7am Wake up a little bit chilled. The heating in the van went off overnight so we are a stiff and grouchy. How can it be that we are further south than London but it’s a lot colder?? We have a coffee at the camp site and hit the road.

8am-12 noon: Valeria drives us through the viaducts and tunnels of Tuscany. Its beautiful. I feel like I know this landscape from a zillion paintings, films, olive oil and wine ads. In Irish churchyards they always try and grow those trees you see in Tuscany (and all the paintings that depict biblical scenes) that look like really big shrubs. Presumably they think that if they can coax the sodden ground into supporting such a tree, the space will be holier.
The trees always go brown. Kanina and I download pics and listen in to yesterday’s conversations again to tag pieces of audio for the video we will hopefully make. For some reason the bits I don’t understand seem
more interesting than the bits I can (the English parts). Its funny when you don’t speak a language how you automatically attribute significance to what is said on a purely musical basis. Italian is tricky to figure out musically as it feels dramatic, as if every sentence is life or death when often Valeria tells us later they were just discussing directions. Like last night in Bifo’s classroom, I think that if I just listen harder I will get it.

12 ish: I take over some of the driving as the bends and tunnels get less intense nearer Rome. I
haven’t driven something this size on the wrong side of the road before so it’s a bit scary. Italians are also crazy drivers coming right up behind you to ’sniff your ass’ (which is apparently the local phrase to describe the habit) and then slaloming around. I have trusting comrades. Valeria takes over again when we get close to Rome’s infamous ring road. The campsite on Via Flaminia (which Janna elegantly re-names via chlamidia) is almost impossible to get to. We lap it a few times.

3.00 Campsite is super luxury. The bathrooms have mosaic, a fountain, piped music and the toilets spray you if you don’t get out in time. What happened gritty camping?! (see post on camper van version of adventure)

4.00 Make it into Piazza del Republica 2 hours late but the demonstration is still close by. I have never seen so much graffiti ˆ and great graffiti. We catch up with Valeria’s friend from the Torino precarious workers group. Janna does an interview with her and then another one with someone else from the same group named Roberta. The interview begins from Bifo’s question that we have relayed from Bologna. There seems to be some ambivalence around this demo. There are communist party flags and banners everywhere, yet the communist party are actually one of the coalition partners in Prodi’s new government. So who are they talking to? There also seems to be some similar feeling to those that Bifo expressed about the limitations of the protest now. Yet, the people we spoke to thought that demonstrations are still important as part of a broader strategy. Janna noticed that people were talking about gathering experiences of precarity in order to develop together an analysis of what is going on. They talked funnily enough about knowledge-sharing, formats for listening, the need to re-group, as many of the people they speak with are confused, depressed and don’t know what to do. It’s the most bizarre experience walking through a city you’ve never been to before, but with whose monuments and images you are so familiar ˆ on a demo! I could just about make out the colosseum and all the other central areas through the red flags.

6.30 We try to find our way to Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durhams’ place for drinks. We get lost a lot.

19:00-20.00: Spend the evening with Maria Thereza, Jimmie and their two friends, Dora and Mario who are
curators of the Sound Art Museum. They have worked in this area of the city and a nearby town for many
years. Turns out Valeria has been to Tunis with Dora before and then we see Lucia who we know from London
has curated an exhibition with them too. It’s an amazing evening. Jimmie wrote a poem that morning about hearing the song ‘You are my Sunshine’ in the shop that morning. They edited out the last line which is always the one where disillusionment sets in, even in the best of love songs ‘When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken And I hung my head and cried’ (Karaoke soundtrack for the song if you now can’t get it out ofyour head
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/sunshine.htm)

20.00-23.00 We go to a restaurant nearby and at the end of the night we ask if we can relay our questions from Bologna and from the people we spoke to in the protest earlier. The group have clearly been thinking about our questions since we sent the email earlier and there is a really generous, thoughtful and interesting set of responses. Maria Thereza speaks about an apprenticeship scheme she heard of in Germany. The apprentice moves from city to city and chooses his or her own teacher. They can leave at any time. We think about this as an educational format there is something about what Maria Thereza says about a community taking responsibility for the education of the young that is really interesting. I wonder if this gets to the heart of the problem of free labour in enforced education ˆ the problem that it becomes a way of taking advantage, milking, controlling and defining
the student rather than ANY of the things education was supposed to be about. We also like the mobility of the format and wonder if we are doing just that on a tiny scale ˆ finding our teachers. Jimmie talks about how we must find a non-economic way to talk about money and economics. He thinks we’ve left it to the economists who of course will only ever define it one way. He worries about how out of control our desire, manipulation, proliferation and dependence on money has become There is some discussion about value, payment, competition…

23.00 There’s too much money in the pot for the meal so we use the surplus for a taxi to the camper van ‘champagne socialists’ Get the heat going properly and everyone sleeps better.