The Padova Chronicles

Alitalia - from airplanes to post offices

The latest Alitalia news:

A new company has been formed ("Compagnia Aerea Italiana") which will be where investors put money to buy out the assets of the old "Alitalia", which will be allowed to fail under a bankruptcy law that the government will craft just for the occasion. In reality, the company will be divvied up into two parts, one of which will include all the juicy bits that are worth something, and the other will include all the debts and expenses and loss-making operations, which will belong to the Italian government. Apparently, time is of the essence, because Alitalia is set to announce something like 400 million euro of losses in the first half of 2008, and once again, they're running out of money.

A few questions come to mind, and a few more details:

• Air France's plan called for 2000 some odd people to be laid off. The new plan talks about 6000 plus, maybe even 7000. Even if the employees are dumped in the toxic company slated for liquidation, it's unlikely they'll go meekly. After years of strikes over comparatively trifling matters, who knows what they'll do.

• In order to reassure the workers, the government proposed the idea of giving some or most of them jobs with the postal service, the tax collection agency, and the land registry office. This is mind boggling. Not only are Italian taxpayers currently paying through the nose for the poor management and subpar employees in Alitalia, but they will be burdened with paying for these people to do jobs that they are likely completely unqualified for, for years to come, in an organization that already provides horrible service? And this is supposed to be the 'business friendly, defend the taxpayers' party in Italian politics?

• The 300 million Euro that the Italian people loaned Alitalia. Will that be part of the "junk" that gets hived off?

• The new company apparently needs an international partner to be viable, so the government is attempting to reopen talks with Air France. Wouldn't it have been simpler and cheaper to have sold the whole thing off earlier this year?

• Splitting up companies like this is pretty dubious. Compare and contrast with "Chapter 11" bankruptcy:

Sometimes, if the business's debts exceed its assets, then at the completion of bankruptcy the company's owners all end up without anything; all their rights and interests are ended and the company's creditors are left with ownership of the newly reorganized company.

• In this case, rather than Alitalia's creditors getting everything, they're going to get "screwed" (that's the technical term in corporate finance), and some of Italy's wealthiest investors are going to get all the nice bits of the company. Anyone want to bet on the valuable assets being auctioned off in a fair and transparent way to the highest bidder? I didn't think so.

• Part of the deal is that "Air One", one of the bigger rivals to Alitalia in the Italian market would become part of the newly created company, decreasing competition, and likely raising prices for consumers on routes where the new company would have a monopoly.

• The European union grumbled about the 300 million euro loan, but was too slow to really do anything. It's improbable that any of these latest machinations will be to their liking, although of course it remains to be seen whether they'll have the courage to put a stop to it.

Ferragosto

Ferragosto, August 15th, is the D-Day of vacation season in Italy, the day when everyone who is in any way mobile gets out of the big cities and heads to the mountains, the beaches... anywhere but home. The month of August is itself pretty much a writeoff in Italy, and the middle of August is the apex of the whole phenomenon. It's a holiday, nominally the Catholic festival of "The Assumption of Mary", but it's not in the slightest a day for churchgoing. Apparently, even in Roman times, there was a holiday on approximately the same date.

Some Italians will tell you that everyone takes August off because it's so hot, but the truth is that July is a hotter month, and the first heat wave, which usually hits in June, is the harshest, because it's often still quite humid, and you're not used to the heat yet. The real reason that August is vacation month is that once upon a time, when business revolved firmly around factories, it made sense for everyone to take the same time off, and it fed on itself. Even in the modern internet-book-delivery business where I last worked in Italy, many of the people who sold us books which we sold on to consumers were closed in August, so that even if we took orders, and wanted to stay open, the volume of books shipped dropped dramatically. It's a chain reaction: if your suppliers are closed, you can't really operate, so you close too. The cafe where everyone went for lunch then has no customers, so they close too, and so on, to the point where many people can't do their jobs and so may as well go on vacation themselves.

Slowly, but surely, it's changing, but I recall my first years in Italy, when nearly one out of every three shops were closed during the height of the vacation season. I recall reading about a hospital that wanted to farm out the patients in one wing to another nearby hospital, so that everyone could go on vacation.

Not being one to follow the herd, I always enjoyed staying in Padova in August. It empties out, so that it feels like there's more breathing room. It's nice and summery, hot even, but not oppressively so, and it feels just a bit dryer than the muggiest days of June, when you often can't see more than a few kilometers due to the sticky heat haze. And the pace of everything is quite relaxed for once; during the rest of the year, Padova is a very busy, even frenetic city, with a sense of "things to do" (well, outside of the public offices, but that's another article for another day). People drive quickly, walk quickly, and are generally quite active. In August, though, all the bustle and activity relocates to the resort towns along the coasts, where you can go if you miss the traffic jams and fancy staying in a concrete box of a hotel built during the 60ies boom (that you will pay extra for in August). Empty Padova, on the other hand, felt like it was "mine", with everyone gone. Some times of day, it was so deserted that I could have taken up the whole road to ride my bike along. One year, I went for a bicycle ride at lunch time on August 15th, already a time of day when traffic usually dies down some as everyone stops to eat, and I quite literally had the roads entirely to myself. I went an hour without seeing a car on roads where there is usually a fairly steady stream of them.

