IF YOU were to walk into Ermete's bar on the village piaza communale on almost any Saturday evening from September to June, you would be greeted by a vision of apparent academic earnestness.
Looking for all the world like finals students with five minutes to finish their papers, worried patrons are rapt in concentration as they pore over small forms.
Saturday night is football pools night in Italy. The scene in Ermete's bar is repeated in hundreds of thousands of bars up and down the peninsula every Saturday as millions of Italians attempt to pull off the mythical "13" or Tredici (Put simply, you have to guess the correct result of 13 chosen football matches).
Until recently, Totocalcio, as the football pools are called, has been the biggest single gambling outlet for Italians. In 1994 it generated a turnover of £1.2 billion. More than that, Totocalcio has represented a way of life for a "hole post war generation of Italians, dictating Sunday afternoon habits as millions stop to tune in for the soccer results, be they in the car, out for a walk, at the restaurant or in their own homes.
Recently, the supremacy of the football pools has been challenged by that pretender to the throne the scratch card a phenomenon familiar to Irish readers. Scratch card turnover in 1995 came to £1.27 billion and in 1996 is expected to outstrip the football pools.
As in Ireland, scratch cards in Italy are on sale at the newspaper kiosk (and also in particular bars and tobacconists) and the national aspiration to turn a one pound investment into a possible £40,000 or even £200,000 win tends to get the better of many a citizen out to buy their morning paper or take a quick cup of coffee.
Normally, the odds against finding a winning card are in the million to one category, if not longer. You can imagine then the surprise of the inhabitants of Curno, Arcene, Olmo Al Brembo, Villa D'Alme, Dalmine, Ponte San Pietro, Paladina and Mapello, all villages close to the northern town of Bergamo, when they discovered that their local bars and newspaper kiosks appeared to be on a winning run.
As in a Roald Dahl children's story, a friendly gremlin appeared to have turned the rules of the scratch card game on its' head. At the above villages, all within close range of each other winning cards started turning up, with monotonous regularity.
Tobacconists and retailers who might expect to sell one winning ticket every year found themselves selling half a pounds worth of winning tickets, one frenzied afternoon as word of the winning run got around.
Within a three day period, the inhabitants of the above villages had won themselves £4.6 million. Furthermore, all the's winnings were legitimate and, Ministry of Finance officials were quick to confirm that all correct winning cards would be", honoured.
So, what had happened For the time being, no specific, answer is available since an internal ministry inquiry is still going on. Officials at the state printing company in Rome suspect that one of their computers went haywire for a couple of minutes, printing a succession of winning cards which were then distributed in the one concentrated area rather than spread all round the country.
This being Italy, there are those who are not so convinced by the computer error theory. Sergio Baronci, head of the Italian tobacconists' association is not so sure. To tell you the truth, I don't believe this was just a simple error. .. I think at the back of it all, there was some scam," he said.
Watch this space.