When In Rome

The Italian Minister of Tourism Excluding Chez Berlusconi has offered a free holiday to a Japanese tourist who was charged seven hundred euros for a meal at a Rome restaurant. The restaurant is a hundred and fifty years old, and "counts Grace Kelly, Leonardo DiCaprio and Harrison Ford among its regulars", despite Grace Kelly having been dead almost twenty-seven years. Perhaps that is why health inspectors have closed the place. Be that as it may, the tourist, Yasuyuki Yamada, has politely turned down the offer, saying that it would be a "useless way to spend Italian taxpayers' money". It is all very civilised of him, no doubt; but he must have a very strange conception of what ministers are meant to do all day.