In his profile of the Berlusconis in the Daily Telegraph (Feb 4th 2007), prompted by we know not what evidence, William Langley decrees that Italians are bored by the Prodi government and were therefore delighted to read Veronica Berlusconi's reprimand to her cheesy husband, tycoon Silvio, erstwhile Prime Minister of Italy

In his profile of the Berlusconis in the Daily Telegraph (Feb 4th 2007), prompted by we know not what evidence, William Langley decrees that Italians are bored by the Prodi government and were therefore delighted to read Veronica Berlusconi's reprimand to her cheesy husband, tycoon Silvio, erstwhile Prime Minister of Italy.
Mr Langely: the Italians have had many different reactions to the Prodi government, but I can assure you that, however fractious we may seem, none of us would agree with you that one of these reactions has been boredom.
Do you, Mr Langley, have any idea of the number and weight of the laws that the person you describe as "bespectacled bread mould" Prodi has bored us with??
Nary a week has gone by, in these 8 months, without some "innovation" being slapped on our country. I realize now from your insightful article that it must have been to keep us from falling asleep.
Well then, please know that from the outset Prodi made it his business to keep us interested, for example by allowing an ex-terrorist killer to be named to the post of secretary of the Chamber of Deputies (the protests of his victim's widow to no avail). Or by letting some 24thousand delinquents out of jail and into the country by an act of clemency. Or by doubling the amount of marijuana people are allowed to carry around on them without being accused of peddling it (40 doses a day). Or by passing a budgetary law that taxes the wits out of us. Or by reinstating the inheritance tax that lively old Berlusconi had abolished. Or by compelling us to do any transaction that might involve sums higher than 1000 euroes through our banks (starting in 2008 I believe). Or by forbidding husband and wife from takng the same name.
Or by lifting the embargo on the sale of weapons to China.
Mr Langely, do you really think Prodi's popularity has plummeted, even among leftists, because we Italians are bored?
As a famous leftist journalist complained early on in center-leftist La Repubblica, in the first quarter of an hour of his administration Prodi scrapped well-advanced plans for the building of a bridge across the Straits of Messina, withdrew our troops from Iraq, abolished the law regulating the media, abrogated a national holiday and re-opened the controversy over the High-Velocity European railway. Subsequently he's had his ministers tinker with any number of existing laws in order to change them summarily, i.e. outside of Parliament. They made up a name for this: "disapplication" of the law.
Thanks to the Prodi government we no longer have troops in Iraq, but we do have troops in Lebanon and are the privileged reference points of Hamas, Hezbollah and Ahmadinejead.
There is never a week that goes by without Prodi being in some foriegn capital discussing we know not what. I haven't kept an exact ledger but I can safely say he's been everywhere from Algiers to Peking, from Sofia to Cairo, from Moscow to Berlin and to all the capitals of the west. Last week he was the only European Prime Minister present at the meeting of the African Union. Next week he'll be in India. Meanwhile our Foreign Minister D'Alema is in Hiroshima commemorating the victims (why he should do so in January, when the anniversary is in August, God only knows) and the President of our Chamber of Deputies, Fausto Bertinotti of the Refounded Communist Party, is visiting Latin America. Despite all this flurry of foreign contacts and missions, today's (Feb.4th) papers quote our Defense Minister and close ally of Prodi as being offended at an appeal addressed to Italy by 8 foreign ambassadors (in which they ask us to maintain our troops in Afghanistan), claiming that writing to the Italian people over the heads of government figures constitutes a breach of our national sovreignty!
Currently on the government agenda is a law regulating religions, a law creating new rights for unmarried couples, whether homo- or hetero-sexual, a law on euthanasia and biological testaments and, oh yes, a proposal by the Communists of Italy Party that would establish film quotas: in their view, two out of three films should be European, while only one third of our viewing should be allowed to come from everywhere else outside of the continent (meaning a great big halt to films from Hollywood).
I could go on about how qualified people have been ripped away from long-standing positions just to satisfy this government's thirst for power, in the national health service and, more threateningly, in the secret services.
But I wouldn't want to bore you.
Remember the links between murdered British citizen Litvinenko and Italian Mario Scaramella, involving hints that our utterly boring Premier P rodi might be the KGB's principal agent in our country? Well, Scaramella has been languishing in jail since flying back from England (where he was in hospital being checked for polonium poisoning) on last Christmas Eve. On what charges? Tarnishing the honor of a Russian ex-KGB agent.
More and more boring.
I'm so glad we have the Berlusconi's to enliven our humdrum political scene.
I'm sure Prodi is glad, too.

Alessandra Nucci
Italy