A week in Austria

Well, not really. In fact, we were in that very northern, mountainous part of Italy called the Sudtirol. But it might as well have been Austria. The people speak German (their mother tongue - they only learn Italian at school), the landscape and architecture look like a scene right out of the Sound of Music, the food is Austrian and the people are, well, not Italian.
"Do you prefer to speak German or Italian?" I asked the hotel owner.

"Lieber Deutsch", was his reply.

The Frenchman, in his oh so French "everything must be centralized" understanding of the world, was aghast. How can the Italians stand having people in their country for whom Italian is not their mother tongue, who prefer speck to parma ham and who seem not to care at all for the idea of, well, fitting in (or, dare we use the term, assimilating).

After all, what did the French do once they (unjustly, some would say) reacquired Alsace after World War I? Forced the German-speaking Alsacians to become French, of course! Out of the question to let the Alsacian culture survive! Now, when you meet person from Alsace, even if his last name is Steinbock or Schmidt or Apfelbaum, he is French. Alsace is awash with a kind of cultural Stockholm Syndrome - they adore their French captors to the point of denying any other possible origin of their sauerkraut and spaetzle dishes, their black forest architecture that speckles the Vosges and their "eastern" (read German) accent when they speak. So you had better not even suggest that he has anything other than French blood in his veins, because as far as he is concerned, he is the most French of all the French.

But I digress. Back to sudtirol. Sudtirol is definitely not Alsace and the Frenchman recognized this fact as soon as our tires hit the regional border. The signs are bilingual but, well, the German comes first and the Italian is often (gasp) written in smaller print. The man at the ski rental shop could speak Italian - that was clear. But he had to really think about it when he did and his first instinct was always to respond in German. I am told that the mountains a bit further to the south in the region (we were in Luson - about 100 km from the border with Austria) are more truly bilingual but you still notice the distinct Austrian flavour.

So when we returned to Rome, we had a chat with a few people here in Rome about how they feel about having non-immigrant citizens whose first language is not Italian.

The universal response went something like this: "They hate the Italians. They would rather be in Austria. And they are really ungrateful because they get more money in the form of subsidies than the entire south of Italy put together. And they collect their own taxes because of their 'special status' that they have by law". In short, they are annoying.

To which I responded: "Okay. Er, so why doesn't Italy just give the sudtirol back to Austria?"

To which they answered: "Are you kidding me? We fought wars to get that land!"