Love locks

If you happen to be in Rome sometime soon, walk across the Ponte Milvio and stop at the middle lamp-post.


You are looking at eternal love. Make obeisance.

Couples take a padlock, write or scratch their initials on it, attach the padlock to the chain that was once used to close off the bridge and then throw the key into the Tiber. (See the Chesterton quote below.) There are now so many that members of the ruling Ulivo party demand that Mayor Veltroni have them removed. These dessicated creatures have been dubbed "The Lovers' Enemy" by the right-wing councillor Marco Clarke. "The Left is against lovers", who will "be offended" by this gross breaking of their vows.

The custom was born as a school-leaving ritual, using locker padlocks to mutely announce 'Escape!' to the world. But teenage couples adopted it after the publication of a book by Federico Moccia (Ho voglia di te - "I want you") in which the central couple seal their love with a padlock attached to the chain on the third lamp-post of the Ponte Milvio.

To assess the style that inspired the custom, sample this from Moccia's blog: A reader asks, "Does the chain exist?" Moccia responds

Does the chain exist? Maybe.
It exists for those who believe. Who dream. Who love the sea. Who love the wind, and as the motorbike leans into it, grip to the person in front...For you who dream, the lovers' chain is for you. Maybe one day, you'll go to Rome, to the Ponte Milvio, to the third lamp-post, the one that looks out over the Tiber and watches the Corso Francia bridge. And you'll find it. You'll find the chain.

There's a lot more, but the spirit wilts and the flesh dries up. If you want more, go to his website with its sky-blue banner (his last book was called 3 Metres under the Sky) and the word 'Fede' (Faith) and a bandana-swathed ...strawberry.

I borrowed the photo from Chiara at 06blog.

Red Brigades write back

The Genovese daily Il secolo XIX has received a leaflet signed "24 January 1979 Group" (an important date in the history of the Red Brigades) which, among other things, threatens grave repercussions on Genoa for the arrest of their comrades on the 12th.

Excuse me thrusting this on you. It's just that the mind-numbing rhetoric of these people never fails to fascinate me.

About the arrests

The action is of no concrete significance because the banner that fell has been promptly regathered for the struggle and the proletarian emancipation from the Zionist and imperialist bourgeois. To the slandering bourgeoisie, to the forces of the constituted and anti-proletarian bourgeois order, to the holders of the means of production, we say that our struggle goes on and will always go on in name and on behalf of the oppressed masses. The illegal action of the bourgeois police will come to nothing but the intensification of our concrete action against the city of Genoa. We shall strike whoever tries to chain the liberty of proletarian thought, the response of the masses, and the intention to attain Socialism as the only way to overthrow the system.

Don't you love the phrase "the liberty of proletarian thought". And also "the forces of the constituted and anti-proletarian bourgeois order".

I haven't been able to render the full flavour. For example, where I have written 'holders', the Italian has 'padroni', which is, literally, 'masters', but I was sure you would think I was taking the mickey. Now the best rendering of the word would probably be 'bosses', but that doesn't have the Olde Worlde connotations that are needed. Because the complement of 'padrone' is 'servo', which may mean either 'servant' or 'slave'. You can see why they continue to employ the term.

Another inadequacy in my translation is 'response' in the phrase "the response of the masses". The Italian word in "riscossa". We would need a noun to match the meaning of the phrasal verb 'strike back', as in The Empire Strikes Back. I can't think of one. You need both the meaning of 'hit back' as well as that of success in your counter-attack.

Remind Prime Minister Prodi

I've just come across Inside Iraq, a blog at Time Online by Stephen Farrell and others stationed there. He tells this story of a press conference held by Nouri al-Maliki.

An Islamist Shiite who lost more than 60 close relatives to Saddam's regime and was at that moment sitting in the former home of Saddam's cousin Kamal Hussein, he [Maliki] was about to be challenged on the former dictator's unseemly execution, and he knew it.

Seated first right as we went clockwise around the table, the Italian journalist got to ask first question, and it was a zinger.

"Prime Minister, President Bush said the death of Saddam ....looked like revenge, a sectarian revenge. And in Italy the Prime Minister, Mr Prodi, condemned the death penalty and asked you to cancel it. Can you comment on that?'

There was a pursing of Islamist lips, a 15-minute justificatory address in Arabic, all par for the course.

Then the killer coda.

"I would like to remind Prime Minister Prodi about Mussolini and the way Mussolini was dealt with."

All thoughts in the room turned to an upside-down Italian dictator and his mistress hanging from piano wire in Milan's Piazzo Loreto. Both manifestly un-legal-processed and riddled with machine gun bullets delivered by - depending on who you believe - Italian partisans or British intelligence agents.

Sniggers from the Americans to the left. Shia imperturbability straight ahead. And I think I even detected a half-muttered 'ciao.' It might have been 'ouch'. Hard to tell.

(via Hot Air)

The Red Brigades are back (behind bars)

An extraordinary roundup of terrorists in Italy - old-fashioned terrorists these, descendents of the Red Brigades. Fourteen men aged between 21 and 55 and a woman of 26. They call themselves the Partito comunista politico militare, which means the Communist Polical Military Party and is typical of their prose style. Ideologically, they hark back to one of the many splinter groups of the Red Brigades, one called the Second Position (I am not making this up). Only someone with a severe disorder would want to know what the Second Position is, let alone the First. I started reading about it, but was overcome by numbness. Several of them are workplace representatives of the CGIL, one of the largest and oldest Italian unions.

Evidently, they'd been under observation for two years. It is not immediately clear why they had not been picked up before, and why they have been now. One night last November, the police filmed them at shooting practice in the Veneto. These people seem to have been filmed and bugged 24/7. During one conversation, last August, Comrade Bruno Ghirardi spoke of his frustrations to Comrade Claudio Latino.

CBG: I can't get my mind off Ichino.
CCL: What else can you do? He's gotta go down.

Andrea Ichino, an economist at the European University in Florence, is a proponent of the liberalisation of Italian labour law (though he may have done worse).

They talk about another target.

He's one of the top managers. You put yourself in front of the door. It'll be a clean strike, right under his house.

They did enjoy talking about it but don't seem to have done much. However, according to the police, they were planning something "inflammatory" this Easter.

The Pcpm may be down, but it's not out. Corriere della Sera was contacted by phone yesterday.

I give you a message from the Red Brigades. Nothing will go unpunished and the banner that fell we have taken up again.

Doesn't really have the same ring anymore, does it? They've been superceded; their revolution is obsolete; they even want to live. They're sad and they're funny, and they're both because they haven't seen that in the idiot stakes of revolution, their tickets were bought in lira, and even then were counterfeit. Fools twice over.