As we approached the giant radio telescope in rural Sardinia, I found myself implausibly dressed in a light summer frock: a Brazilian one, lavishly decorated with black army ants. I should have worn something tougher, since our outing was a treat specifically arranged for Paolo Nespoli, a rugged Italian ex-Special Forces soldier who has twice lived in outer space.

Nespoli’s first trip to orbit was aboard the US Space Shuttle and the second aboard a Russian Soyuz, so this makes Paolo both an “astronaut” and a “cosmonaut.” Most of his space career he spent working on the ground in Houston Texas, so we part-time Texans had plenty to talk about. Our little busload of telescope tourists was a motley crew: me, an astronaut, a science fiction writer, two astrophysicists, some doctoral students, a computer security expert, a nice Chinese girl terrified of heights.

Once at the site of the great towering astronomy colossus, we signed the guestbook and strapped on white construction hard-hats. Then the fun began: climbing endless zigzagging stairs of industrial steel, in and out of instrument chambers and control rooms.

We then emerged from a metal door into the very midst of the vast white satellite dish, a colossal bowl with thousands of rectangular metal panels. The Sardinia Radio Telescope is a giant cosmic ear that can be titled and spun on huge railway tracks. As we struggled to climb up to the perilous rim of this instrument, the slope got steeper and steeper. I crawled on all fours, for all the world like a black kitchen ant struggling to escape a white china breakfast bowl.

The shining walls caught the Mediterrean sun and began to bake us like bugs in an oven. When we reached the sharp rim of the antenna dish — nothing like a guardrail there of course, just a sharp, clean drop to the construction trucks on the ground far below, looking no bigger than big red beetles — I felt a horror vacui which made me lose my grip and slide back uncontrollably.

In that brief disorienting tumble I felt all the fear and horror of a human being floating out in space. The brave astronaut had just briefed us about those issues : his experiences of life without gravity, all about, as he put it, “becoming an extraterrestrial.”

When living in orbit, you learn to float, eat, and even sleep and dream differently: you use all four limbs equally, bounding off surfaces that have no floor or ceiling. The soles of your feet, callused by gravity and friction, grow tender and soft like a baby’s feet. You learn to grope for footholds, to snatch small objects as they drift rapidly away, to double-over with your stomach muscles so you can type away on computers.

Nespoli was a guest at the Leggende Metropolitane festival of literature in Cagliari. There he explained to the warmly appreciative crowd how his dream of astronautics had been inspired by the writings of Oriana Fallaci, the late Italian world famous journalist. He’d even once met Oriana Fallaci, who had brusquely told the young soldier that, if he expected to make it in the world’s elite corps of astronauts, he had better concentrate and not kid around.

The festival was held in spacious square above the old town overlooking the big port and Sardinia’s strikingly beautiful emerald coast. When nature so inspiring, the eloquence soared to astronomical levels.

After three days of physical and mental exercises, the lively event was closed by Roberto Saviano, the 33 year old bestseller Italian journalist. Given he writes about organized crime and the drug trade, Saviano has been living under mafia fatwa since 2006, when he published his first tell-all book about the mobsters of the Camorra in southern Italy.

Since then Saviano has led a rather Salman Rushdie-like existence, warmly supported by world intellectuals and writers while the underworld’s assassins stalk him. Saviano briefly fled the country, but has returned to Italy, amid a conspicuous presence of plainclothes bodyguards, uniformed police escorts, mysterious black cars awaiting him at hotel doorsteps, and so on.

Saviano was in Sardinia for the first time to promote his new book Zero Zero Zero, whose subject is the world traffic in cocaine. If you don’t know the cocaine routes you don’t know the world nowadays, he asserted to a huge, silent crowd of listeners who packed the square in ant-hill style. These are modern drug industries, modern ways of making modern money flow across borders, the drug trade victimizing citizens, as criminals and bank officials become accomplices in offshore money laundering.

