British aristocrat starved of water by Italian bureaucracy.

"Threatened" by Italian police for
complaining about water supply.

Judging from a British Sunday Times article of August 2004, it appears that Italian-born Lady Carla Powell, wife of Lord Charles Powell, former private secretary and foreign affairs adviser to British Prime Minister Thatcher, is having to live like an Ethiopian peasant.

Though living only 25 miles from Italy's capital city of Rome, she has to draw stinking water from a public well three miles from her home.

The reason? Oh, just the usual Italian ones - Bad urban planning and local officials who give all appearances of behaving as if more interested in feathering their own nest than in providing decent public services. Romebuddy has encountered this kind of public inefficiency, footdragging and cosy local politics often enough. Lady Powell is only one of 400 other local residents who cannot get a decent regular supply of clean drinking water with ease or at a fair price.

The Sunday Times goes on to say that after she complained publicly in the local press, a local carabiniere (armed police chief) told Lady Powell that she "shouldn't make such a fuss 'You don't know the consequences', he said". Lady Powell took this as a threat.

Welcome to Italy, the country whose proud native inhabitants regularly claim to Romebuddy is the cradle of post-renaissance western civilization, whose finely cultured inhabitants were, I'm reliably informed by my critics, painting masterpieces while we uncouth Brits were still living in trees and living on raw potatoes.

With police who appear to threaten one for urging a local council to provide a bit of decent civic plumbing in a 21st century G8 country, I think I'd almost sooner have stuck with the raw potatoes, wouldn't you?

Read the full story on The Times website by clicking here, or other reports of the same story, here or here.