Rage 2 In Italian Free Download
Nichelle Gruger
Seen through Scandinavian eyes, Italians drive in a slightly unorthodox way. But if you know their habits, they are not really dangerous. And in my opinion they are not nearly as aggressive as North European drivers. For instance, I have rarely seen Italian drivers use the middle finger or get into road rage, because of the rotten driving of others.
On the contrary, Italian drivers are reasonably magnanimous with a tolerance bordering apathy, when it comes to alternative ways of driving. Their use of the horn seldom signal annoyance or danger. Instead, the horn as a warning in hairpin turns, where the use of horn can be compulsory. When waiting at a traffic light as a favour to the first car in row, who may not have seen the light change from red to green. Or when they are greeting friends or celebrating important events like a football victory. Hoots are rarely hostile, and they are never used as a lesson to others who may have made a wrong turn. Italians in general leave policing to the police.
The advantage a forward looking traffic culture is that it is easy to make way. The zipper rule is used relentlessly, and as long as you take turns, other drivers are almost always willing to let you in. It is an effective form of organised chaos. As long as you remember to show some initiative. No one will pause to wave you forward from a by-road, unless push a little. After all, you might just want to stay there, which also explains, why drivers from behind will make an island of a slow driver and try to pass from both sides.
No self-respecting Italian will, however, be seen in the inner lane among trucks and lorries. Teeny weeny city cars are crawling along in the middle lane forcing other cars into the fast lane, where there is a risk of getting run down by a 200 km/h BMW.
Just back from Como. Driving back to Malpensa had an awful experience that put us off Italy sadly.
Was overtaking a bus and some slow traffic doing 130kmh, the speed limit. Got tail gated and hooted at, but no room to pull over so completed the overtake. After pulling over, man driving with female passenger spent the next 5mins pulled along side me with his female passengers window down, he screaming at me, honking his horn. If I slowed down, he slowed down, if I sped up, he matched me. Eventually the noise from cars hooting behind him made him overtake. He then pulled in front of me and brake tested me almost coming to a standstill on the motorway. I then pulled out to overtake and he swerved into me.
Had 2 children in my car. We all were very shaken.
The former All-America basketball player, Douglas Moe, of Brooklyn and the University of North Carolina and Elon College, now finds himself, at the advanced age of 28, playing in fogbound northern Italy, and we pick up the action as he takes a pass at midcourt and heads into enemy territory, dribbling like Meadowlark Lemon. He absorbs a home-team elbow in the side without breaking stride. He fakes an opposing guard right down to the floor and then nimbly steps over the strategically outstretched foot. He weaves through a traffic jam in the foul circle, lays the ball up perfectly and descends into a threshing machine of enemy elbows, knees and fingernails. "Spingere!" the referee shouts, and signals that Moe has pushed and therefore the basket does not count. He hands the ball over to the home team, while the partisan crowd applauds the lunatic decision, and Doug Moe takes up his defensive position with no show of annoyance. "I'm used to it," he explained later. "It's another world. It's Jupiter."
A dozen or so Americans are playing in the Jupiter of Italian basketball (or basket or pallcanestro) with mingled joy and discontent. Until last season foreigners were banned from the Italian leagues, but the level of play was so poor the authorities decided to permit each team a transfusion of one foreigner. Immediately the 12 teams of the big league recruited 11 Americans (including Bill Bradley of Princeton and Oxford) and one Yugoslav, treated each one like King Farouk and watched the game soar in popularity. But of the Americans who went over in the first wave only three returned this season, forcing the Italian teams to recruit eight new Americans, one of whom has already gone AWOL from the team in Leghorn. And Doug Moe, the first American player to arrive in Italy, has vowed not to play after this season. "It's a dead-end street," Moe said. "They treat you great, but what do you have when you're finished playing here? I'm going to North Carolina and teach school."
The best Italian basketball league is made up of 12 teams which are supported to varying degrees by publicity-hungry Italian businessmen and which play in the soggy, bone-chilling north of Italy, a piece of real estate that rivals Novosibirsk for pure winter misery. To most of the American basketballers, one season of Italy in midwinter is more than enough. Milan and Venice and Padua and other northern Italian towns are at almost the same latitude as Duluth, Minn., and if they do not experience Duluth's occasional dip down to 30 below, neither does Duluth experience northern Italy's constant saturating fogs and rains. "My feet stay cold all winter," said Moe's wife, Jane, who was brought up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina and has found the going rough in the old country.
