Contradictions

World Cup Soccer Night 2006 out of control (in the middle of the pile of revelers is the beautiful Peace Fountain of Piazza Bra)

Venice, Carnevale, 2006 daily polite crowds

Exuberance, individualism, joy, celebration, unrestrained.

Frenetic, fanatic, lemmings, bacchanalian, pagan, danger.

So, which is it?

Depends on the passion. The worst example of an uncontrolled crowd that I have ever been in was the night that Italy won the World Soccer Cup Championship in 2006. I had to turn around and go back to the apartment to safety.

There is a theory about this: that Italy is a country of 'asking permission' so that, when a legal opportunity arises to go wild, Italians go wild. That night was entirely insane.

I'm not comfortable with this.

There are so many contradictions in Italian daily life in Verona. One that every expat notices is the fanatical cleaning of the home...hearing furniture being dragged across floors in the apartment next to you every day to clean for any dust that may have dared to settle...but the city can be littered from one end to the other, with dog poop on the marble sidewalks making walking an eyes-down activity. The painstaking care of the city gardeners who plant flowers in the intersection islands, only to have a motorist late to a restaurant date park in the middle of the flower bed. A man standing nonchalantly waiting for a bus, cleaning out his wallet, little receipts fluttering to the ground all around him...then he walks away.

Too many rules. Little revolts.

I'm not a sociologist, these are only observations. Still, it puzzles me. I wonder why in my own country, a nation of laws, where we have so much freedom of expression and meritocratic freedom to achieve, a country in which people are generally so open, we mostly do observe pooper-scooper laws, littering is not acceptable, I don't personally know anyone who would park in the middle of a beautiful public flower bed. Are we Americans, often derided by Europeans as being 'repressed', the ones who have found a balance? Is it simply that our laws have teeth?

I don't know.