Italian composer Ennio Morricone received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars. He has scored over 504 films and television shows Among the well over 400 features, five of those soundtracks were nominated for an Academy Award. None won.
There can be little doubt that no composer (or anyone else, for that matter) has worked on so many movies or on such a mind-bogglingly wide variety of them. His fame is for the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, particularly "A Fistful of Dollars," "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and "Once Upon a Time in the West" — although I'd elect "Duck, You Sucker" and "Once Upon a Time in America" as the greatest Leone films, in no small part because of the goofy sounds Morricone supplied for the former and the lavish sweep he gave to the epic structure of the latter.
Poke into Morricone's vast oeuvre and you can't miss the harrowing drumbeat tattoos from "The Battle of Algiers."
The woozy yet realistic soundtrack to Pier Paolo Pasolini's perverse "Salo'" raises the film's already over-the-top shock quotient to an intolerable level. Morricone scored "Cinema Paradiso" as though he were the world's greatest barista, measuring with absolute precision how many grains of sugar are needed to counter a perfect espresso's bitterness. His "Carmina Burana"-meets-Bartok music makes "The Mission," an otherwise failed movie, indelibly memorable. But Morricone can just as merrily be a sonic slasher for creepy sex-crazed Italian exploitation flicks. Were it possible to track down "Beach Party, Italian Style" from the early '60s, the reward would likely be a hoot for the ears.The theme from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" will surely be played more than once tonight at the Kodak Theatre. It's a signature tune for a composer whose very essence is to have no signature tune, which means it was a hit and people associate it with Morricone. It's also audacious music. The whistle, the whoop, the '60s rock guitar, the ocarina, the quick-tongued trumpets, the simple harmonies, the catchy melody are a combination never before associated with the American West or anyplace or anything else.A master of nonassociation, Morricone does not Mickey Mouse. That is Hollywood's lingo for making the music mimic the action, a technique that has little regard for the audience's intelligence. Morricone, by contrast, forces viewers to be listeners as well, encouraging the eye and ear to multitask. And therein lies some of his subversiveness.
The rest of Morricone's subversiveness is purely musical and cultural. He mixes what should not be mixed. Now 78, he spent his formative years in the '50s studying in Milan, Italy, where he appears to have picked up absolutely everything.He learned impeccable technique from the leading academic Italian composers of the time. He absorbed the experiments of young Italian firebrands, notably Luciano Berio, including their work with electronically produced music and their layering of found sounds on tape. John Cage was all the rage in Italy in the late '50s, having appeared on an Italian television quiz show. That gave Morricone an appreciation of silence and natural effects. He scores films even when he doesn't score films. The silences are pregnant. In Bernardo Bertolucci's "La Luna," a story of opera and incest, Morricone lets Verdi and pop music do all the nasty work for him. He's as at home with the raw, otherworldly folk instruments of Sardinia as he is with '60s surf guitars and the soft, smooth polyphonic Masses of Palestrina.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
A genius for the wild, high-low mix
Goofy sounds, lavish sweep. In 400 films, Ennio Morricone makes you listen (and whistle).
By Mark SwedTimes Staff WriterFebruary 25, 2007TONIGHT, the Italian composer Ennio Morricone will receive an honorary Oscar. The Internet Movie Database lists 504 films and television shows that he has scored (and two more that have been announced). Among the well over 400 features, five of those soundtracks were nominated for an Academy Award. None won. The lifetime achievement award is his consolation prize, and he is none too happy about that.For a composer to have written hundreds of hours of music — some of it amazing, a lot of it distinctive, a bit of it famous, the vast majority (including more than 100 concert works) unknown — not winning an Oscar has been a badge of distinction, as Morricone told the Associated Press recently. He is one of the great film subversives. And the consolation Oscar, along with an inevitably cornball tribute on the telecast, represents the mainstreaming of Morricone. But the truly weird part of this hommage, however gushy or gauche, is that it will not be altogether inappropriate. Just as you cannot give Morricone too much credit, you cannot dumb him down too low. His music may represent the rebellious avant-garde, but it also sinks to unembarrassed sentimentality. It furthermore carves out an enormous amount of highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow and bargain-basement-brow stylistic territory in between. And that is the source of his genius.There can be little doubt that no composer (or anyone else, for that matter) has worked on so many movies or on such a mind-bogglingly wide variety of them. His fame is for the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, particularly "A Fistful of Dollars," "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and "Once Upon a Time in the West" — although I'd elect "Duck, You Sucker" and "Once Upon a Time in America" as the greatest Leone films, in no small part because of the goofy sounds Morricone supplied for the former and the lavish sweep he gave to the epic structure of the latter.Poke into Morricone's vast oeuvre and you can't miss the harrowing drumbeat tattoos from "The Battle of Algiers," director Gillo Pontecorvo's consummate re-creation of the Algerian struggle for independence.The woozy yet realistic soundtrack to Pier Paolo Pasolini's perverse "Salт" raises the film's already over-the-top shock quotient to an intolerable level. Morricone scored "Cinema Paradiso" as though he were the world's greatest barista, measuring with absolute precision how many grains of sugar are needed to counter a perfect espresso's bitterness. His "Carmina Burana"-meets-Bartуk music makes "The Mission," an otherwise failed movie, indelibly memorable. But Morricone can just as merrily be a sonic slasher for creepy sex-crazed Italian exploitation flicks. Were it possible to track down "Beach Party, Italian Style" from the early '60s, the reward would likely be a hoot for the ears.The theme from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" will surely be played more than once tonight at the Kodak Theatre. It's a signature tune for a composer whose very essence is to have no signature tune, which means it was a hit and people associate it with Morricone. It's also audacious music. The whistle, the whoop, the '60s rock guitar, the ocarina, the quick-tongued trumpets, the simple harmonies, the catchy melody are a combination never before associated with the American West or anyplace or anything else.A master of nonassociation, Morricone does not Mickey Mouse. That is Hollywood's lingo for making the music mimic the action, a technique that has little regard for the audience's intelligence. Morricone, by contrast, forces viewers to be listeners as well, encouraging the eye and ear to multitask. And therein lies some of his subversiveness. Calling attention to himself, the composer insists that music add another point of view. His scores comment, often ironically, on the action. Film, when Morricone gets mixed up with it, is no longer merely the art of the gaze.The rest of Morricone's subversiveness is purely musical and cultural. He mixes what should not be mixed. Now 78, he spent his formative years in the '50s studying in Milan, Italy, where he appears to have picked up absolutely everything.He learned impeccable technique from the leading academic Italian composers of the time. He absorbed the experiments of young Italian firebrands, notably Luciano Berio, including their work with electronically produced music and their layering of found sounds on tape. John Cage was all the rage in Italy in the late '50s, having appeared on an Italian television quiz show. That gave Morricone an appreciation of silence and natural effects. He scores films even when he doesn't score films. The silences are pregnant. In Bernardo Bertolucci's "La Luna," a story of opera and incest, Morricone lets Verdi and pop music do all the nasty work for him. He's as at home with the raw, otherworldly folk instruments of Sardinia as he is with '60s surf guitars and the soft, smooth polyphonic Masses of Palestrina.Never just for effectMORRICONE doesn't switch-hit to be funny or outrageous. He takes himself deadly seriously. I interviewed him once a number of years ago, and he quickly dismissed the notion that his music was in any way ironic. If that is so, I haven't a clue where his musical wild streak comes from. He cares a great deal about his concert music, but does anyone else? He became noticeably angry when I told him I didn't know this music, although he admitted that neither recordings nor scores were easy to come by. How to explain that for a composer of his stature, hardly anyone plays the concert works outside Italy and there are still no major recordings. A cantata written in response to 9/11 that he conducted at the United Nations earlier this month was a dreary return to his '60s Italian avant-garde roots, revealing little of the sublime feeling for texture that runs through his film work.Morricone's conducting at the U.N. even of spaghetti-western hilarity was dull and pompous, if accomplished. And don't call them spaghetti westerns in his presence. He may mix musical metaphors with delirious sensuousness and wage endless musical food fights with film, but Morricone is offended by any suggestion that art and food can be equated. But perhaps we are not supposed to take anything from this bewildering composer with a straight face.This explains why Morricone cannot ultimately be mainstreamed. In a CD released last week, "We All Love Ennio Morricone," the composer defeats the best (or is it the worst) efforts of such greats as Yo-Yo Ma, Herbie Hancock, Renйe Fleming and Bruce Springsteen, all of whom attempt to make the composer fit into their straitjackets and are no more successful than the inconsequential Cйline Dion.The disc, unbelievably, appears to have Morricone's blessing. He wrote the transitions between songs so Andrea Bocelli could segue to Metallica with the least ruffling of feathers.Every track is awful — ambiguous music made into predictable pablum. But maybe it is also Morricone's ultimate act of subversion. He now is his own victim. Go figure.No, don't bother. You won't get anywhere. He is one big mystery. And that is why I love Morricone.
mark.swed@latimes.com
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/suncal/cl-ca-morricone25feb25,0,4436107.story?coll=cl-suncal
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.italiausa.com/ (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.italiamia.com/
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Ennio Morricone: Genius Music Scorer Awarded Lifetime Achievement Oscar
Tuscan Medieval Castle in Napa California ????
Daryl Sattui, has been building a Tuscan Medieval Castle in Napa CA for 12 years. At 121,000 square feet, Castello di Amorosa, tucked away on a hilltop off California Highway 29, could hold 50 average-sized homes. It has 107 rooms on seven levels.
But it's not just big. It's monumentally eccentric, rivaling the late William Randolph Hearst's rambling residence five hours down the coast in San Simeon. And like Hearst Castle, it cost a king's ransom, about $30 million. and still counting.
Sattui, a self-confessed medieval architecture fanatic also owns a former monastery and a Medici palace in Italy.
San Francisco Italian winemaker Vittorio Sattui arrived in San Francisco in 1882 with his new bride, Kattarina, to begin their life in America. Born in Genoa, Vittorio, like his father before him, was by trade a baker from the small hilltown of Carsi. In San Francisco, Vittorio at first worked as a baker, making wine in his spare time, while Kattarina took in washing. Soon the industrious Sattui family had saved enough money to start a boarding house in the Italian colony of North Beach.
Vittorio continued to make wine, serving it to his patrons at the boarding house. By 1885, the reputation of Vittorio's wines allowed him to quit the bakery and devote himself full-time to his real passion, winemaking. Vittorio quickly established a thriving commercial venture (located at 722 Montgomery, now Columbus Avenue) called St. Helena Wine Cellars, taking the name of the small, bucolic, Napa Valley town were he obtained his grapes. Vittorio always said, "there is nothing like St. Helena grapes!" He would personally select the grapes during the harvest and then haul them by horse-drawn wagon to Napa for transfer to San Francisco by ferry.
But in 1920, Prohibition sounded the death knell for Vittorio Sattui's family business. "I'll do nothing against the law." Vittorio said, and V. Sattui Wine Company lay dormant for the next sixty years, a dream deferred and half-forgotten.
In 1972, after two years in Europe beyond college, Daryl began his apprenticeship at various Napa Valley wineries. He still had his dream, the same dream he'd had as a child. Daryl pledged he "would reestablish V. Sattui Winery to its former glory."
In 1975, Daryl borrowed money and lived out of a van while re-starting up V. Sattui Winery Today, it attracts more than 400,000 visitors a year.
------------------------------------------------------
Napa Medieval: Castello di Amorosa
Los Angeles Times By Jane EngleFebruary 25, 2007
A castle is rising south of this small resort town that promises to be Napa Valley's most lavish tourist draw.
Or a vintner's fortune-busting folly.
In April, Daryl Sattui, whose winery and deli a few miles away in St. Helena are a popular picnic stop, plans to open to the public a sprawling, medieval-style castle and second winery that he has been building for 12 years. At 121,000 square feet, Castello di Amorosa, tucked away on a hilltop off California Highway 29, could hold 50 average-sized homes. It has 107 rooms on seven levels.
But it's not just big. It's monumentally eccentric, rivaling the late William Randolph Hearst's rambling residence five hours down the coast in San Simeon. And like Hearst Castle, it cost a king's ransom.
Sattui, a self-confessed medieval architecture fanatic who also owns a former monastery and a Medici palace in Italy, figures his current project will eat up $30 million.
"Honestly, I've spent everything I have except my pension plan," said Sattui, 65. "But I don't care. I just hope I don't go broke."
Castello di Amorosa is a meticulous, if not always authentic, vision of a Tuscan castle. It sports a dry moat, drawbridge, iron-gated entrance, five towers with battlements, a church, a great hall, gargoyles and wrought-iron sconces.
More wondrous stuff lies below, in four underground levels.
A dungeon is outfitted with torture equipment, including a reproduction of a rack and an antique iron maiden, which Sattui said he bought for $13,000 in Pienza, Italy. The iron maiden, looking like an upright mummy case, is lined with spikes meant to impale victims shut inside.
A labyrinth of cellars, housing thousands of wine bottles and barrels, showcases centuries of architectural elements. The largest underground chamber is the main barrel cellar, 135 feet long, with 40 cross vaults.
The most impressive room above is the great hall, 72 by 30 feet, with a 22-foot-high coffered ceiling. Frescoes — decorative but perhaps not museum-worthy — cover the walls, inspired by such classics as Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Good and Bad Government," at the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy.
Throughout the castle, details attest to Sattui's passion for vintage buildings. Iron gates, fashioned five years ago, have been aged with acid to appear ancient. Double doors outside the great hall contain 2,000 nails, all handmade in Italy.
The project, at first overseen by a Danish naval architect and now by Italian Paulo Ardito, has employed workers from six countries and materials from eight, Sattui said.
Down in Calistoga, known for hot springs and mineral water, Castello di Amorosa is an object of curiosity and some mystery.
"A lot of people don't know it's there," said Kendall Heck, a longtime bartender in town.
When bricklayers gave him a tour, he was impressed with the "fairy-tale thing." But he added, "It looks like [Sattui's] got more money than sense."
Sattui agreed that no rational businessperson would have built his castle. But this son of a San Francisco cabby has beaten the odds before. He borrowed money and lived out of a van while starting up V. Sattui Winery in 1975. Today, it attracts more than 400,000 visitors a year.
"I have a philosophy," he said. "Average people can do great things if they don't know they're average."
jane.engle@latimes.com
*
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Vintage stronghold
THE ROYAL TOUR
Castello di Amorosa is at 4045 N. St. Helena Highway, Calistoga, CA 94515; (707) 963-7774 (rings to V. Sattui Winery), http://www.castellodiamorosa.com .
