An Italian working in the building industry
“An Italian guy in a grey suite” is how Claudio Zanovello described himself in the sms message he sent me before our meeting. As a result I easily spotted him sitting at a corner table of Kafe Konditerskaya (Cafe Patisserie), located in the Parus Business Center. He greeted me with a smile and participated in the conversation so openly that, from the very beginning, it became a friendly chat.
Claudio Zanovello, who is in charge of a trade subsidiary of an Italian company that deals with building materials and has been in Ukraine for almost six months. Despite the fact that he eagerly told me about the company, he has secretively asked me to omit its name; such a strange request and makes him mysterious. The company has only been around on the Ukrainian market for three years, and he believes that it “was a wise step coming to Ukraine if we consider the building boom in the country.”
The company’s clients are big retail companies as well as ordinary citizens, who want to build by themselves. “In Italy people usually ask professionals to build houses for them, but you have to pay some extra money for it of course. Here people like to make something with their own hands,” Claudio said. The company asks builders to send pictures of what they have built to place in their catalogues. He added that when clients come to their office, it’s usually women who give advice and orders to their husbands, sometimes even shouting, while choosing the needed materials.
What makes it difficult for Claudio to work with his Ukrainian colleagues is that “people think that instructions are suggestions and don’t respect them, so you have to repeat your request again and again to control the process,” he said. Reasoning from the fact that Claudio is the only foreigner working in the subsidiary, it’s impossible to keep working the way he used to. However, Ukrainians are close to Italians when discussing business, he says. “Ukrainians as well as Italians consider business relations personal, so a business dinner with Ukrainians consists of 90 percent of a friendly chat,” Claudio says, adding with a smile, that both countries are not situated too far from one another anyway. Moreover Ukrainians, according to Claudio understand his sense of humor and what he’s talking about, unlike Americans.
Though Claudio still goes back and forth to Italy to report to the bosses, he is happy to live and work in Kyiv. Before signing for this job, Claudio worked for some time as a sales manager with CIS countries from Moscow and is now tired of constant trips around Europe. Choosing between Moscow and Kyiv Claudio considers Kyiv a better choice since “the quality of life is better here, the people are nicer, and no such hard stories with militia as there were in Moscow.”
His past experience is also connected to Austria,where he worked for an American company. Among other countries Claudio has stayed for a long time are Denmark and the US, where he had studied economics. He speaks English, German, Spanish, Russian, and “a little bit of French.” Russian, according to him, along with Chinese are actually very popular now in Italy – all because of tight business relations with those countries.
However Claudio has had some difficulties when he first moved to Kyiv, he says. He had no electricity or hot water for weeks at his apartment, he recalled. He had to threaten the landlord in order for him to deal with the problem. Another series of curious stories that Claudio recalled were connected to the face control system, which mildly speaking differs from that of Europe and America. “I was rejected entrance to a night club because I was in sneakers, though they actually were Prada shoes. In Italy you are rejected only if you are drunk, dressed badly or there are already too many people inside,” Claudio explained. Along with all these stories or maybe because of them he finds life in Ukraine much more interesting: “You never know what’s going to happen, even with the weather,” Claudio laughed.
The weather is actually the factor Claudio misses a lot about Italy. According to him, in the area of Padova, his hometown, it’s already around thirty degrees and his parents are already swimming in the sea near their summer house.
As Claudio told me, he’s lazy in terms of traveling, and prefers staying in the town. But, he has managed to see parts of Ukraine including Lviv and Cherkasy. But, in Lviv, he was surprised because nobody spoke Russian to him. They only spoke Ukrainian and English.
