Are Mercenary Armies Evil? From Malatesta Baglioni to Evgeny Prighozyn:

 During the siege of Florence in 1530, Michelangelo Buonarroti was actively fighting with the Florentine army. When the city fell, someone hid him in a secret room under the Santo Spirito Church. It is not open to the public, but I had a chance to visit it a few years ago. It is impressive to see the trapdoor built nearly 500 years ago still perfectly functioning. And when you walk into the secret room, you can see Michelangelo's drawings on the walls; the sensation is that he had left just a few days before. If these drawings still exist, and also other masterpieces by Michelangelo, is a merit of the "Condottiere" Malatesta Baglioni, who avoided a bloodshed by forcing Florence to surrender.

During the War of the League of Cognac (1526-1530), the condottiere Malatesta Baglioni was hired by the Florentine Republic to defend the city against the Imperial Army. In 1530, he switched sides. He ordered to turn the cannons of his army against his employers and to open the doors of the city to the besiegers. It was a quick fall for the Florentine Republic that, from that moment, ceased to exist. 

It was a typical behavior of mercenary armies, one of the reasons why they have bad fame from the time of Machiavelli's "The Prince." (1517). Machiavelli didn't see the siege of Florence in 1530 (he died in 1527), but what he wrote was prophetic. 

"Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous, and any ruler who relies on them to defend his state will be insecure and in peril ... Why? Because they have no affection for you, and no reason to go to battle except the small wages you pay them, and those aren’t enough to make them willing to die for you! 

Correct, but wait one moment. Does that mean that mercenary armies are an evil to be stamped out from the surface of the Earth? If we look at the details, Malatesta Baglioni switching sides in 1530 was not so much a betrayal as a masterpiece of diplomacy. It came one week after the main army of the Florentine Republic was decisively defeated by the Imperials. At that point, the war was over, Florence had lost. And Baglioni acted in consequence. He avoided further bloodshed and, among other things, if you can still see the city of Florence in its full Renaissance glory, it is because the agreements that led to the surrender in 1530 were honored by all the parties involved. The city was not sacked, and the citizens' lives were spared. 

Not that mercenaries won't occasionally engage in sacking cities and massacring civilians (there are a few examples in history) but if you can pay them to fight, you can also pay them to stop fighting. That's unlike the behavior of soldiers of national armies, often motivated by propaganda to hate their enemies. They will often fight to the end, which is bad for them and for everyone. 

So, let's try to compare the actions of Malatesta Baglioni with those of a much more recent mercenary condottiere, Yevgeny Prighozyn, and his "Wagner" troops in Russia. There is a clear similarity between Baglioni turning his cannons against Florence and Prighozyn directing his tanks against Moscow. In both cases, we have a mercenary captain betraying his employers. 

Baglioni acted on the perception that the Florentine Republic was already defeated, and he was correct. The Florentines didn't attempt to resist, choosing instead the path of least damage. Prighozyn may have acted on the basis of a similar perception, but he was completely wrong. We may speculate that he was banking on promises that he would be helped by forces inside or outside Russia. Maybe he expected a major Ukraine offensive, or an uprising in Moscow, or he simply was handsomely paid to do what he did. We'll never know for sure who pushed Prighozyn to rebel but, whoever they were, they betrayed him and left him and his soldiers alone against a much more powerful enemy: the whole Russian army. 

The interesting part of this story is how the attempted uprising was relatively bloodless. Prighozyn's men found themselves facing annihilation a few hundred miles from Moscow. Even if their boss hadn't told them to turn tail, they would have surrendered. That must have been clear to the Moscow authorities, too, and they didn't try to annihilate the mercenary column. They have better uses for a few thousand trained soldiers than exterminating them. The whole story ended, if not satisfactorily, at least without bloodshed. 

This is the good thing about mercenary armies. They are, in a sense, a step in the direction of purely robotic armies which will be the only ones fighting in the future. Robots don't fight for glory or for "the country;" they fight because they are programmed to fight. And their programmers probably think and behave like the "condottieri" of mercenary armies: they care mostly for money. War is never a good thing, but if it can be a little less bloody, it is at least an improvement. 

Three months later, Florence restarts. But not quite

The owners of a shoe repair shop in Florence (*). In this picture, taken just after the end of the coronavirus lockdown, they are preparing to reopen their shop. They look happy, even euphoric. Time will tell if that optimism was justified.

The epidemic is almost over in Italy. After almost three painful months of lockdown and the loss of about 30.000 lives, the daily number of victims of the coronavirus is slowly dwindling to zero. In a couple of weeks at most, the epidemic will be completely gone. It is time to restart, but the damage has been terrible.

The lockdown is over and the Florentines are back, walking in the streets, wearing face masks, but free to go wherever they want, provided that they don't form groups ("assembramenti"). A few tourists can be seen, slowly walking around, a little bewildered. Below, you see a picture of a few days ago with two lone tourists taking a picture of the "Porcellino" (Wild Boar) (the boar looks a little bewildered, too.).
 

