Our Man in Rome: Roman road rage

I got on my scooter at Piazza della Repubblica, the circular piazza in central Rome, where art nouveau nymphs prance in the central fountains, and had ridden 20 yards when I realised that I hadn't put my helmet on. I stopped, fished it out of the box at the back and set off again. The lunch I had proposed to a fellow correspondent had been cancelled twice for reasons beyond our control. Today looked more promising. There was no news to speak of, the sun was shining, spring was in the air: we might sit outside, share a carafe of wine. I launched myself down Via Nazionale toward our rendezvous.

I got on my scooter at Piazza della Repubblica, the circular piazza in central Rome, where art nouveau nymphs prance in the central fountains, and had ridden 20 yards when I realised that I hadn't put my helmet on. I stopped, fished it out of the box at the back and set off again. The lunch I had proposed to a fellow correspondent had been cancelled twice for reasons beyond our control. Today looked more promising. There was no news to speak of, the sun was shining, spring was in the air: we might sit outside, share a carafe of wine. I launched myself down Via Nazionale toward our rendezvous.

What happened next suggests to me that, after barely six months in Rome, I have already gone native in ways that are not entirely wise. I was in no special hurry, but to be on a motorino in Rome is always to be dashing, grabbing fractional advantages, carving up the car drivers, squeezing through the clotted traffic. A little way down the avenue there was a Fiat Panda. The lowest form of Italian car life, Pandas routinely travel 20kph slower than anything else on the road. This one was barely moving, just inching forward as the driver craned his head to see the name of the side street.

Two months ago, I would have bided my time and waited for the old chap to sort himself out. But now I am a Roman, so I twisted the throttle and swerved my Honda 125cc two-tone Chiociolino contemptuously around him – whereupon there was a loud bang and I found myself lying on my back in the middle of the road.

Yes, I have been blooded – not literally, I hasten to say; I suffered only a couple of bruises. I had received a glancing blow from a passing taxi. Worse than the pain and the minor damage to the bike was the injury to my dignity, the awareness of eyes up and down and on both sides of the road feasting on my misfortune. But you can't truly call yourself a Roman motorcyclist until you have spent a few moments lying in the middle of the road, looking up at the sky, your machine abandoned some way off like a large crushed insect, while the traffic carves a path around you and the pedestrians stop and gawp.

As you drive around Rome, it's not unusual to see three or four such incidenti in a day. There are so many thousands of motorini on the roads – given the traffic jams, they are for many people, including me, simply the only way to get to work – and so much carefree whizzing that it is mathematically probable that one will come off before very long.

Friends recalled their own scrapes, hitting patches of oil and flying, still mounted, through the air, or getting trapped in tramlines and being catapulted over the handlebars. They are all still scootering, because there is no alternative half as fast; but also because, with the warm sun on your face, a pack of roaring machines all around and the open road before, it's the best cheap thrill Rome has to offer.

Even though, these days, I tend to find myself closer to the back of the pack than the front.

All the colours under the sun

They've wrapped the Leaning Tower of Pisa in a rainbow pace (peace) flag, strung a colossal banner the entire width of the Vittoriano, Rome's most awful monument on the Piazza Venezia, and draped long black flags from galleries high up in the Colosseum. The Italian anti-war movement was always remarkable for its vividness. Hopping between television coverage of the mammoth demonstrations in London and Rome on 15 February, the London march was all words, all monochrome; Rome's was all colour, particularly thanks to the rainbow flag, now the universal symbol of peace and hanging from thousands of balconies and windows up and down the country.

Perhaps the fact that Italy has committed no troops to the conflict in Iraq allows protesters here to be sunnier than their British counterparts. But with the ending of the phoney war and the beginning of the real thing, Italian protests have also become more earnest, more resourceful, more insistent.

In a country notorious for the domination of the media by one man, small satellite networks have sprung up to challenge Silvio Berlusconi's hegemony with anti-war programming. Last week, a winner of the Nobel prize for literature, Dario Fo, took over 30 local channels to broadcast an ambitious anti-war programme. "It's to tell the viewing public the facts about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been censored," Fo explained, "about oil and the other interests behind the conflicts."

Fo's effort was a one-off, but two TV stations have sprung up in opposition to the war, sponsored by left-wing mayors of towns in Tuscany: Global (the name is ironic for a team that is anti-global to its roots), whose programmes are a mix of demo footage and Dadaist anti-war and rock videos; and No War TV, which split off from Global but shares the same Planete satellite and offers news, analysis and interviews from an anti-war posture.

On the far side of the black clouds of this war, is a still amorphous but energetic and rapidly building movement of dissent. That much was obvious back in November, when the European Social Forum attracted one million people to its demonstration in Florence. The numbers and the energy have been building ever since, and in Italy a new generation that never knew the back-stabbing and stultifying boredom of the left in the Cold War years is finding its voice.

This is a post-postmodern voice: sharp, funny, knowing, unshocked and unawed by anything that comes out of the television, but transformed by the sorrow and fury that this war is inducing. And finding new ways of bringing war's reality home. Near some of Rome's most famous monuments, "Don't Cross" tapes have sprung up recently, bearing small stencilled signs: "Off Limits: Mine Storage", "Off Limits: Biological Defence Weapons" or "Designated Refugee Camp". The message: the war is all around, even here among Rome's monuments, in the spring sunshine.

Half a century on, justice is finally done

The machinery of Italian justice is something else altogether. Last week, a high court in Rome ruled that a group of people wrongly denied schooling by the state were entitled to pensions of €500 per month. The people in question were Jewish children expelled from their schools in and after 1938, when Mussolini's regime enacted the iniquitous Race Laws. The same laws resulted, between 1943 and 1945, in the deportation of more than 8,000 Italian Jews to Nazi concentration camps.

In 1955 – 48 years ago – a law was passed awarding a monthly pension to those Jews who were deprived of their schooling but escaped being deported. Why did they not receive the money promptly? Because for 48 years functionaries of the ministry of finance have been trying to kill the law. Shame on them.