Saviano spoke with rare pauses for almost two hours, addressing his obsessions with such passion, detail and sobriety that even the stone-faced cops on stage with him were visibly moved. He said the Italian mafia is the oldest and best-organized mafia in the world. Being in the mafia has little to do with “laws” and everything to do with “rules”: the internal family rules against the state’s laws and the public interest. The mafia culture lives among Italians as part of Italian culture: our neighbors, family and even ourselves belong in someways to those extralegal circles of violence, favors and arrangements.

Saviano admitted that, being Italian, he too knows how to reason against the rule of law like a mafioso. Nobody is innocent . He urged his silent serious crowd to stand up against the injustice, by understanding the basic unfairness of the mafia, the way that the whole world is exploited by a few violent criminals. He interpreted some political problems as mafia doings.

Saviano has been a voice of the young Italian generation who wants to break with the past. This author said: I don’t want to go into politics, I don’t like to do that, I am not good at it, but I do want to be political. We all have to do politics for the sake of our corrupted country. Saviano’ s public appearances have become some kind of cathartic apotheosis: Italians do read the books, they see the movie “Gomorra,” they go to see him, they know it matters.

I happened to be in a restaurant as Saviano ate with a few friends and supporters, his face hidden under a billed hat and his shoulders hunched. Cops peered through the windows every other minute, and Saviano seemed to have the weight of the world on his back. He listened much more than he talked.

He reminded me of many political Balkan activists, mostly anonymous, who had no personal joys and private lives or youth, because of the wars. His hat looked paramilitary, like the cap my teenage father wore as a Communist partisan fighting Nazis. Even the people dining with Saviano had the furtive, let’s-be-cool look of draft-dodgers during the Milosevic regime, people going on with daily life so as not to be pounced on.

Against social evils that are vast and centuries old, it seems so little just to write a book, a movie, or state a personal No… Even when the books and voices achieve a huge success and reach a vast audience, does that diminish the cocaine business and its drug mafias? Everybody knows the state of the matters in Italy, just as they know in Sinaloa and Tijuana, where cocaine soap operas are on TV every day and the journalists are gunned down in dozens.

Writers are like black ants in the white bowl of literature, set on the rotating earth. Still, we can offer our words and our lives, since that’s what we have to offer. Blaga Dimitrovna (a Bulgarian poet Saviano quotes) says : I am not afraid of being stepped upon, the trampled grass will become a path!

The Golden Quadrilateral in today’s Milan is composed of haute couture shops, jewelry emporia, and nouveau riche tourists. It’s the geographic square that once sheltered the novelist Alessandro Manzoni, the composer Giuseppe Verdi, the physicist Albert Einstein, the socialite Clara Maffei. Severe battles raged for days in these streets as the riotous Milanese struggled to expel their Austrian imperial occupiers. Nowadays the blood-soaked alleys of the nineteenth century are luxurious windowfronts where bored, dolled-up sales girls loll inside, among the vidcams and the cybernetic security systems.

In this same Milanese downtown, a failed bank has been retrofitted into a hallucinatory five-star hotel: chandeliers like horror movie infestations, crooked plastic arm chairs in a nauseous green, tortuous, polka-dotted corridors that lead nowhere, and a psychedelic swimming-pool installation that might drown Olafur Eliasson.

The Milanese hotel’s restaurant is weirdly devoid of spaghetti, pizza, vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, or any shred of meat. Here they serve a relentlessly chic macrobiotic green diet of mashed veggies and nutritious drinks without alcohol.

A tornado with hail had recently peltered this bewildered metropolis where I grew up and once studied, but any change has some benefits; the needle-strewn junkie park once full of muggers had recovered its dignity, next to the huge Natural History Museum and the National Gallery.

This spring, the high-tech lifestyle magazine Wired Italia has organized a conference, its first. Next to the endangered whale skeletons in the Natural History museum (itself a ghostly hulk shrouded for repair), the Wired avant-garde had erected clean white plastic domes, where a cheery if rain-dampened crowd gathered to admire the gadgets and discuss the future.