The project has missed many target dates, but owner Daryl Sattui hopes the castle will open April 1. He expects to charge $10 per person for wine tasting and $10 more for the castle tour; you won't be able to take the tour without the tasting.
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Puglia: Did Someone Say Cuisine???
Puglia on the heel of Italy's boot is one of the more mysterious and compelling regions in Italy, BUT since the author is an exceptional Food Critic, that is what her focus is.
As she points out there is NO Italian Cuisine, there is only REGIONAL Italian Cuisine, and she discovers that of Puglia.
----------------------------------------
Italy's Boot: A Setting for the Senses in Puglia
Los Angeles Times By S. Irene Virbila, Los Angeles TimesFebruary 25, 2007
LECCE, ITALY - SIX years ago ? or was it a dream? ? I spent a day and a half in southern Italy on the Adriatic coast, and there I was left mesmerized by the sun-bleached stone, the blue sky, turquoise sea and dazzling white hilltop towns with twisting cobblestoned streets. I feasted on exquisitely pristine seafood and savored homemade orecchiette sauced with limpid green olive oil and bittersweet rapini served in shallow bowls decorated with blue dots. And I'll never forget the taste of the creamiest burrata cheese, still dripping with whey.
Good food and faraway places cast a spell on me. It may take months, it may take decades, but eventually I find my way back. And I finally did, returning last September to Puglia, one of Italy's most mysterious and compelling regions. Of course I got lost. Over and over again. But getting lost only makes getting found more interesting.
Our trip was delightful insouciance, full of surprises and serendipity as we negotiated the meandering roads and the starkly beautiful landscape. We set out to discover the pleasures of an ancient, agrarian cuisine, and we found ourselves seduced by a way of life deeply rooted in this tradition.
We started off one morning last fall. There were four of us: my husband, my Korean friend Sonya and an Italian friend, Roberta, from Seattle who grew up in Turin. Roberta's family comes from the outskirts of Bari, and as a little girl, she used to spend summers at her grandmother's house, where the family had a little grocery.
Before the trip, Roberta lavished me with memories of the bread ? huge golden loaves her grandfather used to cut with a knife into thick slabs. So of course one of our missions was to track down that bread. The other was to discover the regional cooking of Puglia.
Italian cooking is a misnomer. There is no such thing, only regional cooking ? Tuscan or Piedmontese, Sicilian or Ligurian ? and like much of Italy and especially the South, Puglia doesn't really have a restaurant tradition. Other than seafood, which is grilled or cooked practically minutes after it's been pulled from the sea, the best cooking is la cucina delle donne ? women's cooking, at home.
Wild greens and all sorts of grains and beans, sea urchins and sweet shrimp, rabbit and baby lamb awaited. And so the four of us arrived in Puglia, hungry to taste everything the region had to offer.
A trek for bread
FINDING the bread wasn't easy. Ambling through stony white hill towns, we'd see a bakery and Roberta would dash in only to rush back out shaking her head, "No, no, no, that's not it."
We took to snacking on taralli , crisp semolina crackers, shaped like miniature teething rings and flavored with fennel seeds or peppercorns. Where, we wondered, was the bread? We thought those huge golden loaves would be so much a part of everyday life, you'd find them everywhere.
Eventually we realized we'd need to go to Altamura, a town perched on the rocky highlands between Bari and Taranto that is famous for its bread.
Our drive took us from Ostuni, where we were staying, through Martina Franca, another hill town, this one chockablock with baroque and rococo buildings. We spent a couple of hours strolling through streets lined with carved stone facades and curlicue ironwork balconies leaning so far out they almost kissed overhead. At lunchtime, we bought sandwich makings and ate in a park where elderly men gossiped on park benches and teenagers straddled their Vespas, smoking.
Our next stop was Alberobello, a minuscule town with so many beehive-shaped stone cottages, or trulli , that it has been designated a World Heritage Site. Sadly, it's also full of tacky trinkets and busloads of tourists pulling up to inspect prime examples of the region's vernacular architecture ? and a kid who tried to hit us up for money to see the family trullo.
We lost our way to the ceramics town of Grottaglie, and when we finally asked for directions, two policewomen got into an argument attempting to put us right. On our inevitable meandering way, though, we passed through a fantastic landscape of red earth and ancient gnarled olive trees, fortified farmhouses ? the whitewashed masserie ? where jasmine and fuchsia bougainvillea clamber up the walls and cactuses cast shadows on white screens of old stone.
What with stops for espresso, snapping pictures and a visit, finally, to the renowned Nicola Fasano ceramics studio where we lusted after huge terracotta pots incised with geometric patterns, the afternoon was waning. And by the time we reached Altamura, we were more than ready for our bread. We spiraled upward, climbing ever closer to the center, until we found a trio of young men hanging out in a tiny square, having a smoke.
Roberta slowed down. "Where's a good bakery?" she called out.
They're all good, said one. Roberta raised a raven eyebrow.
"I know one, not far from here," volunteered another, acquiescing to her gaze, and as soon as he started to explain how to get there ? turn right, left, left, right and after the second curve, right again ? he could tell we'd already forgotten the first turn.
"Follow me," he said, jumping into his car and squealing around the corner like a Formula One driver. And we were off, soon coming to a precipitous halt in front of a nondescript storefront, at which point our guide honked, waved and raced off again.
Puzzled, we stepped out, and the smell of bread fell upon us like a benediction. A gentleman stood in front as if he had been waiting for us. He nodded and invited us in. He cut us each a thick wedge of warm focaccia topped with tomatoes and olives that had sunk into the pillowy dough. It was incredible.
Come, he said, and led us to the back where two young bakers were taking huge loaves out of the wood-burning oven. They're enormous, misshapen, hunchback breads that weigh well over 10 pounds.
"That's it," cried Roberta. The mother loaf. And this is the Di Ges? bakery, founded in 1838 and run by the same family for generations.
Soon an uncle, a cousin, a nephew begin to show up to see the bread-crazed Americans, and we were just that. This may be the best bread I've tasted in my life, made with gold durum wheat and fragrant with yeast, a perfect accompaniment for the burrata and fresh sheep's-milk ricotta cheeses we picked up at the Dicecca cheese shop around the corner.
Glorious seafood
BY then it was dusk, and we were easily an hour and a half from where we were supposed to be. But before we left, we bought one of those huge golden loaves and some of the various focaccias. We took a photo of Roberta in front with her bread and also with the entire Di Ges? family and said goodbye.
In the car, the scent of warm, yeasty bread enveloped us, and as we drove into the twilight, we were getting hungrier and hungrier with no idea of where we'd eat.
It was dark. Everyone except me and Roberta was nodding off when I saw the sign for Polignano a Mare, home to Da Tuccino, a restaurant known for its crudi , raw seafood. We called to see if we could get in.
Yes, we were told, if you come right now.
The exterior of Da Tuccino is brutally ugly, and I began to wonder if this was such a good idea. And what about the bread? It won't taste the same tomorrow.
Leave it to me, said Roberta as she explained our predicament to the tuxedoed maitre d' in rapid-fire Italian. "Is there any way we could enjoy our bread with dinner tonight?" I waited for an impassioned blowup but heard instead, " Non c'? problema ," he said, whisking the big crumpled paper bag off to the kitchen.
After inspecting the glorious spread of whole fish and seafood laid out on ice, we took a table in the nearly empty ballroom-sized room. Modesto wrote down our order. Our bread arrived beautifully sliced and arranged on a platter. This is heaven, I thought. To arrive tired and hungry and find such hospitality is to experience the real and ancient Puglia.
Da Tuccino's antipasti crudi was spectacular, plate after plate of raw scampi, sweet red shrimp with skeins of roe, pearly squid, small violet-tinged octopus, clams, mussels and oysters. Orata carpaccio arrives put back in the shape of the fish and topped with house-made prosciutto di tonno (tuna ham). Supple orecchiette stained black with squid ink and tossed with zucchini blossoms and small rosy shrimp is fabulous. So is the spaghettini with scampi and bottarga . We could have continued with grilled fish, but we had to stop before we burst.
In any trip, there is a fine balance between planning too much and planning too little, and to have one day like that one, full of surprises and serendipity, colors the memory of the entire trip. Hours drifted leisurely by as if there was no such thing as time, except when it was time to eat.
For years, a friend had been touting the food at Il Frantoio, a bed-and-breakfast on a working farm (an arrangement known as an agriturismo) outside Ostuni, as the perfect Pugliese experience. He started going there when the farm with more than 4,000 olive trees had only a handful of rooms. Now, 15 years after two escapees from the city, Armando and Rosalba Balestrazzi, created Il Frantoio, the number of rooms has expanded, requiring a staff to run the place. It still maintains a quirky, well-tended cultivated charm. Rosalba is such a gifted cook that visitors from around the world descend on the farm for her meals, which are preceded by an informal lecture from Armando on the history of the farm and Puglia's ancient food ways.
On the night we stayed for dinner, Armando was in full throttle when one of the staff whispered, "How much longer?"
"Twenty minutes."
"Can you wrap it up in 10?"
He nodded and spoke faster, ending the presentation by sweeping a cloth off a collection of jams and olive oils and some 30 infused liqueurs, all for sale and each bearing the Il Frantoio label.
Dinner was a multi-course extravaganza where vegetables took center stage. It was served in a dining room with vaulted, arched ceiling. In summer, tables are set up in the spacious courtyard and garden.
Antipasti is an art in Puglia, and Rosalba's is no exception. Fagiolini pinti , skinny local green beans nearly a foot and a half long, are splashed with sweet tomato sauce and embellished with ricotta. Fresh anchovies are stuffed with capers, parsley and bread crumbs, and eggplant is rolled up with smoked mozzarella. Each course employs a different single-varietal olive oil from the farm, and Armando pairs each dish with local wines. It's wonderful, but with so many guests and studied flourishes, it's a production more worthy of a restaurant than a rustic farmhouse meal.
Because Rosalba performs just two or three times a week, the next night we ate at Cibus, tucked away in the center of nearby Ceglie Messapica, just steps from the cathedral.
Owner Lilino Silibello has an exceptional list of Puglia's best wines, sturdy single-vineyard Primitivo, full-bodied Negroamaro and interesting whites and lighter reds, and everything that comes from the kitchen is honest and true. We savored zucchini flowers stuffed with delicate sheep's-milk ricotta and mint followed by ribbons of the summer squash dressed in fragrant lemon and mint. Then came homemade cured meats, a fabulous carpaccio of milk-fed baby pig and a sunny yellow frittata laced with squash blossoms and ricotta. And here too was wonderful pasta ? "priest's ears" ? similar to orecchiette but longer and more open in shape and served with a tomato sauce enriched with roasted meats.
We ate and ate, but by the time we finished the lamb cooked in the wood-burning oven, we had to cry uncle. But you have to try this caciocavallo , Silibello urged. This cheese is made from the milk of a special cow that produces only a small amount. How could we not? Much later, we wandered into the night, slightly delirious. Such is the enchantment of Puglia.
Kicking up their heels
CISTERNINO is a small hilltop town with a spectacular panorama of the countryside. The streets are narrow and maze-like, whitewashed like in Greece, but on weekends the historic heart of town wakes up and parties. On the night we were there, a stage was set up and musicians of all ages played traditional music. The whole town shows up, grandparents, young families with toddlers and babies in arms, teenagers with elaborately spiky gelled hair and the occasional tourist. That would be us.
Cisternino has an irresistible tradition ? a good dozen butcher shops with restaurants attached and tables set out in the street. At Arrosteria del Vicoletta, skewers of meats sizzle at a tilt against the wall of the wood-burning oven, the better to get smoky and stay juicy. The day before, when I sussed out the place and saw the rudimentary wine list, I asked the butcher with wavy blond hair, like a matinee idol from the '30s, if it would be all right if we brought our own wine. Non c'? problema. Roberta of course insisted on bringing wineglasses too.
That night, there was no end to the skewers of sausage links, pork rib chops, turcinieddhi (little bundles of lamb's liver and innards), and braciola (thin slices of pork wrapped around wild herbs) and lamb riblets, all washed down with some inky dark Primitivo and accompanied by vinegary green salad and melted smoked scamorza cheese to sop up with our bread.
Traveling with three other people can make it difficult to plan ahead, and by the time I found a day to go south to Lecce to meet Silvestro Silvestori, who runs the cooking school the Awaiting Table there, it was late into our weeklong trip. The school's website warns students not to bring their cars to Lecce, but we attempted it and quickly learned that driving in Lecce is easy. Finding your way is not. If you're timid about asking for directions, you'll never get where you want to go. Even with the Italian-speaking Roberta and race-car-driving Sonya, we got lost all the time.
At a stoplight, we managed to get the attention of a driver in the next lane, and we implored him for directions. He stared off into space and, finding it impossible to explain, told us to follow him. By now we knew the drill, and we set off on a merry route zipping around squares, squirting around corners, a zillion turns and then, miraculously, our meeting point Porta Napoli, one of the old gates of the city, stood in front of us, with two minutes to spare.
Silvestori grew up in the United States but moved back to Puglia several years ago after earning degrees in jazz studies, sculpture and languages. He immersed himself in the region's traditions and became a leading expert in Pugliese cuisine. He lives and works in Lecce's old town in a palazzo that dates from the 16th century. A former stable is his teaching kitchen. Garlic and dried red peppers and little lanterns were strung from the rafters. At two big work tables, a group of women from Canada were busy shaping pasta into small sombreros by flattening it over the top of a wine bottle.
Silvestori collects recipes from grandmothers and the old ladies in the villages around Lecce and the Salentine peninsula to the south. Sometimes he invites guest teachers like Clifford Wright, who's written a number of books on Mediterranean cuisine, or Nancy Harmon Jenkins, who wrote "Flavors of Puglia."
He took a moment to demonstrate how to make the most basic Pugliese pasta, those adorable orecchiette . It's all in the gesture, he explained, how you roll the dough off your thumb. And nothing, quite frankly, you could learn from a cookbook.
That's the beauty and my regret. Sadly, we had no time to stay, and as we left, he walked us past the glorious honey-colored Baroque and Rococo buildings in the historic center. Wherever he went, the fishmonger, the baker, the woman who runs the bed-and-breakfast, called out a greeting.
It was a beguiling farewell to Puglia and just the right touch. I'm a romantic. I like to leave a place believing that I'll be back. Without that hope, it would be too wrenching to say goodbye to all the places I've fallen in love with over the years.....