Many shops have reopened, but not all of them -- maybe 30% are still closed. For what I could see this morning downtown, all the open shops are empty of customers. The restaurants also look empty. The buses are nearly empty, too. Here is a picture taken this morning, with me and my wife the only passengers of a bus that used to be packed full before the epidemic. Note the signs saying "You cannot sit here!" They don't seem to be necessary, given the situation.

To pass to you some idea of the somber atmosphere in Florence these days, here are two fragments of conversations I had or witnessed in the street. Maybe these people are too pessimistic, but I have a feeling that they have correctly evaluated the situation.

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First, an exchange I overheard a few days ago while waiting in line at the entrance of a supermarket. I don't know the names of the protagonists, two men in their 50s. The one who said he had a shop I recognized later standing at the entrance of a small clothing shop in Via Romana, in Florence. I am reporting from memory, but the gist of what they said is there


 - Hello. How have you been doing? I haven't seen you around, recently.

- Oh, nice to see you! Of course you didn't see me! I was at home, like everybody else.

- Yeah, I was at home, too. But are you reopening the shop? I saw it is still closed.

-  Yes, it is still closed, but I am reopening on Monday.

- That's good, right?

- Not so good, really.

- Why?

- What do you think I can sell? There are no more tourists.

- Well, you didn't sell just to tourists. They don't come here so often.

- No, but you see. Someone from Spain would come and buy something. Then someone from America would come and buy something. And so on. See? It made the difference.

- I see....

- So, I am opening yes. But I am just selling off the stock I have. Then I'll close for good. In a month or two, I think.

- Really? Are you sure?

- How do you think I can pay the rent and the taxes? And for renewing the stock?

- Well, I think the government will help us.

- Yeah, sure.

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Now, a conversation I had this morning with a man who had a kiosk selling used books downtown. Again, it is reported from memory, but I tried to reproduce the sense and the tone of what I was told.


See? This kiosk has been around for a long while. Really long, see, it was here during the war already. The woman who had started this business sold the license in 1946. Oh, yes, and I have been selling books here for a long time. Sure, I am 66 now. Last year I thought I could retire, but then I decided I could keep going for a little longer. But they have been ruining me. First, there used to be an antique market right behind the kiosk, you know that, and then the city decided to send them away -- not elegant enough for the city of Florence. Sure. Before, people would visit the market and then stop here and buy books -- I had some good books, even antique ones. I was known, people knew that I had those books. I still have a few. But the antique market is gone -- they sent it somewhere out of town. Yes, it was not elegant enough for here, they said. They call it "decorum" of the city. Sure, and the people of the market are not selling anything anymore, where they are now. And I wasn't selling anything, either. Well, a little I was still selling. Not much, but a little. But then this. I have been forced to close down for three months. And I told them that I couldn't pay the license and the tax. And they say, fine, you don't need to pay for three months. Then you have to restart paying, and that's final. And if you don't pay, they said, you bring back your license to us and we'll give you a compensation of Eur 600, and that's it. And good riddance. You understand? They are happy that I close. Perfectly happy. A kiosk is not elegant enough for the decorum of the city, they say. Maybe they think that when tourists see my kiosk they run away screaming. Tourists like fancy shops only. And I have to pay 54 Euro per day -- yes, 54 euros in taxes and fees to the city. And I have to sell books for more than that if I have to eat. And to buy more books to sell, otherwise, what am I going to sell? Don't you see? There is no way. Nobody walking around, nobody buying anything, no tourists, they have gone. I should have retired last year, but I couldn't have imagined.... how could I have imagined this? And the city helping us? Ha! The mayor says he is furious, yeah, sure, he said that. I read it in the newspaper. He said he is furious because the central government didn't give him any money for the epidemic. That's what he said. And what should I say, myself? If the mayor is furious, how about me? I have been giving money to the mayor for 30 years and the mayor now is furious because he has no money to give to me. Aw.... even if he got some money from the government, I am sure he won't give any money to me or to the people who have shops and who need money. Like me, that's it. And so I'll be closing down. I'll be just selling the books I have and then good riddance. This square will be empty: no antique market no kiosks, nothing. I figure they'll be happy. It is what they wanted all along, decorum, yes. An empty square, and that's it. 


(*) The owners of the Calzoleria Leonardo Tozzi in Via Romana were kind enough to give me permission to publish the photo you see at the beginning of this post. If you happen to be in Florence, and you need a shoe repair job, you can find them in Via Romana 135r, just a few steps from the clothing shop mentioned in the first conversation reported in this shop

Florence: Two Months Later. The Day of the Zombies

May 1st, 2020. Florentines sit in the sun the "Piazza Pitti" square in Florence to pump up their vitamin D levels after nearly two months of segregation in their homes.

