The ANNOTICO Report

I have a new respect for Italian Bureaucrats.

However, my regard for American Bureaucrats is still in the Toilet. I have
spent the last month in a Alice in Wonderland Twi Light Zone. The
Indifference. The Incompetence. The Contradictions. The Catch 22s. It's
Bizzare!!! :(

This may warm your heart while it tugs at it.

The London Guardian
John Hooper in Rome
Monday August 8, 2005

Modesta Valenti was a bag lady. She lived, and died 22 years ago, in the
Termini railway station in central Rome.
She would never have dreamed that one day she would have a street named
after her. Yet today Rome has a Via Modesta Valenti. It is home to almost
700 people.

But try to get a taxi driver to take you there, and you will have
difficulties. Look it up in a street guide and you will draw a blank.

For Via Modesta Valenti is one of at least a half a dozen "virtual streets"
in Italy that bear witness to Italian inventiveness, soft-heartedness - and
skill at dodging awkward laws. The streets' "existence" was brought to
light yesterday in a report published by the weekly supplement of the daily
Corriere della Sera.

They were invented by local authority bureaucrats as a way of providing
help to the homeless. Under Italian law, you cannot get identity documents
without a registered address - and without identity documents you cannot
receive benefits, medical care or even, sometimes, charitable help.

It seems it was a caring bureaucrat in Bologna who hit upon the idea of
creating a fictitious street for the homeless. He or she called it Via
Senza Tetto, or Roofless Street.

The biggest such community is in Florence where Via Lastrucci is "home" to
more than 1,300 people.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/
story/0,12576,1544688,00.html