Home II- return to the motherland

The second return. Back to Italy after 14 months of absence.
And it’s strange, as strange as London was for its very lack of strangeness.
Standing out here about as much as I’d folded straight back into her smoggy pleats back there.

Small town Italians are a funny breed. Lacking the style of the city, the self proclaimed stylish tend towards the lurid and the crass- true italiano style a delicate balancing act along the razor’s edge. A razor that claims many casualties in the provinces- lost to lizard skin and blue undercarriage lighting, slim fit sheaths on the unslim, all set off by a jaunty died pink rabbit skin trim.

In the one fancy bar in town, I discovered the true usage of daytime sunglasses- protection of the more sensitive from crotch tight lime green trousers set off by a prosecco paunch and blood red trainers- or hooker boots on indecently terracotta-d mutton. Or maybe that particular shade of orange should be henceforth known as pellecotta- not cooked earth, but cooked skin.

To be far, these are but the exceptions that test the rule- but jarring significant minorities in a mainly brashly stylish whole. A whole presided over by the king of brash- if the world’s a village; the idiot resides in its patent leather boot.

Berlusconi, oh he of the inappropriate Hitler comments and hair implants. With his pellecotta air of a modern day Mussolini- all pumped and pomped up image, with the man, hands wringing, deflated behind his mediatic shield.

This Italy worries me slightly, an ode to Europe’s apparently rescinding lurch to the right, the ‘fascio’ held alight.