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Oct. 30, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
32:16
Reflections on Italy

Just some thoughts on the differences between us.

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So I was meant to go out to Australia last week for about nine days or so.
And for some reason, the Australian Border Force decided not to process my visa.
I applied for the visa weeks ago with my wife because we were both going to go out there for a holiday.
And I was going to go see some people while I was out there.
I wasn't going to make any money or anything.
So I got a tourist visa.
And my wife's came back almost like that.
It was very, very quick.
But mine was left processing.
However, being an idiot, I didn't actually double check this.
I just got the email saying, hey, your visa is here.
Here's your visa.
And I thought, great.
Okay, well, then my visa's come through.
But actually, it was only my wife's visa that had come through.
So we got to the airport and I wasn't allowed to get on the plane, which actually was good because I'd rather they tell me there instead of after 25 hours on a plane, only to reject me from the border of Australia.
That would have been awful.
So not great.
And my wife was deeply disappointed.
So I was like, well, look, we can actually still go somewhere.
We just can't go to Australia.
So we decided to go to Italy.
Now, as you can see from the Pompeii shirt I'm wearing, an old Pompeii shirt, I've been to Italy many times.
I've been to Rome, I've been to Pompeii, I've been to a couple of other places whose names escaped me offhand.
And this time we decided to do sort of a little tour, you know, spend a few days in different places.
So we went to Sicily, which I'd never been to before, and then to Florence and then to Pisa and then came home.
And I've been, like I said, I've been to Italy before, but I've been to very touristy places.
And this time we did go to a few places that are not so touristy.
And man, did I have a culture shock when I was there?
It was quite surprising.
And even some of the bits that were touristy were not like the bits I'd been to previously.
I mean, Rome is quite a nice city, obviously.
Beautiful, full of lovely stuff.
But it's obviously some kind of open-air museum.
That's genuinely the impression that I got of it when I was there.
And of course, when you go to Pompeii, that is literally just a big tourist area.
So you're seeing an industry that's geared to deal with lots of foreigners coming and visiting.
So you don't really get to see the authentic thing.
Whereas this time we went to a few places that were not that touristy.
In fact, some of them not touristy at all.
And I tell you what, I don't want to hear people doing that in Swindon anymore after seeing some of these places.
So the first place we went to is Sicily.
And I thought, right, okay, well, I personally would like to just see some of Sicily.
And I would like to see Syracuse.
Because, of course, myself being a big ancient history guy, Syracuse was an important ancient city.
And I wanted to go and go to the places where the action took place and actually see it for myself.
And I got to.
But on the East Coast, we went to stay in a city called Catania.
Now, we arrived at the airport, got a taxi to the thing, and it was dark, but you could still see the streets.
And I don't want to be mean, but it was a fucking shithole.
It's really bad.
And it was a real culture shock from where we came from as well.
Because, I mean, like, okay, Swindon's not the world's greatest place.
But the outskirts of Swindon, which is where I live, it's lovely.
And it's peaceful and normal.
And we found ourselves in quite a dingy Sicilian, I suppose we say, town, city, with very narrow streets and weird suspect-looking men just standing around doing nothing.
And then when the taxi pulled us up to the place where we had to be, I was like, oh my God, is this where we're staying?
And it was on the fourth floor, no lift.
So I had to carry our luggage up, fourth floor of this giant building in some sort of Airbnb.
And the culture shock was quite extreme.
I mean, I was like, okay, well, I'm going to go out and get some food.
My wife's like, I'm not going out because she felt in danger of the area.
Now, I don't think the area actually was dangerous.
And after a day or so, she got used to it.
It wasn't that bad.
It was just a real shock compared to what we were used to, which is actually a place that is clean and feels safe.
Because this was not clean and didn't feel safe.
In fact, Catania, the whole thing, she thought I brought her to the bad area of Catania, but it seems like the whole town was just like this.
And so it was like, so I'm not trying to be mean, but it was just like, oh, right, okay.
