One of the enduring curiosities that engages the newly-arrived foreigner in Italy is that section in most national papers known as cronache or human interest stories. These are sometimes grisly pages, containing tales of everyday angst, desperation, dishonesty and violence as well as stories about high fashion, education, the workplace, traffic, health issues and much else besides.
Last week's cronache, for example, represented a typical haul. There was the sad tale of a 30-year-old Venezuelan woman who, perhaps suffering from postnatal depression, killed herself and her two-month-old baby girl by jumping out of her sixth-floor apartment, near Venice.
There was the story of the blind woman from Cameroon, who resorted to prostitution to help pay medical fees for treatment to her eyes. Then, too, there was the sadder than sad story of a 70-year-old man in Macerata found dead after two months, seated in front of his still turned-on TV.
All papers carried the grimmer than grim story of the jealous brother-in-law from Bergamo who (literally) carved up his pregnant sister-in-law, for reasons yet to be clarified.
Although the cronache stories may at first seem exceptional, the longer one lives in Italy the more some of them begin to fit into a recognised social pattern. Take the case of Massimo Predi (40), the inspector from Cesena, accused of having killed his parents, wife and child in a gory blood bath, and all for the love of a Ukrainian call-girl.
Towards the end of January curious neighbours asked Predi about the whereabouts of his wife, Maria Carli, his daughter, Michela (12), and his parents, Ezio and Giovanna. None of the family, apart from Massimo Predi, had been seen since mid-January.
Predi told neighbours that his wife had moved to Turin for work reasons, taking their daughter with her. As for his parents, they had gone off to thermal baths for a three-week cure. Those same curious neighbours, however, became suspicious when someone noticed that no one had fed the family's pet rabbits, left to die of thirst and starvation in their cages.
Alerted by the neighbours, police broke into the house. A trapdoor in the floor of the garage, hidden by a parked car, opened into a well where police made the gruesome discovery of all four bodies, apparently shoved into the well after having been hammered to death with a heavy object. Subsequent medical examination established the date of death as January 14th.
Further inquiries revealed that Predi had just two days earlier paid £1,000 to a travel agency in Cesena for a one-way flight to Kiev on February 11th. Talkative neighbours (again) related how Predi had seemingly fallen in love with a 23-year-old Ukrainian prostitute, with whom he had regularly been seen sipping champagne in local night-clubs.
A look through the Predi family bank account revealed that Predi had been withdrawing up to £300 a day for most of the previous six months, money taken from an account still controlled by his 73-year-old father. Investigators believe the withdrawals were made to pay the "fixed rate" charged by Predi's unnamed Ukrainian sweetheart.
Investigators also believe that the fight in which the Predi family members were killed may have begun when Ezio Predi confronted his son with bank statements, wanting to know where the money had gone. Predi had apparently lived a double life for some months, managing to hide his obsession with his Ukrainian lover from his family.
Predi went on the run, eventually being recognised by an alert police officer in the waiting room of the train station in Bari, southern Italy. Aware that he could no longer take that Milan-Kiev flight, Predi may have been trying to get out of Italy via a boat ride to Greece.
He is now in prison in Forli, charged with the murder of his family and awaiting an eventual trial. At first glance, his story reads like the exceptional madness of someone caught up in a bloodthirsty trance. On further examination, however, his story seems less extraordinary.
The post-Berlin Wall influx over the last decade of a wave of east European prostitutes, especially into provincial Italy, has not happened without sometimes profound sociological consequences.
This correspondent knows of at least two village families whose communal bank account was cleaned out and whose business was threatened by the "passion" of a male member for an east European call-girl, a "passion" born out of the dreary repetitiveness of a hard-working provincial life, where going to bed after 10 p.m. comes under the "dangerous living" category.
The Predi family tragedy is especially grim, but it is one that may well have its roots not in "madness" but rather in the confusion of fast-changing provincial or rural societies, caught up in the front line of east European disintegration.