The Scroobious Guide to Italy (bits of)

Everybody knows Italy already — even if you've never been anywhere further than your neighbourhood pizzeria. You know about Italian food (garlicky). You know about Italian sunshine (hot), Italian fashion (sexy), Italian art (plentiful) and music (operatic). You know Italian history — at least the bits about Mussolini (dangerously nuts), and Nero (ditto). You even know a bit of the language: maybe enough to read music, enough to cheer the soprano in gender-correct terms, or enough to order from a pasta menu.

I don't know any more than you. But I just spent 10 days in Venice and Florence, and damned if I'm going to pass up this opportunity for another Scroobious Guide.

Venice and Florence, of course, are hardly Italy. In fact, the books tell me "Italy" was only formed in the 19th century; before that it was just a bunch of city-states and duchies and such. Venezia and Firenze are simply two of its cities, and the two least representative of the modern country, at that. Both are simultaneously crippled and kept alive by the weight of tourism. Both are Unesco World Heritage Sites — note, they don't contain heritage sites, they are heritage sites. It's like visiting Warwick Castle and thinking you know England.

But then, writing a proper guide to Italy would probably require conducting a proper tour, all the way up and down and over the islands, into the cities and out in the countryside; and while I can't say I have any objections to this notion, at all, and if there should suddenly be a terrible journalistic crisis that created a severe market shortage in travel writers, I would have no hesitation in nobly volunteering for the job — well, that crisis shows no sign of materialising* and my own budget, and schedule, don't really support this plan.**

So, the Scroobious Guide to Venice and Florence it is.

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* Dammit.
** See above.