I'm really trying not to be horrible, but holy crap, I wouldn't go there twice.
The place smelled like an open-air fish market or something, because in fact, it smelled very much like rotten craps in many of the areas.
Because there were lots of seafood restaurants and fish markets, seafood markets, and they just dump the day's refuse in the bins near the market, which smelled absolutely abominable, absolutely gross.
So the place didn't exactly have the most charm.
Then when you're walking around, you're presented with non-stop graffiti.
Every building, everywhere, all the time, is covered in graffiti that obviously goes up to sort of like, you know, arm height to where the people doing the graffiti can reach.
And it just makes the place look foul.
It's a vile thing to have everything graffiti.
Now, in previous visits to Italy, I've noticed that there was a lot of graffiti, and that's gross.
Really gross.
Like in Rome and the train to Pompeii, like the trains just being completely graffited up.
It's just a vile thing.
And it was like, why would you want to live like that?
And I've seen graffiti on British trains now, the same sort of things happening.
It just speaks to a real sort of decline.
And many of the Italian towns I've been to feel very run down.
Like nobody really cares about what happens on the streets and takes care of the streets, which is not how northern European towns are.
I've been to many places like Germany, in England, in Norway.
The streets of the towns themselves aren't well taken care of.
And when they're not, everyone is constantly going on about potholes in the roads or broken tiling and stuff like this.
But in Italy, this was just completely normal.
It would be very easy to be walking along the street and trip and break your ankle and twist your ankle because of the really poor conditions of the paving.
And it's just like, okay, well, why do you want that?
Like, I don't think that's necessary.
But there appears to be, I guess I'll get to this now rather than later.
There's this kind of strange mindset in Italy that it's it's I'm trying not to be mean, right?
So I'm trying to be nice about this, but Italy is chaos, right?
It is pure chaos because Italians seem to have main character syndrome.
I've never seen driving as bad as Italy.
I thought the driving in Greece was bad.
I thought the driving in Spain was bad.
No.
In Italy, and in particular Sicily, although this was characteristic of Italy itself, the driving is awful.
And all of the cars have got like dings in them, all of them.
And I can't believe there aren't more road traffic accidents.
I didn't see anyone getting run down.
But basically, Italians don't really use their indicators.
And they just walk into the street.
If you want to cross the road, you just walk out into the road as if your life isn't dependent on those guys stopping, coming to you.
And so it's just this complete, it's chaos just everywhere with no order whatsoever.
And everyone just taking their lives into their hands just all the time.
And this is normal to the Italians.
I'm just like.
I just don't know why you would choose to live that way.
I just don't know why that would be the way that you would organize your society.
It's just non-stop in the streets, complete disorder.
And also the way the streets are laid out.
I mean, obviously, they're old, they're old cities, so they're not planned.
But the streets are incredibly narrow, incredibly packed with cars and little bikes, like mopeds and various other things.
And obviously just people just wandering all to and fro all over the place.
And so it's just like, right, okay.
It's got this kind of like Warren or Hive feeling to it, which felt constraining.
I really didn't like it.
And I really felt a huge amount of culture shock going to these places.
And the people on the streets, just walking around the streets, just didn't give each other consideration.
I mean, not only for the luck, you know, when you're driving, just literally, you've got cars going by, and then the taxi driver just pulls straight out into it.
And these cars have got to break suddenly.
It's like, Jesus Christ.
A small amount of consideration goes a long way.
You don't have to drive like you're in India.
You could drive like you're in a modern first world country if you wanted.
But it's with everything, just wandering around the streets.
People just don't, they don't move for you.
They don't.
They don't give you any consideration as they're going past.
And so you feel like you're constantly in this kind of war with everyone else wandering around where no one's giving anyone else any consideration.
If you want to get someone, you just have to push your way through.
And it's normal to live like that in Italy.
Whereas in England and in Germany and Norway, people were polite and like would see you coming and make allowances for the fact that you were coming as you would make allowances for them.