Restaurants & Shops, Cooking Schools, Hotels, Agriturismos, Bed & Breakfasts at original Article
http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-tr-puglia25feb25
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Monday, February 26, 2007
Rugby: Italy Stuns Scotland in Historic Manner 37-17
I never thought of Italy and Rugby. Yes, rugby is a cousin to Soccer, and Soccer is Italy's passion, but I have not
seen that much Italian interest.
But Italy ROCKED the Rugby world with it's victory over Scotland, AND did it in such a historic manner.
Italy scored 3 times in the first seven minutes!!!!!!
The Scots, and English press were unusual in their gracious attitude toward Italy, were suitably impressed, and made No excuses.
The Scotland Courier describes the Italian Team, PRIOR to the Italian Victory:
Italy made it extremely awkward for everyone they played against in the Six Nations last year and they’re on the verge of doing something special.
Everyone is aware of how powerful their scrummaging is and they are improving the quality of their attacking play all the time. Italy’s forwards remain their outstanding strength and their abrasive style has been unsettling for opponents.
In the scrummage they are particularly formidable,their lineout is sound, have a good centre partnership in Mirko Bergamasco, possibly the best player in his position in last year’s championship, and Gonzalo Canale. However, Italy’s fatal weakness lies inside them.
Italy still have a real problem at half-back. That Italy had to rely on veteran Allesando Troncon for the match against England was an admission that Italy still have a real problem at half-back.
The latest incumbent at stand-off is Andrea Scanavacca, but he doesn’t look like the answer.
In addition, Italy have problems on both sides of the crucial kicking game; they don’t have the reliable placekicker which is essential in modern international rugby, and they give away far too many penalty chances to teams that do.
http://www.thecourier.co.uk/output/2007/02/24/sportstory9345412t0.asp
---------------------------------------
Rugby: Italy stun Scotland
New Zealand Herald
Sunday February 25, 2007By Alan Lorimer
Italy 37 Scotland 17
EDINBURGH - Italy made an historic breakthrough by achieving their first away win in the Six Nations championship after defeating Scotland 37-17 in an amazing game...
In a bizarre match Scotland were 21 points down after only seven minutes after Italy ruthlessly cashed in on a series of Scots blunders.Thereafter the Scots were hopelessly chasing the game
Halfback Alessandro Troncon rounded off the Italian scoring with their fourth try late on and told the BBC: "It's the result of our hard work. "We were focussed and we played well and today I think is the start of a new era for us.
Scotland tried desperately to get back on terms but were three times thwarted by determined Italian defence... Scotland continued to try everything to break down the Italian defence but It was to little avail.
A historic win for Italy and a decidedly disastrous day for Scotland
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/4/story.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10425686
--------------------------------------------------------
Scots rocked by Italy trouncing
Rugby World
IC Wales
Saturday 24th February 2007
SCOTLAND were tonight reeling from a 37-17 defeat by Italy in the RBS 6 Nations Championship which wing Sean Lamont described as “gutting”.
Italy’s first away win since entering the competition in 2000 was achieved on the back of tries from Mauro Bergamasco, Andrea Scanavacca and Kaine Robertson in the first six minutes.
The home side handed Pierre Berbizier’s side an astonishing 21-0 lead, and although Scotland hit back with tries from Rob Dewey and captain Chris Paterson, another Italian try from Alessandro Troncon ensured the home side ended empty-handed and resoundingly beaten.
Lamont told BBC Radio Scotland: “It’s beyond comprehension. It’s gutting. We gave them too much of a start with three interceptions in the first five minutes. That killed us.
“It was a nightmare start. That is unacceptable really and we couldn’t recover.”...
Scotland head coach Frank Hadden... offered no excuses, and added: “We were absolutely shellshocked in the changing room".....
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0500rugbyunion/0200news/tm_headline=scots-rocked-by-italy-trouncing&method=full&objectid=18671187&siteid=50082-name_page.html
----------------------------------
Italy's show on the road at last
Planet Ruby
Saturday 24th February 2007
It has taken 33 matches and some heart-breaking close failures, but Italy finally have claimed an away win in the Six Nations, beating Scotland 37-17 in Edinburgh on Saturday. Scotland presented their visitors with a 21-point head start within the first seven minutes! But after nearly forty minutes of rock-like defence as the Azzurri fought off the Scottish comeback, the Italians dominated the final ten minutes to make the game safe. Rome, the Eternal City, is history. There is history at every turn. The whole of Italy is one great miracle of history. But today Italy made history in Scotland. Hadrian built a wall to keep the Picts out, for the Romans had no stomach to invade Caledonia stern and wild. Today Marco Bortolami went where Hadrian did not go. He went to the heart of Scotland and made history. For the first time Italy won a Six nations match abroad and won it well. Afterwards exhausted and exhilarated Alessandro Troncon, heaving for breath, announced that this was "the start of anew era for Italian rugby". What a day, what a victory - and what a muzzle for those who have been preaching Italy out of the Six Nations. Three tries in six minutes! It must be a unique situation in the annals of the International Championship however many nations were playing. Murrayfield was stunned. Scotland got lots of referee assistance. They had eight penalties before Italy had one, 10-4 in the first half, 20-10 in the match as a whole. Just as Italy had started so brilliantly, so they finished the stronger of the two as they throttled the life out of Scotland keeping them pinned in their own territory till the match was lost and won.
Imagine the overflowing of joy at this most famous victory. Moment of the Match: Of course, those three tries in six minutes. But there was a touching moment at a break in play after 60 minutes when Chris Cusiter stood there looking downhearted and bewildered and Alessandro Troncon gave him a comforting pat on the head. Cheering up was not possible but it was a decent moment.
http://www.planet-rugby.com/Story/0,18259,3551_1940653,00.html
----------------------------------
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Obit: Al Viola, 87; Frank Sinatra Accompanist for 25 years
Al Viola was born in Brooklyn on June 16, 1919, and grew up in a large — and musical — Italian family whose home was filled with guitars, mandolins and an upright player piano.
Viola first met Sinatra after the war when the singer dropped in to hear him as part of the Page Cavanaugh Trio in a club on Sunset Boulevard. Sinatra liked them so much, that he took the trio to New York with him when he performed at the Waldorf-Astoria. Thus began a 25 year association.
Sinatra called him "one of the world's great guitarists…. I think he plays beautifully. As a matter of fact, if you weren't looking at him, you'd swear he was an octopus."
"Viola was a chameleon and could play in any style — that was his great talent," said jazz singer Judy Chamberlain, "He was a flawless player," "You could barely see his hands move, he was so smooth and quick with his fingers. He was a marvel of dexterity on the guitar, even until the end." Jazz musician Buddy Collette said : "Once you played with him, you knew how great he was. He had his own way of playing, his own style; you could tell within a couple of bars who it was. And you could ask him to play anything. He had a background that was unbelievable.
"What I enjoyed most about working with Sinatra is that he was unpredictable," Viola said. "When I accompanied him, I couldn't quite predict where he was going, which made it challenging and exciting. He always surprised me on stage. Although he wasn't known as a jazz singer, he ad-libbed like one and wouldn't sing a song the same way twice."
----------------------------------------------------
Al Viola, 87; Longtime Studio Guitarist Known for Work with Frank Sinatra
Los Angeles Times
By Dennis McLellan, Times Staff WriterFebruary 23, 2007
Al Viola, a versatile guitarist best known for his long association with Frank Sinatra and his memorable mandolin playing on "The Godfather" soundtrack, has died. He was 87.Viola died of cancer Wednesday at his home in Studio City, said his wife, Glenna.Viola, who arrived in Los Angeles as a member of the Page Cavanaugh Trio after World War II, became a prominent member of the local recording-studio scene. "He was a chameleon and could play in any style — that was his great talent," said jazz singer Judy Chamberlain, a friend who performed with Viola in many settings, including a jazz salute to Sinatra at the Hollywood & Highland Center in 2005."He was a flawless player," she said. "You could barely see his hands move, he was so smooth and quick with his fingers. He was a marvel of dexterity on the guitar, even until the end." Said jazz musician Buddy Collette: "Once you played with him, you knew how great he was. He had his own way of playing, his own style; you could tell within a couple of bars who it was. And you could ask him to play anything. He had a background that was unbelievable."Sinatra, with whom Viola worked for about 25 years on recordings, TV specials, Las Vegas appearances and concerts, offered his own distinctive praise of Viola during a concert at the Lido in Paris in 1962, which can be heard on the 1994 CD "Sinatra and Sextet: Live in Paris."After finishing a free-form vocal-guitar duet of Cole Porter's "Night and Day" with Viola, Sinatra called him "one of the world's great guitarists…. I think he plays beautifully. As a matter of fact, if you weren't looking at him, you'd swear he was an octopus."For Viola, the positive feelings were mutual."I had to turn down a lot of work to go on a world tour with him for 10 weeks," Viola told Guitar Player magazine in 1994, "but I liked what he was puttin' down."Viola, whose work with Sinatra took him from the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas to the Parthenon in Athens and beyond, can be heard on such Sinatra hits as "Witchcraft," "All the Way," "My Way" and "New York, New York."He first met Sinatra after the war when the singer dropped in to hear the Page Cavanaugh Trio in a club on Sunset Boulevard. Sinatra liked them so much, Viola later recalled, that he took the trio to New York with him when he performed at the Waldorf-Astoria, followed by an appearance at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, N.J.The trio also did a recording session at Columbia Records with Sinatra, turning out two sides: "That's How Much I Love You" and "You Can Take My Word for It, Baby."After quitting the trio in 1949, Viola remained in Los Angeles and began doing studio work.He worked in the recording studio — and occasionally did local gigs — with the big bands of Harry James, Ray Anthony, Les Brown and Nelson Riddle. He also worked with jazz groups, including playing with Collette, Red Callender, Bobby Troup, Terry Gibbs and Shelly Manne."When I was working with Bobby Troup [in the mid-'50s], one of Sinatra's buddies heard me and told me that Frank needed a guitar player," Viola recalled in an interview on his website. "What I enjoyed most about working with Frank is that he was unpredictable," Viola said. "When I accompanied him, I couldn't quite predict where he was going, which made it challenging and exciting. He always surprised me on stage. Although he wasn't known as a jazz singer, he ad-libbed like one and wouldn't sing a song the same way twice."As a studio musician, Viola appeared on more than 500 albums with artists such as Julie London, Steve Lawrence, Marvin Gaye, Neil Diamond, Linda Ronstadt and Natalie Cole.In addition to being the solo mandolinist who performed the classic "Godfather" theme, he played on numerous TV and film soundtracks, including "West Side Story," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Blazing Saddles."Born in Brooklyn on June 16, 1919, Viola grew up in a large — and musical — Italian family whose home was filled with guitars, mandolins and an upright player piano."My brother, who played mandolin, needed someone to accompany him, so he taught me a few chords on guitar to play behind him," Viola recalled on his website.Teaming up with a violinist friend, they began playing duets in their neighborhood and performed in Chinese restaurants. "My mother thought I was robbing the bank because I was bringing home $22 a week during the Depression!" he recalled.While stationed in Sacramento, where he played in an Army band during World War II, Viola and fellow band members Page Cavanaugh and bassist Lloyd Pratt formed the Page Cavanaugh Trio.After arriving in Los Angeles, the trio played top nightclubs such as the Trocadero and Ciro's, made a number of records and appeared in several movies. More than 60 years later, Viola was still playing. His final performance was at Spazio, a jazz supper club in Sherman Oaks, in late January."He played great that night too," Glenna Viola said.In addition to his wife of 62 years, Viola is survived by his two sons, Dan and Jeff; and a granddaughter. A funeral service for Viola will be held at 3 p.m. Monday at Church of the Hills, Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, 6300 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles.http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-viola23feb23,0,4865870.story?coll=la-home-obituaries
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Friday, February 23, 2007
Fuggedaboudit Fallout
Johnny Amoroso-Levato's parent's objected to a school play titled “Fuggedaboudit ” that had all the Italian Mob negative stereotypes.
The Principal and School District Superintendent cavalierly spurned all concerns from local and national Italian American organizations.
Predictably, Johnny faced a "hostile" environment, so with assistance Johnny was transferred to a private school.
Script writer Matt Myers,nor Batavia School Superintendent Jack Barshinger responded to requests as to how they might react to a school play titled "The Shylocks" with all the negative Jewish stereotypes.
The Schools supposedly "Preach" Tolerance and Sensitivity, and "Practice" Bigotry... ????
Our Respect to Johnny and his mom, Marina Amoroso-Levato, and the Order Sons of Italy that supported them.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Play Flap Leads to Site Swap
Kane County Chronicle
By Eric Schelkopf Thursday, February 22, 2007
Johnny Amoroso-Levato had been a seventh-grader at Rotolo, but left in November after the school allowed performances of “Fuggedaboudit” to go on, despite objections raised by the family, claiming that it stereotyped Italian-Americans, said officials with Order Sons of Italy in America.
Amoroso-Levato enrolled at Aurora Christian, a private school, in January.
“He said, ‘Mom, I can’t go back,’ ” said his mother, Marina. “ ‘I can’t go back to a school where there was such a wrong thing done.’ ”
Batavia School Superintendent Jack Barshinger said the district did not hear any concerns from the family after the controversy.
Barshinger said Rotolo Principal Donald McKinney worked to make sure that the student was in a safe and secure environment.
“The environment was just the opposite of hostile,” Barshinger said.
Marina Amoroso-Levato did not specify any school-related incidents but said her son was harassed at December’s Celebration of Lights festival in downtown Batavia.
“Several kids were looking at him and laughing, and he pulled his hood over his head,” she said.
In a e-mail statement Wednesday, Order Sons of Italy in America officials explained the family’s decision to switch schools, while announcing that several Italian-American groups based in Chicago had collectively raised $5,000 to assist the family with tuition costs.
“They [the family] stood up to be counted, and they need help as a result of that,” said Dona De Sanctis, national deputy executive director for the Order Sons of Italy. “By standing up and protesting this, the family found itself in a situation where Johnny was not comfortable in school anymore.”
The play controversy was sparked when Marina Amoroso-Levato contacted Washington-based Order Sons of Italy in America after reading the script for “Fuggedaboudit,” which was written by Rotolo drama and communication teacher Matt Myers.
The group said the play stereotyped Italian-Americans as gangsters. School officials disagreed, saying that the message of the play was to not judge a book by its cover.
The Order Sons of Italy went to federal court to seek an injunction to prevent the school from staging the play, but U.S. District Court Judge John Grady denied the request.
