Ben Harnwell

I live in Italy.

I've lived in Italy for 15 years.

In some respects, many respects, one of the great founding contributions to Western civilization.

Some of you might know I was involved in running, Joe mentioned it, a monastery, Trisulti.

I'll say a little bit, but obviously time is limited.

It's a complex of some 83,000 square meters, but it has 15,000 square meters of roof.

And in the brief period that I ran that monastery before being so ingloriously kicked out,

I learned something about how Italy works and how Italy thinks.

It has the historic roof tiles on these 15,000 square meters.

That's a lot of roof.

And the Italians have an obsession about conformity and regularity.

You can't just, if you have a leak or a need of repair,

or you need to put a substitution in.

You can't just do it.

You need to write to the Soprintendenza.

You need to show them the ones you're going to put in.

The colour has to match.

They're obsessed about the uniformity.

To add an aside, if you cut down, they're so obsessed by uniformity, by conserving the landscape, that if you chop down a tree on your own property, under certain conditions, not only can they come and arrest you on the spot for doing so, they can actually throw you in jail.

Again, the idea is the conservation of something.