Travelling

"Travel" is the name of a modern disease wich became endemic in the mid seventies and is still spreading.
It is carried by a germ called prosperity.
Its symptoms are easily recognisable. The patient grows restless in the early Spring and stars rushing about from one travel agent to another (or surfs the Web) collecting useless informations about places he doesn't want to visit, studying air routes or road routes; then he, or usually she, will do a round of clothes shops, shoe shops, summer sales, sport shops and spend three and a half times as much as he or she can afford; finally in August our patient will board a plane, train, coach or car and proceed to foreign parts along with thousands of fellow-sufferers not because he is interested in or attracted by the place he is bound for, nor because he can afford to go, but simply because he cannot afford not to.
The disease is highly infectious.
Nowadays you catch foreign travel rather as you used to cacth influenza.
The result is that in the Summer months (and in the last few years also in the winter season) everybody is on the move.
In Positano you hear no Italian, but only German; in some French parts you cannot get along unless you speak American; and the official language of the Costa Brava is English.
What is the aim of all this travelling?
Each nationality has its own different one:

1)The Japanese want to take photographs of themselves in: Trafalgar Square with the pigeons, in St Mark's Square with the pigeons, and in front of the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris, without pigeons.
The idea is simply to collect documentary proof that THEY HAVE BEEN THERE.

2) The Germans travel to check up on their guide books:
a) that the Ponte di Rialto is really at his proper place
b)that the Leaning Tower is in its appointed place in Pisa and is leaning at the promised angle.
They tick these things off in their guide book and return home with the gratifying feeling that they have not been swindled.
But why do the Italians travel?
First, because their neighbour does, secondly they have been taught that travel broadens the mind and mostly they travel to avoid foreigners.
Here in our country one is always exposed to the risk of meeting all sort of aliens.
The main aim of the Italian abroad is to meet people, I mean nice Italian people from next door or from the next street.
Usually if you meet your next door neighbourg at your front door you pretend not to see him or, at best, nod cooly; but if you meet him in London or Madrid, you embrace him fondly and offer him a drink or two; and you may even discover that he is quite a nice chap after all.