There's also a sense of camaraderie - "survivorship" - for lack of a better word, amongst those who remain. Since everyone is gone, it's often a good time to reconnect with those who you normally don't see so often, and August's hot, languid evenings are perfect for a nice, relaxing dinner amongst friends.

The Paradox of Choice

I read an insightful book a while back, called The Paradox of Choice, which has a lot of relevance to people in our situation: we could basically move anywhere in the US or Europe - we're lucky enough to be able to live anywhere in a relatively large portion of our world.

Along with that freedom though, comes a lot of responsibility: since we can pick amongst many places, we feel that's imperative that we select the right place, especially now that we have a daughter to think of. Sometimes we envy those people who are born and raised somewhere, and that's where they'll stay. It makes a lot of things easier in life to have some certainties like that. You might not know this or that, but you're pretty sure that you're always going to be in Padova, Italy or Hayward, California or Innsbruck, Austria, or wherever. This lets you focus on other things in life, rather than wondering whether the grass is greener over there. We, on the other hand, have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to have lived in all those places, and can firmly state that the grass is greenest in Innsbruck, because it rains so damn much in the summer.

Joking aside, though, once you get used to a place, and learn its ins and outs, the annoying and the great things about it, there are bits and pieces you wish you could take along. For instance, in Padova, the central piazzas with their multiplicity of uses, from markets in the mornings, to outdoor bars in the evenings, are something that would be part of my perfect city. Italian drivers, on the other hand, I would happily do without. Here in Austria, the drivers always stop at the crosswalks and let you by, and people are generally kind, courteous and helpful, despite the stereotype of being a bit cold. On the other hand, it's true that Innsbruck lacks that happy, fizzy energy that runs through even smaller Italian towns, and makes them so much fun. And summer doesn't feel like summer with so much rain and clouds, even for an Oregonian. Most cities in the western US don't compare that favorably either (with some exceptions here and there), but the work and business environment is far easier to deal with in many ways, compared to Europe. Despite this and that and the other thing being screwed up by politicians, for many, many people, the US really is a land of opportunity. And of course, there is still a lot of really open, empty land in the west, which has a "rugged beauty", if you'll pardon the cliche, that is just different from what you get in Europe.

Culturally, we really like how social people are in Italy. Even the nerdiest of my programmer friends there is pretty well adjusted in terms of being able to relate to other people, and having friends and interests outside of their field. In the California bay area, I recall it being quite difficult to meet people not involved with computers in some way, with many people being quite accepting of that situation. I hesitate to comment too much on Austrian culture, because without speaking the language and being fully integrated, I don't feel that it's fair to say too much, but I do get the impression that social bonding here is more driven by alcohol, and not quite so easy and graceful as in Italy. Something I do appreciate very much about the US is the independent mentality, and the willingness to strike out and try new things. One of the problems in modern Italy is the attitude of security above all else, which is ultimately self-defeating, as people pick jobs that don't fulfill them, live in towns that don't excite them, and "settle" in ways that I don't think are healthy.

These questions and thoughts are quite prominent in our minds right now, as we try and decide if we want to leave Innsbruck, and if so, where we might wish to go.

Alitalia: A tall, dark, handsome stranger?

The latest:

Last week, Berlusconi announced that now there are talks with a "foreign firm", about an "alliance". Obviously there were no actual details, just the same vague declarations that have been forthcoming since last spring. Why anyone would want to partner with Alitalia is a good question... it would be sort of like dancing with a cadaver.

The Economist has a good writeup of the situation so far:

If the government can corral new investors for Alitalia, it will then have to decide how to split the firm. The law says Alitalia would have to go through a procedure similar to bankruptcy in order to split itself in two and have its debt stay with one half, says Edoardo Staunovo Polacco, a lawyer who specialises in bankruptcy. The government wants to revise the law to speed things up, but has so far denied that Alitalia will be placed in bankruptcy.

In short: the government might craft a special bankruptcy law just for Alitalia in order to split the company in two: one good part that keeps going, and one part junk with all the debts that can then safely go down the drain.

Silly Names

I spend a lot of time thinking about the differences between the cultures of the countries I've lived in, but once in a while, it's fun to relax and enjoy one of the more puerile aspects of living abroad: laughing at inadvertently funny names. For instance, here in Innsbruck, and Austria:

• Mega Putz: http://www.voelser-wirtschaft.at/neues_archiv/neues_archiv5.htm#putz - actually the guy's name looks Turkish, rather than Germanic.

• http://ass-team.eu/ - "Ass Team"?

• http://jakschitz.at/ - there are lots of ads for Jakschitz around here.

• There are some cars around here with license plate holders tagged "Manfred Wanker": http://www.hotfrog.at/Firmen/Manfred-Wanker

• Naturally, 'schmuck' is German for "jewelry", so there are various signs around for that.

• The famous 'fucker bus': http://flickr.com/photos/cunaldo/157532914/ although this is German rather than anything local.

For some reason, there are more of these in German than in Italian, but this next one almost make up for it:

• http://www.fartneongroup.com/ - true to their business of selling neon signs, they have a bright neon sign next to a major roadway spelling out FART.

• http://www.fag.it - technical publishing.