The event opened with a greeting from an Italian astronaut, recently launched to the International Space Station. He sent warm greetings to his many social media followers, his Wired Italia audience, and of course his mom.

Then this fiesta went on for three spring days, while a cavalcade of futurists, technicians, writers, and artists commuted through the local tourist traps, the hotels, the arcades, the museums, the tents, the gravel paths and muddy grass of the public park, hoping that the troubled skies would clear while anxiously seeking a wifi connection. Their elegant geodesic dome of laser-sawn plywood and inflated tubing was the perfect headquarters for their shaky future.

During the festival, a famous Italian writer actress and feminist died of old age. Franca Rame was the wife and coauthor of the Nobel prize-winner for literature, Dario Fo. The committed Milano of the activist 1970s was thrown at once into deep mourning, while, in the Wired high-tech pop-up dome, a scientist from Genova explained the prospects of caring for Italy’s aged population with robots.

Thanks to European grants for robotics studies, the scientist possessed a stunningly cute and remarkably capable little Italian robot, which specialized in simulating human empathy. The planet’s poor and starving were beyond the help of personal robots, the scientist explained, but Italy abounds in luckier souls who get cancer, go senile, become blind and deaf, and whose many ailments of physical decline can and should be tackled with nano technology, nano medicine, and artificial smart prosthetics. The brain is the only organ that cannot be rejuvenated.

A young visionary from Brescia, a city close to Milan, spoke of nurturing technical talent in local bars, where Italians might be programming in Linux instead of sipping coffees and playing bocce. Big online communes full of shareable tools are ideal centers for Italy’s young unemployed, who cannot afford to leave their parents or travel and live on their own. New solutions must be found in the endless status quo of economic crisis and imposed austerity. In Italy, middle aged people are driven to suicide by the economic policies from Rome, Berlin and Brussels, but there’s plenty of room for start-up incubators inside the husks of dead industries.

Other visionaries were advocating networked sharing and digital home manufacturing during tomorrow’s third industrial revolution. If a whole generation is to be precarious and severely underemployed, shouldn’t that be politically recognized as our genuine way of life now? In Italy, unaffordable housing is a middle class issue, no longer the usual plight of the Roma, the clandestines and the youth. The pressure of a predatory real-estate system forces once law-abiding citizens into makeshift squats and lofts in abandoned industrial estates. One has to live in some genuine shelter, no matter which offshored bankruptcy trust may allegedly own the territory stencilled on the Google Map. The “stuffed animal” is the signature urban form of Europe’s 21st century: the facade still remains in place, while banks become hotels, factories are collective squats, pop up domes are cultural centers, and the future is a museum.

The downtown Milan tourist zone is densely trampled by Russian wives and mistresses teetering in new stilettos, but they would never read the patriotic novels of Manzoni, whose imposing mansion, once the literary HQ of Italian nationalism, stands as shabby and forlorn as a failed bookstore. The presences of Verdi, Einstein and Maffei are marked only by modest plaques among Milan’s much-prized scars of Austrian cannon-ball damage. Maybe it’s for the best that the dead of Milan rest easy. The dead don’t need push-up bras and hand-stitched leather cases for their iPads: the dead are ubiquitous and virtual, while fame is a fickle thing.

Yet there is something missing today in this deeply superficial city. Where are the flying cobblestones of 1848 and 1968, where is the sense of danger and genuine potential? In the 1970s, when everyone still expected a car and a garage as a matter of course, my dad owned a blue BMW and drove it ceaselessly — even though it was once stolen and used in a robbery. The Wired expo also has a BMW — a futuristic all-electric BMW, clean, green and entirely unaffordable. This spectacular showpiece has undulating digital curves and a pedestrian-dazzling paint-job that’s embedded right into the chassis.

