A petty vendetta in the silly season

A 30-year-old insult lies at the heart of the slanging match between Germanyand Italy, but it's all just a sturm in a teacup, writes Derek Scally, in Berlin

It's business as usual at Il Casolare, Berlin's best pizza restaurant - which means that, as usual, it's heaving. The Italian owners don't take reservations and you can forget about trying to get a table at 8 p.m. Last Thursday night the customers were queuing out the door, proving that Germans may have taken Italian insults that they are "fat, hyper-nationalistic blonde louts" to heart but not to their stomachs.

Here in the German capital it's much easier to find Italian restaurants serving pizza and pasta than German restaurants serving Wiener Schnitzel, just a small indication of Germany's love affair with its sunny southern neighbour that began two centuries ago.

"Oh, how happy I feel in Rome!" wrote the German poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1788 after his two-year trip through Italy. In contrast, he visited Berlin just once, dismissing the Prussian capital as "crude".

Last week's insults were a rude awakening for the 10 million Germans who holiday in Italy each year. They now realise that, like American tourists in Ireland, Italians have been only too glad to take their money, but it doesn't mean they like them.

Italians have been nursing a grudge since the 1970s when Der Spiegel, Germany's best-selling news magazine, published a cover story about Germans' crime-plagued Italian holidays. The details of the article are long forgotten in Italy, but the striking cover image of a smoking gun sitting on a plate of spaghetti is still infamous.

Der Spiegel's Rome correspondent was reminded of that when he tried to organise an interview with Silvio Berlusconi ahead of his Italian presidency of the EU.

"Mr Berlusconi has no intention of talking to Der Spiegel and he says you know why," said a spokesman, alluding to the 30-year-old cover story.

The magazine went ahead anyway with a cover story, showing a sinister-looking Berlusconi on a gold throne above the headline "The Godfather". Days later the Italian Prime Minister lost his temper in the European Parliament, suggesting a German MEP change careers and play a concentration camp guard in a new Nazi film being shot in Italy.

Despite the uproar, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was anxious to put the matter behind him and was even prepared to turn a blind eye to Berlusconi's now-it's-an-apology-now-it's-not. Then Stefan Stefani, the Italian tourist minister, attacked German visitors as a people "intoxicated with arrogant certainties" who invade Italian beaches each summer. In one swipe, Stefani managed to insult one quarter of Italy's tourists, not just "the beer-swilling, belching contest" Germans he described, but also the movers and shakers in the so-called Tuscany Set.

Schröder, one of the most recent converts, cancelled his holiday there, telling his would-be Italian hosts: "Everything has its limits." With no apology coming from Rome, Otto Schily, the interior minister, and other leading politicians that make up the Tuscany Set are now coming under pressure to back the chancellor and abandon their Italian holidays too.

The German press is divided over whether Schröder made the right decision, but two-thirds of Germans think he is right to stay in Hanover, as does the powerful Bild tabloid. "Schröder says Basta To Pasta" it screamed from its front page this week. Yesterday, the paper ran a cover photograph of the topless women it sent to camp outside the Italian embassy in Berlin to show that, far from fat, ugly and loud, German tourists can be "sexy and charming".

The newspaper also printed useful phrases in Italian to arm German tourists already there: "Mmm, tasty, I love cold pizza" and "Take your oily eyes off my wife".

Despite the falling-out, few in the German tourist industry expect long-term consequences from the row. "We have had zero reaction so far and don't expect any," says Mario Köpers, spokesman for the huge German travel agent TUI.

It seems the best man to resolve this dispute is the British entertainer Noël Coward. He understood Stefani's complaints perfectly in his song Why Do The Worst People Travel? But he also pointed out in Let's Not Be Beastly To The Germans that Germans are a nice lot when treated well: "Their Beethoven and Bach are really far worse than their bite."