Italy like Tangled Phone Lines

"Residenza" is a short piece by author Tim Parks that takes a personal experience of dealing with issues of residency and phone bills in the Italian culture and conveys some cultural knowledge to the reader. While the piece does make some useful insights about the round-about style of many things in Italian culture. For instance his observation on Italian conversations, "So many conversations in Italy follow these serpentine paths, with new laws and regulations constantly raising their ugly heads to turn the most obvious ways forward into dead ends". Anyone who's had a conversation while in Italy knows this is often the case.
However, some of the main material i.e paying phone bills is un-relatable (at least at this juncture in my 20-something life). He does make some good observations though about the differences between the Italian onion of "residency" as compared to other cultures. He also relates this aspect well to other cultural significances, such as the troubles with Italian bureaucracy, saying, "Bureaucracy is a huge tangle of sticky string in which every attempt to loosen one knot tightens another". He closes by citing an example of the confusing serpentine paths that many Italian aspects follow when he mentions a scenario where several bills are in the name of a man who is deceased. The ending feels a little abrupt but nonetheless it gets the point across, but I think it could have connected to the introduction a bit more fluidly or provided a slightly different perspective than the traditional one that it does.

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