I don’t want to give the ending away but I’m posting this from a laptop with a 38kbs cellular modem card. That’s slower than an old dialup connection and 3.7% of the bandwidth you get with basic DSL. It’s the kind of bandwidth where you’re pathetically grateful to your mates who delete the previous exchanges from the body of the email before replying. And you’d happily kill the bastard who sends you a novelty 5MB mpeg.

11 months ago we put in a request for a telephone to Telecom Italia. Three times since then an engineer has shown up at the house. Each time, the engineer has got out of his car, looked around and has seen that there’s no phone line. And no telephone poles to hang one from.

“There’s no phone line,” he says.
“That’s why we asked for one.”
“I can’t make the connection if there’s no phone line.”
“So put one in.”
“That’s another department. You’ll need to call the switchboard.”
Now things get heated.
“We’ve called the switchboard. We call the switchboard every week. They say they’ll send out an engineer to make the connection.”
“There’s nothing I can do, you’ll have to call the switchboard.”
At which point he leaves and we throw rocks at his car as he drives up the hill.

Valentina, Marco’s office manager, chased Telecom once a week for us all through the autumn. Finally we were promised that we’d be up and running by December 18th. Were they sending an engineer just to tell us that there wasn’t a line? Or were they coming to put in poles? Telecom assured Valentina that they were coming to do everything: install the poles, put up the line, connect the house, and turn on the connection. I was cautiously hopeful.

December was slipping away and there was no movement. No one had come to survey positions for poles or dig trial pits or do anything you might expect them to do in the days before we were to have a phone.

Valentina called again and Telecom told her that one of our neighbours was withholding permission. They said nothing could go ahead until the permission was granted. So I went to all the neighbours that same day and asked if they’d received a phone call or maybe something in the post. They all said they hadn’t heard a thing. Not just one neighbour – all of them said they hadn’t been contacted.

When pressed, Telecom rechecked their files and found that they weren’t waiting for permission after all. However, the line wouldn’t go in on December 18th as originally promised but instead they would send an engineer to survey the positions for the poles. I had to be at home at exactly 10am. If I wasn’t there, the engineer would leave and they couldn’t say when they’d be able to schedule another visit.

Unluckily I had a flight booked for lunchtime on the 18th (I was going to London to catch up with Tessa and Henry) but I didn’t have to leave until 11. Deep down I knew it wasn’t going to work out because our experience showed that the chances of the engineer showing up at the right time on the right day to do the job you’d asked him to do were atomically small. But as I went outside to wait at 10am on the 18th, I couldn’t suppress a tiny ember of hope.

11 o’clock came and he hadn’t come. Unreasonably disappointed, I rang Valentina to tell her what was happening and, being a fantastic person, she volunteered to come down and wait at the house. I later called her from the UK and she said he had come later that day around lunchtime and claimed to have had a flat tire. But in the meantime the weather had turned and it was foggy on our hillside which made it impossible to take sight lines. And so he left without finalising the positions for poles. When would he be back? No one could say. Telecom was now closed for the holidays.

But the engineer had made a mistake. He’d given Valentina his mobile number and a name: Signor Canzonetta.

In the first week of January, Valentina began to call every two days. Canzonetta was ill. Then he had to speak to his team, who were unreachable. Then he stopped responding to her calls altogether. I got his number from Valentina and began calling from a different mobile each time so he couldn’t screen our calls. In the end he cracked and agreed to come as soon as I’d asked all the neighbours’ permission to cross their land with poles. It’s already done, I lied, everyone has agreed already.

This morning, 24 hours later than agreed, he arrived at the house. He is maybe 40 and bloated and damp looking and takes wheezy breathes through his mouth. Lino came down as soon as I called and when I told him who the bloated guy was he laid right into him. I was immediately apprehensive because, although I wanted Canzonetta to know we were pissed off, I didn’t want him off side altogether. We’d waited 11 months when they had nothing against us. What happens when it’s personal? So I was looking at Lino and thinking, I appreciate this mate but you’re going to fuck this up. Then as a listened I realised he was doing a skilful dance.

Lino was almost shouting: you bastards are all the same, dragging your feet and causing people problems. If it was me, I’d have killed you by now. And Canzonetta, getting his back up now, said, oh you would have, would you? So Lino glanced up in the sky and saw some pigeons and said just like those pigeons. Do you hunt? Canzonetta was caught off balance and said yes, he was a member of the Amandola team. Lino said he was a member of the Loro team and they talked for a minute about how many wild boar their respective teams had killed. And just when it was getting chummy Lino laid into him again. It went on like this all morning. Lino never let up except to keep Canzonetta just off the boil. At one point Lino turned towards me during a tirade and, out of Canzonetta’s vision, gave me a wink.

We went up the hill to Rossi’s and found him burning pruned olive branches near his barn. Yes we could pass across his land, he said. Where could we put the poles? Wherever is necessary, he said. And the four of us (Lino was right there all the time) staked out where the poles would go. At one point the line has to go below ground for 100m to run beneath some high voltage pylons. We worked out where the trench would be dug and how to avoid Rossi’s water pipes.

100m of trench sounded expensive to me and I had always been told that phone connections were free. Free in the middle of Rome, Canzonetta said, but a connection like this required work. He called his office and they quoted €500 - €600, which hurts but not as badly as it might have. But then again, we don’t have a written bill yet.

We went up to Renato’s, the nearest house with a phone connection. The dogs shied away but the guard geese went mad. Renato arrived home while we were walking through his garden and working out where to put poles. He came down and told us to put the poles wherever necessary. And that was as far as we needed to go.

Canzonetta, Lino (who by now had appointed himself my official representative), and I stood in a circle in Renato’s yard and talked about what would happen next. I explained I was worried about having to go back to the UK or even losing my job because we had no ADSL, which is only a slight exaggeration, and Canzonetta seemed to take it in. The engineers would come this week, he said, or early next week. They’d need two or three days to do the work and at the end we’d have a working phone and, much more importantly, could order ADSL.

And he left. Lino was still shouting after the car as Canzonetta pulled out of the drive.