Recycling doesn't exist 3/07/09

Mio marito had the meeting with the mayor yesterday about the ban on glass bottles outside. We were at a lovely beach with friends from Arezzo for the afternoon. He came back saying what a scene. Only about five of the original thirty locali representatives turned up. The guy from the noisy bar went mad saying he wanted the right to have the bottles outside and it was his right and they were stifling his business (understandable – they have little space inside). The capo dei carbinieri (chief of police) exploded and told him he would come and check on him and close him down if he found anything out of line and that he knew him and they were the noisiest bar and had many complaints from residents. Really? Strange that they don’t do anything about the complaints. So mio marito had to intervene and said this is all beside the point I want to propose we look after the borgo and put more recycling bins and collect the rubbish because no one comes to clean the streets in the borgo. The mayor tried to insist they do and mio marito said he had counted three weeks that three bottles of were in the same spot. The mayor said recycling was a joke and didn’t exist (!) and mio marito suggested that he take the matter on board to make sure it works, but the mayor said there were no resources. Mio marito said he could delegate that function to another department for financing. And explained his expertise in the field a bit. The mayor said Pachamama was a restaurant and didn’t come into the whole bottle fight, but mio marito said he wanted to resolve the matter and collaborate in an atmosphere of dialogue (words the Sicilians were not used to hearing, it appears) and he got them all talking. Good for him, they are not used to dealing with someone of his calibre.

The assessore (assistant) of the mayor showed up on the beach funnily today and talked to mio marito about it and took his number and I promoted him by saying this is his whole field of expertise, he wrote projects funded by EU and Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ran them in Argentina and Peru and Chile and Ecuador. The guy got all into energy saving methods too and we said our light bulbs were all energy saving, etc. It seemed positive.

But he had hardly gone out of earshot than mio marito said, shrugging his shoulders, that it is all talk, all hot air, and that nothing would ever come of it. Is this what Sicily does to you, make you cynical and lose hope?

Lola

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