Italians- Europeans Hate Bush-US
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BUSH, U.S. HATED AROUND THE WORLD
| Niagara Falls Reporter |
DETROIT -- President George W. Bush has managed to alienate nearly the entire world, and in a relatively short span of time the United States has become an international pariah. Forget about the terrorists who "hate us because of our freedom," the "axis of evil," the "Islamofascists," or whatever label Bush uses to demonize people and spread fear.
The true measure of just how much Bush has systematically nurtured antipathy toward the United States is found in Europe, and especially in Italy. It is stunning how shattered the relationship now is.
I asked a friend, an Italian-American who often visits family there and had just returned from a Christmas trip, what Italians are thinking of Americans these days. His answer was grim and crisp: "They hate us."
Saturday, more than 80,000 people marched on the streets of Vicenza protesting the planned expansion of the U.S. military base there. They want nothing to do with the $576 million investment and more U.S. troops stationed there...
Some of the anger may be attributed to the general European resentment toward American cultural arrogance and unbridled materialism. Perhaps some of it is rooted in the Europeans' own sense of cultural and intellectual superiority.
But those strains and attitudes have been around a long time and are usually accepted with mutual accommodations. What we are seeing now is unprecedented and tragic. They hate us because of Bush and a government that tramples on human rights and is devoid of any sense of decency. They can't understand how the American people could choose such a reckless cowboy to lead our nation and create havoc around the world.
The Italians suffered greatly under Benito Mussolini's government, his alliance with Hitler, the war, the Nazi occupation and the Allied invasion. They had their fill of fascism, and when the U.S. government uses fascist tactics on Italian soil, they get real upset.
A judge has indicted 26 Americans, most thought to be CIA officers, and five Italians on charges they were involved in kidnapping a Muslim cleric outside his mosque in Milan in 2003.
The case pivots around the abduction of Hassan Mustafa Nasr, a radical cleric known as Abu Omar. The prosecutor, Amando Spataro, says after Nasr was snatched off the street, the CIA flew him to Germany and then to Egypt where, according to a Reuters report, "he was tortured with electric shocks, beatings, rape threats and genital abuse."
Nasr told ANSA, an Italian news service, "I have been reduced to a wreck as a human being." He said he could hardly walk because "they burst my kidneys." An Egyptian court freed Nasr last week, finding his four years of detention were "unfounded."
At the time of his abduction, Italian officials were investigating Nasr for suspected terrorism-related activities and recruiting fighters for radical Islamic causes. But prosecutors say the kidnapping breached Italian sovereignty and compromised the nation's anti-terrorism efforts.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, comedian Rush Limbaugh, the chorus of right-wing pundits and far too many Americans just shrug off such conduct. Their usual refrains are: "Hey, this guy is a terrorist." "We can do anything we want to protect America." "We go to the dark side to save the light of American liberty." They spout simplistic justifications for using fascist tactics "to defend freedom."
That attitude infuriates the Italians and our other former friends in Europe. They cling to this radical notion that if Nasr or anyone else is involved in terror, charge them and have a trial to determine their guilt or innocence.
While the European people consistently support human rights and oppose the abuses of the Bush administration, their governments don't always reflect that. An investigation for the European parliament released last week accuses Britain, Germany and other EU countries of complicity with the U.S. government.
Britain's Guardian reports the probe "accused some European countries of turning a blind eye to the flights, a number of which were allegedly used to illegally transport terrorism suspects."
Several countries were criticized for a "lack of cooperation," and specifically the investigators "accused Britain, Austria, Italy, Poland and Portugal of showing an obstructive attitude." The reason they don't want to cooperate is that the World Court in The Hague may someday be looking into the CIA kidnappings and the culpability of European accomplices.
The report found that "more than 1,200 CIA-operated flights have used European airspace between 2001 and 2005." The Swiss government has authorized prosecutors to investigate the flight that took Nasr from Italy to Germany and whether it violated Swiss air space.
A prosecutor in Munich has issued arrest warrants for 13 people in another suspected CIA operation, in which a German citizen was grabbed near the Macedonia-Serbia border and whisked off to Afghanistan.
These cases of "extraordinary rendition," the ridiculous term coined to describe kidnappings, which have no basis in U.S. statutes or international law, show the utter contempt the Busheviks have for fundamental rights.
The people rounded up are deliberately taken to nations where torture is routine. Their families usually have no idea where they are. They are never charged with crimes, since there is no proof of crimes. They are often labeled "terrorists" based on hearsay remarks or questionable information from paid informants.
The entire practice is repugnant to everything America should stand for, and since Bush and Cheney will allow and defend anything billed as fighting terrorism, we now have to find our moral direction from the Europeans, Canadians and others people with civic consciences.
No doubt, the CIA types will never face the consequences for what they did, but they may be tried in absentia and won't be taking any European vacations soon. The Italian defendants aren't so lucky. One of them is the former Italian chief of military intelligence, Nicolo Pollari.
He told the judge his organization took no part in the kidnapping, but he will be unable to defend himself properly because documents supporting his innocence contain state secrets and cannot be presented as evidence in open court.
But given Pollari's shady past and sordid dealings with the Bush administration, he may be trying to cover his tracks. Pollari was the courier in one of the greatest hoaxes of our times and a lie Cheney and others embraced with ruthless zeal.
In September 2002, while Pollari headed SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency, he made a secret trip to the White House, specifically to Condoleezza Rice's office. His mission was to deliver the forged documents and phony dossier claiming Saddam had been shopping for enriched uranium in Niger.
The already-discredited hoax and bag of lies Pollari delivered were used within days. This was the material Cheney drooled over so he could declare with certainty that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons." Rice would use the lies to scare the masses, warning, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Pollari was actually the tail end of a long, convoluted plot to peddle the phony documents as evidence that Saddam had been shopping for yellow-cake uranium used to refine into fissionable material for nuclear weapons.
Reporters Carlo Bonnini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo blew the lid off the plot for Italy's La Repubblica newspaper. They traced the origins of the scheme to Rocco Martino, a former SISMI operative who when fired for "defects in character" became a freelance spy, selling his information to the highest bidder.
Back in 1999, Rocco "smelled a business opportunity" in selling information to the French about uranium being stolen from the mines in Niger. A French consortium owns the mines.
The clever Rocco knew Saddam did buy uranium from Niger in the 1980s. But after the Gulf War, United Nations inspectors successfully dismantled Iraq's nuclear program, and the uranium was never reconstituted.
Rocco saw Saddam as a convenient usual suspect. With the help of some confederates, the hoax was hatched. Rocco arranged to have papers with government letterhead stolen from the Niger embassy in Rome. The plotters then cut, pasted and forged documents showing Saddam ordered shipments of 500 tons of uranium.
They tried to sell the fabricated dossier to the French, and it was quickly recognized as a transparent, amateurish fake. But Rocco knew there were other interested customers, especially people in the Bush administration looking for any scintilla of evidence linking Iraq to nuclear weapons.
Rocco hand-delivered the forged documents to MI6, British intelligence in London. That little caper gave Bush the opportunity to say in the 2003 State of the Union address, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The CIA is now blamed for those "16 words" that helped ignite an unnecessary war, but the real culprits are in the White House. When Pollari delivered the Niger dossier, he didn't take it to his U.S. counterpart, CIA director George Tenet.
No, he brought the forged papers to Stephen Hadley, then Rice's top deputy, who now heads the National Security Council. Why not sit down with the CIA and discuss the documents and their authenticity?
Rice had to know what was going on, but she'll start speaking the truth the day after hell freezes over. The whole uranium story was a colossal hoax Rice, Cheney and Bush used sell their war.
As least Rocco Martino admits a little of what he did. "It's true, I had a hand in the dissemination of those (forged Niger) documents," he told La Repubblica. "But I was duped. Both Americans and Italians were involved behind the scenes. It was a disinformation operation."
We know the Italian end of the lie operation. It's high time Bush, Cheney and Rice admitted theirs.
Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is gallaghernewsman@sbcglobal.net.
Live Well - Live Long in Italy OR Live Fast - Die Young in England?
--------------------------------------------------
Discussion of the differences between the
The Children’s Society is to set up an independent inquiry to look at all aspects of childhood amid growing concerns over the health and quality of childrens’ lives in the UK. Complex family structures and an overwhelming number of exams and assessments means that they’re filling their faces with junk food, spending hours alone in front of computer screens and suffering from stress. Their poor parents, meanwhile, seem oblivious to all this as they rush around trying to cram as much as possible into already overcrowded schedules.
It would seem our lives are now lived at breakneck pace with little time for some of the simpler pleasures. Being idle is a sin and slowing down practically unthinkable! The importance of paid work and the primacy of economic competitiveness, whatever the personal costs, is almost accepted wisdom in here in the UK.
Having just returned from an extended writing trip to Italy it has become obvious to me that the contrast in lifestyles between the two countries could not be greater. Sure, the Italians have their own problems and their share of stress but they do seem to have their priorities better thought out. The Italian government doesn’t need to trumpet family friendly policies or work life balance initiatives because the society instinctively values leisure time and knows what is important.
In Italy the extent to which the different generations mix with ease is also striking. The older members of the community sit around chatting whilst keeping a watchful eye on children playing in the square. At first glance these children seem to be running amok in a very unstructured manner. In reality their play is simple and unhurried while our own children seem stuck in their rooms, glued to shoot ‘em up games or else they are being frantically ferried around from one organised activity to another.
The importance of taking a few moments out of the day to sit down for a break is also important for Italians. A coffee stop is considered a virtual human right and there appears to be a national commitment to living life at an even pace. Meals can take hours to consume and lunch is a non-negotiable part of the Italian working day. The typical British schedule, however, leaves us guilt-ridden if we’re still for more than a few moments or if we leave our desks for a break. Sadly, frantic activity and full diaries have become the norm.
Visitors to Italy should also be aware of a social phenomenon which I have dubbed ‘The Italian Distraction’. Far from being unpleasant this social technique is, in fact, designed to force you to relax. I suspect it may even be some covert government initiative to preserve the quality of Italian life. The Italian Distraction invariably involves two people meeting by chance. There then follows a lengthy conversation about nothing in particular. A third or even a fourth person may join in. After a respectable amount of time a joint decision is invariably taken to continue the discussion over coffee, a glass of wine or perhaps a meal.
Thus, a five minute trip out for a pint of milk could take all morning. Italians do not seem to consider such time wasted - far from it - The Italian Distraction is an important part of daily life. Ultimately, any way of life is all about choices. Here in the UK we’d rather spend our spare time at home engrossed in DIY or consuming in huge shopping malls. The Italians would rather just wander out and about to see what emerges.
Obviously, I am generalising and there are exceptions to the rule. I have spoken to a number of young Italians who are educated and frustrated, seemingly unable to capitalise on their skills and academic qualifications. Some of these young people told me they wanted to come to the UK where they had heard there were rich pickings. ‘Was it true?’ they asked me. ‘Yes, it’s true. You will probably find a job and earn some decent money,’ I told them. I felt it only fair to point out the downside. ‘Rents and mortgages are high and the food is not only bad but also expensive. More importantly,’ I continued, ‘everything is incredibly hectic and you will probably be so busy commuting and working that you won’t have a life!
There will also be less time for your friends and you can forget lunch! The leisurely evening passeggiata with it’s slow stop for gelato or coffee will be replaced by the Great British Pub Crawl which involves liver numbing quantities of alcohol consumed within a staggeringly short time span. My anecdotal observations of British life seemed to be enough to discourage most I spoke to.
Sure, Italy has an underperforming economy, its fair share of corrupt politicians and the world’s most frustrating bureaucracy but it still possesses a fantastic quality of life and there are some things money just can’t buy. What’s the point working crazy hours, sacrificing your family and social life if you’re going to die before your time of a stress related disease due to over work?
It is no accident the Italians stay healthier for longer than we do. Maybe it is because they view their existence as a joyful jog rather than some crazy lone sprint where profits and short term efficiency gains are placed above anything else.
Henry Fonda - His Italian Connection
Henry Fonda was married five times. His marriage to Margaret Brooke Sullavan in 1931 soon ended in separation. In 1936, he married Frances Ford Seymour. They had two children: Peter and Jane. In 1950, Seymour committed suicide. In 1950, Fonda married Susan Blanchard, the stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II. Together, they adopted a daughter, Amy (born 1953), but divorced three years later, and in 1957 Fonda married Italian Countess Afdera Franchetti. They divorced in 1961. Soon after, Fonda married Shirlee Mae Adams and remained with her for seventeen years, until his death in 1982.
He appeared against type as the villain "Frank" in 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. . After turning down the role, he was talked into it by director Sergio Leone, who flew from Italy to the United States to persuade him to play the part.
The 1970s were the time of " disaster" movies. The first of these came in 1977 with the Italian killer octopus thriller Tentacoli (Tentacles) [RAA: I think I'm glad I missed that one:)]
------------------------------------------------------------
Henry Jaynes Fonda
BIOGRAPHY
Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was a highly acclaimed American film, stage and television actor, best known for his roles as plain-speaking idealists. Fonda's subtle, naturalistic acting style preceded by many years the popularization of Method acting. He was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including son Peter Fonda, daughter Jane Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda and grandson Troy Garity.
Fonda was born to William Brace Fonda and Herberta Jaynes. From his humble upbringing in a Nebraskan Christian Scientist family, Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor, and made his Hollywood debut in 1935. Fonda's career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance in 1940's The Grapes of Wrath, an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the 1930's Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a versatile career and a concrete screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men.
Later in his life, Fonda moved both toward more challenging and lighter roles in such epics as Once Upon a Time in the West and family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours. He earned a Tony nomination for his role in 1974's Clarence Darrow (having previously won a Tony in Mister Roberts in 1948), and finished his career with a critically-acclaimed performance in On Golden Pond in 1981, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Fonda was also honored with "Lifetime Achievement" Academy Awards, Golden Globes and Tony Awards. He died in 1982, leaving behind a legacy of classic performances, many of which are considered the finest examples of the "Golden Age of Hollywood."
Obit: Joseph Gallo, 87; Wine and Cheese Magnate
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Joseph Gallo, 87; California dairy magnate lost legal fight with his winemaker brothers
Gallo, who had been in declining health for several years after a stroke, died Saturday at his home in the San Joaquin Valley city of Livingston, announced his company, Joseph Gallo Farms. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for more than a decade, said John Whiting, his lawyer and close friend.
While managing Ernest and Julio Gallo's vineyards in Livingston, southeast of Modesto, for more than 20 years, Joseph accumulated his own holdings. By 1967, he had struck out on his own with a cattle ranch and vineyards. The first of his five dairies in Merced County followed in 1979.
