Setting priorities

Here's a couple of pieces of news about nowadays Italy. This is about money, so it's as boring as it gets, but no money no honey, so let's get into it quick and dirty.

First, I'm happy to hear that after around 50 years of planning, dreaming, discussing, allying, cancelling, replanning, modifying, questioning and delaying, the project to build a bridge between continental Italy and Sicily has finally been awarded to a company. It's the first good sign that we don't only talk in Italy: sometimes we can even do things.

Money wise, it's an impressive thing, comprising a road and rail link over the 8 kms of strait that separate Sicily from Calabria. The cost of the project, at 2002 values, is estimated at 4.6 billion euros, but the financial impact will be some 6 billion euros.

Now stop for a while and think about 6 billion euros. It's an incredibly large sum. You could take that money and, say, buy a copy of Ligabue's last CD to every inhabitant of the six larges european nations. In an impulse of generosity, you could buy every Italian person two pairs of shoes at high street prices, or you could pay yourself fuel to drive until Pluto and back around 45 times with your average city car. In a nutshell, it's as much money as you will never even figure out, unless your name is Berlusconi or Gates of course.

So it's good that we got the money for this project. We are a modern, European nation, and we are doing our best to improve our infrastructure. Given that it currently takes around 22 hours to travel the 1650 km distance that separates Aosta from Palermo by train we could very well do with some improvement in infrastructure.

But then I remember that we are in 2005 Italy, a country that is officially in an economic recession. We live in a place where the government just approved the strictest budget law that anyone can remember of, in a desperate attempt not to breach the EU rules that we have so eagerly accepted.

This year is a special one, because we have elections. And if you have elections, you cannot cut too much, otherwise people won't vote you. And you see, Italian politicians like their jobs, so much that they seldom make unpopular decisions. This has even prompted Standard & Poors, the international rating agency, to express worries about the effectiveness of our policies, particularly concerning tax.

Nevertheless, we just cut our budget for culture and arts, and are even putting the 2006 winter olympics at stake with budget cuts to the companies that were supposed to provide vital services such as transport.

Now you may start wondering whether all this makes sense. If you look into the figures, it's quite hard to find any logic in this. In fact, you could rephrase it this way: are we all fucking mad?

Think about it: we're trying to save the pennies here and there to stay in Europe and not lose our face in front of the likes of Lithuania and Cyprus, we are into recession, our research and development budget is at central-african levels and we build a bridge over the strait, just to shorten travel time between Aosta and Palermo from 22 to 20 hours?

And then we wonder why people don't pay tax! Do you trust a family man who renovates the ceiling of his house while his kids have not enough food?

I'm amazed. Just hope that whoever goes into the prime minister seat next will cancel this folly and give the money back to where it belongs: more public transportation, fixing the electrical and water distribution network, renewing our roads, maintaining our monuments, planting more forest, cleaning our dirty rivers and enlarging our ports so that even ships to Sicily will be faster.

And please, let Sicliy be the marvellous island it is today. Would you ever feel so wonderfully isolated, so mystically separated from the rest of the world if there was a bridge? Sicily has survived perfectly for thousands of years as an island (see the pic above, which I took in an undisclosed village near Messina). We don't need the bridge.