Letter from Rome: The old hands, those ex-pats who have lived in Italy for ever and a day (I do, of course, realise that I am one of them), will always offer cheerful advice to the newly-arrived. Whatever you do, they will say, do not use the banks and do not get sick.
That hairy advice is based on the notion that Italian banks and hospitals are at best chaotic and unhelpful and that the hospitals are at worst downright dangerous. With regard to the health service, media stories about "mala sanità" (the shortcomings of the national health system) are commonplace, if not a daily event.
Just last month, the news weekly L'Espresso ran two successive cover stories highlighting shortcomings at one of Rome's biggest hospitals, the Policlinico Umberto 1. Disguised as a cleaner, journalist Fabrizio Gatti produced an undercover report that, among other things, recounted how rubbish and animal excrement piled up in underground hospital corridors; how doctors, nurses and patients smoked right beside sick patients; how analysis laboratories were left unguarded and damaged; and, most ghoulishly of all, how the cadavers of deceased patients had to have a police escort to guard against unscrupulous people stealing body parts.
This week much attention has been paid to a horror story in which two men and one woman in hospitals in Pisa and Florence were mistakenly given transplants of HIV-infected kidneys and liver taken from a 41-year-old woman who was HIV-positive. Aside from the original mistake, there was an unforgivable delay in sounding the alarm when the mistake was detected. As of now, one of the three transplant patients has tested HIV-positive.
While such stories feature in the media with depressing regularity, they do not paint the entire picture. Faced with nationwide outrage in the wake of L'Espresso's articles, health minister Livia Turco was at pains to point out that the Italian health system contained many examples of "buona sanità", i.e. many excellent and talented doctors and nurses.
Your correspondent would like to vouch for this, based on his own recent experience. You see, my life was rudely interrupted last August by a brain haemorrhage. For those of you who know nothing about brain haemorrhages, let me just say the experience is akin to being run over by a high-speed train. Hence, too, the reason for my absence from these pages for some time.
Having had both professional and family reasons over the years for visiting the Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli hospital (known to Romans simply as the Gemelli), we opted to go there post-haste. Many years ago, a talented speech therapist at the Gemelli had impressed us with the ease and efficiency with which she resolved a minor speech impediment our then five-year-old daughter, Roisin, had.
More recently, as part of the ghoulish band of papal health-watchers, I had found myself making occasional visits to the Gemelli to see how the late Pope John Paul II was making out. As I struggled with the vicious pain of a haemorrhaging brain, I did think to myself that whatever was good enough for old JP2 should be good enough for an Irish Times hack, even if he is a black Northern Prod.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Gemelli hospital. Not only did the neurosurgery unit save my life, but also for two months I was surrounded by the encouragement and solidarity of a nursing staff who every day urged me to get better and stronger. When I eventually struggled out of bed and on to shaky legs in the corridor, my rickety progress was greeted with a kiss from just about every nurse in sight - it was almost worth getting sick for.
While this was going on, my sister-in-law, Mary, came out to help us through a trying time. Ironically, Mary went down with a mild heart attack while staying with us. She, too, was whisked into hospital - the San Giacomo in central Rome - where she was astonished to see, on the morning "rounds", no less than five specialists at the foot of her bed.
Hospital experiences tend to be unforgettable. I shall long remember the family visits received by my room-mate, Pasquale. His parents, uncle and aunt and oft-times friends came to visit him every day. They would visit me, too, chatting away amiably as they offered mozzarella and other delicacies. They were the living expression of a civilised cosiness.
The bar at the Gemelli is worth visiting. Patients in pyjamas and dressing gowns and patients on portable intravenous drips mingle with a frenetic public in search of their morning cappuccino. Women patients, of course - we are in Italy - manage to pull this off with huge style and glamour.
Aside from all this, what I will long recall was the sense of solidarity, from staff and fellow patients alike. As the health minister says, there is much "buono sanità" in Italy.