The Florentines are back. After two months of forced segregation because of the COVID-19 epidemics, the regional government issued an "ordinanza" allowing people to walk free in the streets of their town. They are still ordered to wear face masks and groups are forbidden, but it seems that it is past the time when you were insulted from the windows if you were seen walking in the street, or reported to the police by your neighbors if they saw you leaving home more than once per day.

Now, Florentines can walk in the sun again. And that's what they did on this sunny weekend in May.

The result was eerie and disconcerting. There was a definite sense of "zombie movie" in the masked people cautiously exploring the streets, looking at each other as if asking, "are you a zombie, too?" It was a scene not unlike the photos of Tokyo or Hiroshima after the bombings of WW2, with the survivors walking aimlessly among ruins. Florence has not been bombed, of course, but, in a sense, it has been razed down like Hiroshima. It is in ruins in an economic sense.

All the shops are closed, so are hotels, museums, and offices. With the current rules of "social distancing," it is unthinkable that they will ever be able to reopen, they just can't make ends meet without their usual number of customers. And when will tourists come back to a ghost city? No shops, no tourists. And no tourists means, no money, no jobs, no income. And no shops. Those people walking along the street yesterday were economic zombies, and they knew that.

But, if it all happened, it was because it had to happen. Florence couldn't survive forever to the sheer pressure of the millions of tourists arriving every year, something had to give. The only surprise is how fast and abruptly it happened. As Lucius Annaeus Seneca said, "Growth is slow, but ruin is rapid"

Just to give you an idea of how things were, and expected to be as the norm, here is Florence's Piazza Duomo, last spring.

In the end, even zombies have hearts. And, like this old lady, they can sit on a bench, take off their face mask, and enjoy a quiet afternoon in the silence of the empty streets and the closed shops.

Afternoon in Piazza della Passera, Florence -- empty of the usual throngs of tourists. This lady looks British, but she is probably a Florentine.

The doom that came to Florence

Where once had risen walls of 300 cubits and towers yet higher, now stretched only the marshy shore, and where once had dwelt fifty millions of men now crawled only the detestable green water-lizard. Not even the mines of precious metal remained, for DOOM had come to Sarnath. -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Doom that Came to Sarnath"


Before:

After:

Images courtesy Miguel Martinez

Florence Hit by the Coronavirus: The Curse of Hyperspecialization

Like the Giant Panda, the economy of Florence is at risk of extinction. 
                                                                    

Florence is like the Chinese Panda: a creature highly specialized in the resources it exploits. The pandas need bamboo, Florence needs tourists. No bamboo, the pandas die. No tourists, well....

These days, walking in downtown Florence reminds me of my childhood, when Florence was not packed full of tourists. It is a ghostly experience: there is almost nobody around. The few Florentines walking in the streets look perplexed, as if asking each other "and now what?" All Italy is like that, frozen: schools and universities are closed, most restaurants have closed and the trains and the buses run nearly empty.

Right now, the number of victims caused by the coronavirus is relatively small. It will not be a new black death. But the epidemics illustrates the fragility of our economic system: it is being disrupted not because people are killed by the virus, but because it lacks resilience. It is subjected to that deadly phenomenon called "enhancing feedback" -- the loss of an element of the network can destroy the whole system.

This fragility is especially visible in some highly specialized economies: the city of Florence is a case in point. I already discussed how Florence evolved over the past two centuries or so from a purely agricultural economy to one centered on tourism. You might see it as a parasitic economy, or maybe a scavenging economy. Modern Florentines have been living on the work of their ancestors, hundreds of years ago, in the form of art masterpieces and spectacular buildings.

The problem is not how you define the Florentine economy. The real problem is another. It was known but carefully ignored: it is that this economy is fragile. Tourism is highly sensitive to economic shocks: in difficult times, the first thing that people stop spending money on are expensive trips abroad. And this is exactly what's happening: with the rampaging coronavirus, people all over the world have canceled their trips and they are staying home. And Florence is empty.

In a way, it was expected: it is what I call the "Seneca Collapse." It is something typical of complex systems. Normally, they can absorb external shocks and adapt. But when they are under stress, it may happen that a small shock unbalances the whole system and causes it to collapse. Here is how the Seneca curve looks like: it is inspired by something that the Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca said: "Growth is sluggish, but ruin is rapid."

It is nothing more than the old story of the straw that broke the camel's back. It was not a fault of the straw, but of the camel having been overloaded. Seen in retrospect, it was not a good idea to overload the Florentine economy with infrastructures that brought more and more tourists to the town and that required more and more tourists to provide the resources needed for their maintenance. More hotels, more restaurants, more shops, more events, more roads, and so on. Even a bigger airport was in the plans but that, fortunately, may never materialize. 

