I once was an offender of the law, caught and fined for my crime. That’s right. It’s not something I’m proud of. I especially regret to inform you all that I was charged guilty and reprimanded not once, but twice. The victim of my criminal mind: the Milan public transportation system.

I’ll elaborate.

To enter the Milanese subway, one purchases a paper ticket from an archaic looking machine. Archaic is the appropriate word, there’s nothing remotely high tech or digital about this. The contraption is a rusty color red and resembles what I imagine Fred Flintstone’s Stone Age freezer to look like. You drop your euro coin into this barely functional apparatus, it makes a sputtering noise, and down falls a small rectangular piece of paper. You then enter the subway by sticking this purchased piece of paper into the mouth of one of the neon orange turn-style metro entrances. The date and time then clicks and stamps down onto the ticket with the precision of an animal’s jaw. If in one of the newer metro stations, instead of passing through a turn-style, two “high tech” dirty plastic barriers would approvingly spread apart for you upon receiving a stamp.

What’s fascinating about this system in that no one physically checks your ticket, nor is the machine sophisticated enough to know if you’re stamping a purchased ticket, yesterday’s losing lotto numbers or a gum wrapper. The system essentially trusts you, the patron, to buy a new scrap of paper to stamp every time you utilize public transportation. Now there was a catch: Milanese transportation authority “soldiers” supposedly roamed the subways and buses like predatory lions controlling everyone’s ticket – i.e. making sure everyone held a piece of rectangular paper with the current date and time stamped across the top of it. If you failed to present such a document to the “controllante” you were subject to a fifty-euro fine. Now had I ever seen one of these mythically figures that apparently loomed in the subways waiting to pounce on patrons with a day old ticket? No, never.

Okay that’s a lie. I saw one once on a bus. He was quite easy to spot since he had on a rather formal, British-looking, black outfit and a ridiculous cap that you could spot from a mile away. Just in case you had any doubts and thought he was a member of the military, police, Guardia di Finanza or just one of those psycho people who pretend to be statues for money, he also had a large mechanical purse that he’d use to print up people’s fines and receipts. I knew immediately that he must be one of the legendary controllante: as soon as he entered the tram an entire group of delinquent, high school aged children immediately disembarked. One can only assume they weren’t ticket holders. The controllante then politely checked the tickets of the obliging, sweet old ladies at the front of the bus while more and more people scampered off the tram at the next stop, realizing they didn’t have the proper documentation to ride. This was an effective system – NOT.

The only other time I saw a controllante was in the Duomo subway stop. Here their brigade was more effective. They were still dressed in their goofy outfits, but rather than roaming the trams in search of residents too cheap to buy bus tickets, they were stationed in a military-like line at the top of the escalator you must take to transfer from the yellow to red subway line. In order to get past them, you had to show your appropriately dated ticket. If you were really crafty and knew the subway system well, perhaps you could subtly escalator your way down to the nearest exit. Yet they were looking out for such cheaters as well.

As I’m sure you’ve all already insinuated, I fall into the charming and classy category of Milan residents too cheap to buy subway tickets. My first summer in Italy, I chose the criminal route: June through August I bought one rectangular piece of paper and stamped it over and over until it was so used that its edges frayed and its surface was jet black from the repeatedly stamped ink. This ticket served to humiliate the entire Italian transportation system. It was an insult to the Italian state. The worst part of this story is that I derived such carnal pleasure from cheating the system and stamping the same, darkened ticket over and over again. It was my personal revenge on the Italy, my own war against the system. How could I, a sweet model behavior girl indulge in such a heinously classless act? Well, for me every free subway ride was like the Italian government paying me back for:
-Eating my ATM card every time I went to a bacomat
-Taking 45% of my earnings for “taxes” for a government that in my opinion barely functioned
-Taking another 20% of my earnings to pay my Italian layer to figure out how the hell to pay my taxes
-Having an overall, ineffective bureaucratic system
-Having no shops open on Sunday (my one day off) or during lunch (my only two hours off)
-Having tampons located above pharmacist’s head behind the counter so you physically have to point out what kind of menstrual absorbent device you’d like in front of the entire store
-Having a painfully inefficient and slow health care system (not to mention unsanitary in my opinion)
-And for Milanese cabs being a monopoly and rip-off of gargantuan proportions.

I didn’t see my activity as wrong. Quite the contrary, it was merely a means of equalizing an already unjust situation. I mean, the least the Italian state could do was offer me free public transportation. Look at my list of woes. That first summer, my abused ticket and I were getting along swimmingly, until one fateful day at Stazione Centrale, skipping through a turn-style I received a suspicious look from a metro entry guard.

To Be Continued….