, rise out of the Maurienne Valley.)

Environmentalists in both countries oppose the line out of concern, among others, for its impact on a fragile alpine ecology.  Questions have also been raised, especially in France, about its costs.  Lately, in Italy, elements of the "No Tav" ("Treno alta velocità") opposition has become violent.  The article in Corriere della Sera reported what is counted as the 15th incident of sabotage against the line.  Yesterday, while workers were off for lunch, someone entered a worksite at Bussoleno in the Susa  Valley and set fire to a piece of heavy equipment.  Bussoleno is about 50 km west of Turin.

This kind of violence is never acceptable opposition. It's dangerous and extortionist and those found responsible deserve serious judicial sanction, never mind their motives.  Still, I'm not sure yet where I stand on the matter of the line itself.  Will it, in fact, cause environmental harm?  I've visited the Maurienne Valley and it is not an isolated alpine environment, at least down along the highway running along the Arc River.  And that highway, as I rode my bike next to it, seemed to be carrying quite a bit of truck traffic.  Wouldn't that freight travel with a lot less pollution on a train?