After establishing a cheese-production company in 1982, he began selling the product to consumers under the label Joseph Gallo Cheese.
His older brothers sued him — claiming trademark infringement — and denounced the cheese as an inferior product that could damage the winery's reputation. The lawsuit also referred to him as an unknown cheese maker, and the charges infuriated him, Whiting said.
"I have only got one name," Joseph told reporters outside the courtroom in 1988. "I don't know how I'm supposed to look for another one."
The federal judge ruled that using the Gallo name confused consumers, leading them to think that the cheese was connected to the winery. He ordered the name changed on the package. Now sold under the Joseph Farms label, it is the largest-selling retail-brand cheese produced in California, according to the company.
Joseph countersued, arguing that his brothers had used their parents' estate to launch their E. & J. Gallo Winery in Modesto. He claimed that they owed him a third of the business, which had grown into one of the world's largest wine-making operations.
Dismissing the suit, the hearing judge lamented that the best witness — the Gallos' late father — "was out of the reach of the court's process," The Times reported in 1988.
The legal battle drove a permanent wedge between Joseph and the brothers who had raised him since the age of 13 after their parents died in a murder-suicide.
The Gallo family's history was documented in "Blood & Wine," a 1993 book by Ellen Hawkes that comes squarely down on Joseph's side in the legal feuding. She contends that the sibling tensions began soon after Joseph was born Sept. 11, 1919, in the Bay Area city of Antioch.
The youngest brother by almost 10 years, Joseph was not only their father's namesake but also his favorite child, Hawkes says. As such, he escaped the hard physical farm work that Ernest and Julio were forced to do as boys, and they may have resented him for that, she writes.
Their Italian immigrant parents had a stormy relationship that ended in 1933, when the senior Joseph killed his wife, the former Susie Bianco, and then turned the revolver on himself.
Six weeks after their parents died, Ernest and Julio invested $5,700 to form the E. & J. Gallo Winery, according to the 1988 story.
During high school and while attending Modesto Junior College, Joseph worked with his brothers to help establish the winery, according to Joseph Gallo Farms.
He entered the Army Air Forces during World War II, first serving as a gunnery instructor and then in the Philippines and Korea.
Upon returning in 1946, he became ranch manager for his brothers and had three children with his first wife. One son, Peter, was killed in action in the Vietnam War in 1968.
Joseph Gallo Farms traces its beginnings to the late 1940s, when Joseph began acquiring raw land and developing its grape-growing potential. He later expanded to growing other crops and raising cattle. The 4,000 acres of vineyards he amassed made him one of California's largest wine-grape growers, his family said.
In 1995, Successful Farming magazine recognized Joseph Gallo Farms in Atwater, just east of Livingston, as the nation's largest farm, according to the family. By then, he had more than 37,000 dairy animals and an operation that milked more than 17,000 cows.
He had an affinity for the outdoors — he liked to hunt and fish — and had established wetlands and wildlife programs on his property, his family said.
"He was a very optimistic person and very hard-working," said his son, Michael, who took over as chief executive officer of Joseph Gallo Farms when his father retired. "He believed in leadership by example and would literally work right alongside his employees."
In addition to Michael, Gallo's survivors include his wife of 41 years, Patricia; daughter Linda; stepson Sam Gardali; brother Ernest; and six grandchildren. His brother Julio died in 1993.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-gallo22feb22,0,217401.story?coll=la-home-obituaries
Thursday, February 22, 2007
US Alone Eats 3 Billion Pizza Pies a Year!!!! -Forbes Magazine
The hungry citizens of the United States eat 350 slices of pizza a second, or 400 acres (17.4 million square feet) per day. Don't even think of the geographical scale of a year's pizza!
As an industry in the U.S., pizza tops $30 billion. The country's 69,000 pizzerias make up 17% of all restaurants. The nation eats 3 billion pizzas in a year--that's pies, not slices; 93% of Americans eat at least one pizza per month. That's 23 pounds (including the toppings) of pizza a year.
------------------------------------------------
Pizza's Global Footprint
Forbes Magazine
Robert Malone
February 21, 2007
Pizza has gone global, and it is governed by a heavy commitment to contemporary logistics.
In India, one pizzeria manager, Pavan Bhatia, describes his Pizza Corner Domino Pizza store as "more a logistics company than food service, since supply chain management is the factor that differentiates the winners from the losers" in this business.
Bhatia's Pizza Corner store in New Delhi gets its potatoes from Canada, where it is shipped to ports in Mumbai and Delhi. Pizza Corner pepperoni comes from Australia, and jalapeno requirements are fulfilled from Spain. Cheese is sourced closer to home--from Bangalore. Pizza may be an Italian cuisine, but it is the last word in global supply chains.
The hungry citizens of the United States eat 350 slices of pizza a second, or 400 acres (17.4 million square feet) per day. Don't even think of the geographical scale of a year's pizza!
As an industry in the U.S., pizza tops $30 billion. The country's 69,000 pizzerias make up 17% of all restaurants. The nation eats 3 billion pizzas in a year--that's pies, not slices; 93% of Americans eat at least one pizza per month. That's 23 pounds (including the toppings) of pizza a year.
Americans' favorite topping is pepperoni (36% of all orders), and that means a lot of sausage must be transported. Other favorite toppings are mushrooms, extra cheese, green peppers and, of course, onions.
On the other hand, specialty or gourmet toppings are becoming popular regionally in the U.S. Some pies come with shrimp, chicken, artichoke hearts, eggplant, sprouts, crayfish--even duck and Canadian bacon.
Mozzarella cheese accounts for 30% of all pizza cheese, but other favorites include provolone, ricotta, parmesan and romano. The amount of cheese used runs into the hundreds of millions of pounds.
Pizza Hut, a part of Yum! Brands ($9.56 billion in sales 2006), is the world's largest pizzeria franchise. It has 34,000 outlets in over 100 countries (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Israel, Hong Kong and Serbia, to name but a few). The chain's most popular pizza is the deep-dish Pan Pizza. Each year, Pizza Hut uses 300 million pounds of cheese, 525 million pounds of tomatoes, and 200 million pounds of pepperoni, which, if sliced, would girdle the Earth twice and still have enough over to reach the moon.
Domino's Pizza has only 8,000 stores in 54 countries and sales of $4.6 billion. It is known for its development of centralized ingredient logistics systems.
One of these central logistics systems is PWC UAE Logistics. It works with Specialized Services Establishment and Domino's restaurants in Bahran, Qatar, Saudia Arabia and Jordan. An order fulfillment center is used to service these places.
"By creating a centralized order fulfillment center, we will be able to provide real-time response to all our GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council states] and Levant-based outfits," says Ibrahim Al-Jammaz, the managing director of Specialized Services Establishment.
The inbound logistics delivery of pizza ingredients involves the use of sea lane container ships, aircraft for specialty items, and trucks, trucks and more trucks for pizza deliveries.
Outbound logistics from stores all over the world make use of scooters, bikes, fleet-footed delivery boys and vans.
The last word: The first pizzeria in New York, according to Italian history, was John's on Bleeker Street. The son of the original owner drove a Lincoln whose license plate read, "NO SLICES."
http://www.forbes.com/logistics/2007/02/20/pizza-shipping-logistics-biz-logistics-cx_rm_0221pizza.html
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Prodi's Support for US Rejected - Submits Resignation
International journalists either are oblivious or have an agenda. Most reports focus on chaos in Italy.... again.
Whereas, the actual situation was that Prodi was elected with a razor thin majority in the Senate, (two votes), nine months ago, and already exceeded the time he was expected to face his first threat.
Yesterday Prodi was asking for Endorsement of TWO Pro AMERICAN Measures. (1) Allowing the increase in size of the US Air base in Vicenza, in northern Italy, and (2) the continued presence of 2,000 Italian troops in Afghanistan.
Italy was still seething from the disclosure of US showing little respect for Italian sovereignty and operating cavalierly in "renditions" (capturing anti -US suspects and flying them to countries permitting torture in interrogations), and then when Italy indicted 21 US agents, the US neither apologized and asked for waivers, but ignored the indictments.
The outcome was predictable. Prodi will be asked to form a new government, and a few portfolios will be changed.
Nothing to be concerned about. It is difficult for Americans to recognize that it is preferable for reassignment of portfolios frequently, to make many slight course changes, rather than the extreme course changes that the US suffers when there is a change of Administrations.
------------------------------------------------
Italian Prime Minister Resigns
The New York Times
By Ian Fisher
February 22, 2007
ROME, Feb. 21 — Italy’s fragile government snapped suddenly on Wednesday under the weight of its own internal divisions as well as a broader skepticism about the European role in the worldwide fight against terrorism.
Prime Minister Romano Prodi, in office just nine months, submitted his resignation on Wednesday evening after his ruling coalition lost a key vote on foreign policy in the Senate.
Two of his own far-left coalition members abstained amid tensions over whether Italy should continue to provide troops to Afghanistan and Mr. Prodi’s support of an expansion of an American military base in Vicenza, in northern Italy.
With only a razor-thin majority, the abstentions killed the measure, aimed at gaining Senate support for Italy’s foreign policy, and unexpectedly doomed the government.
“I can’t in any way give my vote to this government with this foreign policy,” said Fernando Rossi, a senator from the Italian Communist Party and one of the dissenters.
The vote came the same day Britain announced a substantial reduction of its troops in southern Iraq and a week after a European Parliamentary committee issued a strong report criticizing secret American flights in Europe of terror suspects.
But the government’s collapse also reflected its own inherent weaknesses, possibly signaling that Italy’s chronic political instability may be coming out of remission. In a nation that has had some 60 governments since World War II, Mr. Prodi has presided uneasily over a coalition of nine diverse parties, ranging from moderate Catholics to Communists.
“It’s very bad,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a professor at the University of Florence and expert in electoral law. “We still have to come to terms with a working political system. We do not have a working political system.”
There are many scenarios for what comes next — and one possibility, if not immediately likely, is a return to power of Silvio Berlusconi, whom Mr. Prodi defeated in elections last year.
As ministers met throughout the afternoon to discuss how to go forward, Mr. Berlusconi’s supporters rallied outside the seat of government, waving banners and demanding that the government step aside.
“The country has been exposed, by a majority that isn’t and by an incompetent government that has rejected parliamentary dialogue — a grave international humiliation,” Mr. Berlusconi told reporters.
For Mr. Berlusconi to return, new elections would have to be held, which at the moment seems several steps in the future.
After accepting Mr. Prodi’s resignation, President Giorgio Napolitano will begin on Thursday to consult with political parties and will ask one of them to try to form a government.
Many political experts believed that Mr. Prodi would be given a chance to shuffle his cabinet in a way that would satisfy the parties already in the government. Then he would call for a confidence vote in Parliament.
But many experts noted that such a government would remain weak, with the deep splits over Afghanistan and the American base unresolved.
“Something has broken,” said Franco Pavoncello, the president of John Cabot University here and a political scientist. “This vote and the reaction of the government has created damage to Prodi’s ability to last.”
In theory, the prime minister’s term lasts five years, but Mr. Berlusconi is the only prime minister to have endured that long.While the government’s weakness made it liable to fall at any moment, its collapse on Wednesday came as something of a surprise. For months the government has been bickering internally — and weathering attacks by Mr. Berlusconi and other opposition leaders — over issues ranging from the budget to a proposed law giving rights to unmarried couples.
But foreign policy remained a particular weak spot. Essentially, Mr. Prodi and his ministers have sought to walk a difficult line, echoing much of the skepticism in Europe about President Bush and the war in Iraq while maintaining Italy’s traditionally strong ties with America.
The government’s far-left members, however, have strongly resisted the presence of nearly 2,000 Italian troops in Afghanistan. And last weekend, tens of thousands of people rallied against the expansion of the American-staffed NATO base in Vicenza, which Mr. Prodi’s government reluctantly supported.
The splits grew deeper, and on Tuesday in Spain, Italy’s foreign minister, Massismo D’Alema, himself a former prime minister, called for the Senate to endorse Italy’s foreign policy. If it did not, he said, the government should “go home,” or step down.
In a long and impassioned speech before the vote on Wednesday, Mr. D’Alema defended his government’s position on Afghanistan and the Vicenza base, in terms that he hoped would win the left’s support.
“We have not supported the neo-conservative politics of the American administration and we have not sent soldiers to Iraq,” he told his colleagues. “There is a profound difference between the military operations in Afghanistan, approved by the United Nations, and those in Iraq.”
He added that the support of expanding the Vicenza base was essential to good relations with America. “To change course would be a hostile act against the United States,” he said.
In the end, the government needed 160 votes, but only got 158 with the two abstentions. Opposition senators roared at the result, shouting immediately: “Resign! Resign!”
Many experts said they believed Mr. D’Alema, one of the most powerful and experienced members of the government, would resign. And as Italy’s leaders search for a broader solution in the next few days, there are several alternatives to a mere shuffling of the current cabinet.
The most dramatic, and perhaps least likely, is that Mr. Napolitano could call immediate elections. But he has said he will not do so until the current electoral law, instated by Mr. Berlusconi last year, is changed. Many experts blame the law for virtually guaranteeing a thin majority in the Senate no matter who wins, and thus destabilizing the political system.
Another option is the appointment of a temporary government made up of largely centrist technocrats. The aim would be to steer Italy toward new elections, most likely engineering a change to electoral laws first.
A final possibility involves peeling off the more Centrist Union of Christian Democrats, a party long allied, if uneasily, with Mr. Berlusconi. Even as the government tottered on Wednesday, one party leader, Marco Follini, seemed to raise the possibility. “The moment has arrived to put into the pipeline a different center-left,” he told reporters.
But Mr. D’Alimonte noted that the party does not have enough seats to allow Mr. Prodi to cast off the rebellious far-left of his own party. Simply adding on Mr. Follini’s party to give Mr. Prodi a larger majority in Parliament also remained a possibility, although Mr. D’Alimonte noted that it also seemed a recipe for even deeper disputes, since the party shares little politically with the Communists who brought down the government.
Peter Kiefer contributed reporting.
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italian Ethnic Pride Turns "Garry" Back to "Giarraputo"
The national "political flip flop" from "Assimilation" to "Diversity" in the early 70s, that launched Ethnic Studies for "minorities" to instill Pride, left Americans of Euro Ethnicity in a void.
A "mere" American with NO Ethnic "connection" began feeling like an "orphan". And as long as other Ethnicities continue to foster that Ethnic Pride, the Italian Communities failure to provide Italian Studies programs will "short change" it's younger generation.
