Romance

Of course there’s the giant statue at St Pancreas Station where close relatives have become betrothed. With its mile long Champaign bar for those who need more encouragement I’m surprised that the late Peter Costello, (oh he’s not dead, I didn’t know that) didn’t commission a copy at Canberra airport. Although I don’t keenly recollect many examples I am reminded by the number of times I heard Alice protest with the phrase ‘get a room’ that the Europeans are more demonstrably romantic than their southern hemisphere cousins.

I was certainly charmed by the French couple kissing as they waited on their bicycles for the lights to change on their morning commute to work. Middle class early thirties bourgeoisie, utility baskets with laptops on handle bars, bicycle clips on cuffs, they sat motionless with hands on bar mounted brakes as they kissed long and passionately. Whew, lucky for Alice she was not there to see.

On one Italian train trip, I think from Salerno to Rome, while stopped at some suburban town I watched a young boy and girl who were the only occupants of the adjacent platform. She was seriously snogging him and he passively accepting till it began to embarrass him and he pushed her away. Unperturbed she came straight back and took a firm grip of him by his wedding tackle. I was surprised by such sluttish forward behaviour in full view of a train load of strangers and the boy was at the least severely embarrassed.

I soon learned some facts about romance in modern Italy that put this cameo into better perspective. Apparently Italian boys are adored by their mothers in whose eyes they can do no wrong. They are outrageously spoilt, fed, clothed, laundered, housed, flattered and praised by mothers who thus become formidable competitors, if not for girlfriends, certainly for potential wives. Boys stay at home sometimes past middle age leaving their female peers with no option or encouragement to behave any way other than as whores and prostitutes.

So it would seem that the sexual morals of this predominantly catholic country’s young men and women are as much the antithesis of those preached by the dogmatic Il- papa housed in his own city state inside their most famous city, as are their mafia parent’s attitude to the fifth commandment. Of course neither group has any difficulty with the first four commandments so I suppose if the commandments valued by position from one to ten, four out of ten is not too bad.