Come no?

I never thought I would see this happen. When I lived in Florence in 2002, the best way to assure decent service in a restaurant was to smoke -- heavily -- both before, during, and after a meal. This was true in virtually any caliber of place. Even if the staff could tell you were an American, a sky blue pack of Camel Lights worked better than a 10 euro note in winning them over.

Judging from anecdotal evidence, it is hard to believe that only 18 million Italians smoke out of a population of 58 million. In the garage that was next to the back entrance of the school I was attending in Florence, an ancient man spent his days on a stool filling plastic bottles with pills. By my estimation, he smoked about 30 cigarettes during each 8-hour period he spent there. Even social smokers, like my professors, insisted that a diet of seven cigarettes a day was sufficiently modest to eliminate any risk of lung cancer.

As for the fly-by-night apothecary in the driveway, I discovered about 3 months into my stay that the apartment building above the garage was marked as a hospital on older maps. You can imagine my surprise one day when a door inside the vestibule had been left open and a doctor in a blue sanitary uniform was bustling down a corridor. Considering that this hospital had no apparent flow of patients (I knew, because I smoked my seven cigarettes in the driveway and did not once see a vehicle other than the one my decrepit friend arrived in each morning), one wondered what kind of hospital this was. General sketchiness aside, it seemed quite likely that the pill-bottle operation in the garage was the result not of impropriety, but of genuine regard for the health of others. Even if amputations were regularly performed behind that mysterious door, without anesthetic and for the benefit of the mafia, the fact that my smoking friend was sequestered in the driveway was reassuring.

My only other experience with Italian hospital workers was less so. Granted it was 3 am (I had come to retrieve a friend), but I was somewhat shocked to find doctors smoking casually in the hallways. They weren't huddled in some corner or out-of-the-way place, but calmly going about their rounds, circulating from room to room and filling the waiting areas and hallways with the aroma of stale tobacco -- just what you want in an emergency room.

At any rate, it is very clear that a smoking ban in Italy will be less like anti-smoking laws in the U.S. and more like a recent local law passed in Mexico that forbids residents from going nude inside their own houses. If bars and restaurants are asked to police this rule themselves, nothing will change. There was also a law in Florence against any business being open more than six days a week. The Chinese restaurant I visited each evening avoided suspicion by opening late in the afternoon on Sunday and leaving its gate partially closed into the evening. Then there were the ticket-inspectors on the bus, who approached only American students speaking English to one another to demand fares, and Malpensa airport in Milan, where the foodcourt (like all other areas) was supposed to be smoke-free, but every single table had at least one person casually smoking a cigarette kept out of view under the table.

Italy is in for a lot more of the latter and, if people aren't careful, the principal effect of this legislation will be a few burnt tablecloths.