And suddenly you have a much more friendly feeling, civilization, which is just again, I know I'm going on about a very strange thing here, but this was a huge culture shock for me and I didn't really enjoy it at all.
This, again, it just felt like main character syndrome that the Italians are suffering from.
But they also do a lot of milling around, which I noticed, just standing around in the streets for ages, just doing nothing, which I found really weird.
Because even when I was a kid, I had nothing to do.
We didn't just mill around.
We'd find something to do.
But no, the Italians just sit around and mill a lot, which, um, okay, I mean, I'm not gonna necessarily pass judgment on that.
But what was really interesting in comparison to the public spaces, which the Italians, I feel, kind of have just decided, right?
Okay, that's out of anyone's control.
There's no chaos, it's all chaos, there's no order.
And the thing is, it's not just the people themselves wandering around chaotically, it's also the arrangement of the buildings.
Like, we stayed on a street in Florence that wasn't even properly numbered.
There were two of the same number house that we were supposed to be staying at at either end of the street.
And the street wasn't in numerical order.
So you didn't even know which direction you were supposed to be going in to find the place that you were staying.
It's like, why would anyone live like this?
Why wouldn't you have some sense of propriety in just ordering the number of the buildings?
It's like there's 27 there, there's 16 there, and there's eight over there.
Like on that same street, why are you living like this?
It was really, really weird.
And again, just a profound culture shock.
But the chaos of the street is very, very starkly contrasted with the prim and proper and orderliness of the private.
The Italians have just gone, no, okay, we can't get other Italians to behave in a civilized manner.
But in my house, in my private area, in the restaurant I own, or in the cafe or whatever it is, man, was that orderly, tidy, neat, clean, and well-regulated?
And they are very judgmental about people in their private spaces.
Now, I'm not saying that's good or bad or anything like that.
In fact, it's in many ways admirable.
But is there any reason that you can't bring that kind of energy to the public space?
Like, actually, your streets could also be well-ordered if you all took that energy and supplied it to the way that you deal with the outside.
So essentially, it feels like there's this kind of raging inferno on the streets of like crazy things happening and people doing mad things.
And then you step out of the street.
Italian life seems to be an attempt to get away from the public life, incidentally.
You come into any private space, any privately controlled space, and it is tranquil.
It is calm.
It is quiet.
It is beautifully ordered, beautifully maintained.
And then you step out into the street and it's a chaotic slum.
And it's like, okay, you know how to live well.
You could just have your indoor personalities on the outside, which is what the English do, as well as having your outside personalities then can be on the inside and you can have an orderly society everywhere.
I'm not trying to, again, I'm not in any way trying to sound derogatory because I do like Italy.
I've been there many times.
I had a good time.
I just never really thought about the cultural differences in such they never struck me as being so forward, so forward and just in my face before.
But now I just can't not see it.
So anyway, this was a strange contrast that I noticed.
For anyone wondering, the food was, of course, delicious.
Give them a credit there.
Italian food is brilliant.
Apart from their pizzas, American pizza is better.
No, I'm joking.
Am I joking?
I know.
I do like American pizza.
Anyway, the point is the food is superb.
The Italians are great cooks.
So, you know, you can take that.
And that's a win for you, Italy.
So, anyway, going back to Catania, it was just horrible.
Genuinely horrible.
And for anyone who complains about Swindon, Swindon is just 10 times better than this town.
It was just so much worse.
And the thing is, this was a major hub.
Like, this wasn't a small place.
And it was actually enormous.
And we needed to go there to get to Syracuse because, of course, that's where the airport was.
And it's an hour journey on the train to get to Syracuse.
And then when we travel from Pisa to Florence to Pisa, we use the train there.
And my God, Italian trains are so much better than our trains.
You can tell that we are subsidizing this.
Not only are they more comfortable and they're more spacious, they're less crowded, and there are more often.
They're also way cheaper.
So each time to get from Catania to Syracuse, about an hour, to get from Florence to Pisa, about an hour.
And in Britain, for me to get from Swindon to London, Paddington, is an hour.