This fascinating all-electric BMW is a concept car, born as a stuffed animal: nobody can afford it, there’s nowhere to drive such a car in downtown Milan (the tourist zone is closed to cars for the sake of window-shoppers, while the highways have speed limits).

The only people with any genuine use for this car are the tall, near-naked, bottle-blonde Milanese BMW booth bunnies, who stalk around the vehicle lending it even more sex appeal, but who never open its doors or even flash its slanting headlights. One pities the car thieves who would dare to steal this artifact — it’s festooned with smart GPS tracking alarms. And as for the rest of us, well, we live in the twenty-teens — long after the assembly-line prosperity of Fordism and the black gold-rush of cheap oil. That violently boisterous lifestyle of the Space Age, and the universal terror of the Atomic Age, have both melted away like our ice-caps. Likea smart little robots scurrying under the towering bones of the dinosaurs, we live among the consequences now.

It is a literary party, in Iowa, inside a big house which resembles a barn. It is an event for foreign writers thrown by the sponsors of the Writers Program at the Iowa University, in 1997. I am one of these foreign writers, and our hosts have prepared such a huge amount of food and drink that I am expecting a crowd from the streets to show up and join us.

But no, it is all our business, and it is actually businesslike. Very “what’s in it for me.”

– So, you are a writer! A huge American woman, dressed with Midwestern bad taste, approaches me in her wheelchair.
- No, no, I am a woman who sometimes writes.
A Polish poetess intervenes. – Oh come on, don’t be so modest, this is our hostess! The Polish poetess beams violently at our benefactor.
- Where do you come from, asks the hostess, edging her wheelchair closer to me.
- Serbia, I say, apologetically.
She stares at me blankly. Gosh, I dote on Americans, because they just don’t know so many embarrassing things. Such as where Serbia is, and what it means to be Serb.
- Europe, bounces in my lively Polish translator. ( She was married to a much older Polish poet, and during the Cold War she had learned all the survival tricks of the East-West literary life).
– And you write poetry? relentlessly goes on the hostess.
– No, no, I just write whatever comes to me, God forbid poetry, I say modestly.
– My ex husband was a poet. I add.
- He said that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky could not live under the same roof.
Why is this hostess picking on me? There are 11 other foreign writers with their spouses from the same program in this house. Did I dress badly? Am I not eating enough of her food, or drinking enough?
- My friend is very modest! crows the Polish poet. She writes incredible stuff! She is a Nobel prize winner.
- Oh my God! my hostess exclaims startled and puts her hand over her mouth.
- Oh my God, I cry, startled too.
The Polish poet takes another glass of wine, looking at me ready to kill if I stop her performance.
- She is a feminist writer.
I feel relieved: at least that part was true.
My hostess seems relieved too. Her face lightens up and she spreads her arms up towards me.
- I am so glad to hear this! I want you to give a speech to this crowd here. I worked all day to make this feast happen, and not only me, all the women from the family worked while the men played cards.
I look at the idle men of the family, who are not in wheelchairs.
- Play cards and drink! And besides that Nobel, that’ s no good! We had a writer in our family who got a Nobel. He just drank, and he never raised a finger in the household. This is a big farm, this Iowa land needs to be taken care of, the cattle and the weather are unpredictable. The whole family needs to be alert to survive and feed the country.
- I know, I say with full understanding, my granddad had farmlands and was always like that. He never let my mom study opera because of the farm work..
The Polish poet stood up: Let’s make a toast to my feminist friend who will give us a speech!
By now I was toast myself. I stood up and gave a short but effective speech on families, duties, crops, women and poets.
My hostess was in tears while my host was in deep shame.
After I crushed down on my chair, staring blankly in front of myself from the shame of such public exposure, the host came to me:
- Thank you so much for your wonderful insight! You made my wife and daughters so happy. All these years in this family, it was all about men writers and politics, and women did the hard work.
- Not only here in Iowa, I promptly answer, now ready to lead Iowa from the US Middle Ages, if possible.
My hostess struggles to stand from her wheelchair. I wonder if this is some miracle. Shall I witness a miraculous cure by words?
– You see, my dear guest, she says. I am in this wheelchair because of food. My limbs have grown weak and my joints loose. I have been eating all these years while cooking. Instead I should have been writing, just like you.
- But… I try to intervene.
– Never mind the Nobel Prize! chirps the Polish poet, taking over the conversation – Let’s all sing a nice song together!
– Oh let’s! The hostess is delighted.
She stands up, holds onto me on one side and the Polish poet on the other and begins, with tottering steps and a tiny voice:
-Siiiiiinging in the rain…
That’s how I got my Nobel prize for Literature.

