Contortionists
A flexible and talented contortionist lady who likes latex
Italy is in the midst of an especially interesting election campaign, one you are not likely to hear much of since the American presidential primaries are bound to get more press worldwide. We ought to deal with the subject, and someday maybe we will, but in the meantime we believe what you really need to know about is the parking ticket situation at Milan’s “Linate” airport.
Milan has two airports. One, the aspiring intercontinental hub at Malpensa, is about forty minutes by train from the city center and does not concern us today. The other, Linate, is a more or less in-town airport twenty or twenty-five minutes out by car depending on traffic. It’s the one you would usually go to to fly to Rome and to the nearer Continental destinations like London, Paris and Vienna.
So, in airport terms, Milan’s situation is a common one, pretty much like that of, say, the two airports serving Washington D.C; with Linate cast as Washington National (which we understand is now “Ronald Reagan”) and Malpensa as Dulles, way out in the Virginia countryside..
Except that Milan’s in-town airport is not quite “in town”. It is just barely outside the city limits and is spread between the nominal jurisdictions of two little places called Segrate and Peschiera Borromeo. These two towns are too small to have local police forces large enough to manage the automobile traffic a busy airport can generate, and so that task has for many years been handled by the City of Milan’s municipal police.
This means that if you park illegally at the airport or insist on driving in a lane reserved to public transport there or something like that, you are liable to ticketing by Milan city cops even if you are not technically in Milan. Messy perhaps, but as long as it works…
Well, it has of course stopped working. The jurisdictional problem was originally sorted out in an agreement drawn up between the three city governments back in the 1960s. This piece of paper has now gone missing and cannot be found. There are plenty of copies of the text floating around, be these are apparently undated, unsigned and not “official.” The upshot is that the courts have begun refusing to recognize traffic citations issued to unruly drivers at the airport because it cannot be formally shown that the police officers signing them have any authority to do so.
Now, you might think that would be simple enough to deal with; maybe, just for instance, the three administrations involved, all of whom have apparently lost the orignal document, might want to, oh, jointly sign a letter recognizing the existence of their agreement – which after all is not in doubt. But then there is another interesting problem. The fines actually collected for traffic offences committed at the airport do not go to any of the civil administrations involved. They instead are collected by a national agency called ENAC, essentially Italy’s national Civil Aviation authority.
ENAC would like to have the money, but since its business – if that is the word – is that of supervising the operation of airports, it has no staff or resources to dedicate to actually collecting traffic fines from people who rarely want to pay them. It would probably like to receive a clean and simple monthly check from some entity that is set up to do that, say, Milan’s municipal police. But why should Milan want to bother? Or Segrate? Or Peschiera Borromeo? Or much of anybody at all?
Up to now, this has not been a huge problem with ordinary drivers. On the whole, they don’t want to get tickets, “real” or not, since they would still have to go to court to get them cancelled. And, out of habit, they rather expect to have to park between the yellow lines or something. Where the knots are reaching the comb – the delicate way the Italians refer to the “shit hitting the fan” – has to do with attempting to discipline the taxi drivers who haunt places like airports. They go into gales of laughter and make offensive remarks when Milanese traffic cops tell them they have to, oh, “move along” or something. Sooner rather than later this is going to be a problem.
We’ve told this tiny story because it is exactly emblematic of the way government is slowly breaking down in Italy. There are more dramatic hypothetical explanations for why the garbage cannot be collected in Naples (here) or why government offices are not paying their electrical bills (here) or why the Ministry of Justice feels compelled to seek commercial sponsors for courtroom proceedings (here), or for why the State Railways solve their maintenance problems by bolting restroom doors shut (here), but most really amount to the simple fact that the machine is breaking down and no one seems to know how to go about fixing it.
Please note that the question is not even really one of money, though it may seem so at first glance. Italy undeniably belongs on lists of the richest countries in the world, but government here has become too complex to actually govern. There is always “a slip between cup and lip” and it is growing larger every day.