Ben Harnwell

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.

Which is great.

Which is great, OK?

Especially Italy.

Beautiful, beautiful country.

But I sort of think it's somewhat quixotic to be obsessing so much at an institutional level, they have the laws that back this up, about the uniformity of roof tiles and have very little concern as to the people that are living beneath those roof tiles.

The point I'd like to try to make, and it's a controversial point in some quarters, but surely human beings, people, culture, communities, values, religious background, those things are more important than roof tiles.