Lucerne

We drove into Lucerne many years ago in my Peugeot car that had seen better days. I stopped at a garage where there were men in blue overalls, the mechanics, and men in white overalls, the managers. I asked them if they would fix my car and a man in white said "bring it here at 7.30 in the morning please," perfect English but spoken like a man who had been trained by the SS. We did so and we picked it up in the afternoon; it was not only running like dream now but it had been cleaned, the engine too.
The place had a German feel to it. Everything worked: the doorknobs worked, the doors didn't squeak etc.
At that time, June or July I think, the Lucerne Music Festival was on with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Phil. if memory serves me right. I went to the box office and asked for two tickets for "tonight's concert". I was met by a young woman's face which had gone sort of blank. She seemed speechless. She just shook her head. In retrospect I believe I might have got a ticket if I had booked a couple of years before.
We left Lucerne, a lovely town, and crossed the Alps into the southern part of Switzerland, the Italian part. There, we went to a cafe to have a drink and maybe something to eat. It was not the sort of cafe we had seen in the German part of Switzerland. It was rather dingy and fly-blown. Then an argument began, I don't know about what; it started quite sociably, the two men smiling but suddenly it got violent and almost came to blows. Then it was over and everything returned to normal.
It is not racialist to say that there are vast differences between Italians and Germans; they differ in temperament, way of life, behaviour, manner etc. Fred Zinnemann, on Desert Island Discs said that if there is a bumping of cars, an English man will wish to exchange insurance policy addresses; a Frenchman will want to fight but an Italian will try to kill you.
But when Professor Hoggart was once asked where he'd like to live other than England he immediately said "O Italy. My young family loved every minute of it there." Then he added: "In Italy no one pays taxes."