Swiss people love flying their flag.

This is something an Italian notices right away when crossing the border with the Confederation: the square (important!) red flag with the white cross is everywhere. Especially private houses.

Now, this might not sound that odd to my USian friends, ‘cause Americans love to fly the old red-white-and-blue but as noted many times it’s super rare in Italy. Basically only official buildings have flags in Italy.

Here, instead, I received a booklet advertising a flag company, where you can buy flags in 3 different grades of cloth of growing quality, carabiners, poles, ropes, and even special flag-cleaning products to wash them! And they don’t just make the red Swiss federal flag, obviously, but one flag per Canton (which is to be expected)… but also for each single Municipality, City and other local institutions! Plus, whimsical Swiss flags featuring super-swiss things like Cows, Edelweiss, and so on.

It’s still odd to me, but mostly harmless :)

Swiss Flags, Canton Flags, City Flags! Flags Flags Flags!

Oh, if you zoom the pic you can see a bonus oddity: the text says “Attenzione, bandiere in azione!” which, if you know Italian (or use Google Translate) seems to say “Warning! Flags in action!”… which is not what it means. This is one of many “Swistalian” bits of language: “Azione” (action) actually means “on sale” ^___^

(this is a repost of an older g+ post)