This is how I lost my Nobel prize: I was in this hotel where the prize winners for literature stay when they come to Stockholm. I was keenly interested in talking to the waiters there.
I was there with my Swedish friend: she was getting really drunk at the table, where we sat with the wives of the Nobel Prize committee. That table had far more information than the official one. We seemed a random company but still a happy one.

My Swedish author friend was desperate that night. Her long-term partner was quitting her, after betraying her for many years, and infesting her with some sexual disease. Only now had she found this out. Only now did she realized how dominant she was in their relationship, and how dependent he was. Now that he was splitting, she saw it all.
– I gave him everything! The best roles in my plays! He even played women’s roles if I decided they were better for him!
The wives of the Nobel prize committee seemed really interested in this confession. Some were teachers, some were publishers, some housewives. But they certainly never dressed their men in women’ s clothes for the stage. On the contrary, often they had to wear men’ s clothes to perform when their husbands were absent.
Tonight, they had to hear the stories behind the curtains: who really wrote those fantastic plays and who deserved the Nobel prize.
– I am very unhappy that Franca Rame didn’t win the Nobel prize along with Dario Fo, I commented. After all, they always worked and wrote and performed together.
– Oh I know that, said my Swedish friend, he was such a womanizer too, gosh like mine…I can even understand that part, but why didn’t he tell about the disease? Why do I have to have a disease now?
– Franca Rame did a great feminist play on abortion.
– Oooooooh, there was a sigh around me.
I wondered: what was the Nobel prize committee’s stand on abortion?
– Personally, I think a hot Mexican chili hurts worse than an abortion.
After saying that, bravely and drunkenly, I emptied my wine glass and my last drops of credibility.

Three weeks after I signed up online and sent them my measurements, I received my new dress from Constrvct in New York, shipped here to Torino in Italy.

Italian Customs hit me up for 37 euros in duty fees, unaccustomed as they are to importing dresses from Manhattan rather than exporting them there. However, the sealed package was light and the blue dress arrived in fine condition. What excitement and happiness: a dress that is entirely personalized, computer-assembled, and even the pattern was generative art! I myself chose the fabric, the color, and the shape, and then some computer-governed devices sliced it up and stitched it out, for me and me alone.

Five years ago, when our theme at the Share art conference in Torino was “digital manufacturing,” a prospect like this still seemed remote and futuristic. Three-d fabrication machines were still the industrial monsters for cars and aircraft, not swift consumer gear for clothes, furniture, or kitchen gadgets.

It’s still a bit dreamlike to order and manufacture personalized objects sent from New York to Italy, but in the time that passed, little hacker, Maker, and fabrication ateliers are springing up in Italy like mushrooms. They’re mostly retailing simple curios in plastic, vinyl and rubber though: a real dress that comes from clicking a website still has a Cinderella quality.

With that said, the dress, which is a personalized version of Constrvct model #2385, “Spines” from “Nervous System,” is a genuine dress, it’s not some mere CafePress T-shirt. I threw the dress over my head like Cinderella, zipped it up, and went out to road-test it on the busy streets of Torino.

“Spines” is a pretty pattern, but it’s not strange enough to stop any traffic. There’s a Turinese vogue this season for hyper-active floral patterns, and the streets are full of women in wild elastic jeggings that make “Spines” look demure and even ladylike.