That's well north of £50.
And it could be over £100 if you're going at the wrong time of day.
In Italy, it was about 8 euros.
8 euros.
Some of these trains were like double-decker trains.
They were genuinely comfortable and the trains were just lovely.
And I was just like, my God, we are getting so ripped off.
And it's because the Italian state trains, the company that's owned by the state, owns a lot of our trains, like our East Coastline trains or something like Avanti.
And we're subsidizing it.
And I was just, we need to nationalize the trains, lads, right?
The Europeans have nationalized their trains.
We need to nationalize our trains.
It's just the way that things have to be.
It's just the case that we are getting the worst trains, the most expensive trains in Europe for a reason.
It's because these vampires are taking the profits from them and making their own trains bloody lovely to use.
We can have that.
We can have that.
Anyway, I went to Syracuse, which was great.
I saw a bunch of historical stuff in Syracuse that I wanted to see.
Got to see the port of Syracuse, which is nice, the harbour, which is what made Syracuse a superb place.
The jury's still out whether they had a chain on there or not.
But the point is, you can see why this would become a powerful city-state in antiquity.
And I saw the quarry where the Athenians were sent to die after the failed Athenian expedition, which was superb.
Absolutely.
Again, I'm talking a lot about contemporary Italian culture, but they do a very, very good job of preserving the very long history that they have and the large amount of it.
They do a very good job of that.
And so that was excellent.
Absolutely excellent.
We went to the Valley of the Temples and Agregantum and a couple of little villages here and there.
And it was just a lovely, lovely time and a lovely place.
So an incredible Roman villa that has the most amazing mosaics.
I'll try and remember to throw up some pictures when I'm editing this.
Just incredible, incredible preservation of stuff.
And so, and this is all taken very seriously, and that's great.
So very, very good.
I personally got to enjoy a bunch of stuff.
Florence is an incredible place.
Genuinely a vibrant, beautiful, and obviously very wealthy place.
Florence Cathedral, actually, though, was one of the more disappointing cathedrals.
The only thing of any real note in there, I thought, was the tapestry of Sir John Hawkwood, an English mercenary who was very famous in his day in like the 15th century.
But actually, it was not terribly well decorated inside.
Whereas you can just walk into like the average church.
I'm just going to walk into a church.
So here's a church.
It's a beautiful thing.
And you get that chaos of the street and the sort of dilapidation of the street.
You go into a little slice of heaven.
Whereas the average church in these towns is just unbelievably beautiful.
Gilded.
Paintings everywhere.
The whole thing just immaculate.
And you just think, wow, this is incredible.
And so the cathedral in Florence was actually a bit disappointing, frankly.
It was kind of bare, frankly.
It was kind of this.
I expected it to be something that would blow your socks off, but it really wasn't.
But the building on the outside, absolutely lovely.
Pisa was a surprisingly run-down place as well.
It just felt kind of, especially like the outskirts of it that we had to travel through look horrific, frankly.
The place smelled like an open sewer.
It's like, right, okay, why are you letting that happen?
Especially as Pisa itself is, of course, a famous tourist city.
But it's actually only sort of one central area with the leaning tower of the cathedral and then a basilica or something next to it.
This is this round building, which was quite nice.
That was actually the sort of touristy area of it.
The rest of it is just kind of run-down, left-behind area and with a general kind of smell of an open sewer.
And it was just like, okay, it's kind of grim.
Again, I'm not trying to do anyone down, but this is honestly the impression that I got of it.
And I was just okay, that's weird.
The Leaning Tower is leaning.
So demerits for that should have been put straight, obviously.
Beautiful tower.
Why have you left it crooked?
And being in Pisa as well, a bit of a demerit.
But the tower itself is actually beautiful.
It's weird to climb it.
You can climb it.
It's perfectly safe, I assume.
And so it's 251 steps up.
So you're a bit out of breath by the time you get to the top.
It's not too bad.
But it's weird and disconcerting because it is on a slight lean.
