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Costa Concordia sinking and Francesco Schettino: Symbols of magnificent, but malfunctioning Italy

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House arrest: Captain Francesco Schettino told magistrates his actions saved 'thousands of lives'

In the aftermath of the Costa Concordia disaster, the Italians themselves are getting in on the act. They’ve christened the Costa Concordia’s lifeboat-hogging skipper Francesco Schettino ‘Captain Coward’ and are selling t-shirts printed with the words shouted at him by the coast guard official Gregorio de Falco: ‘Vada a bordo, cazzo!’ or, ‘Get back on board, for ****’ sake!’ You can even buy parodies of the classic WWII British government poster: ‘Keep Calm and Vada A Bordo Cazzo.’

Of course, as those same Italians are painfully aware, the whole disaster is a terrible confirmation of every negative stereotype the world has ever had about Italy and its people. Capt. Schettino is the Berlusconi of the seas and his ship is less like the Costa Concordia than the SS Bunga-Bunga.

This is a captain who crashed his ship because he veered off course to show off to an old colleague. Shortly before the accident happened he was rumoured to have been deep in conversation with not one but two beautiful women – we must, perhaps, be grateful that he did not promote them to senior positions on his crew as the real Berlusconi might have done.

  More... Captain Coward: 'I only left because I FELL into lifeboat when ship listed suddenly as I was trying to help' DAVID THOMAS: Never mind spending, why aren't we talking about making? DAVID THOMAS: Will the winds of change finally blow these eye sores away?

Having skippered the Costa Concordia, in the words of one of his crew, ‘like a Ferrari driver’, he then behaved with all the courage and determination of an Italian tank-driver – the kind whose tank, as the old wartime jokes had it, had one gear going forward and five in reverse. Schettino deserted his sinking ship faster than a turbo-charged rat, quickly followed, it has been alleged, by his sailors barging women out of the way as they ran for the lifeboats.

Tragedy: Schettino faces the prospect of charges of multiple manslaughter, causing shipwreck and abandoning ship

Gregorio de Falco is the ideal face of modern Italy, the country that arguably provides the finest cuisine, the most elegant clothes and the most beautiful cars in Europe, if not the world. But Capt. Schettino is Italy’s soft, flabby, greedy, indolent underbelly. He is a reminder of a country in which only fools pay tax; where corruption is a way of life; where voters gave three terms in office to a prime minister who owned the nation’s most powerful media outlets, flaunted his sexual excesses and, among many, many alleged criminal acts faced charges of sex with an underage hooker.

Hero: Livorno Coastguard Captain Gregorio Maria De Falco ordered Schettino to return to his stricken ship

Many people who work in shipping and aviation are saying that it’s not fair to blame Schettino alone. He was working in a corporate culture that, they claim, had not instilled the proper attitudes, training and emergency procedures in its staff at every level. So this disaster was a failure of governance and organisation. Again, how like Italy itself.

This is a nation held in such contempt by the powers that be in Brussels and Berlin that they no longer trust it to choose its own government. An inoffensive Merkel-approved Eurocrat called Mario Monti has been installed as the unelected head of a puppet regime. His job is very simple, to cut and cut and cut again until Italy’s spending is so low that even this tax-allergic economy can pay its own bills.

But Italy’s debts are so great and its ability to meet them so poor that it remains in very great danger of a default that will sink the

'Get on board, damn it!' T-shirts bearing harbourmaster's tirade against Captain Coward Schettino sell online for £12

Euro as surely as that rocky shore sank the Costa Concordia. Not that Monti’s writ covers his whole country. Great swathes of southern Italy are effectively the domain of criminal gangs like the Sicilian Mafia, the Nepolitan Camorra and, perhaps most powerful of all, the ‘Ndrangheta of rural, impoverished Calabria.

Italy as a nation, is not fit for 21st century purpose. Like the Costa Concordia it is beautiful, glitzy and apparently bang up-to-date. But like the Costa Concordia it may be fatally wrecked.




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