Internet access in Italy--SUCKS

Mad Finn

OK I'm on holiday in Beautiful Milan, and it is beautiful apart from the Smog--stock up on the antihystamines before you come--and for reasons too long to delve into here, I need to grab off and print an e-mail from my web account. No problem, you might think. Just pop into an Internet cafe or Internet point and Bob's your Uncle.

Wah-Uhh! Not in the home town of Silvio Berlusconi, George Bush's most reliable European ally after Toady Blair. First of all, you look around during your normal touristy tribulations around one of Europe's great cities and you see very little of the sort of Internet points that are all over Dublin at this stage jumoping out at you. Feck it, in a non descript little town in the South of France earlier this summer, I was tripping over them.

Then you ask people, like police, people in railway stations etc and you get the same blank look. What is this bloody foreigner on about? Then finally you go to the tourist office in the main square (a must see, the square that is not the bloody tourist office) and they direct you vaguely to Via Torino. You walk up and down Via Torino looking down every side street and finally you find it in a little cubby hole in a laneway.

Relieved at last, in you go. 'Passport' demands the monosyllabic monoglot behind the counter. 'You wha'?' 'Passport,' he demands. 'No passport, no Internet'

There are many reasons why one may not have one's passport about one's person all the time in a foreign city. Suffice it to say I hadn't and it was another bunch of hassle to get it and proffer it to said mutt so that I could get my mail.

He carefully noted down all my passport's details before letting me access my mail and type out this diatribe.

A passport to get an e-mail? WTF

Any other countries in teh supposedly Free World that do this? is this all to do with the Patriot Act or Italy's version thereof? And apparently there are only about three or four places in Milan where you actually can get on teh Web if you are a visitor. And this is Milan, the commercial capital of Italy.Centre of its information economy. Not some god forsaken arid village in the south or in Sicily where the only prospects are the Mafia or emigration.

Methinks Ireland Off Line need to say 'our work here is done' and bog off over to Italy. Don' forget your passports though.

What a load of MERDA.

DemonOfTheFall

Hah, and they wonder why Italy's econonmy is in shíte.