A lot of people in Florence are complaining because they are losing money from their investments in bonds and stocks. But the real problem is with the people whose living directly depends on tourism. The people who clean the rooms of hotels and of airb&b's, who serve in restaurants, who drive taxis, who sell trinkets in the squares, who take tourists on tour in groups, and so on. Right now, they are on the edge of panic. Typically, they have no financial reserves and they are often indebted to the banks. But they have to pay their rent and to buy groceries for their families. And they are running out of money.

There are further stacked layers of people who indirectly benefit from tourism. For instance, a friend of mine makes a living out of giving private English lessons. In turn, people in Florence take English lessons mainly because it is a skill useful to deal with foreign tourists. But the virus has scared her students and, in any case, in this uncertain situation, most of them thought it was better to skip the cost of English lessons, it is one of those luxuries that can be postponed for better times. My friend's income has dwindled to zero in a couple of weeks. And she has to pay the rent for her home and buy food for her family.

Let's see things a little more in perspective. According to Statista,  "In 2019, the contribution of travel and tourism to the Italian gross domestic product amounted to 237.8 billion euros. The industry, which is one of the most important ones for the country’s economy, constituted about 13.3 percent of the Italian GDP."

Can the Italian economy survive the loss of 13% of the GDP? Probably yes, just as you can survive being run over a truck. But that doesn't mean it is a pleasant experience, nor a painless one.

Then, how about Florence? There are no data about such thing as a "Gross Town Product" for Florence, but some rough estimates of mine indicate that the fraction of the Florentine economic machine that runs on tourism could be around 30%, and perhaps even more. Now, imagine that international tourism vanishes for an extended period of time. . .  Ow. . . No more bamboo shoots for those poor pandas.

With a bit of luck, the virus will go away in a month or two, leaving an Italy battered but still there. Italians have shown great resilience in the past, think of when they rebuilt the country after the disaster of the second world war. Can they do that one more time?

In principle, yes. But it would take a serious rethinking on the part of a political class that so far has placed all bets into expanding tourism as much as possible, beyond all reasonable limits, all in the name of growth for the sake of growth. For once, they might learn something from this experience.

Unfortunately, right now, the first impression is not good, with noises recently heard from the government about the need to provide economic stimuli for people to buy new cars in order to "restart growth." People never change their minds, just like pandas never change their diet. And, as usual, we march into the future while looking backward.

Italy Becoming Poor -- Becoming Poor in Italy. The Effects of the Twilight of the Age of Oil

The living room of the house that my parents built in 1965. An American style suburban home, a true mansion in the hills. I lived there for more than 50 years but now I have to give up: I can't afford it anymore. 

Let me start with a disclaimer: I am not poor. As a middle class, state employee in Italy, I am probably richer than some 90% of the people living on this planet. But wealth and poverty are mainly relative perceptions and the feeling I have is that I am becoming poorer every year, just like the majority of Italians, nowadays.

I know that the various economic indexes say that we are not becoming poorer and that, worldwide, the GDP keeps growing, even in Italy it sort of restarted growing after a period of decline. But something must be wrong with those indexes because we are becoming poorer. It is unmistakable, GDP or not. To explain that, let me tell you the story of the house that my father and my mother built in the 1960s and how I am now forced to leave it because I can't just afford it anymore.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Italy was going through what was called the "Economic Miracle." After the disaster of the war, the age of cheap oil had created a booming economy everywhere in the world. In Italy, people enjoyed a wealth that never ever had been seen or even imagined before. Private cars, health care for everybody, vacations at the seaside, the real possibility for most Italians to own a house, and more.

My father and my mother were both high school teachers. They could supplement their salary with their work as architects and by giving private lessons to high school students, but surely they were not rich. They were typical middle-class people. Nevertheless, in the 1960s, they could afford the home of their dreams. Large, a true mansion, it was more than 300 square meters with an ample living room, terraces, a patio, and a big garden. It also had many fancy details: windows in high-quality wood, door frames in hand-wrought iron, a home-intercom system (very rare at that time), and more. It was in a green area, on the hills near Florence: an American-style suburban home.

I lived in that house for some 50 years, first with my parents, then with my wife and my two children. It was large enough to host six people easily in two separate apartments. After the death of my parents, I inherited the house in 2014 and I had some grand ideas about how to restore and improve it. With my wife, we started doing just that: rebuilding the patio, refurbishing the greenhouse, restoring the living room, repairing the roof, and more. But, after a couple of years, we looked into each other's eyes and we said, "this will never work."

We had spent enough money to make a significant dent in our finances but the effect was barely visible: the house was just too big. To that, you must add the cost of heating and air conditioning of such a large space: in the 1960s, there was no need for air conditioning in Florence, now it is vital to have it. Also, the cost of transportation is a killer. In an American style suburb, you have to rely on private cars and, in the 1960s, it seemed normal to do that also in Italy. But not anymore: cars have become awfully expensive, traffic jams are everywhere, a disaster. Ah.... and I forgot about taxes: that too is rapidly becoming an impossible burden.

