What has happened to Italy, a country that not even Mussolini could discipline? It used to be cheerfully anarchic and self-indulgent: cars parked haphazardly all over pavements, long lunches and long siestas, fat tummies full of pasta. Officialdom, though bloated and intrusive, could also be flexible. I first fell in love with Italy more than 50 years ago when I skidded on an icy road into a tram stop in Milan, knocking over a bollard and banging my head (no seat belts then) on the windscreen, and a man in uniform poked his head through the window offering to help me move the car because the bollard was the property of the Milan City Council, which would certainly make me pay for it if it found me there, and I noticed that the uniform he was wearing bore the insignia of the Milan City Council, no less.
That was then: now it could never happen.
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