Colle di Tora (Italy) (AFP)

The last time a customer tried to pay with their bank card at Anna Rita Pani's grocery store in Colle di Tora, a village near Rome, it got a little awkward.

"We had to wait a quarter of an hour for the card reader to work ... during this time, we stood there staring at each other," she told AFP.

Its card reader works with wifi, but Colle di Tora is one of the least well-connected cities in Italy, a country that is digitally behind compared to the rest of the European Union.

Closing this gap is a priority for Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who wants to revive the Italian economy ravaged by the coronavirus through investments funded by the EU.

Mr. Draghi is due to present to parliament on Monday his five-year plan for spending some 200 billion euros in the form of loans and non-repayable aid from the European Reconstruction Fund.

For Italy, a lot of the challenge is to connect places like Colle di Tora, not really cut off from the modern world, but just a little behind.

This medieval village located some 80 kilometers northeast of Rome is a tourist resort nestled on a ridge overlooking a lake near waterfalls, forests and nature reserves.

"The situation here is correct, but if you have to send a heavy email, it can take a few minutes instead of a few seconds," said the mayor, Beniamino Pandolfi.

- The weather is interrupting the line -

Colle di Tora is on a list of 200 municipalities where state-subsidized fiber optic broadband will be deployed.

This week, workers laid cables in one of its squares, assuring that high-speed internet should be operational by the end of the year.

"We will welcome him with open arms", already rejoices the mayor.

At present, the post office - on which the 360 ​​inhabitants of the village rely to withdraw cash in the absence of a bank - is sometimes forced to close its doors because the internet does not work.

Bad weather can disrupt the signal, which is also a problem for cell phones and television.

These poor connections have become an even more serious problem with the pandemic, which has forced people to spend months in their homes.

Simona Cardella, owner of a laundry, says her teenage daughter struggled to take online classes when schools were closed.

“Sometimes the sound is cut off, sometimes the video is cut off, and if the weather is bad, the signal disappears altogether,” she says.

Sometimes unable to download the program or upload her homework, her daughter was reduced to "taking lessons via WhatsApp," Cardella said.

- Italy offline -

The government wants every Italian to have high-speed internet access by 2026, but there is still a long way to go.

Almost a quarter of Italians do not use the internet, and a third of households do not have a home connection, according to figures released last month by the National Institute of Statistics (Istat).

At the same time, only 30% of households had access to the latest generation of broadband in 2019, a figure however up 6.1 points compared to the previous year.

In the European Commission's latest Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) (2020), Italy was in 25th place: only Bulgaria, Greece and Romania did worse.

The mayor of Colle di Tora notes that access to the latest generation of broadband in isolated areas like his municipality could make them attractive places for remote work.

For other residents, it would simply allow them to enter the 21st century.

Nicolas, the 22-year-old son of the grocer, is an avid gamer, but complains that it sometimes takes "four to five days" to download a game to his PlayStation that his friends in Rome get in a few minutes. hours.

"It's not that I can't do without it, but if (internet) worked a little better, that would be good," he observes.

© 2021 AFP