So we decided to sell the house. We discovered that the value of these suburban mansions had plummeted considerably during the past years, but it was still possible to find buyers and we are just now packing up. We expect to leave the old house in the coming weeks, moving to a much smaller apartment downtown where, among other things, we should be able to abandon the obsolete concept of owning a car. It is not a mansion, but it is a nice apartment, not so small and it even has a garden. As I said, wealth and misery are mostly relative terms: surely we are experiencing a certain degree of "de-growth," but it is good to be able to get rid of a lot of the useless stuff that accumulates in decades of living in the same house. It is a little catharsis, it feels good for the spirit. (and it is also a lot of work with cardboard boxes).

What's most impressive is how things changed over 50 years. Theoretically, as a university teacher, my salary is higher than that of my parents, who were both high school teachers. My wife, too, has a pretty decent salary. But there is no way that we could even have dreamed to build or buy the kind of house that I inherited from my parents. Something has changed and the change is deep in the very fabric of the Italian society. And the change has a name: it is the twilight of the age of oil. Wealth and energy are two faces of the same medal: with less net energy available, what Italians could afford 50 years ago, they can't afford anymore.

But saying that depletion is at the basis of our troubles is politically incorrect and unspeakable in the public debate. So, most Italians don't understand the reasons for what's going on. They only perceive that their life is becoming harder and harder, despite what they are being told on TV. Their reaction is to lash out at whoever or whatever they think is the cause of their economic decline: Europe, Angela Merkel, politicians, immigrants, gypsies, foreigners in general. Italy is rapidly becoming a nasty place to live in: racism, hate, fascism, poverty, the rich getting richer and the poor poorer. It is normal. It has already happened, things will be better one day, shall pass, one day, but I am afraid it will not be soon.

It is also impressive to think that I am moving back to the southern area of Florence, the area called "Oltrarno," where the Bardi family has its roots since Medieval times. The Bardis living there were not rich, they were mostly low-class workers and some of them were wretchedly poor, I told this story in a post of two years ago. It was only with the prosperity of the golden age of oil that some Bardis could feel rich enough to afford a mansion in the hills. Not anymore. I suppose that my descendants will live there, just as my ancestors did. It is the great cycle of life.

And here is me, engaged in packing up my collection of science fiction novels. More than one thousand books, most of them in Italian. They have no commercial value but I don't want to throw them away. For the time being, I'll store them in boxes, then -- who knows? -- one day the great cycle of life may have them resurface again.

Note added after publication: Some people wrote to me worried that we are going hungry or that we'll be living in a shack. No, no....  Not at all! As I said, we are moving to a nice apartment in the Southern area of Florence. Look, it even has a bomb shelter in the garden in the form of an ogival thing in heavy concrete. Someone built it during WW2 and, who knows? It may become useful again!

Happy August 15th (and a little rant from UB)

August 15th is a big holiday in Italy. Here is a translation of the post I published today on the Italian version of this blog.

An image of the "new normal" in Italy. In Florence, a downtown shop tries to fight the heat wave of this summer by installing an air conditioner, without worrying too much about spewing hot air right onto the hot and sweating tourists.

Happy Aug 15th, everybody! Here, in Florence, the worst seems to be over and the forecasts tell of rain today and tomorrow. This July has been the hottest ever recorded in Italy, but we suffered, on the whole, only limited damage. We had more than a month of brutal heat, but also some rain that eased the problem of the forest fires. Now, we can hope to arrive to September without big troubles, at least in terms of sheer heat. 

It is sure, anyway, that this Summer we got a taste of what the "new normal" is going to be. Apart from the horrible heat, we saw a number of spectacular disasters created by bad weather. I can tell you that I had never seen the roof of a house blown away by the wind. I had seen something like that only on TV, and mainly in the US, where the wooden homes always have that look as if they were coming from the tale of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf. But seeing the roofs of concrete buildings in Florence being ripped off and deposited in the courtyards, below, well, it has been a shock.

So much the shock caused by these events, that on TV someone mentioned the term "climate change". Fortunately, they immediately found an "expert" who appeared on screen and said that everything was fine and that it had been just a normal summer thunderstorm. 

Apart from the shy, and immediately removed, intrusion of the real world on the TV screen, Italy continues to operate in conditions that I would call "political Alzheimer." That is, conditions in which the patient continues to repeat the same things over and over, without reacting to external stimuli. So, we vaguely remember that, in the past, there was a good time in which the economy was growing and there follows that there is nothing else and nothing more than pursuing growth to fix all the problems.

This catatonic form of politics is not a fault of any specific political force. The faces we see on TV are a little like what people saw in one of those old "houses of mirrors" in amusement parks. Distorted mirrors would return your image as taller or shorter, fatter or thinner, crooked or straight; but it was always the same person. So, the politicians ruling Italy today are just slightly deformed reflections of the society that has produced them. It is us: we are aggressive, disoriented, angry, and without ideas. 