The fabric is polyester, which traps heat next to the body and had me sweating on a cold day. Despite my careful measurements — I did my best, but I’m no tailor — the cut was somewhat ungainly. The bustline turned out too big while the waist is too loose.

A sleeveless dress with a simple cut needs to be extremely precise to look elegant. Somewhere the data had slipped: was it me, the cutting machine, the stitching machine, the data entry process, who knows? My mother, whose generation knew a thing or two about hand-tailoring, would have sternly rejected such sloppiness from a dressmaker. She would have taken her tailored purchase back to the Chanel shop, or told her private seamstress to fix it. A lost centimeter here or there is the very soul of ladylike couture.

The dress is also too long, maybe an inch. The past-kneecap length is good for showing-off the unusual pattern, but all my overcoats are shorter than my dress. Who has the priority here, the fabric-artists at Constrvct, or the user’s knees and calves?

The underskirt lining is too long (it’s as long as the dress), so as soon as I sit, the lining shows itself. Try as I might, I can’t drape the skirt in a way that conceals the lining. The stitched seams are visible, machine-made, of uniform width, too big and coarse, and not neat and tidy.

The dress also creases easily, while polyester cannot be ironed!

The beautiful mermaid-like sea colors, computer generated patterns from the well-known code-artists at “Nervous System,” are shiny and cheerful, and all in all rather wonderful. The spiny, wavy patterns suit my curly hair, while the blue shades go with my blue eyes. A dress with a pattern this busy can be accessorized with all kinds of oddities.

For instance, the Constrvct “Spine” dress is perfect for my blue plastic computer-generated shoes from “United Nude.” These angular Dutch shoes feature a low poly-count that makes them look like shoes off the set of Super Mario. I bought these “New Aesthetic” shoes mostly to irritate and intrigue Italians, who always notice people’s shoes. However, with the “Spine” dress, these shoes become a low-key ensemble.

I walked all over the porticos and boulevards of downtown Torino in my computer-generated dress. Far from looking like a showboat Internet geek-freak, I looked pretty standard for the Turinese, who tend toward the dignified and somewhat upscale. I’m the only woman in Torino with this dress — it even has my own name stitched into the collar, which gratifies one’s vanity — but no style-conscious Italian stared or took any critical offense. The dress has a simple, conventional cut. When it’s worn with a sweater, a scarf, a hat or a bag, it’s just another part of a wardrobe.

What is the victory condition for this unorthodox means of production? This is Maker-style disruption at work, no doubt about that. To have our dreams come true with mouseclicks, to encourage human creativity while avoiding the limitation and expense of human hands, to make it cheaper and more attainable, to be unique, to be pretty and comfortable…to be affordable and also adorable! To make Cinderella come to the ball with the magic of digital crafts, instead of the crude spells of her fairy godmother!

To give a woman everything she wants from a pretty dress is a tall set of orders for a new-startup with a website and a few machines. I’m pleased and happy to wear Constrvct’s alpha rollout, but this garment isn’t yet the gorgeous finery of the old regime. This is a rumble in the New York garment district. This is a street rebellion.

First things first: oh, you world travelers, for pleasure or for work, never, ever fly Baltic Airlines. First they will stiff you by making you pay sixty euros to carry regular-sized hand luggage. You will note their particular eagerness to pounce on innocent non-Baltic travellers, especially haplessYankees with credit cards.

During the flight you can expect to be charged for the air you breathe, since they don’t even give free water.

Finally, god forbid if something goes wrong with your flight and ticket, for Baltic Airlines will gladly maneuver you into buying a heavily-priced new one. Fleeing home via Baltic Airlines beats prison and deportation, but not by much.

