The way Italians deal with taxes absolutely kills me. Most American’s idea of evading taxes is simply not paying them come April 15th. Then sooner or later the IRS finds you and you get strung up. Things are much more suave here. I’ll give an example. The other day we had lunch at a friend’s restaurant. When asked how much we owed, the restauranteur replied “55 euros. But I didn’t ring up anything.” He thought about it for a second, punched a few buttons on the cash register and slapped the receipt on the counter. “You had 2 lunch menus and 2 coffees, ok?”. The way this works is that if you walk out of the restaurant without a receipt at all both you and the owner could be in trouble if you get caught. However, if he rings it up for €28 and you give him €55 he can pocket €27 “in the black” as they say here. Then if the Guardia di Finanza (Finance Police) stop you outside the door, everyone is covered because there is a believable receipt. Much larger purchases of jewelry etc can be done in the same way if you’re careful. The evasion of taxes is so ingrained in the culture that its part of how things are done. The funny thing is if everyone would just pay their fair share, everyone would probably pay less in the end. At the very least those poor saps that try to stay honest would pay less.