On this point, there is a very interesting post by John Michael Greer (the "archdruid") titled "the war against change."  Greer maintains that the traditional distinction between "progressives" and "conservatives" has been replaced by a situation in which the progressives became conservatives in the sense they oppose any and all change, whereas the conservatives still favor changes, provided that they will worsen things considerably.

This view can be perfectly applied to the Italian situation, with the so called "left" that shows a deep hate for renewable energy and for everything sustainable, whereas the right continues to push for drilling more and drilling deeper in order to get more energy from the sea of oil on which, notoriously, Italy floats. This idea of the right is being applied with great enthusiasm by the left, presently in power.   

But I would also say that Greer is somewhat optimistic, in the sense that the ongoing mental paralysis is affecting all political forces, both on the right and on the left. And it is not just a problem of the political parties: it is the entire Italian society that can't find anything better to do than to blame the bugaboo of the moment, be it Putin's Russia, Merkel's Germany, or whatever. And a good fraction of the public seems to find refuge in the most extreme forms of conspiracy theories, those which are unseemly for the dignity of the human condition, such as chemtrails and the upcoming new ice age. 

All right, sorry for this little rant from me. But, really, it is impressive to note how nothing moves in the debate, while we are facing gigantic changes in the ecosystem and in the economy. Do we have any hope to see something moving in the future? Hard to say. Surely, 2016 will be hotter than 2015, and 2017 will be even worse. But, on TV, there will always be some "expert" telling people that everything is normal. 


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Note: to be sure, this 2015 has seen one big change in terms of new ideas. The "Laudato Si" Papal encyclical. It is impressive how this set of  ideas comes from the Church of Rome, the bugaboo of the old and rigid "left," who once were priding themselves of the definition of "progressives." It reminds me of Tonybee, when he placed himself in the position of an ancient Roman and asked: "what good can ever come out of Bethlehem?" And yet....

Good tourist is one more tourist: Florence's fragile tourism industry.

One of the many shops in downtown Florence whose owners hastily installed an air conditioner to save themselves from the heat wave engulfing the city. Note how the exhaust blows hot air directly onto the tourists walking in the narrow street where this shop is located. Florence is clearly unprepared to the "new normal" of hot weather created by climate change. But the main problem may be the concentration of hundreds of thousands of tourists in about one square km. And the administrators of the town want more of them! (photo by the author, August 2015)

If you have been visiting Florence during this hot and humid August, it is likely that you'll remember your experience not so much in terms of the art pieces you saw. Rather, you'll probably remember a place that looks more than all like one of Tokyo's busiest subway stations during rush hour.

I took a small trip to downtown Florence this week, and I saw tourists marching in crowds under the scorching sun, waiting for hours to have access to the main tourist attractions, carrying bottled water with them as if they were crossing the Sahara desert in an adventure movie.

Florence, as a city, is simply not prepared to the "new normal" of temperatures that climate change is creating. And one can only wonder how the situation will evolve as climate change runs its course with higher and higher temperatures.

Tourists in Florence carrying umbrellas to defend themselves from the scorching sun.  (photo by the author, Aug 2015)

Heat is only one of the problems that tourists have to face in Florence. An even worse one is overcrowding. Let me pass you some data. In 2014, we had some 13 million overnight stays of tourists in Florence or in the nearby area. To this number we have to add all those who come by bus or by car just to spend a day in Florence and then go back or move on to another destination. I think we have to add at least a couple million of them per year. So, a conservative estimate of the total would some 15 million "tourist-days". That makes an average of more than 40,000 tourists in town every day.

But that is only an average. Clearly, tourists tend to come during high season, especially in summer, and then the density is much larger than the average. So how many of them are in town every day this August? A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? Or more than that?

Tourists in Florence on their rented Segway vehicles. Given the density of people in town, these machines are not much more useful here than in your living room. (photo by the author, Aug 2015)

In principle, there is nothing wrong in cramming the city with so many tourists; at least as long as the people in the crowd don't panic and stampede, generating a large number of casualties. It is just that when the historical Florence was built, there were perhaps 100.000 inhabitants in town. Today so many visitors are a disaster for structures that just weren't thougth fod twice as many people or more (and note that they tend to concentrate more and more in the same, restricted, areas). Some people speak of the need of "saving Florence" from this calamity. They are well intentioned, but arrive too late. Florence, intended as a "normal" town, doesn't exist any more. What exists is a huge theme park surrounded by an expanse of suburbs. And, as in any theme park in the world, the people whom you see walking in the street are not residents; they are either visitors or employees of the park.

