milan: green and windy

I don’t like Milan. This is just to keep it politically correct. From my first touch down with the capitale morale d’Italia in 1990, I could never manage to stay in town more than one day in a row, and exclusively for business, and if I really had to.

But this time round I must confess I saw the most beautiful Milan ever. A strong spring wind was sweeping the city (and tons of dust from the Stazione Centrale renovation and neighboring building sites). Balconies showed off a lush green vegetation, and the sky was not milky white overcast as usual. This time round spring in Milan was not like being trapped in a bag of salad left rotting under the sun.

So perfect timing to spend an evening together with friends before work the morning after. Catching up after a while, years for sure. Yes, the problem is, I hate Milan but I have many dear friends there, and my allergy to the city has the unpleasant side effect of not seeing my friends as much as I would like. E-mails help…but it is when you meet the kids that you realize since how long you didn’t meet in person with your friends.

My favourite spot in town is the garden bar of the Bulgari hotel. It is the perfect venue for focused business meetings in front of a coffee. In any season, nature will be in front of your eyes and not the ubiquitous milanese fashion boutiques. Silence. In between meetings you can focus on the next things to do, get some things sorted out with the office, with the benefit that you can pretend to be in a modernist beauty farm in the countryside.

No Grands Palaces paraphernalia, grooms, concierges, maitres twirling around you like on a manège. You can stand still, no circus around you. And if you spot a friend from Switzerland having a meeting there as well, the nice feeling of being somehow “at home”. Premium espresso it is, but worth it every penny…

Roma Termini-Moscow (via the rest of Europe)

An excel spreadsheet, A3 format, full of travel details, business meetings and appointments with friends after work.

It’s one of those trips…there are business meetings in a couple of european cities, and since a flight is a flight, some optimization of logistics and CO2 reduction call for saying hallo to friends in between two stops without coming back to Rome in between! And at the end, a weekend in Moscow with MeinMann!!

In 1998, right in the middle of the Ruble crisis, I crossed Russia on the  inspiring Krasnaya Strela. What a beautiful experience. The first page of Philip Roth’s “In Russia” – one long whistle blow gets lost in the night, the ship of the taiga leaves for and endless ocean of land.

No Red Arrow this time round. Just the crisp apron of the skies, Lufthansa . Still, I’m leaving with a red train tomorrow, the Frecciarossa. And about the Ruble…we will see!

cats in the earthquake

A friend from the IOL forum highlighted today that the famous Largo Argentina Cat Sanctuary association has rescued some cats from the L’Aquila earthquake and they are available for adoption, since it is difficult to find their owners.

You can find all the information on the Association on their website …

Next time you are in Rome, come and distribute some extra cuddling to the Largo Argentina cats…they need you!

Feeling at home at Villa Medici

Yesterday my belle-sœur D. and I, we decided that we needed a bit of renaissance nobildonna lifestyle. The weather forecast called for heat and baking sun. So we headed for Villa Medici…

The Granet exhibition provides those shades of green and blue that are so refreshing for the eyes. Curious vistas of Rome under a gray parisian sky…translucent acquarello views of Versailles…

While the stylish french voyageurs adjusted their Ingrès turbans and their Renoir canotier hats getting ready for the garden visit at midday, we settled in at the “cafeteria”. It is somewhat diminutive to call cafeteria such a beautiful renaissance salon, with a balcony offering the best panorama on the eternal city. But its simplicity and absence of hype makes the charme of the place, with its new-quattrocento simple furniture full of colors, its reasonably priced salads and campari soda, and the soft sound of chiacchere by art lovers…

Frederic Mitterrand has innovated, now the gardens can be visited and soon the villa will be open for visits too. But let’s be lazy today, on the first day of summer.

The hunt for shadow in Rome has started, and we are sitting on comfortable cotton divans, enjoying the shade and chatting with Rome at our feet. The Medici’s lifestyle, for one day.

Marchionne’s auto-critique

Busy week in Rome this week. Many celebrities in town. All the bosses from the big corporates were in town for the industrialists’ meeting, and for the seismic waves emanated from it, conferences and the like.

So today at 5pm Mr Marchionne appeared magically (from Detroit? from Berlin? from some Ministero?) in steamy hot hot-house Rome, wearing his Linus-style blue jumper in an appropriately sub-zero air conditioned conference room. He sipped an espresso in religious silence at the speakers’ table in front of a couple of hundreds of eyes. I thought the moment was very Louis XIV.

Bits and pieces. He explained platforms and said that an Opel today has a 80% Fiat Punto skeleton. So the operation should make a lot of sense to the German government, if you know that I mean. (But we’ll see how that turns up over the weekend).

He also said that in the car industry top management either comes from the back  – the kitchen, ie the factory -  of from the glitzy front, the Geneva Car Show. But the car industry cannot look pretty and sassy in the front if it does not clean up its ugly kitchen. (For sure there were some greasy c(r)ooks at the helm, in those kitchens…)

He said that the car industry has been destroying value for too many decades. (That  makes a lot of sense. If the car industry were the IT one, we would still be running Lotus 123 and playing Pac Man, with advertising on TV boasting “green figures on a black background: cool!”).

He explained the negative Net Working Capital mechanism. You get paid for the sale of the car before you pay the metal that goes in it. Sort of magic. That magic stops  when you stop producing.

He said that the car industry did all sorts of monkey corporate behavior. Buy financial services. Sell them. Buy components manufacturers. Sell them. They tried all the tricks. Now it’s over. (Good auto-critique…or car-critique).

the long night of the museums: de-light…

Also a Berlin favorite, Die lange nacht der Museen, moored to Rome’s cultural shores yesterday night. “I’ll wait for you until late at night” was the tag line for this event.