Decades of Soviet occupation leave some deep cultural habits. Despite the proud independence and nationalism of the three independent Baltic republics, it hasn’t been that long since 1991. It’s hard to find any mishap in Estonia that isn’t some blamed on Russians. If the roads are bad (and they are bad enough to burst tires), it’s the Russian roads. When the coffee is lousy (the imported Italian coffee is quite good), then it’s the communist coffee. If the storks are too big and dangerous, it’s because they were bred to an ungainly size by the Russians.

I lived under Communism, but not the Soviet kind. The Estonians saw the real deal hard core of totalitarianism, the kind with mass deportations, mass shootings and mass hunger. That kind of regime doesn’t leave mere “traces” in society, it leaves trenches. The Estonian nationality barely escaped being one of Europe’s submerged or even extinct nations. Well before any Soviets showed up they were gleefully trampled by Swedes, Poles, Danes — back when they were harmless pagans, they were even massacred by Christian Crusaders.

In the seventies in Rome, I once took part in a magazine called “La Citta di Riga,” an Italian pun which refered to the capital of Latvia and also meant “the city of lines.” This conceptualist magazine was an art project through which period artistic luminaries such as Francisco Clemente, Alighiero Boetti, Achille Bonito Oliva, Fabio Mauri, Umberto Silva, etc, wanted to change the world. Since this was the 1970s, concepts were considered more important the materialist objects or political policies. “The City of Riga” was a distant, romantic place for these Roman radicals of the Cold War days, a city carrying the flag of the globalist artsy utopia.

At the time, I was the only one in that group who came from a communist country. Most dissidents from the Soviet bloc had a keen understanding of the conceptual differences between alternative culture and the rigorous strictures of their daily lives. But I had my ticket back to Belgrade, the non-aligned way station that was half Moscow yet half Paris. I, too, could treat Riga as a mythical city of drawn lines, instead of a grim urban kolkoz where unruly ethnic populations were mixed, matched and eliminated at the whim of Stalin.

Our Estonian literary festival in Tartu was full of stories, often stories where Siberia loomed as large as Siberia actually is. It seemed that most every family had lost relatives to Siberian exile: a parent, a grandparent. A woman poet vividly explained how, during her childhood, her mother was deported. After years of absence a stranger returned: she had no teeth nor hair, but only wrinkles and bones. Our poet said: this is not my mom, my mom was a pretty woman! Until this day she writes patriotic poetry, due to that sense of horror and guilt towards her mother and her country.

At the same festival, a dissident Russian historian passionately described how Russians fail to deal with their impossible past, much preferring to hide the darkness under the carpet. In Russia, history is an instrument of power, rather like Russian courts where there is no presumption of innocence, so only the guilty show up. When it comes to historical crimes like the Estonian deportations, however, nobody was there, nobody is guilty, nobody is responsible and nobody remembers. However, this convenient denial and falsification is a poor counsel for peoples who still have to live together in the world, and who tend to repeat the mistakes of their parents. This story is obviously well known in both the Baltics and the Balkans. It’s distressing to hear that some story told in a small, Finno-Ugric language, yet on such a colossal scale. It’s especially painful when told in the clear words of the victims, rather than the rambling evasions of the perpetrators.

The Prima Vista Tartu literary festival is keen on the appreciation of words. Words are cherished, and the event was held within the handsome library of the famous university of Tartu. E-Stonia, the country where Skype was invented, has free internet everywhere. Obsessed as I am with wifi, I checked it obsessively, and I always found that connectivity flowed like water. What a contrast to benighted nations like Italy and Britain, where free Internet is associated with terror and fraud for the benefit of rapacious and conniving phone companies. In E-Stonia, the dark prospect of an Internet takeover by global copyright lords brought the population into the streets. “Respect existence or expect resistance,” say these shy and softspoken people, who know what human rights abuse looks like, no matter what mask it wears or what shape it takes.

Someday even the cruel dictatorship of Baltic airlines will be relegated to the ash-heap of history. Occupy Air Baltic, and give a free return ticket to all!