As everything in this world, if something happens, it means it had to happen. Under many respects, it was unavoidable that Florence would be transformed into a major worldwide tourist attraction and it was unavoidable that more and more people would want to visit the town every year. What surprises me in this story is not the transformation that Florence underwent, but how the city authorities and the representatives of the tourism industry are totally oblivious to the problems brought by this huge mass of people dumped into the city center. Not only they are blind to that, but they want more! When the data for 2014 came out, everyone was delighted, actually ravished, that the number of tourists in Florence had increased of about 3% with respect to the previous year. If there was some regret about that result, it was that it was "only" of 3%! The rule seems to be simple: good tourist is one more tourist.

Everyone is so completely convinced that more is always better that the city authorities are planning a substantial expansion of the city airport that should perhaps double the number of passengers landing in Florence. The only criticism I heard about this idea is that the new airport should be built somewhere else, not that more people are not a good thing.

But can anyone remember that in 2005, 10 years ago, the tourists arriving in Florence were less than seven million, that is about half as many than today? How long do you think you can keep doubling the number of tourists every ten years and still report it as a good thing? And how long do you think that the tourists will put up with being crowded, herded, goaded, trapped, pushed, overcharged and mistreated in various ways, before they decide that they can find a less crowded theme park - say - in Anaheim?

This great tourist boom is so fragile that it is incredible that nobody realizes it. Some 75% percent of the people visiting Florence come from abroad, and many from overseas. An economic crisis or a major geopolitical instability could easily stop the tourist flow and destroy the economy of a city that, by now, depends on the two billion dollars or so that the tourists bring in every year. If you want to have some idea of what might happen, you could do well by re-read "Babylon Revisited", by Scott Fitzgerald, that describes Paris as a ghost town after that the great crash of 1929 had sent away the American tourists.

So, does anyone in this world understand the concept of "resilience"? Apparently not, and I can't blame too much the city authorities of Florence for pushing so hard for their new toy, the airport. After all, the mining industry keeps operating on the assumption that resources are infinite and always abundant. And then, what's the difference? Humans just seem to be made to overexploit resources and, be the resources crude oil or tourists, it is about the same. So, it had to happen, and it is happening.


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I don't want you to think that I am trying to prevent you from visiting Florence. Despite the ongoing disaster, it is still worth coming here if you avoid the overcrowded areas of the center and if you take a little more time than the average tourist. If you do this, you may discover that such a thing that I would call "city spirit," survives in Florence (for now, at least)

Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence

Image by James Good


Garrett Hardin's idea of "The Tragedy of the Commons" has become well known, but not always really understood. In my case, I can say that I have big troubles in having my students grasping its mechanism; that is the interplay of individual advantage versus public goods; the basic factor that leads to what we call "overexploitation."

Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Hardin used the example of sheep and pastures to explain the reasons of the tragedy, but that's rather unfamiliar to my students (as well as to most of us). For instance, many of my students don't seem to be able to grasp the concept of "overgrazing", that is the fact that grass doesn't regrow if it is grazed too much. Besides, the pastures that Hardin was considering never experienced the "tragedy"; they were well managed and well regulated, specifically in order to avoid it.

So, let me propose a different example for the mechanism of overexploitation, based on a real event that happened to me. Maybe it can explain the concept better.

Just a few days ago I was literally kidnapped inside an underground parking in Florence because I had lost my entrance ticket, with the employees of the place insisting that they won't let me out unless I was willing to shell out 237 euros for about two hours of parking (!!).

I described the experience in detail in a post in Italian, that you may machine translate if you are really interested. The gist of the story, anyway, is that I found myself caught in a trap mainly designed to siphon out some money out of the pockets of the hapless foreign tourist passing by. In my case, I was able to negotiate my release and avoid paying the exorbitant surcharge. But, put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't speak the local language, doesn't know what are his/her rights, is in a hurry; then the best strategy is to pay and be over with it. Although, after such an experience, most tourists will probably swear that they won't ever again set foot in this hateful city.

Now, despite the rather nasty circumstances, what I have described is nothing more than an economic transaction. But, here, there doesn't seem to hold the conventional view that demand and offer are always the same and, at the same time, "right". What happens, instead, is the perverse mechanism of Hardin's tragedy taking hold of the situation.

Let's quantify: by forcing a tourist to pay 237 Eur, the management of the parking lot gains the difference between the normal parking rate (say, 4 euros) and the surcharge; a net gain of 233 Euros. At the same time, the fact that the tourist mugged in this way will never come back to Florence means a loss in terms of hotel rooms, meals, various purchases and more. Considering that the enraged tourist will also discourage friends and relatives from coming to Florence, the overall loss is surely of the order of several thousand euros. The transaction, therefore, turns out to be a net loss for everyone involved.

But here comes Hardin's tragedy. The loss of thousands of euros is spread over several thousands of operators in the tourism industry and for each one it is so small to be nearly invisible. Instead, the monetary gain of 233 euros is well visible for those who pocketed it. There follows that almost everyone, as an individual or a single firm, gains in overcharging tourists. That's what generates what we call a "tourist trap," a common occurrence everywhere tourists go.

