Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

[ROME] To visitors from the other side of the Alps, the Italian capital appears chaotic. But here's the thing — it works. Maybe it's got something to do with the extraordinary creativity of the people. Life is fluid and lateral thinking is required constantly. Take the traffic. Staying alive on the streets requires extraordinary motor skills, in every sense of the expression, but most of the participants in the fray seem to survive.

To better understand what's going on here, the book to read these days is The Dark Heart of Italy: Travels Through Space and Time Across Italy by Tobias Jones. A Brit, who moved here in 1999, Jones loves the country and its people, its food, its culture and the extraordinary sense of style that the Italians possess. The things he doesn't love about the place, he loathes and they include Italian television, "The only thing on offer is bosoms, football and money." He also scourges the bureaucracy and the corruption, and the collusion between the Mafia and politicians.

No book about contemporary Italy would be complete, of course, without an assessment of Silvio Berlusconi and Jones, excellent journalist that he is, has a great old time with the media magnate turned prime minister. How could such a character emerge from a maze of business and legal puzzles and still be elected to the highest office of a western democracy? In pursuit of the answer Jones turns over the stones that hide a host of unsavoury facts about a nation that exerts such a fascination on so many people. What he unearths should make us all shudder — thousands of ghastly, dangerous buildings erected without planning permission, to mention but one example — but it seems to have the opposite effect. The more grotesque Italy appears, the more people feel drawn to it. Is it because there's too much order and not enough chaos in our own lives?

Incidentally, Tobias Jones is also very good on the Italian language, which he says doesn't have words for concepts such as "self-control" or "hangover". Facing into a weekend among Italian and Irish rugby enthusiasts, that's incredibly valuable information.

Diarist of the day: H. L. Mencken, 19 February 1932

"Ellery Sedgwick, edior of the Atlantic Monthly, was her for dinner last night. Later in the evening Paul Patterson, Hamilton Owens and John W. Owens dropped in. When Sedgwick left, along about midnight, Patterson and John Owens remained, and I finally got to bed a little after two o'clock. Sedgwick was full of curious anecdotes. He told about being at a dinner party with the late Moorfield Storey. The name of Hearst came up, and Storey said: 'Hearst married a prostitute, and then gradually dragged her down to his own level.' "