This was the last straw! Giorgio was burning with rage because of his brother’s Franco’s last comment, made in jest: “Siete quasi clandestini! You are some sort of illegal immigrants!” How could he say something like that, how could he act so maleducato, blunt, towards such respectable people as we were in Giorgio’s eyes. Persone serie, persone brave. Because of the way Giorgio emphasised that last bit, we got the impression that he didn’t come across many people like that in Italy. Is Italy full of untrustworthy characters who cannot be taken seriously? Who say one thing and do another? We would soon find out. Luckily, according to Giorgio, we didn’t belong in that category.
Although they were brothers, Giorgio and Franco had strikingly different personalities. Giorgio was short and squat like a rugby player with dark wiry curls; he had a beard and wore glasses and everything he said seemed to have been well thought out. He often had an introspective air about him. Franco, on the other hand, was tall and slim, with thinning hair, and had no beard or glasses (the latter for reasons that would become apparent later). Franco moreover, had a nervous energy that didn’t let him sit still, paired with impulsive tendencies: he blurted everything out directly whilst looking straight at you as if waiting to see your reaction. Each brother seemed to impersonate a different aspect of ‘the Italian’: Franco, the jovial, carefree, cheerful, not-to-be-trusted Italian of the proverbs, as most outsiders imagine them; Giorgio, the caring, pessimistic and slightly depressed version of the Italian, the kind you come across in Italy quite often. It’s not for no reason that many Italians will answer ‘how are you?’ with “non c’è male” ‘not too bad’ instead of with “bene, very well”. Franco always greeted everyone with a deafening “Tutto bene?” He meant this as a rhetorical question because he repeated it every time you fell into a momentary silence: “Tutto bene?” He never really listened. Giorgio, on the other hand, often engaged you in deep and serious conversations about the shortcomings of Italy and its people and about the bleakness of his own prospects. Like every coin, Italy seems to have two sides: manic and depressed.
The exchange intensified between these brothers representing the extreme polar opposites and (we felt) it was growing into a full-blown argument. We understood very little of what was said, we picked out the words “Schengen” (pronounced: shyenghen) and “Sei pazzo! You are crazy!” Disagreement? Oh well, this was just the typical way feelings were expressed, in keeping with the Italian temperament. A good example of ‘much ado about nothing’. When the dispute was finally over, Giorgio carried on irritably with the complicated and extensive paperwork that the anti-terrorism legislation required him to fill in. We were renting his apartment as foreigners with temporary residence permits and the Italian government needed to know all the ins and outs.
Giorgio’s and Franco’s flat forms part of a so-called condominio, an apartment complex. These can be found all over the small town suburbs in Northern Italy: 3-4 storey buildings, surrounded by a garden, with their own car park and protected by a metal railing. The gate securing the area surrounding a condominio (safety first!), is not just an ordinary one, but a cancello a telecomando, a remote controlled gate! And it’s also fitted with a flashing light because a house or a condominio without such a gate and orange light is like a monarch without a crown. You have only really made it in life if you successfully moved into a house equipped with both an automatic, remote controlled gate and an orange flashing light. There were also supposed to be little warning signs to prevent accidentally trapping children completely automatically between the wall and the gates and squashing them into French fries when opening the gate. Safety first.
The flats in Giorgio’s and Franco’s condominio were accessible through a shared lobby. There were no external corridors. The basement consisted of small box rooms and garages. The management of the condominio was carried out by an unavoidable group of owners, the ‘neighbourhood watch’ who (safety first) ensured cleanliness, peace and routine. The condominio was situated in Via Moruzzi, west of the city centre and Pavia’s railway station. It was surrounded by a beautiful garden and there were plenty of covered parking spaces reserved for each flat. The wall in the brand new lobby was clad in polished natural stone. And of course we received our own genuine telecomando for the gate, which was naturally equipped with a lovely flashing orange beacon. But first, we had to be cleared of any suspicion of subversive intentions that could possibly link us to terrorists. Giorgio did his best to arrange this for us, but the pile of paperwork full of official jargon made it a nearly unbearable chore.
Whilst Giorgio was focused on deciphering the instructions, Franco, completely unaffected by the previous argument, started up a friendly chat. About reading glasses and the dangers of wearing multifocal lenses, for example. Franco had heard stories from people wearing varifocals who fell down staircases because they couldn’t see the steps properly. “Deadly!” he asserted. He was adamant not to wear glasses of that sort or, to think about it, of any sort, even though he was short-sighted. As a result, he read the year on our 1875 Bols Genever Gin bottle as 1575. Franco was preoccupied, just like nearly all Italians, with danger and health. We noticed this when he showed us around the neighbourhood, shortly after we had moved into the flat. He pointed out the hospital, the farmacia, the pharmacy and the headquarters of the Red Cross and the Green Cross, all these facilities available to us within our district. We as persone serie were completely safe, he seemed to say.
By now we had already spent a couple of weeks living in Giorgio and Franco’s flat, who on this fine evening cleared us of any suspicion of terrorist activities. We had to drink a proper Dutch toast to that. Bols Genever from 15... no, wait, 1875.