It is the same mechanism of Hardin's original example, with the tourists in the role of grass and the tourism operators in the role of shepherds. In Hardin's example, overgrazing leads to the destruction of the resource (grass). In the case I was describing, tourists in Florence have not been destroyed, yet, but they are constantly overcharged, overcrowded, and overexploited in various ways. It is not so obvious that they will continue to flock to a place where they are so badly mistreated and so often.

I know what you are thinking, that Florence will always be Florence. True, but visiting Florence is, in the end, the result of the fact that it is fashionable to do it. And fashions change over time. Years ago, it was fashionable to buy overpriced and oversized cars, and manufacturers thought they could overexploit their customers at will. For a while, yes; then look at what has happened to Detroit.

The final point of this discussion is to note how difficult it is for human beings to manage well the resources they exploit. The overexploitation phenomenon lurks almost everywhere and it is extremely difficult to stop it, because it generates a cascade of economic gains that overcome the (usually feeble) attempts of the authorities to regulate the use of the resource. It is true for tourism, but also for minerals, for fish, for agriculture, whatever you have that generates an economic return sufficiently large to make it possible to reinvest a fraction of it to increase the exploitation rate. We haven't found a way to avoid the tragedy in modern times and chances are that we never will, at least as long as we reason in terms of maximizing individual profits and we keep believing that doing that optimizes the exploitation of the system. Maybe it does, but at the cost of destroying it.

Italy: adapting to collapse

The new San Lorenzo mall in Florence, Italy. An American style food court designed mainly with international tourism in mind. It is an example of the attempt of the Italian economy to adapt to the ongoing collapse of its traditional manufacturing sectors, trying to exploit new sources of revenue. So far, this brand new set of restaurants seems to have been successful. Unfortunately, however, even foreign tourists may be an unsustainable resource. 

If you happen to visit Florence, these days, you may notice the brand new food mall on the upper floor of the ancient downtown market. It is a major restructuring of what used to be a vegetable market, patronized mainly by locals. Now, it is a typical American style, "food court" with many different restaurants sharing the same tables.

From my personal experience, I can tell you that the food in this place is of medium quality; overpriced, but not terribly so. It is the kind of food that foreign tourists have come to expect in Florence, I'd call it fusion food with a Florentine veneer. Not that I want to discourage you from trying this place. On the contrary, it is at least a way to avoid the many abominable tourist traps you may be unfortunate enough to stumble upon in Florence (you may also like to take a look at some notes of mine on the ancient Florentine cuisine). I just wanted to note how it the new food court is an example of the present trends of the Italian economy.

I have already discussed the Italian collapse in previous posts (one and two). The collapse keeps going and the latest results from the Italian Statistical Institute (ISTAT) indicate that Italy has lost 25% of its industrial production after 2008, with no signs of improvement in view. Politicians are screaming about "restarting growth" but there is little that anyone can do facing such a disaster. The best they seem to be able to conceive is to trick the statistics in order to create the appearance of a non-existing recovery.

The collapse is mainly the result of the increasing burden on the Italian economy of more and more expensive imported mineral commodities. This extra burden has destroyed the competitivity of the Italian manufacturing industry. As a consequence, the Italian economic system is actively re-adapting, trying to find new resources. It must find "light" market niches, areas which don't need large amounts of energy and minerals to be run. It is finding them mainly in the fashion and the food industries.

If you live in Italy, and especially in Florence, you can't avoid noticing how the fashion industry is prospering; you can see that also from highly debatable initiatives such as "dressing" the Baptistery church in Florence as if it were a gigantic foulard. Gone are the traditional manufacturing power centers, and with them there went much of the traditional financial power in Italy. The Monte dei Paschi Italian bank survived the Black Death during the Middle Ages, but it may not survive peak oil! Even the celebrated new prime minister of Italy, Mr. Matteo Renzi, is a consequence of the new balancing of the economic power in Italy.

Tourism is also quickly gaining a new status of fundamental resource in the Italian economy. Tourism has always been a traditional Italian industry, but now it is becoming something new: with impoverished Italians traveling less and less, International tourism is becoming dominant. But it is not any more the time when international visitors would stay in Italy for months or years, to explore the ancient culture and landscape. Now, tourists stay a few days at most and have little time and interest to explore things other than the standard sightseeing tours in the art cities: Venice, Florence and Rome. The result is the concentration of tourism in areas where it can be efficiently exploited by initiatives such as the food court in Florence I was reporting about. Outside these centers, tourism is in trouble, too.

So far, the expanding economies of some countries, primarily China, are providing an increasing flux of tourists to the main touristic centers of Italy. However, it takes little to expose the fragility of this small economic boom in Italy. Think of the possibility of a new financial crisis, such as the one of 2008, and you can imagine what's going to happen. Will the upper floor of the San Lorenzo market return what it used to be? Maybe, and my impression is that we really lost something by dismantling the old vegetable market.