Italians are not easily impressed by new technology, but it it helps them flirt, talk or agitate its success is guaranteed
I don’t believe it’s ever been decreed, but come August, it is obligatory for Italians to holiday with the family. This has a strange effect on the Italian landscape and economy. The biggest cities empty (except for tourists, who never seem to leave – they just get larger and more confused) while little seaside communities and hilltop holiday retreats fill to capacity.
This massive remigration from the cities to the sea or the countryside is what the Italians call le ferie. It is not always a holiday atmosphere. It’s a pastime filled with rigid rules starting with morning coffee (please, stranieri, don’t order a cappuccino after 10am, or this transgression will be the topic of the day) the lunch menu, and how much time must elapse before it is safe to return to the sea after lunch (at least two hours, sometimes three). But the food is sumptuous, and the seaside and mountains are an oasis from the unrelenting city heat, making this one Italian tradition that I have happily adopted since coming to live here.
For me, there’s an added bonus. I get to observe Italians interacting with each other in a more intimate Petri dish than Rome. I am treated to their favourite pop songs (either the Eighties have never gone away, or they’re making a dramatic comeback here), to their debates about the merits of the new Fiat Cinquecento and the technology that now has become an essential part of their lives.
Aside from the Italian love affair with the telefonino, Italy is not a particularly tech-savvy country, and certainly not one of Europe’s early adopter markets. It wasn’t until last year that I began to see iPods around Rome with any degree of frequency. And, I know just three Italians who own one. I’ve gone through three myself since I arrived two years ago.
This doesn’t mean the geek spirit isn’t alive and well. It’s just that Italians, from my observations, are more drawn to technologies that allow them to communicate, express their opinion, flirt or agitate about some social ill. How can they listen to an iPod if they’re always on the telephone?
For this reason, blogs too have become a popular mouthpiece for the Italians of late. In the past year, my friends, spread across the country, have set up a blog (eoltre.blogspot.com) as a type of online meeting place to relive the long evenings of debate they once had at a favourite osteria during their University of Siena days. The eoltre blog posts generate just as much dinner party debate in Rome these days as the Big Three: politics, the Vatican and football.
For Italians, Skype rounds out the trinity. If the mobile phone gives the fretful Italian mamma a reassuring communications lifeline to her loved ones, and if the blog affords a young revolutionary his audience, then Skype is the great liberator from consumer tyranny.
The tyrant, in this case, is Telecom Italia, the plodding former monopoly that Italians bash with vigour. It’s also a firm they mistrust, particularly following accusations of wiretapping levelled at Telecom Italia’s security team. The allegation is that in exchange for an envelope full of cash a rogue band of Telecom Italia employees would spy on businessmen and their girlfriends, footballers and their girlfriends, politicians and their girlfriends. The fear has become that anybody who picks up a telephone in this country runs the risk of being bugged. Bypassing Telecom Italia has become an obvious lure. Throw in free calls, and the country is sold on Skype.
My father-in-law Massimo, an art critic, is a Skype newbie. Test-driving it for the first time about a month ago, he now uses Skype as much as anybody I know, barking “pronto, pronto” into his headset every few minutes. He has even set up a Skype cordless phone so that the family can call each other more often (as if that were possible).
Luckily, the Skype outage two weeks ago occurred during the biggest summer holiday, while most Italians were outside barbequing or at the beach. Still, the news was unsettling. Not buying the Microsoft update explanation for the outage, Italians peppered me with questions about the incident. Could somebody be sabotaging their Skype?, they asked, looking for clues to feed their growing list of conspiracy theories against Telecom Italia.
I tried to assure them it was just a blip, and tucked into the pasta, hoping somebody would change the subject to something more benign like the new Fiat Cinquecento, the Vatican or politics.
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