The clerks and typists of Milan pause on their way to lunch, and look at the bank windows in the Piazza Cordusio. They watch the screens that (in one window) tell them the state of their shares and (in the next window) their bonds. Round the corner, more sophisticated onlookers are studying the options market.
These people, in the past 18 months, have discovered that they can share in the booming profits of their country's industry. Are they typical of modern Italy?
They are. But so are the rather tubby people who, every weekday morning, get on the 9.23 train to Lugano. When they get back on the train to Milan they are slim; the money stuffed under their clothes has been deposited in Swiss banks. Many of them have perfectly legal reasons for exporting the money; a son studying abroad, a debt to be repaid. They could have got permission from the proper authorities. But not everybody can wait for the weeks, months or years that the proper authorities take.
Prosperity and restriction, surging growth and a stifling bureaucracy--Italian life is made up of the struggle between these forces.