Italians bitten by the bingo bug

It was probably fitting that Italy's first official bingo winner was a glamorous 48-year-old blonde, complete with shocking-red miniskirt. The game the Anglo-Saxon world associates with pensioners could take on a very different, more upmarket image in Italy.

Bingo hit the country's streets for the first time earlier this month, when 440 people turned up one Saturday night at a converted car showroom, revamped with a metallic high-tech look, in the prosperous northern town of Treviso. The winner, a school caretaker called Assunta Bianchin, collected €428 for her full card.

You might say the wheel has turned full circle. They have had lotteries - not quite bingo, but a form of gambling nonetheless - in Italy since at least 1530, after all, some 400 years before Edwin Lowe, an American toy wholesaler, invented bingo in Atlanta.

Were you of a certain old-fashioned, antiglobalisation nature, you might wonder whether this latest gambling acquisition will do much to improve the quality of Italian life. Have Italians not long enjoyed tombola, a more subtle, more entertaining version of the game?

Years ago, on a Christmas holiday in Tuscany, I made my first acquaintance with tombola, played in a risquΘ Neopolitan version. The game looked like bingo, in that one had to buy a card, then listen for the numbers being called out.

The master of ceremonies did not limit himself to calling out the numbers he pulled from a sack, however. As each number came out, he told a hilarious story linked to the fact that, in the Neopolitan version, at least, each number is represented by a personality: the soldier, the lover, the priest, the cobbler and so on.

Such was the MC's skill that players missed their numbers, so busy were they laughing at his less-than-parliamentary rendering of his improvised ditty. As more and more Tuscan red was consumed, the game went on long into the night before we had a winner.

In my village, too, on Lake Bracciano, the summer season's festivities have long been marked by a more prosaic, public version of tombola, for which almost the entire village gathers in the piazza in the balm of a hot August evening to look up at the balcony on the town hall from which the numbers are declaimed.

Again, the event tends to be of the de Coubertin school, more a social occasion at which taking part - dressed up in your best and most revealing summer wear - rather than winning is what matters.

Compared with such games of tombola, five-minute bingo games in a converted car showroom, where silence and a deadly concentration are obligatory, seem very dull. To put it another way, bingo is to tombola what the Big Mac is to scalopini al vino. Need I say more?

Not, mind you, that this will prevent bingo from becoming a huge success in a country where 59 per cent of the population likes to gamble in some form or other - football pools, lotteries, scratchcards: there is plenty of choice. Being Italy and Italians, too, they will bring a sense of style to the ghastly business.

The Treviso bingo hall, for example, was fitted out with a bar and a nursery, and the background music - U2 reportedly featured - would suggest the promoters are trying to win over a younger age group that normally would not be associated with the game, at least in Anglo-Saxon parts.

Nor is there any lack of interest in bingo. Following a government decree last January, no less than 1,400 companies or individuals applied to the ministry of finance for licences to run the 420 bingo halls initially allowed. CIRSA, the bingo multinational, intends to invest €500 million in 36 bingo halls, where it hopes that between 500 and 600 players per day will guarantee a monthly turnover of €500,000 (a card costs 3,000 lira, or €1.5).

Within two years, there could be as many as 800 bingo halls in Italy. Not that this displeases the taxman, as the government will collect 23.8 per cent of the turnover. Almost 60 per cent goes to the winners; the remaining 18.2 per cent ends up in the coffers of the hall's owner.

To some of us, such as crotchety Italophile expatriates, the idea of bingo halls all over Italy is about as appetising as a hole in the head. That notwithstanding, it is easy to predict that, like other equally undesirable Anglo-Saxon imports, such as pubs and McDonald's, the bingo bug will catch on. Tempus mutant . . .