Without a Traceroute

I should say a few words about Stefania’s car. It’s a totally hilarious 22-year old beater. The roof leaks when it rains, so she has to always leave the windows open a crack so the interior can dry out. There’s a joint from a previous owner wedged deep in one of the air vents, so if you turn on the heater, the entire car smells like weed. There’s a broken radio from an even older car in the dash—when Stefania got the car, the radio didn’t work, so she replaced it with the radio from the car her father had owned when he met her mom, which he had kept as a memento (aww). Then that radio was destroyed by moisture after a few months. The back of the car is covered with tons of random bumper stickers, including a “01-20-09: Bush’s Last Day” sticker that an American friend of hers had insisted she put on the car. “It always confuses the Europeans, because they write the dates the other way,” she told me.

There was some question as to whether the car would make the 100km journey to Pisa without incident, but it performed like a champ.

Upon arriving in Pisa, we visited was a large social center near the city center. It’s not quite a squat, because the groups using it had a two-year lease from the city that recently expired. They haven’t moved out, and are currently embroiled in a fight to renew the lease. The city wants to bulldoze the building and construct a bus depot. It’s a big structure, and twenty-three groups involved in all sorts of different activities are based there. There’s a group that provides free bike repairs, a group that offers Italian language classes to the local immigrant population, and the hacklab offers tutorials on the internet and computers. Stefania conducted an interview with one of the hackers for her Ph.D. research, and he also gave us a tour around the premises.

Cool broken-computer art piece in the courtyard

The bike repair room

Wall of the library in the social center

After the tour, we were invited to borrow some bikes and participate in the Critical Mass demonstration that evening. Apparently Pisa holds Critical Mass events every month, but they are usually not that large, with only a few dozen people in attendance. This event was different, because instead of the normal organizers, it was put together by protesting university students.

A little bit of background, the Italian government recently passed a new law (“legge 133″) which drastically slashes funding for education in Italy, including universities. There isn’t a whole lot of English-language media on the issue, but Nature has published a couple pieces on the impact it will have on research scientists in Italy. It’s not just the scientists and staff who are upset, though. University students are also righteously pissed off. In protest, students have occupied many of the public universities in Italy in 1960s-style sit-in takeovers, and there have been many large street demonstrations. The University of Pisa (founded 1343!) is one of the more prestigious Italian universities, and, along with some of the universities in Rome, has been playing a leading role in these protests.

So anyway, that’s what this Critical Mass was about, a protest against law 133. Somewhere between two and three hundred people showed up, and even the organizers were suprised by the number of bike-riding supporters. The group assembled in front of the University buildings, and then rode from there to the Piazza dei Miracoli (“Square of Miracles”) in front of the Leaning Tower, making a lot of noise, chanting slogans (“Hands off the University!”—it rhymes much nicer in Italian) and attracting attention along the way. Arriving at the square, somebody broke out a megaphone and people were taking turns addressing the crowd from the pediment of a statue in front of the Tower. One of the teachers whose job is now in jeopardy spoke and was well-received; several students shouted fiery rhetoric into the megaphone.

The guy with the megaphone in the above photo, in particular, seemed to me to be the very embodiment of the dashing, romantic young student-cum-revolutionary. He spent a lot of time with the megaphone.

I was just thinking about how awesome it would be to stand on statues and yell things into megaphones for good causes when Stefania poked me, “Hey, they want people who speak foreign languages to come up and address the tourists.” Somebody spoke in French, and then Spanish; I figured they would easily have somebody to do English, but I’ve found that the Italians are surprisingly self-conscious about their English, even when they speak it relatively well.

It was then that I was really glad I hadn’t shaved in a few days. You gotta look the part, right? I stepped up onto the pediment, megaphone in hand, and discovered to my surprise that it’s not as easy as one might think to ad lib appropriate, inspiring, and eloquent rhetoric when facing a crowd of several hundred students and perhaps a thousand more tourists and onlookers.

I think I must’ve been reading too much American political coverage lately, because on my first attempt I could summon nothing but bland banalities about the importance of education. I said, among other things, “A great nation like Italy deserves a great university system.” and “Education should be a government priority!” Not exactly the stuff of which revolutions are made.

People were supportive though, and after a minute or two, I stepped down. A small, shy Asian kid stepped up after me and addressed the crowds in timid Japanese. He was awesome and everyone loved him. About 10 minutes later, some of the Italian students motioned me over again. Apparently they really wanted English addresses because so many tourists speak English.

On my second go around I felt I did a much better job. I explained to the tourists that, “this demonstration is against a new government law that cuts funding to education, they are strangling the university,” and went on to say that “universities are important to the health of a nation; especially a nation with a culture and history like Italy’s. Some of the oldest universities in the world are here in Italy, and now they are threatening to destroy that. We cannot allow this!”

The ‘we’ was a bit of a stretch, I concede. I also found myself being far more nationalistic with my rhetoric than the Italians who were speaking. Had I shouted, “Death to Berlusconi!” I suspect the protestors would’ve eaten it up (I also suspect I might’ve gotten an angry phone call from the US State Department). But I felt that as a foreigner, it wasn’t my place to issue sweeping denunciations of the Italian government. Please note that this kind of courtesy doesn’t stop Europeans from talking shit on my government continuously.

Approaching the tower

These guys were awesome, their signs say Adopt A Mathematician

After the Critical Mass, we headed back to the social center for a party, but the rest of the stuff in Pisa is probably worthy of a separate post.