"...there's still good things to be heard, and fine things to be seen..."

[fpb]

A Romanian immigrant named Ion Purice, married to an Italian woman and with a young child, works as a long-distance trucker for a company in Rovigo, Italy. A day or two ago, as he was taking a load of foodstuffs (I think) to Holland, he saw a terrible road accident: just ahead of him, a Moroccan father and little daughter were in a car that smashed against the guard-rail. The little child, clearly brutally injured, was thrown in the middle of the motorway. Ion Purice placed the truck across the roadway to shelter the child (and the Red Cross volunteers who luckily just happened to be passing and stopped to help) from oncoming traffic, and kept signalling to the coming cars till help came. Once the little girl was placed on an ambulance, he moved off - he still had work to do, you know? At his destination he apologized for the hour's delay - I ran into an accident on the motorway. But meanwhile all of Italy had seen him on the news, and when he returned to his base, he found - his son, his wife, all his colleagues, some Trade Union representatives, several journalists, and the mayor of the town, to give him a hero's welcome. His reaction? "I just did what anyone would have done, the Red Cross boys were more heroes than me." No wonder that his boss hired him, years before, in spite of the bad reputation that Romanians have in Italy, because he was "una persona seria", an untranslatable Italian compliment that roughly says "a man who does his job, does it well, and thinks nothing of it".