“Giovanni” could hardly contain himself. If I had my way, he said, the parliament would be hit by such a tremendous explosion that bits of it would end up in the lake (which, by the way, happens to be about 50km away).
Giovanni runs a thriving market garden business just outside our village. The Baroness and Man Friday had stopped with him the other day so that we could buy flowers number 2,347 and 2,348 of the spring/summer. In fact, Madame was looking for “capers”.
In theory, these are spiny, trailing Mediterranean shrubs, complete with edible flower buds. In practice, they sum up much of what goes on in the world of gardening. After all, my Collins dictionary defines a caper as “a high-spirited escapade”.
Anyway, as he stood there in his shorts and wellies in the blazing sun, Giovanni wanted to say his bit. We have known him for more than 20 years. He is someone who has experienced setbacks, familial, economic and otherwise, but he has always picked himself up and got on with it. His brother Antonio, who runs a thriving olive oil and honey business, is similar. Both of them are self-made, tough, hardworking family men.
Rant
He asks me how "business" is going. I give my usual cheerful answer along the lines of "never-a-dull-moment-in-crisis-ridden-Bunga-Bungaland" – good for the foreign hacks. Wrong answer. It was a bit like striking matches in the 40-degree heat of the woods behind Giovanni's vivaio (useful word, that one – it means market garden).
Off he goes on the father and mother of a rant. In essence, his anger is directed at the unfair privileges (as he sees it) of an Italian political class who have spent much of the past four years telling Italians to tighten their belts, while they get their enormous snouts ever more firmly into various troughs.
Giovanni was probably listening to Radio 24 the other morning when it was pointed out that not just the parliamentarians themselves but the permanent personnel – ushers, stenographers, library staff, technicians etc – are more than handsomely treated.
If an Italian deputy earns €20,000 or more per month, a barber at Palazzo Montecitorio (the lower house) can end up on a salary of €10,000 to €11,000 per month.
Cost of politics
The M5S protest movement, which has made the fight against the cost of politics one of its battle cries, recently pointed out that the 1,500 or so permanent personnel in the lower house cost the taxpayer about €500 million.
Parliamentary personnel start on a modest enough €40,000 a year but thanks to the anzianità, or salary increase system, they can end up on €340,000 a year.
There is also the question of Italy’s 62,000-strong army of “state cars”, which cost €1.1 billion to staff and maintain.
Campaigners love to make all sorts of calculations about these beasts – you would need 1,200 football pitches to park them all, for example – but the point is they are an irritation to public opinion in general and to our Giovanni in particular.
For him, however, worse than the state cars are the finance police. They love to pounce on retailers, checking their bookkeeping arrangements with a view to finding just what sort of heavy fine they can lay on you, he says.
Giovanni is far from alone in this viewpoint. Rightly or wrongly, the Italian small- business classes feel they have to pick up the tab for their larger industrial cousins, who they claim do not always pay their fair share of tax thanks to offshore banking arrangements and other devices.
This summer, the commercial classes in the village have had something new to complain about: the weather. Not only does the crisis mean that one in two Italians cannot afford a holiday, but to rub salt in the wound we have had an unusually wet July, which has hit the Rome daytripper trade on which bars and restaurants depend.
For much of that “high- season” month, the village was alarmingly quiet, with trade picking up only now in the middle of August. Even the weather gods are against us, it seems.
Mind you, there was one consolation for the Baroness. The “automatic” watering service provided by the weather gods eased the burden of summer watering. It might even have been good for the “high-spirited escapades” or, sorry, capers.