Twenty Italian Numbers
A board for the “Gioco dell’oca” table game, early 18th Century
The factoids that follow have been extracted from a recent issue of “Specchio,” the weekend magazine of the Turin newspaper “La Stampa.” For once, copyright law works in our favor because it protects “creative execution” and not the facts themselves – so, unless these numbers are pure inventions, we should be OK…
At any rate, of a total Italian population of around 59 million, roughly:
1 percent live in a family in which the sole wage earner is a woman
2 percent are of non-Catholic religious persuasion
3 percent admit to having had sex with simultaneous multiple partners
4 percent do not know what the Internet is
5 percent are dyslexic
6 percent read at least one book each month
7 percent of smokers buy contraband cigarettes from street vendors
8 percent treat themselves with homeopathic remedies
9 percent of the elderly exercise more than once a week
10 percent sleep less than five hours a night
11 percent have hearing problems
12 percent of males have difficulty maintaining an erection
13 percent are poor
14 percent are convinced that living together is better than marrying
15 percent do volunteer work
16 percent consider the clergy the most reliable of professional categories
17 percent suffer from depression
18 percent follow diets of their own invention to lose weight
19 percent live in rented property
20 percent would like to make love in an elevator
The Specchio version, which is beautifully done, carries this on until it reaches 100 percent. We are overwhelmed with admiration for Stefania Racca, who appears to have put this all together, but would not want to have to redo the whole thing all the way to the end. We cannot resist adding however that 49 percent of all Italian believe that animals have souls while 73 percent, if they smoke in an automobile, toss the cigarette butts out the window.
26.11.06
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