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Germans are sick and tired of being the people in Europe everyone loves to put down, and Berlusconi proved why when he attempted to explain away his gaffe at the Strasbourg Parliament. Martin Schulz, he prattled, reminded him of Sergeant Shultz, the bumblingly sycophantic but endearingly human guard on the 1960s American sitcom Hogan's Heroes, which used to run on Berlusconi's private Mediaset network.

That such a trite image of Germans would be foremost in his mind isn't just embarrassing to Berlusconi; it's embarrassing to Germany, too. Despite spending half a century in a painful, unprecedented process called Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), Germany hasn't forged a wholly new identity to supplant the old one. And Germany may be the (now humbled) powerhouse, but Italians consider themselves the winners of another contest: Where Would You Rather Be? They make up less than 2% of foreign visitors to Germany, while Germans make up 25% of visitors to Italy, and spend some €8 billion there each year. Italians can't blame them for that; by and large, they still view Germany as the Roman historian Tacitus did in A.D. 99: "Who would leave ... Italy to visit Germany, with its unlovely scenery, its bitter climate, its general dreariness ... unless it were his home."

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Or maybe, the Italians suspect, not even then. The German tourist board is launching an ad campaign in France, with film clips from Berlin's annual hedonistic Love Parade and the slyly sexy slogan there's so much we can do together. With time, maybe it will work. But right now, there's so much the Germans would rather do in Italy. Along the Rimini coast near Schröder's aborted destination, it's Stefani rather than any German who is persona non grata. Maurizio Melucci, the head of tourism for the city of Rimini, was one of the first to call for the junior minister's resignation. People wondered why the patriot manqué drives an Audi rather than a Lancia, and whether his former marriage to a German woman influenced his feelings. Says Bernabò Bocca, president of Federalberghi, the main association of Italian hotels: "It looks like he had a problem with his wife and decided to take it out on a whole populace."

At the October Fest bar on the Rimini coast, owner Roberto Drudi insists "we have no problem with Germans." He hopes the spat will soon fade, but others fear it won't. "Stefani paraded out the Northern League's old boorish way of talking," says Camillo Brezzi, professor of contemporary history at Siena University. "But it derives from a basic anti-European attitude of this government. They do not see real possibilities for collaborating with their most important partners." French President Jacques Chirac got whomped in February when he said Central European politicians who spoke out in support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had "missed a good opportunity to be quiet." This summer, it seems as if everyone's missing that same good chance.