Many friends that commented my latest posting thought that it was taken in a mall. Actually, it was taken in a street at 9 o' clock in the night. We don't have malls in downtown Padova because of the staunch opposition of downtown shop owners, who also control packets of votes. In Padova we have a group of power which controls the Townhall with methods used by the Daley dynasty in Chicago. It is an iron alliance between the bishop and the former secretary of the former Communist Party (who became the mayor 15 years ago and still is at the head of the town), the wealthiest merchants and traders (Padova is the commercial heart of the region, we don't have an industry to speak of, most factories are in other provinces of the region), and the University bosses. The well-informed swear that the bishop and the mayor are also first cousins. I don't know whether it's true, but it's a fact that the convent of nuns close to the provincial seat of the mayor's party (the Democrats) votes 100 per cent for him. The hostility for malls has prevented the building of them in town, the French Auchan mall aside, close to the industrial park. Of course, malls have sprouted everywhere just outside the town border, in the small communes of the Paduan belt, which favor them with very low taxes and good services. Thus the bishop, the mayor and downtown merchants wail at the malls and berate at the mayors of the small belt towns for 'unfair competition'. Actually the bishop has sold the huge compound of the former seminar to be turned into a mall, but he was hoisted with his own petard, because after ranting form the local papers against malls, he didn't foresee that the local citizens would oppose the traffic around the new commercial buolding and suited him and the buyer to prevent its transformation. Given the speed of Italian courts, it will last for many years. Local gossip aside, this is a side window of the same department store, Coin, which sells mostly top-notch clothes, and is part of a chain owned by a Venetian family. Thank you for your kind comments.