The "mere" study of the Italian Language is Not enough. And as touching the story below is, the "mere" changing of the family surname is neither not enough.Foster Italian and Italian American Studies in your Schools and your Community!!!!
Below: Giarraputo became Garry after the father was told he wouldn't advance in the insurance business with an Italian name, when Italian-Americans were the most numerical victims of ethnic intolerance.
When the kids discovered their "roots", they were enthralled with the idea of reclaiming their original surname.
But Dr. Garry -- was on the fence, even in these supposedly advanced years, with the concern about the effect his "Italian" surname would have on his medical practice.
-----------------------------------------
Ethnic pride leads family to reassume real surname
Courier Post Cherry Hill,NJ,USAChristina Mitchell Ties That Bind February 20. 2007
When fourth-grader Ryan Garry embarked on a school project about his ethnic heritage, he was at a loss: There wasn't a lot of information on the surname Garry.
But when he looked up his dad's original surname, Giarraputo, Ryan hit the jackpot.
That school project one year ago renewed a discussion between Ryan's parents, Gibbsboro psychiatrist Dr. Leonard Garry, and his wife, Linda, about reclaiming the original surname.
Garry's father, also Leonard, had changed his name to Garry decades ago, after being told he wouldn't advance in the insurance business with a name like Giarraputo.
"The kids knew the history already," says Giarraputo, a father of four who lives in Medford. "They were enthralled with the idea of regaining it."
But the doctor -- whose aunts, uncles and cousins had kept the name Giarraputo -- was on the fence, concerned about the effect on his medical practice.
"There was a lot of thought that went into this," says Linda Giarraputo, who first discussed the name change with her husband when they married in 1991.
"For me, personally, and for my children, it was a no-brainer. But for Len, it wasn't that easy."
"I had a couple of sleepless nights," her husband adds. "But I thought about it for a while and it really seemed like the right thing to do."
Three months of paperwork and a couple of trips to Motor Vehicles later, the Garrys officially became the Giarraputos in October. The doctor's patients were fine with the change, but, just in case, he still answers to Dr. Garry or just "Dr. G."
Giarraputo's daughter Brianna Rose, 9, was thrilled the name translated to "wild rose," while the youngest, 6-year-old Megan, still is grappling with the spelling. The Giarraputos also have a 13-year-old daughter, Amanda.
In the end, the change has been a lesson in how things used to be -- when Italian-Americans were among victims of ethnic intolerance -- and, in a sense, how they still are, given the current anti-immigrant mood of the country.
"I'm sensitized to the effect of change as a mental health issue," says Giarraputo, 42. "And I liked that it sensitized our kids.
"This isn't about wanting to become Italian again. We love being Americans. And it's because of where we live that we were able to do this."
Linda Giarraputo believes her children learned a priceless lesson. "It's OK to be who you are in this day and age," she adds. "You can be proud of it."
For Giarraputo's father, the original name change "wasn't an easy decision," says his son.
"But it was the right decision for the time," Giarraputo adds. "And now there's a sense of pride in my being able to take the name back."
Giarraputo's relatives recently researched the family ancestry and discovered most of the clan settled in either New York or Texas. Giarraputo was born in Queens, N.Y., but moved to Cherry Hill as a toddler.
"It's a neat feeling of reconnection with the family," says Giarraputo, who recently received a note from his Uncle Frank that read, "Welcome back to the fold."
Ties That Bind is a weekly column about families.
If you have a story to tell, contact Christina Mitchell at (856) 317-7905 or cmitchellat courierpostonline.com.
http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070220/COLUMNISTS09/702200312/1004/LIVING
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italy's Health Threatened by "Americanization"
It's a paradox that Italy, the country of the Mediterranean Diet, being pushed hard by Nutritionists in America, needs to introduce nutritional guidance because of advertising, consumerism and the hurry people are in, brought about by the American Influence.
-----------------------------------------
La Dolce Vita: Italians Troppo for Tutti Fruitti
The Age
Queensland, Australia
Tom Kington, RomeFebruary 21, 2007
LONG revered as models of healthy living and eating, Italians are abandoning the fruit and vegetable-based Mediterranean diet in favour of soft drinks, cigarettes and deep-fried food, and are paying for it with their lives.
Italy's Health Ministry is planning to send emergency rations of fruit into schools, hospitals and offices after research revealed Italians are dying in their droves from diseases linked to alcohol, smoking and processed food.
Southern regions around Naples are worst hit, said Walter Ricciardi of Rome's Catholic University, the author of one study.
"Bad food and smoking in the south is pushing the level of diabetes above the national average, while the south is also catching up with the north on tumours."
Unveiling a series of health initiatives, Health Minister Livia Turco said "killer" ailments linked to poor lifestyle, including heart disease, tumours, diabetes and respiratory disease, were implicated in nine out of 10 deaths in Italy.
"Rising obesity and weight problems, a return to smoking, rising juvenile alcoholism, bad diet and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle are now general tendencies," she said, noting that 41 per cent of Italians undertake no physical activity. Obesity levels have risen to 9 per cent.
Ms Turco's action plan includes promoting health education in schools, reducing the price of fresh vegetables and encouraging the sale of fruit from vending machines in schools, factories and offices.
"During a recent visit to China the minister was impressed by the fruit set out as a snack during government meetings, rather than the biscuits served in Rome," said a Health Ministry spokesman.
Ms Turco said: "It's a paradox that the country of the Mediterranean diet needs to introduce nutritional guidance because of advertising, consumerism and the hurry people are in."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/la-dolce-vita-italians-troppo-for-tutti-frutti/2007/02/20/1171733762817.html
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Cracking The Spaghetti Sauce Code
I have often heard heated arguments at our Family get togethers on Sauce vs Gravy, But Never a Discussion on how to make the best "Sauce". That was usually a sacred family secret, that Momma only shared on her "death bed".
The making of the Sauce is an ART not Science, AND the Formula is one of of Adaptation, of Nostalgia, of Comfort.
The Nostalgia, was jogged by using many of the same Spices (oregano, basil, roasted pepper, lots of parsley) meant to Remind one of the Joys of Dinners with the extended Family in the Home Country,
The Adaptations were simply practical. As one of many, using tomato paste, for example, was a way to make the watery tomatoes in the United States taste more like the thick-fleshed kind that grew in Italy.
But even in the different Regions and even Towns of Italy there was adaptation by incorporating those ingredients that were unique, or even abundant to that area, and therefore made it "special".
The author recounts an hilarious and touching account of her trying to get the "Sauce" recipe "perfecto", and not being thwarted by "secrecy", but more by her mother's "adaptability".
The article at the New York Times offers:
Multi Media Slide Show: How to Make Italian Meatballs
Recipe: Italian Meatballs
Recipe: Zappa Family Spaghetti Sauce
------------------------------------------
Thanks to Pat Gabriele
A Grandchild of Italy Cracks the Spaghetti Code
writePost();
The New York Times
By Kim (Zappa) Severson
February 21, 2007
MY Italian is so bad I have a hard time pronouncing gnocchi, but I grew up hearing enough of it to know when I’m being yelled at. And that’s definitely what was happening at a table in a small roadside restaurant in Abruzzi.
I had driven through the Italian mountains with an interpreter to find Ateleta, the village where my grandmother Floriana Ranallo Zappa grew up. I had come in search of a recipe. Or more precisely, the evolution of a recipe.
For reasons I couldn’t put together until recently, I had been obsessed with tracking a path that began in my grandmother’s village and ended with the pot of red sauce that simmers on my stove on Sunday afternoons.
I ended up on the red sauce trail largely because I don’t have a hometown. My parents were dutiful players in the great corporate migrations of the 1960s and ’70s. My dad worked for the Uniroyal Tire Company. His rise through the ranks of midlevel management required a series of moves, which were always euphemistically presented to the children as “transfers.”
The company sent us from Wisconsin to California to Michigan to Texas and then back to Michigan, where I finally got off the family train and went to college.
Through all that moving, the one constant was my mother’s spaghetti sauce. As soon as we got the kitchen shelf paper laid and she figured out where the grocery store was, she made the sauce. It meant this was home, and that first plate of spaghetti and meatballs made us all feel as if everything was going to be O.K.
Now, with several more states’ worth of my own transfers behind me, the first thing I cook in a new kitchen is a big pot of sauce. When my siblings and I visit each other, spaghetti is on the menu.
I wanted to know where the recipe came from. And in a way, where I came from. So I became a culinary detective.
But back in the Italian village where it all supposedly began, things weren’t going so great. I was sitting with the closest relative I could find, Filomena Sciullo Ranallo, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. We were at a table at La Bottega dell’Arte Salata, the small rosticceria my distant cousins run. They were thrilled each time one of the American relatives came to visit, explaining with great pride how Madonna had tried to find her relatives at a nearby village a few years ago and failed. But not you, they told me. You are luckier than Madonna.
I was trying to write down recipes when the old woman grabbed my arm, shaking it hard. Why didn’t I speak any Italian? And even worse, why did I think oregano had any place in tomato sauce?
Well, because my mother put oregano in her sauce. But oregano, like the meatballs I add to the pot, was only one of the twists and turns the recipe had taken during nearly a century in America.
In fact, it turns out that there is no single iconic red sauce in my grandmother’s village. There are sauces with lamb, an animal the village organizes an entire festival around. There are sauces with only tomato and basil, sauces just for the lasagna and sauces just for grilled meats. Small meatballs might go in a broth, but never in sauce for pasta.
In fact, only two things in the village reminded me of anything I grew up with. The fat pork sausages were cooked and served the same way, and my Italian cousins looked just like my brothers.
To understand why I made my sauce the way I did, I needed to start closer to home, with my mother. She has been making spaghetti sauce for almost 60 years, from a recipe she learned from her mother, who had been making it with American ingredients since the early 1900s.
My grandmother had been shipped to America, literally and largely against her will, to marry an Italian named John Zappa. He ran a dairy farm in a little town called Cumberland in northwest Wisconsin. She was still a teenager, illiterate even in Italian. To the day she died, Grandma Zap spoke only enough English to communicate the most basic things to her bored American grandchildren, of which I was one.
In between, she raised 11 children. My mother, Anne Marie, was the second-youngest.
Among my four siblings, how mom makes her sauce has been a constant source of discussion. We’re all decent cooks, but none of us can get it just right. When does she put in the paste? Is a little bit of roasted pepper essential? Do you need to use oregano in the meatballs?
This is a problem my cousins have, too. Sharon Herman still lives in Cumberland, not far from the Zappa family dairy farm. Her mother (my aunt and godmother, the late Philomena DeGidio) was one of the oldest of the Zappa girls and was considered the best sauce maker. My cousin has lived for years under the cloud of never having mastered the master’s sauce.
“I could never figure it out,” Cousin Sharon told me. “I even took her little hand once and made her measure out all the spices like she did and put them in measuring spoons to try to get the exact amounts. It still didn’t taste right.”
The master’s secret, perhaps, was that she ran a can of carrots, a couple of celery stalks and the onion and garlic through a blender and then put the mixture in the sauce. My mother doesn’t do this. The master also put in the tomato paste at the end. My mother prefers to brown the meatballs and ribs first and then deglaze the pan with the paste.
Getting a recipe out of my mother is like trying to get a 4-year-old to explain what happened at day care. She’s not one of those annoying and cagey matrons of the kitchen who build their power by dangling the promise of a secret ingredient that will never be revealed. She just cooks by hand, so she’s never really able to articulate every step.
She can tell you to make sure the meatballs are well browned. (“Don’t put those white meatballs into that sauce!” she’ll warn.) And she can give you tips on the all-important step called “fixing the sauce” — tasting it toward the end and adding a little red wine vinegar or maybe, in a pinch, a handful of Parmesan cheese to smooth out the flavor.
But an exact recipe? Not so much. For example, thin-skinned Italian peppers were always around the farmhouse she grew up in, so she likes to use some kind of pepper to give the sauce what she calls “homemade flavor.” She often just uses pickled peperoncini from a jar, which I do, too. Once, when I was out of them, I called to see if she had a substitute. She suggested green bell peppers.
“But I never put in green peppers,” I told her.
“Well, if you had one you would,” she said. “But don’t go out of your way. It doesn’t make that much difference.”
O.K., Mom. Let’s focus.
“When do you put the chicken thighs in?” I asked another time.
“Oh, honey, I never use chicken thighs.”
“But last time I was home, the sauce had chicken thighs.”
“Huh — that’s funny,” she said. “I guess I must have had some in the freezer.”
These are maddening conversations, but I think they will go on until the day she makes her last pot.
If anything, her sauce, like her mother’s sauce, and the sauces from the home village of Ateleta, are about making do. Well-browned meat is the key, but you use the meat you have.
Once my grandmother made it to America, there was plenty of meat around. So her sauce became an American version of three-meat ragщ, a dish not uncommon in parts of Abruzzi. They would butcher their own hogs and fatten up a few of the dairy cows, so the sauce often simmered with a piece of neck bone or tail or even a steak from a shoulder blade.
My mother, who lived through elementary school without a refrigerator, was often dispatched to the cellar to scrape two inches of sealing grease off the top of a crock and return to the kitchen with preserved sausages and pork ribs for the sauce.
Mom happily left the farm and married Jim Severson, whose roots are in Norway. My father will never turn down a piece of lefse, the flat bread of his people, but he can still catalog the distinct tastes of almost every Zappa sister’s sauce.
As he moved my mom around the country, she fell in love with convenience foods and the big, clean supermarkets of the suburbs. She no longer had to can tomatoes or dry basil and parsley on cookie sheets. And all the meat came on those nice, clean plastic trays.
Mom even took to using something food manufacturers call “Italian seasoning.” But she’ll also use a mix of about three parts dried basil to one part dried oregano. My grandmother never used oregano; just lots of parsley and basil. But all the Zappa daughters did.
I was stumped about why the family sauce ended up heavy with oregano and meat. So I called Lidia Bastianich, the New York chef who has written much about the transfer of Italian food to America.
“This is a cuisine of adaptation, of nostalgia, of comfort,” she said. By overemphasizing some of the seasonings Italian immigrants brought from home, they could more easily conjure it up. And sometimes the adaptations were simply practical. Using tomato paste, for example, was a way to make the watery tomatoes in the United States taste more like the thick-fleshed kind that grew in Italy.
My family’s serving style is to pile the pork and beef and meatballs onto a big platter of spaghetti, sometimes with sausage. That mountain of meat might be a homage to my grandmother, who found such abundance when she arrived. Or maybe she was just overwhelmed: on a farm with no refrigerator, not a lot of money and 11 children, she didn’t have time for a separate meat and pasta course.