And of course, when you're climbing steps, you're normally used to just straight steps as you go up.
And so to have, as you go around the thing, you can feel more of a pull on the leaning side than on the side on the other side.
So it's just disquieting to go up and be at the top of.
But it's a beautiful marble tower.
Absolutely gorgeous.
And you get an incredible view, obviously.
And they've got a series of mountains in the background.
It's absolutely incredible sights and beautifully built.
You know, absolutely lovely thing.
So it's definitely worth your time seeing the touristy things.
Like Florence is, again, another one of those things where be prepared to spend a lot of money.
Obviously, it's an expensive place.
And there's lots of leather shops and things like that.
So be prepared to get some gifts for people.
But it is absolutely lovely.
The museum in Florence with the famous artworks.
I mean, I saw the statue of David in the flesh, as it were.
And it's massive.
I didn't realize how big it was.
It's like three meters tall or something.
It's absolutely colossal.
But of course, it is spectacular.
I saw the statue of Perseus, which is just outside on display.
The statue of Machiavelli at the Museum, which is also outside in display.
And loads of famous artworks, like these sort of famous artworks you've seen pictures of on the internet, are actually in this museum in Florence, the Ethusio Galleries, I think it's called.
And it genuinely just astounding collections of things that they have there, like art and archaeology and history.
So you will not at all waste your time if you want to see these things in the flesh.
Like they're genuinely beautiful.
They're really magnificent.
And it's the sort of thing that, you know, Italy can have many other many other problems, but you can't take this away from it.
This is where it truly shines in having some of the most beautiful things in the world and having preserved them really well.
I guess the final thing to talk about is, yeah, there were a lot of foreigners there.
And I don't mean tourists either.
I mean, foreigners essentially, you know, play acting as Italians.
Like, you know, foreigners running.
speaking Italian and running Italian shops.
And like, weirdly, like, there's loads of Africans around who like just want to talk to you and they want to tell you how great Africa is.
And I'm just like, okay, well, why, why are we, why are you like talking to me about Africa in Italy?
I'm not really interested in talking about Africa generally, especially not when me and my wife were just on holiday in Italy.
Why would I want to be talking about Africa with you?
It's just really weird.
They're just standing around.
And I assume that they are pickpockets.
I assume that what they're trying to do is steal something from me because I just don't understand why they'd be standing around at these public, like the monuments and whatnot, just trying to strike up conversation about Africa with people.
I can only assume they're here to try and steal something, trying to take my wallet or something, right?
Why else would they be doing it?
It's really, really weird.
Because a lot of the, they weren't trying to sell you something.
Like, if they were trying to sell you something, you'd at least understand.
Oh, these are, you know, just trying to shill some stuff or whatever.
But they weren't trying to do that.
They were trying to just talk to you about Africa and black people.
Like, literally, one of them came up and said, oh, do you love black people?
I'm like, what?
Did you get those shoes from Africa?
They're really nice.
My shoes aren't nice.
And no, I didn't get them from Africa.
But again, I assume that this is about throwing me off my guard and not really about proselytizing Africa to me.
But there were lots of Indians working in shops and things like that there.
So just FYI, you're going to meet a lot of non-Italians in Italy doing the things that you expected Italians to be doing, like running restaurants and things.
But to be fair, there were still quite a lot of Italians living in these cities.
Whereas in areas of England, you'll find there are areas that are just nothing but foreigners.
And then you'll go to an English area.
There were lots of Italians amongst all the foreigners.
And so what this meant was it still felt rather Italian, even if you'd see a bunch of shops that are run by foreigners, because there were lots of Italians around on the streets and also running like Italian restaurants.
It was not hard to find Italian restaurants that are staffed entirely by Italians, even though lots of them are staffed by foreigners.
So it still felt like an authentically Italian experience, even though, I don't know, maybe say 20% of the people that you meet are foreign, something like that.
Again, depending on where you are, but I mean, in Catania, there are far fewer foreigners, far more Sicilians or Italians, whatever I'm supposed to call them.