"At first there wasn't anything we liked about it," Moe said in the family's terraced two-bedroom apartment in Padua's "Garden City," where Moe and his wife and their two preschool boys have lived, all expenses paid, for the last two winters. "They put us in a hotel, and we didn't speak the language, we couldn't move around, we had no car, nothing. A couple of the players on the team spoke English and they tried to help us, but we couldn't understand anything anybody else said, and it was depressing, and we were freezing to death, and there was nothing to do with our free time." The Moes are not serious Shakespearean scholars, but they would have taken violent issue with Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, one of a handful of plays Shakespeare set in what is now Italy's fanatical basketball region. Lucentio spoke of a "great desire I had to see fair Padua, nursery of arts," and went on:
What made the Moes hang on was not any satiety that was immediately available in the ancient town of Padua, but the wondrous goings-on down at the gym, where the 6'5" former Tar Heel was taking the leading role in what the Italian press came to call "a homemade miracle."
Moe had been signed on to play for Unione Sportiva Petrarca, the David of the league, a sort of church team in Padua, the middle-size industrial town some 25 miles inland from Venice. The original function of U.S. Petrarca had never changed: any boy in Padua could enjoy the fun and games of the sports club provided he attended one hour a week of religious instruction by the foxy Jesuits and also attended Sunday Mass. The sports club, in other words, was a carrot held out by the church.
"We first got together in preseason training," Moe recalled, "and it was the Tower of Babel. The new coach was Alexandar Nikolic of Yugoslavia, the man who coached the Yugoslav national team for 15 years. He didn't speak a word of Italian, but he had some English and French. Most of the players could understand his French, and then he'd repeat everything to me in English."
"Was very bad at first," Nikolic said in his rudimentary English, one of his five languages. "Was what somebody call 'language cocktail.' Many of basketball words were English; I could said tira or I could said shoot. Jump shot in English is jump shot in French, but in Italian is tiro sospensione. In French dribble is dribble, but in English is difference between dribble and drive, and in Italian you say palleggio for dribble and entrate for drive. At first made terrible mistakes. Would tell player to cover other player and would cover wrong one. Would take player out and would think was telling him a good boy."
"To make things worse," said Moe, "Petrarca had always been a loser. They were always down in the mouth. Before every game they'd say, 'We can't beat this team, we can't beat this team.' And I got there and I couldn't understand this, and I said, 'What do you mean, you can't beat them? You're finished before you start with that attitude.' So the first game was against one of these teams you can't beat, and we beat 'em, and before the preseason schedule was over we'd won 10 straight, including one with the European champions.
"By this time the coach had learned Italian, and I could understand it a little, and we were beginning to do everything in Italian, and we began working together better. If I wanted the ball I knew how to yell 'Dammi il pallone! (give me the ball) or 'Guarda, guarda! When the coach talked to us in the time-outs he began using Italian, and some of those language screw-ups began to disappear."
By the end of the first half of the long seven-month season, U.S. Petrarca was leading the league. "In the second half we came back to form," Moe recalled, "but we still finished third only to Simmenthal and Ignis, and they're practically professional teams. It was the best finish in Petrarca's history, and it had the whole town going crazy." Moe was the hero of Padua, and the happy Galtarossa moved him and his family into a pleasant apartment, provided him with a car, a few vacation trips and a cushy job paying $6,000 a year. "The people couldn't do enough for us," Moe said. "One day we went to the corse al trotto (the trotters) and one of the drivers slipped Jane a piece of paper with the names of all the day's winners on it. We bet 200 lire (about 30) on every race through the fifth, and we won every one. Then Jane mislaid the paper, and we bet on the wrong horse in the sixth. The winner paid 25 to 1, and it was listed on the sheet the driver gave us. We found it later and felt like shooting ourselves."
Newspapers all over northern Italy joined in praising Moe. A typical article called him "the fabulous Moe" and observed that he could do anything "with or without the ball." The newspaper Il Resto del Carlino, published in Bologna, said: "Italians view it as extraordinary that he thinks every match can be won. That is something out of our mentality, and is considered typically American and typically sporting." Cesare Rubini, coach of the champions from Simmenthal, said that Moe was "easily 50% of the Petrarca team," and Signore Galtarossa proudly remarked that Moe's presence made every other member of the squad play far over his head. Moe had averaged 30 points a game and led the league in almost every individual department except slugging.
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