As hard as my mother tried to get off the farm, I am trying just as hard to get back. Like her, I use spareribs and a nice, fatty piece of beef. I try to buy them from local farmers who raise their animals outdoors on pasture and sell them for prices that make my mother shake her head. I would give anything to have a crock of sausage under a layer of pork fat in the cellar.
I use fresh basil and fresh bread crumbs instead of Progresso in my meatballs, but I still stick to dried basil and oregano in the sauce. My canned tomatoes come from Italy, even though my mother thinks Contadina or Hunt’s is just fine.
It never tastes just like hers, but I keep trying. And maybe that’s the problem. Perhaps I’m too fixated on my fancy-pants ingredients. Or perhaps it’s just a psychological quirk of the kitchen. The one that makes you think nothing ever tastes as good as your mother’s.
Around Thanksgiving, my parents moved into a small condominium and were going to sell the family dining table. Instead, I arranged to have it shipped from Colorado, where they live now. It’s a little too big for my Brooklyn brownstone, and it’s not an antique or even an heirloom. My mother bought it during one of our many transfers simply because she needed a bigger table.
But it is the table I grew up with. I have eaten hundreds of plates of spaghetti on it. I feel the need to keep it, to pass it on to one of my nieces or nephews. I want to say, “This was your grandmother’s table.”
And then I will make them sit down and eat spaghetti, and tell them the story of the red sauce trail.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/dining/21sauce.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Dana Gioia Saved NEA from Itself, Kept it Alive, Now Flourishing
Dana Gioia, a former marketing manager for the desserts division of General Foods, with "Jell-O Jigglers" one of his big successes before he left the corporate life in 1992 to write full time, mostly poetry and music criticism, and become a highly regarded poet.
When Gioia was drafted to be Chairman of the NEA in 2003, the NEA Board had previously emphasized Exhibits, and felt that Art was an effective tool for Radical Politics, with the apparant theory that the more Controversial, the greater the effect and the audience. It was a very narrow view, with a very limited positive effect on the Arts nationwide.
The Right was frothing at the mouth and monthly were introducing bills for the NEA 's abolishment. The Left was hoping for his failure, because they wanted anything that Bush was involved with to fail.
A decade after Congress was on the verge of killing the agency, the NEA's most recent budget was readily approved on a voice vote, with no dissents.
Gioia has single-handedly reversed that course, he has had a profound effect on the NEA, converting the once-beleaguered federal program into the nation's main engine for integrating arts and education.
Gioa has accomplished this by redirecting the agency toward rebuilding the nation's arts infrastructure by sponsoring research into arts and reading habits, and helping arts organizations become more integrated with and vital to their own communities while creating a broad consumer market for the arts.
He has conceived or backed such NEA innovations as sending theater and opera troupes to military bases; creating a national network of acting companies to perform Shakespeare to expose more people to the work and give actors jobs; helping support the Big Read, a program building on the trend of communities reading and discussing a single literary work; and sponsoring Poetry Out Loud, aimed at getting high schoolers to connect with poetry.
Less visibly, Gioia has ensured that the NEA awards at least one grant a year in each congressional district.
Such a sensible and productive program.
His pitch for the arts has kept NEA alive
Dana Gioia has made education programs the top priority for the once-embattled agency.
Los Angeles Times
By Scott MartelleTimes Staff WriterFebruary 19, 2007From West 111th Street, Lennox's Moffett Elementary School could be mistaken for an underground military weapons depot. A driveway passes through a gray metal fence, then curls up onto the paved roof of the building. At the southwest side, broad brick stairs funnel pedestrians to the school doors, and grassy earth is banked up against the southeast wall, forming yet another fortress in a neighborhood of bungalows behind forbidding fences and grated windows.Dana Gioia, 56, grew up a few blocks from here in Hawthorne, and he has returned from Washington, D.C., for a few hours to do something he does well: sell.Gioia, a highly regarded poet and former marketing manager for the desserts division of General Foods, is just a few weeks into his second term as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. "Jell-O Jigglers" was one of his big successes before he left the corporate life in 1992 to write full time, mostly poetry and music criticism.Now Gioia sells the arts, a gig he says he initially didn't want when first approached more than four years ago."I was a writer. I was very successful. I was living in California," Gioia told about 40 people gathered for a grant-seeking workshop at Moffett, a site selected in part for its innovative arts-based education programs. "I had no interest in going into politics or going to Washington. But I saw a trend across the United States that scared me."The trend: the erosion of arts education from the nation's public schools.Though no one claims that Gioia has single-handedly reversed that course, he has had a profound effect on the NEA, converting the once-beleaguered federal program into the nation's main engine for integrating arts and education.It's a remarkable turnaround for an agency whose mere name was once enough to get Newt Gingrich and other social conservatives foaming at the mouth. Controversial exhibits, including Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs and Andres Serrano's picture of a plastic crucified Christ in a jar of urine, made the NEA the central battleground in the 1990s culture wars."The most important thing for the NEA was to bring it outside politics and to refuse the polarization that the critics had imposed on the agency," Gioia said, sipping a Beck's beer from a glass in a Marina del Rey hotel a few hours after his Moffett school appearance and visits to the Torrance Cultural Arts Center and L.A. Theatre Works.For Madeline Puzo, dean of USC's theater school and a former NEA consultant, the key questions raised by the assaults on the NEA remain unanswered."In a democracy, what is the role of the arts and what is the role of the government with the arts?" Puzo said. "There was support for the arts from those political and religious institutions. We haven't figured that out."But she believes "one has to credit Dana Gioia for managing to not only help [the NEA] survive, but to grow a bit."A decade after Congress was on the verge of killing the agency, the NEA's most recent budget was readily approved on a voice vote. "We let our critics dictate the public conversation about the arts endowment and government funding — then you're always reacting," Gioia said about the earlier NEA controversies."It seemed to me that we had to take an active role in creating the public conversation that would lead to productive change in society. You don't do this by venting opinions. You do this by figuring out what should be done, and what works."Stepping into the frayWhen Gioia was drafted to take over the agency in 2003, the bullets were flying from all directions."Both the left and the right would have been happy for me to fail for different reasons," Gioia said. "The right — when I came to Washington, every month there were about 125 members of Congress who voted to abolish the NEA. They were constantly shooting warning shots across the bow. And I think the left would have loved to see any of the [Bush] administration's efforts fail, just to prove that it wasn't working."Gioia, taking Franklin D. Roosevelt's Depression-era Works Progress Administration as his inspiration, decided to redirect the agency toward rebuilding the nation's arts infrastructure by sponsoring research into arts and reading habits, and helping arts organizations become more integrated with and vital to their own communities while creating a broad consumer market for the arts.He has conceived or backed such NEA innovations as sending theater and opera troupes to military bases; creating a national network of acting companies to perform Shakespeare to expose more people to the work and give actors jobs; helping support the Big Read, a program building on the trend of communities reading and discussing a single literary work; and sponsoring Poetry Out Loud, aimed at getting high schoolers to connect with poetry.Less visibly, Gioia has ensured that the NEA awards at least one grant a year in each congressional district, under his belief that arts support should be spread as widely as possible."When I got there, 22% of the U.S. never got a grant," Gioia said. "You're talking about 70 million people."Spreading the grants around also has the politically pragmatic effect of giving the agency a support base in every congressional district."You're in a lot better position to face controversy if you've got grants going to districts throughout the U.S.," said Jonathan Katz, chief executive of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. "The context has been redefined.... You can have conversations [with congressional critics] and say, 'Yeah, we fund the range. We fund what your folks and constituents have requested that we fund.' "Still, such initiatives take their own large slices of the NEA's shrunken pie."Expanding these kinds of programs could mean less money for other kinds of programs," said Bob Lynch, president of the Americans for the Arts advocacy group. "Everything like that is a choice. His emphasis and his hope is to create a broader visibility for both the arts and the NEA," which Gioia believes "translates into a broader consumer market."Though some of the turnaround began under one of Gioia's predecessors, Bill Ivey (1998-2001), Gioia's efforts to mend political fences in Washington and make the NEA more integral in promoting the arts across the nation has taken the NEA out of the social conservatives' woodshed."He's been pretty systematic in the way he's gone about doing that," said Doug McLellan, a Seattle-based arts writer and editor of ArtsJournal.com. "It's no longer the political hot button it once was. That's partly the changing political climate, but he has certainly contributed to it by making it an institution that's difficult to argue with."The cost? A certain homogenization. "They're not on the cutting edge," McLellan said. The benefit? Even Democrats like him."I really think he's a star in this administration," Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), a harsh White House critic, said as she introduced Gioia to the grant seekers at Moffett Elementary this month.Over the last four years, Gioia has overseen a fundamental change in the way the NEA works. The terms were dictated in part by the Republican-led Congress, which in 1996 effectively gutted the NEA with the acquiescence of the Clinton administration after Congress threatened to shutter the agency altogether. A budget that peaked at $175 million in 1992 was slashed to $99.5 million, and 40% of that was set aside as block grants for states. Direct grants to artists were eliminated.Funding since then has slowly climbed to $124.4 million in the current fiscal year, and President Bush's budget proposal sent to Congress recently would hike the budget to $128.4 million. Direct artist grants are still banned. Though private groups such as the Warhol Foundation have sought to try to pick up some of that slack, the net effect for the NEA was its removal from the battlefield of the culture wars."I don't believe the arts are about right or left," Gioia said. "If we want to create the communities we want to live in, and if we want our schools to produce the best educations for our children, we need the arts. This is not a partisan issue. This is civic common sense."scott.martelle@latimes.com
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-gioia19feb19,0,7193110.story?coll=cl-calendar
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
65 th Anniversary of "Day of Remembrance"- Executive Order 9066
On February 19, 1942 President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066- the document that made it possible to intern thousands of Italian, German and Japanese Americans, and even Italian, German and Japanese Latin Americans during World War II.
The article below written to pander to Japanese Americans, hardly mentions the Italian and German Americans.
600,000 Italian Americans, 300,000 German Americans, and 120,000 Japanese Americans were declared Enemy Aliens during WWII , and were to subject to Registration, Internment, Relocation,(and fire sale of homes) Confiscation of property, such as Fishing Boats, Curfews, (resulting in loss of Jobs requiring night work such as Restaurants), Restrictions fromCertain Types of Employment, No possession of Radios, Flashlights, and further endless list of prohibitions.
The Italian Americans were by Number MOST greatly impacted, and one could argue that even Otherwise, economically, and freedom wise, were more greatly impacted.
The Internment Camps were Housing Centers that had the highest live-birth rate and the lowest death rate in wartime United States. The Japanese in the centers "received free food, lodging, medical and dental care, clothing allowance, education, hospital care, social programs and all basic necessities. . . . The government even paid travel expenses and assisted in cases of emergency relief." Additionally, 4,300 students of Japanese ancestry received scholarships to attend more than 500 colleges and universities located outside of the exclusionary zone.
What kind of life was it for an Italian when he could NOT get a job, pay the rent, and feed his family?
The Internment Camps in comparison seemed like a "free' ride.
No, they were not Resort Hotels, they were Military Barracks that US Military are required to live in, when they are not in tents, "improvised" housing, or fox holes. Nor were they "Homeless"
The Japanese seem to have to keep up this "drumbeat" to counter the public's negative feelings about Japan's "Sneak Attack on Pearl Harbor" , and the incredible number of unspeakable atrocities committed by the Japanese Military, i.e "The Bataan Death March" , "The Rape of Nanking"
For the Japanese Americans to scream that racial prejudice was the basis of Enemy Alien treatment, is to ignore:
(1)The far greater numbers of Italians and Germans "Restricted",
(2) That Italy or Germany did Not commit a "Sneak Attack" on Pearl Harbor, or ANY other American territory, and (3) There was no fear of Italy or Germany invading either of our coasts, while Japanese Submarines were Shelling
Oil Refineries and unleashing Fire Balloons on the West Coast, that had the US Population in a lather.
Further, the Japanese Americans received an APOLOGY and REIMBURSEMENT as far back as 1988, while the Italian and German Americans were still trying to get Documents Declassified. Why the "selectivity", the "discrimination"?
After persistent efforts, the Italian Americans were able to get the Documents declassified, and a Justice Department Report written, But NO Apology, nor NO Reimbursement or Restitution!!!!!!!!
It makes me angriest when some self consumed Japanese American states: "The US would NEVER have done the same to the Italian Americans. They had Joe DiMaggio"
They DID Do it to ITALIAN Americans, in far Greater Numbers, AND they Did it to Joe DiMaggio's parents, who were prevented from going near their Restaurant on the San Francisco Wharf, and had to relocate from their Home, ALL while "Slugging" Joe DiMaggio was in the US Military.
One of the best stories is about how the US required a 93 year old BED RIDDEN Italian American to be taken from his home in the "Forbidden Zone" on a "stretcher" to a place further inland where he would not pose so great a Threat!!!! :) :(
I do not rejoice in, nor approve of the treatment of the Japanese Americans, BUT I highly resent their almost complete excluding of Italians Americans from discussion of the WWII Enemy Alien Treatment. It is Self Centered, Selfish, and Distorted.
Their efforts could better be spent on showing their solidarity with Muslims who are now having their Civil Rights violated, with "profiling", arbitrary detentions, and often coercive treatment.
The best tribute to PAST injustices to You, is to dedicating yourself to Defending Others from Injustices Now!!!!!
See: Una Storia Segreta by Lawrence DiStasi
http://hcom.csumb.edu/segreta/
See: The Censored History of Internment by Joseph E. Fallon
http://www.foitimes.com/internment/fallon2.htm
See: German and Italian Americans Under Siege during World War II
http://fear-itself.com/faq.htm
Justice for the Forgotten Internees
Washington Post
By Xavier Becerra and Dan LungrenMonday, February 19, 2007
Art Shibayama is an American who served in the Army during the Korean War. Like many veterans, Cpl. Shibayama was not born in the United States. He was born in Lima, Peru, to Japanese Peruvian parents. Until 1942, Shibayama, his two brothers and three sisters lived comfortably with their parents and grandparents, all of whom had thriving businesses. However, after America entered World War II, his family was forcibly removed from Peru, transported to the United States and held in a government-run internment camp in Crystal City, Tex.
Like many Japanese American families, Shibayama's family lost everything they owned. But the greater injustice occurred when his grandparents were sent to Japan in exchange for American prisoners of war. Their family never saw them again.