The ministers of the new Italian government were sworn by the re-elected, new/old, physically ancient president of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano.  Half a mile away, a despairing 49 year old who had lost both his wife and his job shot two policemen in front of a government building.   The assailant wore a tie and a nice dark suit.  He ran out of bullets before he could shoot himself with his black-market handgun. 

   So he fled the scene of his mayhem, but he was immediately caught by the police.  Naturally, in this country where political tension and terror are always a living presence, everyone feared for the worst — especially the interior minister, whose face showed visible concern as he attended the swearing-in ceremony. 

   It’s been a complicated path to the formation of this latest Italian government, even by Italian standards.  After years of partisan stagnation, the Internet movement of the histrionic comedian Beppe Grillo had emerged as a new force and a possible power broker in Parliament.  But the Movimento 5 Stelle, as Grillo’s insurgent party is known, refused to play by the conventional rules of Italian patronage.    

    Grillo, who is not an elected official and always seems to prefer a good ruckus to actually wielding power, had a falling out with a faction of his own “Grillini.”  This led to protracted party wrangling that finally ended with the M5S going back to the Internet to poll its own grass-roots supporters.

     Grillo recently threatened to march on Rome at the head of his massed supporters, a tactic familiar to both Garibaldi and Mussolini, but not the usual maneuver when one fails to place one’s own candidate for the president of the republic.   Italian politics has become a shadow-boxing contest between the clownish populist Grillo, the maestro of Internet politics, and the clownish television mogul Berlusconi, who still looms large in Italy despite his many legal cases and his appalling personal life.  

   A prominent Italian political analyst said, I don’t despise Grillo as much as most of the  people I know.   Despite his rough and ready methods, after all, Grillo has managed to improve the Italian political scene.  It will never be the same again: we have young people and women entering the parliament in large numbers, and finally party leaders and bureaucrats have to deal with a new political force. 

    But an old Italian Berlusconi voter told me: Grillo is just like Berlusconi.  I voted for Berlusconi when  he was young and I was too.   I still vote for Berlusconi because he is a true representative of Italian people as we are, for good or for bad.  But he’s of  an older generation. Now it’s Grillo’s time.

     Cases of severe governmental corruption from the past are shaking Italy day by day.  The misdeeds of party functionaries, as eager as ever to take their bribes and embezzle the taxes, are harder to endure when public hospitals schools and libraries are closing.   There seem to be no lines left between the public good and private profit, while unemployment rises and business collapses, and bankruptcies and suicides are common.   Entire families  who cannot survive the Austerity are found dead at home, having written rather reasonable and dignified goodbye letters. 

    The middle-aged and armed assailant who shot two policemen in front of the Italian government was not an organized terrorist.  He was a jobless desperado loudly committing “suicide by cop” through a misery many Italians will recognize.

     Meanwhile, President Napolitano, a creaking 87 years old, was forced into office yet again through the Parliament’s inability to manage its own affairs.   The elder statesmen gave them a hard reprimand, admonishing them that he took up this task against his  will and own good sense, in order  to save the country.  Napolitano even broke into tears, for he personally remembers the historical days of the resistance against fascism in the second world war.   This very respected politician has somehow kept credibility with the left and right during the many decades since, but rarely, if ever, has the situation he faces been this sordid and muddled.

    Now the right and left have formed a truly peculiar post-ideological national coalition that exists mostly to exclude the Grillini.  There are some new faces taking power here and there,  and the atmosphere among the ”caste” of left/right time-servers seemed unusually cordial.  Things seemed calm, even, until the lone gunman arrived from Piedmont and checked into a Roman hotel-room.  After his arrest he declared that he was on his way to kill some politicians; unfortunately the police officers were frustrating him, so he had to shoot two of them instead.

   A pregnant passer by was also randomly hit by a bit of shrapnel.  Her wound was minor, but it was a fearful shock for a vulnerable woman on a luckless day.  The Italian people must share that sentiment.