Living in San Giorgio di Pesaro and Kingston

Mr Berlusconi often says that Italians are heavily taxed and that he will not add to the burden. So some months ago they announced that there would be a tax of 1 euro on every cinema ticket. In recent years he number of people going to the cinema has been increasing and we have been regularly adding to the number. So putting the ticket price up from 7.50 to 8.50 wasn’t welcomed by the cinema owners or by us. The extra euro was to go towards supporting the Italian film industry.

However, before the new increase became law there was a lot of protest from cultural bodies about the lack of government funding for spending on culture – buildings, art, music etc. In fact over recent years, and despite governments saying how important culture was to the tourist industry, the budget for the Ministry of Culture had been steadily cut. To show that it took culture seriously the Government decide to increase the budget. It did so by scrapping the idea of a tax on cinema tickets and instead put extra tax on petrol. A government spokesman said that he thought Italians would be happy to absorb the increase as it was in  good cause.

So now getting into the cinemas stays as before but not the cost of getting there.

Our internet had been down for over a week.

One morning I tried to make a phonecall but the phone was dead. A few minutes later it was working again. However, when we tried to get on the internet we failed. We contacted Telecomm who said there was a fault on the line and that it would soon be repaired. However, even after the repair the system didn’t work and so we went to Trony near Fano to buy a new router/modem. When we plugged it in we still couldn’t connect to the internet. We spoke to Telecomm again who sent a couple of engineers to investigate. They could get a signal on their modem to show that adsl was working but couldn’t get through to the internet. One of them went to the local exchange and did something and using their modem google appeared. However, when we tried our new modem no connection was possible. They suggested we return to Trony to change the modem.

When we arrived at Trony I spoke to Marzio who had sold me the modem. He was sceptical about the modem not working and asked if it had been installed correctly. I stammered something about “plug and play” at which he smiled and said that the modems needed to be activated and showed me the instruction sheet that came with the modem. I had misunderstood the instructions (even though they were in English) and so Marzio linked my modem to a computer in the store and went through the setting up prodedure. Having gone through the procedure he asked if I had someone to install it at home. I replied that now I knew what I was doing I could manage. He smiled gently and said that as he had the modem linked to the computer already he might as well activate it for wireless internet access. Within a few minutes it was done and when I returned home I plugged in the modem and here we are back on the internet. What great customer care from Marzio.