Chaos in the Mails

In Italy, as just about everyone knows by now, governments come and go in a matter of months. These days, however, even that pace is frequently faster than the Italian mails. Take E. Paul Getty II's severed ear: when his kidnapers mailed it from Naples last fall, it took 20 days to arrive in Rome--and that was a brisk delivery by Italian standards. Some airmail Christmas cards from New York arrived at Easter time, and letters wending their way from one Italian city to another sometimes take a leisurely six months.

Italian authorities, who unblinkingly insist that 95% of all mail is delivered on time, nonetheless admit that there is a daily backlog of 5,000 tons of mail; newspapers charge that it is more like 12,000 tons. Whatever the figure, the backlog is so huge that cynics have suggested that the mountain of undelivered mail be junked and that the post office start all over again. Someone in the system seems to agree: in June, Italian police discovered that 200 tons of undelivered mail had been sold to a Bergamo processing plant for recycling.

Many businesses are giving up on the postal system. Some, like Fiat, are arranging to send orders by Telecopier.

Others are using expensive but reliable courier services, paying as much as $8 to ensure delivery within 24 hours of a letter from Milan to Palermo. Northern Italians routinely drive an hour or more to mail letters in Switzerland.

The Italian Parliament hopes to ease the crisis by restoring overtime hours for postal workers, banned a year and a half ago as too costly to the postal system.

Italy has 180,000 postal workers, about the same number in proportion to population as the U.S. But too many are deskbound and inefficient. As Paris' Le Monde recently observed in an editorial, "Italy is the only country besides Tibet in which it is impossible to communicate through a postal service." Le Monde's slur was unfair--to Tibet, which can get an airmail letter to New York by yak, truck and plane a week faster than young Getty's ear reached Rome.

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