L’amico dell’amico - Friend of a friend: The code for getting things done in Berlusconi’s Italy

This book is the description of a personal journey via South Africa to an academic sabbatical sojourn in the cities of Bologna and Modena in the region of Emilia-Romagna in Italy. The book has evolved out of the compilation of a sequential diary of this journey. Within the text I am trying to relate not only my personal experiences but how I saw the multitude of social, economic and bureaucratic interactions that makes living in central Italy so wonderful, but innately frustrating. Based on my extended experiences in Africa working on AIDS programs as a physician my pre-Italian experiences provided me with the opportunity to comment through my visions of the world upon some of the important social issues. I began my experiences with the Italian bureaucracy in Tasmania and Melbourne while I prepared for my sabbatical at Modena University, long before I arrived in Italy with my wife. It was here I had to obtain the first of the multitude of documents that are essential to function as an