So you can see the effect that mass immigration has had on Italy.
And another thing I couldn't help is there are not that many kids around.
Now, I appreciate the Italian birth rate is basically, I think it's lower than one at this point.
And it shows, like, there are not many kids around.
And nothing, like, you know, going through the towns and cities, very little of it was geared towards kids.
Like, you know, you didn't see play parks or like here we've got like soft plays and stuff like that.
We saw one soft play in this whole time.
And so it's just, it's a civilization that is not geared towards raising children, which I'm sure is downstream of the fact that most Italian women aren't raising children now, I suppose.
But It just feels like this is an unusual thing, especially as you can't help but feel that, say, 50 years ago, like children would have been a staple part of normal Italian life, right?
I mean, like, every woman would have had dozens of children, probably, you know.
So it's, it's, it's weird that it's a kind of post-family environment in Italy.
Like, it's just really strange.
Because at least, I mean, in England, we are getting to that point, but there are still lots of things for families to do.
And I just didn't see that in Italy.
And I'm not, I'm not saying it doesn't exist anywhere or anything.
I'm just saying where I went, I didn't see it.
But it was quite weird.
And again, the whole thing, and not just in the tourist areas either, but the whole thing, bit of a culture shock overall.
But I mean, I don't want to make it sound like I didn't enjoy myself.
And although the Italians weren't lovely, right?
The Italians were nice.
And, you know, they were friendly, polite.
Although some of the people serving us actually weren't polite.
I guess we must have done something to offend them, but most of them were.
Most of them were lovely.
And they seem fairly happy, which is nice.
And, you know, like I said, the bits that are beautiful are insanely beautiful.
But there is a weird degradation in the place that's the same in the same way that there is here.
There's a weird degradation where nothing's being properly kept up outside of those particular private spaces that need to be maintained.
And it's like, all right, it's interesting.
It's interesting it's not just us that this is happening to.
But overall, like I said, I really enjoyed it.
And you should definitely visit Italy.
I just felt a strong culture shock going there that I didn't notice before.
I think maybe it was because I was paying attention this time.
In previous times, now I think about it, I did have this kind of feeling in Italy, especially about the driving.
But I hadn't really considered it.
And another thing as well, the stereotypes where people make fun of Italian language are all true, right?
Italian is the most stereotypically parodied language accurately.
The most accurate parodies of Italian are, you know, with the hand movements.
Honestly, it was so funny.
Like, I see just, you know, some, like, we'll be going to a cross and there's some woman who's got a headphone in, she's talking, and she's literally doing this on her headphones.
The person can't possibly see the hand movements, but it doesn't matter.
She's there driving along, yapping away on her phone because they genuinely do that.
Like a huge amount of Italian communication is in motion, and the sound of the language is kind of like the family guy jokes about it.
It is genuinely, it sounds like that to an English speaker.
But that's part of the charm, you know, not that's that's not a demerit or anything like that.
So that's part of the good bits of it.
But overall, like it felt quite safe still, right?
Even though it was, especially in Catania, we were in a very run-down place.
The people don't feel aggressive or anything like that.
The people feel well socialized.
And, you know, we never found danger or anything like that.
So it was nice.
But it was just very strange, chaotic.
And honestly, like with all holidays, I'm genuinely glad to be back in England.
Like, just it doesn't make sense in foreign countries.
Like, the airport in Pisa was the worst airport I've ever seen in my life.
It's tiny, considering Pisa's a famous holiday tourist destination.
It's a tiny, tiny international airport.
And so the queues are literally for hours to get through to Get through security.
Why?
Why are you like this?
You don't have to be like this.
This is a choice.
Anyway, I guess I'll leave it there because I'm just waffling on now.
But it's very different to the culture that I'm used to.
But it's also very different to other European areas, let alone non-European areas.
It's all each country really is very, very different to the others in Europe.
And they cultivate their own very unique cultures.
And it's just one of those things where you don't realize the differences until you actually spend a significant portion of time there.
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