mi dai una mano o accendo l'incendio?

As a foreigner living in Italy.. this is the behaviour i have seen to dominate the Italian mindset and it is very shamefull, revolting even.
Ninty years of saboutaging the Italian sense of group seems to have resulted in the death of solidarity.. and people can only get together on negative things, such as a pissing contest against a joker like Berlusconi.
Society has locked into a mode that people need money to survive.. it did not use to be like that, but ok. There is nobody here lending a helping hand to those they do not know.

Where is the private Italian? The one who dares to feel another's pain beyond the simple boundaries of family or campanilismo?

sono stato aggredito da 4 maroccchini bestie schifose per un cellulare e dei documenti... questa città è una merda!!!! VOGLIO SENTIRE CHIARA LA TUA POSIZIONE SU QUESTE BESTIE!dato che non c'è nessuno che possa difendermi...

When forty years-or-so-ago I saw the first homeless people sleep in card boxes, black families barely eeking out a living on the farms of the deep south, Native North American children sniffing glue, overdosed drug addicts dying in the streets and alleyways between gleaming skyscrapers as more and more boarded-up stores and houses appeared, and as gun-toting teens killed each other in the inner-cities, soup-lines getting longer while more and more food-banks opened up, it was overwhelming, it was poverty out of control, and always thought that I would have never see those awful sights in Italy. To be sure, I had seen the shocking poverty of the fifties in Southern Italy and of the small towns in the central regions of the Appenines but for one reason or another there was a certain civility about it, there was some humanity left that poverty had not yet broken down. It was poverty under control. Even Italians, in general, seemed more generous, less greedy, more in solidarity with one another. When I came back to Italy for the first time, after ten years in Canada, in the sixties, the country was booming and changing Italy. Jobs were plentiful and people worked hard to build themselves new houses, and buy refrigerators, washing machines and Fiats. Italians prospered and taunting me, "You went looking for America and here it was, here all the time," they would say to me. Twenty years later outside the Termini train station I saw a few homeless people. I was told not to be surprised by the "clochard" by the "barboni." They explained homelessness as people wishing to be free, it was an "existential choice" by people who wished to live without masters. I had heard the same romanticized explanation about homelessness before and knew better: I knew that only a few people, if any, choose the icy sidewalks instead of a roof over his head, a warm bed and a regular meal. The other face of America in Italy was beginning to appear and, like in America, it was ignored, no one wished to see it. In fact, by the mid-eighties Italians ignored, stepped over, skirted around human derelicts on sidewalks no more and no less as New Yorkers did on their way to work. Then, the shocking episodes of homeless people set on fire by bored rich kids, about homeless people freezing to death, or beaten to death with baseball bats, of politicians' promises to eliminate the causes of homelessness, or stories of violent "baby-gangs" attacking immigrants, of pitiless working conditions, of cruel acts of exploitations, or seeing statistics of rampant youth unemployment, of declining manufacturing jobs, or watching Milan trying to become Chicago while BMWs and Audis and Mercedes zoom by as poverty keeps rising... like in America.