Italians read fewer newspapers than most of their Western European counterparts – only 5 million Italians (out of 60M) regularly read books or newspapers – resulting in an always-amusing range of marketing tactics in order to sell more black and white print. Magazines are regularly bundled with irresistable gifts like large beach bags or a pack of cards – which are then spread outside the vendor’s shack like a patient etherized upon a table – while newspapers offer series of encyclopedias, guidebooks, and dvds promising English in 3.5 days. In this country they still sell things in “serial” like the serialized stories of the American 1950s, but they come in the form of a car or dinosaur that you have to glue together, and at the low price of only 2.99E per piece (the first one’s free!) it’ll cost you a mere 187 euros by the time you’re done.
While few Italians actually READ newspapers (or books, but that’s another story thanks to their bound format), what DO they do with them? Always thrifty, they are the first to apply the three R’s of reduce (don’t read), re-use (see below) and recycle (perhaps once having completed the actions below). So here are the top five alternate uses for newspapers by Italians. In descending order…
And the Top five alternative uses for newspapers in Italy are…
(5) Balled up and combined with Vetril (the streaky Italian version of Windex), newspapers are the only material to be used for cleaning windows. Anything else will streak more. They don’t seem to get the fact that the ink comes off the paper, making this counter-productive…. Because they are right. Try cleaning your Italian glass with anything else and it will be worse than not cleaning it at all.
(4) My husband went to the soccer game and came home quite chilled to the bone. He admitted that he should have listened to his brother, who has seasons’ tickets. Gianluca advised: bring a newspaper to put under your feet. It stops the cold from coming up through your shoes and into your whole body. I think this trick could also be used when visiting (and especially teaching in) cold churches in the winter in order to avoid the hypothermia I regularly got while working as a teaching assistant.
(3) the insulating properties of newspapers are not lost on professional cyclists who, my friend Fabio tells me, put a layer in their shirts to keep warm. Or at least they did so in the olden days of Gino Bartali; now they probably wear Gortex like the rest of the world.
(2) Protection is the name of the game here; newspapers also protect your head – from paint. The traditional Italian painters’ hat is a boat-shaped topper made each morning out of fresh newspaper. Does he read it first? your guess is as good as mine. (NB the baker also wears a paper hat, but of a different shape.)
(1) and the number one alternate use of newspapers in Italy is… Put up on the windows of a car (preferably an old Fiat Panda whose seats notoriously lay flat), it provides all the privacy a young couple could need. While this is an international phenomenon (the book Carma Sutra
Urban legend?
Now, it may be an urban legend, but I have heard that somewhere in Italy a couple was once doing it in the car, newspapers hiding everything that needed to be hidden, when they were involved in a fender-bender. Apparently, they were practicing the rhythm method which failed due to the surprising bump, resulting in pregnancy. The couple sued the careless driver. I don’t know the outcome of the case – if it ever really happened.
You don’t have to understand Italian to figure what’s going on in this hilarious clip from an Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo movie in which three men are forced to sleep in a car whose windows were covered with newspapers…:
PS – you know this is all for rhetoric, right? ;-) Italians are all smart and highly literate. Especially italian readers of arttrav.
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