Italy's current tenuous ruling coalition of right-leaning parties, unable to achieve much in a legislature twice as large as America's, relies on referenda like the one that took place here on June 15 to make policy. On the ballot this time were two proposals. The first would have extended employment regulations, which require large businesses that wish to fire employees to submit their request to an arbitration panel, to include businesses of 15 employees or smaller. The second proposition would have required the government to seek permission of landowners before laying electrical wiring on their property.

In any referendum, a turnout of more than 50 percent of the eligible electorate is required to make a vote binding. It is no surprise, then, that some parties, instead of campaigning against a proposal, successfully encouraged the Cagliese to go to the beach instead of the polling precinct. Only about 22 percent of the more than 8,200 registered voters in Cagli actually cast a ballot, slightly below the turnout nationwide.

Sauro says he's tired of all these referenda. "We elect these people to make decisions for us," he says (though he voted anyway). Tarsi said he did not want CGIL to take a formal position on the referendum, which he felt was better in theory than it would have been in practice. He was not as averse as Sauro to holding referenda, and rejected the idea that it was a waste of money.

"Democracy is never a waste of money," he said. The problem, he says, is that the politicians propose referenda to solve problems that are unsolvable. "These problems can't be solved with one referendum."