Far from being dismissed as fatuous and demeaning, this remark has been taken seriously by women across the world. The rationale behind Eve Ensler's theatrical monologues is that, in her words, "the story of your vagina is the story of your life". A weird, unhealthy disconnection is taking place between the body and what is happening in the heart or head of that body's owner.It is revealing to note how differently women and men have responded to this new trend. Mysteriously (and I suspect that the new ubiquity of varying types of porn may have something to do with this), sex has been reduced to its component private parts. Viagra, the great wonder drug that put lead in the pencil of millions of men, allegedly transforming and enlivening their intimate lives, has been revealed, in a new book called The Viagra Myth, to be causing more problems than it has solved.Elsewhere in today's 2'6" above the ground world, that great celebration of female genitalia, Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, is showing at the Edinburgh Festival with none other than Christine Hamilton in a lead role, while the more disgusting tabloids compete with one another in the area of covert close-ups taken up the skirts of female celebrities as they get out of cars. Oh yes, and dropping dead, quite a few of them.When they did finally go outdoors, they came face to face with Italy's future: because as Italians have given up the struggle to breed, the immigrants are the country's only hope.
For many, especially in the north, this is not a cheerful thought But they don't appear to have any other bright ideas.. When, 30 years ago, a film called It's a 2'6" Above the Ground World was released, its title was deemed a witty reference to the sex obsession that was all the rage at the time. In that dawn of liberation, the personal had become the political and, for a few happy years, sleeping with lots of people became something of a civic duty among domestic revolutionaries. "Oh, it's much better than it was in the summer 10 years ago!" returning Milanese tell me. Meaning a few supermarkets remained open, and you only had to walk two kilometres for a newspaper.For weeks, the families of Milan have frolicked at the seaside, or cooled off in the mountains, while their elderly relatives, abandoned in cramped inner-city apartments in the relentless cruel heat, fended for themselves: watching television, cooking their frugal meals, tottering to the shops when it got a little cooler.
When I moved into the flat of an absent friend a month ago, it was as if the population had been wiped out by plague, an epidemic from which only the extremely old, and immigrants from China and sub-Saharan Africa, were immune. Those who fail to comprehend the role of the Celtic west fail to comprehend the whole history of Britain.. As many people are aware, Italy is in the grip of a fertility crisis. Up and down the country, the once proverbially big, happy Italian families are imploding. No society in the world is ageing faster: in 15 years one-third of the population of Milan, Italy's economic and industrial hub, will be over 65. Perhaps the fact that there are so few children around makes them all the more precious.The bears and dolls are accumulating because this anonymous strip of asphalt next to a desiccated public garden in a sink estate south of Milan was the scene one week ago of a very nasty shooting. Late last Friday evening, a small-time drug dealer called Vito Cosco, aged 26, got into an argument with two young men, allegedly about money owing for drugs.
One of the two punched Cosco, who went home and fetched a semi-automatic pistol and shot the two men dead.In doing so, however, he also killed a 60-year-old pensioner walking his dog. And a little girl called Sebastiana Monaco, aged two-and-a-half, sucking a pacifier in her mother's arms, took a bullet in the neck She died on the way to hospital. And not merely Milan but the whole of Italy has been talking of little else since.A pensioner is merely an anziano, an "ancient", however innocent; the two young men who died, as well as the purported killer himself, are bluntly described even in the best newspapers as pregiudicati, losers. But little Seby Monaco was a bambina, a tesoro, a piccolina, and the tender innocence of her small life was made only the more poignant by the hideous anarchy of the place where she lived and the ghastly manner of her death. Of all the photographs of the murders' aftermath with which the newspapers here have been engorged, the one that seemed to get to most people was the shot of Seby's dummy lying on the street, encircled with chalk.Whatever else Vito Cosco imagined he was up to when he rushed to the flat he occupied nearby (illegally, they say) with his girlfriend and two small sons, and grabbed his gun, killing a bambina cannot have been part of the plan. If he had merely rubbed out the two youths, the story would have been forgotten within a matter of days; Cosco would probably have high-tailed it to Calabria in the far south, the region where he comes from, and melted into the lawless enclaves of the 'Ndrangheta, Calabria's own version of the Mafia, and waited until the fuss died down.Instead he must have understood pretty fast that he was in trouble up to his neck.