Mein Mann and I picked our local, the Macro museum in via Reggio Emilia, the museum for Contemporary Art,  the closest museum to our neighborhood, and it proved to be a good bet.

First, a giant hangover of faux-jasmine perfume to start with…a nice walk along the gardens from home to the museum with our friends, to see the building site of the new Odile Decq project for the new Macro wings.

The ambiance was groovy – pity there was no music, some techno would have done the trick – hectic green laser installations by Arthur Duff and rounds of ruby-red campari soda.

I snatched the last ticket to the building site and surprise surprise here are the pictures by the official “documentary-maker” of the party.

The programme called for concertoes in the most famous museums and archeological sites, but rumor had it that queues were very long almost everywhere.

So we decided to stay local and ventured in our local park, Villa Torlonia, for a nocturne exploration. Mein Mann and our friends grew up as a kids nearby this park, yet it was a premiere for them as well.

As we approached the Villa (once home to the Torlonia princes, then to the italian dictator, threafter to the american GIs, now finally available to the citizens) we found ourselves in the middle of a piece promenade…

It was gorgeous to lay on the grass by night, under the tall palms and the obelisk, while listening to Rossini…

Sublime conclusion of the evening, we spotted in the woods two lightning bugs flying one towards each other…beautiful.

a discreet minus 5.9%

Bingo! The best kept country’s secret, the debacle of the first quarter GDP, is out of the bag. Beware of disfattismo! We weren’t told the figures in order to keep our optimism and remain upbeat! With a little governmental Schadenfreude for our friends, Spain and Germany, during the past months.

Interesting to note: THE BASE. I hate to admit it, but yes, I work with numbers and each time someone gives me a % variation, I ask myself: what was the bloody base? Q1 2008 GDP growth in Italy had been +0.4%. Anaemic bordering on fainting. Always look behind a number. There’s another one.

Anyway, even if the government and the press give us oeillieres in order not to look at scary things upfront, don’t worry. We had realized how bad the situation was a while ago, and have no wishful thinking left in storage. There’s no sound infrastructure built in the 2000s under the belt of the country, like in Spain. No investment on long-term Weltanschauung of our own economy, like in Germany, to tumble from. It was mean before. It’s frayed and worn now. Pendant les famines, les gros maigrissent, les maigres etc…

Don’t worry, tomorrow the news will be focusing again on security measures, over zealous ronde, anti-multikulti attitude. Elections oblige. Bingo.

music for the masses

The elections are approaching and there are a couple of lyrics turning round and round in my head…it must be the politics of dancing…

source of the video: depechie17 on youtube

supporting evidence

The OECD’s recent study “Society at a Glance 2009″ sort of confirms some opinions we may have when observing society.

• Italians have less children than the French.
• Germans seem to have more time outside paid work for themselves and for the family, and don’t waste it watching TV.
• In Italy some people work too much and some other not enough.
• French take their time when they eat, and their pleasure too, and more than Italians. Obesity rates in Italy are among the lowest.
• Compulsive house-cleaning is, more than an italian obsession, an italian social distortion (see how different are detergent advertising campaign in Italy vs Rest of Europe).
• Italian students’ performance in science and maths ranks among the lowest in the OECD countries, after Mexico, Turkey and Greece.
• Japanese live longer than French (but the French live better, and sleep more).

So, nothing new under the italian sun or the berliner luft.

Italy is simply stuck, and is not progressing.

How are OECD societies progressing? How effective are their actions in promoting social progress? Society at a Glance provides a basis for addressing these twin questions. It offers a concise overview of quantitative social trends and policies across the OECD. This 2009 edition includes a wide range of information on social issues – such as demography and family characteristics, employment and unemployment, poverty and inequality, social and health care expenditure, and work and life satisfaction –as well as a guide to help readers understand the structure of OECD social indicators.

TriestBerlinExpress!

The BerlinRomExpress is for the moment only a blog and not a reality. Yet now there is an Autozug linking Triest to Berlin! From the beach of Triest to the beach of Berlin…Wannsee!

Am Autozug-Bahnhof in Berlin-Wannsee werden die Kunden mit Prosecco, Orangensaft und Salzgebäck begrüßt. Während die Gäste die Getränke und die Sonnenstrahlen genießen, werden Motorräder und Pkw auf den Zug verladen. Am nächsten Morgen – nach einer 17-stündigen, sanft ratternden Fahrt auf Schienen – werden sie am Bahnhof in Triest von einer kleinen Musik-Kapelle empfangen, die italienische Schlager schmettert. Dazu gibt es den weit über die Landesgrenzen hinaus berühmten San-Daniele-Schinken sowie Weißwein aus der an Slowenien und Österreich grenzenden italienischen Region Friaul-Julisch Venetien.

E’ arrivato oggi alla stazione di Trieste il primo treno con il servizio Autozug auto-passeggeri di Deutsche Bahn, che colleghera’ fino a ottobre il capoluogo giuliano a Berlino, Amburgo, Dusseldorf e Francoforte. Ad accogliere i primi turisti sono stati i rappresentanti di Deutsche Bahn, Trenitalia, Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia, Comune di Trieste e Agenzia Turismo Fvg, oltre a una banda musicale. I treni (tre o quattro alla settimana) sono composti da quattro carri (per un totale di 48 auto) e da 4-5 carrozze con cuccette, un vagone ristorante e alcuni vagoni letto. Il costo per persona del viaggio notturno parte da circa 60 euro, mentre il trasporto di una macchina costa 149 euro. Il servizio e’ gia’ attivo ad Alessandria, Bolzano e Verona.