Shibayama and his family were among the estimated 2,300 people of Japanese descent from 13 Latin American countries who were taken from their homes and forcibly transported to the Crystal City camp during World War II. The U.S. government orchestrated and financed the deportation of Japanese Latin Americans for use in prisoner-of-war exchanges with Japan. Eight hundred people were sent across the Pacific, while the remaining Japanese Latin Americans were held in camps without due process until after the war ended.
Further study of the events surrounding the deportation and incarceration of Japanese Latin Americans is merited and necessary. While most Americans are aware of the internment of Japanese Americans, few know about U.S. government activities in other countries that were fueled by prejudice against people of Japanese ancestry.
That is why we have introduced H.R. 662, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent Act. We should review U.S. military and State Department directives requiring the relocation, detention and deportation of Japanese Latin Americans to Axis countries. Then we should recommend appropriate remedies. It is the right thing to do to affirm our commitment to democracy and the rule of law.
This year marks the 26th anniversary of the formation of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, whose findings led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. It provided an official apology and financial redress to most of the Japanese Americans who were subjected to wrongdoing and confined in camps during World War II. Those loyal Americans were vindicated by the fact that not a single documented case of sabotage or espionage was committed by a Japanese American during that time. This act was the culmination of a half-century of struggle to bring justice to those who were denied it. But work to rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our nation's history remains unfinished.
U.S. involvement in the expulsion and internment of people of Japanese descent who lived in various Latin American countries is thoroughly recorded in government files. These civilians were robbed of their freedom -- their civil and human rights thrown by the wayside -- as they were kidnapped from nations not directly involved in World War II. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians acknowledged these federal actions in detaining and interning civilians of enemy or foreign nationality, particularly those of Japanese ancestry, but the commission failed to fully examine and report on the historical documents that exist in distant archives.
Today, the Day of Remembrance, marks the anniversary of the 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066 -- the document that made it possible to intern thousands of Japanese Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans and Japanese Latin Americans during World War II. Though it is important that we remember what took place, it is more critical that we act, for justice delayed is justice denied. And for the dwindling number of surviving internees who became Americans, such as Cpl. Art Shibayama, justice has been delayed far too long. They deserve our attention, our respect and the official recognition of a country that is willing to heal and to make amends.
Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, and Dan Lungren, a Republican, are U.S. representatives from California.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/18/AR2007021800906.html
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
"Little Italy" in San Diego has the Charm of the Old Country
Though neighborhood is small, it's big on dining and shopping
Dallas Morning News By ERIC NOLAND / Los Angeles Daily News Sunday, February 18, 2007
SAN DIEGO – Late on this Saturday morning, the three older men had commandeered wire-mesh chairs on the sidewalk in front of Pete's Quality Meat and arranged them to face the street, presumably so they could bask in the sun and take in the scene.
They chatted in Italian, laughed a great deal and didn't seem in any hurry to go anywhere.
From the doorway behind them wafted delectable scents of grilling sausage and frying peppers and onions. Next door, the candy-stripe pole of the barber shop turned slowly; both chairs were occupied.
It might be startling to hear that this scene, right out of Rome, was playing out on a downtown street in San Diego.
A Little Italy district here? It's true. And this neighborhood is as richly ethnic as Boston's North End or New York's Mulberry Street. It has existed since the 1920s, fueled by San Diego's once-robust tuna-fishing fleet.
"It was a quaint little community," said Danny Moceri, general manager of Filippi's Pizza Grotto, the oldest Italian business in the neighborhood, begun by his grandparents as a grocery store in 1950. "From the bay up, it was all Italians and Portuguese. It was so much like Italy."
The idyll was shattered in the late 1950s and early 1960s when San Diego's Crosstown Freeway, today known as Interstate 5, cut the neighborhood in half, sealing off walking lanes with a massive, elevated concrete thoroughfare. This was followed by a body blow: The tuna-fishing industry went into a period of decline.
Families began moving out. Businesses closed. And the neighborhood descended into blight.
A rebound began 15 years ago, however. Antiques stores and furniture boutiques moved in. Former fisherman's cottages were turned into shops or offices. Restaurants opened and cordoned off parts of the sidewalks for outdoor seating. High-rise condos began to sprout, this being prime real estate on the north edge of downtown.
Now a revitalized Little Italy is one of the most popular hangouts in the city, both day and night, as the parking crunch will attest.
Much of the neighborhood's appeal derives from its authenticity. The city didn't completely evacuate the neighborhood before redeveloping it. So amid the cafes and art galleries are radiator repair shops, dry cleaners and little grocery stores selling homemade pasta. Where cottages haven't been torn down for high-rises, morning glories engulf walls and fences, and citrus trees flourish.
The sounds, meanwhile, are enchanting: a train whistle, the chimes of Our Lady of the Rosary Church, the clanging bell at a trolley crossing, snippets of spoken Italian.
The Little Italy of today is a sliver of what it once was. It lies along India Street from Ash Street to about Laurel Street, hemmed in on the west by the train tracks, on the east by I-5. Its northern reaches have emerged as the Art & Design District.
In this clutch of easily walkable blocks, a visitor will find eclectic shopping and will be in no danger of going hungry.
Step into Filippi's (1747 India St.) if only to savor the wonderful scents from its grocery store and deli. In the back rooms are red-check tablecloths and Chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling.
For nontraditional Italian fare, try Sogno DiVino (1607 India St.) or Buon Appetito (1609 India St.), two bustling trattorias with sidewalk tables.
In the morning, one of the most popular gathering spots is Caffe Italia (1704 India St.), which serves espresso and pastries and has tables indoors, on the sidewalk and in a pleasant courtyard.
But dining options aren't culturally monolithic... there is also Pacific Northwest, Japanese, English, and New Orleans fare....
The shopping in Little Italy, meanwhile, is first-rate.
A charming enclave for getting started is the Fir Street Cottages, a row of former homes just off India Street. Shops carry children's wear, jewelry and fashion accessories, fine clothing and accessories and home decor.
At Architectural Salvage (1971 India St.), owner Elizabeth Scalice has collected all the stuff from old houses that no one would have considered valuable 30 years ago: windows, doors, heater grates, bathtubs, door knobs, garden gates, fireplaces. Retro rules, and all that weathered wood, chipped paint and rusty iron is now prized.
India Street Antiques (2361 India St.) specializes in oak furniture and religious icons. Antiques on Kettner (2400 Kettner St.) displays midcentury collectibles.
Mixture (2210 Kettner St.) hopes that you'll step in to peruse its modernist furniture made from contemporary materials. Disegno Italiano (1605 India St.) carries stainless-steel Italian kitchen appliances and furnishings.
While strolling in Little Italy, you can't miss the many colorful murals painted on the sides of buildings, some of them depicting tuna fishermen at work or memories of the neighborhood or Italy.
WHEN YOU GO
WHERE TO STAY
Two moderately priced options:
•La Pensione Hotel (606 W. Date St.; 1-800-232-4683; www.lapensionehotel.com), a European-style guesthouse in the heart of the district. Rooms are small; $80 per night for bookings made by phone or e-mail. Rooms at the rear catch breezes off the harbor.
•The Little Italy Inn (505 W. Grape St.; 619-230-1600; www.littleitalyinn.com), with 23 rooms from $79 (shared bath) to $199 (two-bedroom suite). It's in the flight path for Lindbergh Field and a bit noisy.
RESOURCES
•Little Italy Association, www.littleitalysd.com. Site has a walking map.
•San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau, www.sdcvb.org.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/travel/thisweek/stories/DN-sanitaly_0218tra.ART.State.Edition1.20879c9.html
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italian Language Classes Surge in New Jersey
Gloucester County (in South New Jersey) has realized a large surge in enrollment for Italian Language classes, principally because they are NOW being offered, solely because the State mandated that Local Communities have a say in which Languages be offered in schools.
With a substantial number of residents of Italian heritage, and effective grass-roots community efforts, plus grant funding many of the fledgling Italian education programs became possible.
In addition to the urge to connect with their Heritage, Italian language is also popular because of the panache of Italian fashion, and Italy as such a popular tourist destination. Even Italy winning the World Cup last year had an impact.
A Happy problem the success has created is a shortage and demand for Italian Language Teachers.
Ciao, Italia! Old Language, Brand New to Local Schools
Jew Jersey .com
By Matthew Ralph
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Seldom spoken in the classrooms of Gloucester County, the language one out of every four county residents can claim as part of their cultural heritage has been on the rise in recent years.
"Ten years ago only Glassboro was teaching Italian," said Joseph Cannavo, area representative for the Italian-American Committee on Education. "Now all of a sudden we are seeing more and more districts offering it."
In addition to Glassboro, Gloucester County Institute of Technology, Paulsboro, Greenwich Township, Logan Township, Kingsway Regional and Swedesboro-Woolwich offer Italian as part of their world language curriculum. Washington Township offers students an opportunity to take Italian through Gloucester County College. The language is also offered at Clearview Regional's evening adult school programs.
Cannavo, an instructor at Swedesboro-Woolwich, said the movement toward more Italian education programs has grown over the past decade out of the state Department of Education's 1996 core curriculum standards. Included in the standards was a provision that the community could have a say in what world languages are taught locally.
"When word began to leak out in these heavy Italian-American communities like Swedesboro-Woolwich and Gibbstown that they had a say, it just started to snowball from that point," Cannavo said.
Grass-roots community efforts and grant funding available to districts have helped make many of the fledgling Italian education program possible, Cannavo said. To date, he said Swedesboro-Woolwich, has received about $44,000 in grant money from the Italian Consulate.
Gloucester County's large Italian-American population second highest per capita in New Jersey to Ocean County might explain some of the surge in the language's popularity. According to the 2000 U.S.
Census Bureau, there are 62,095 Italian-Americans living in the county, about 24.4 percent of the county's population.
It's not just those with Italian ancestry driving the upswing. Cannavo said students in the performing arts academy at GCIT were behind the effort at the school eight years ago.
"There's a couple reasons why overall it's becoming popular," Cannavo said. "It seems to be sort of fashionable if you look at the fashion designers and the fancy race cars. As a tourist site it's becoming more vogue to go there. Believe it or not, even Italy winning the World Cup last year has an impact."
Gina Mateka, director of secondary education at GCIT, said Italian continues to be a popular world language option. The school also offers Spanish and Latin.
"It is growing," Mateka said, noting that roughly 130 students are enrolled in classes. "The interest level is definitely there."
Earlier this month, GCIT was host to an Italian education conference where Cannavo and representatives of area Sons of Italy chapters gathered with area educators.
Among the topics of discussion was the challenge many districts face in finding certified Italian teachers.
"One of the fears of a lot of the districts and it's a legitimate one is the lack of teachers," Cannavo said. "Certified Italian teachers are at a premium. When an Italian teacher leaves a school district, the district usually goes into a tailspin."
Between July 2004 and June 2005, New Jersey issued 1,000 teaching certifications in Spanish and 214 in French. The state issued 83 certifications for Italian during the same period.
The shortage of available certified teachers was cited by school officials in Washington Township in response to a petition drive by township resident Anthony Girardo last year.
About 40 students are enrolled in after-school Italian courses for college credit through Gloucester County College, according to school officials.
"Any decision to adopt any additional world languages in the high school curriculum will be reviewed when the adoption cycle comes due," said Jan Giel, spokeswoman for the district.
As teaching of the language continues to grow in the county, a future generation with and without ancestry traced back to Italy are learning to speak more than just Spanish or French in the classroom.
Trevor Elm, 11, a fifth-grader at Walter Hill School in Swedesboro, has been exposed to the language as part of the world language curriculum since fourth grade. Last week, he used his knowledge of numbers in Italian to win a game of bingo in his afternoon class.
"It's a different language and I can speak it and no one else at my house will know what I'm talking about," said Elm, who rushed to the teacher's desk to collect his prize for winning, a key chain with the outline of the country over a red, white and green background. http://www.nj.com/news/gloucester/local/index.ssf?/base/news-5/1171788145139740.xml&coll=8&thispage=2
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italy's Rich Rent to Look Richer
Although Americans are quick to spout :" You have only ONE Chance to make a good impression" (and it's hard work to maintain), and "Clothes MAKE the Man", Americans all walk around like such "slobs".
No I'm not referring merely to the Rednecks, the HillBillys, the Cowboys, the Hippies/Counter Culture, the Inner City, or even the Fatties, just the plain ol American. Go to the shopping mall, the park, the movies, theses people HAVE to be INTENT on being unattractive, they couldn't look that bad just naturally.
Therefore I'm not surprised when Americans refer to the Italian "bella figura" in a denigrating or vain manner. It would not even surprise me if those same people thought that a once a week bath showed too much attention to physicality.
This article reports that Italians have the option of renting for a day, a week, a month, instead of buying, the latest model automobiles, sleek yachts, villas, helicopters, fine art and even designer jewels and custom watches.
But this isn't News. They've been doing this in Beverly Hills (and NY) for decades.
Except that they have even a MUCH better system here. It's called buying it, using it for a very "Special Event", and returning the item the next day, for full credit, like expensive evening gowns, fur coats, expensive jewelry. :)
There is an alternate system called buy it, claim a defect, and refuse to pay for it, and eventually "negotiate" the price way down.
Italy's Rich Pay to Look Richer
A special club allows the merely affluent to borrow expensive cars, yachts and even art to present the bella figura.
Los Angeles Times
By Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff WriterFebruary 18, 2007
MILAN, ITALY Michele Raucci, a successful financier, needs just the right car when he's off to a swank party or a weekend of truffle hunting and wine tasting. Something to match his outfit, his mood. Maybe a red Ferrari F430 one day, a sporty Lamborghini the next.He's in luck. Raucci belongs to a new club in Milan that caters to the whims of the wealthy, offering them the option of borrowing instead of buying the latest model automobiles, sleek yachts, villas, helicopters and fine art.Members such as Raucci can show up at each event in a different car. Or they can throw a party with an impressive, albeit temporary, collection of paintings on their walls. And soon they'll be able to snag designer jewels and custom watches.Although such clubs are growing in number elsewhere in Europe and the United States, perhaps they reach their apotheosis in Italy ? offering the ultimate bella figura, that very Italian belief in the primal importance of making a good impression by looking good. This is not a case of the poor trying to look rich, but of the rich trying to look richer. Most members of the so-called Circle Club own multiple homes and can easily afford the club's hefty fee. But they are not quite in that stratosphere of super-rich ? who really do own a car for every occasion ? and instead are merely affluent enough to move in circles where the trappings of opulence are de rigueur.On normal workdays in Milan, Raucci, a 38-year-old equity fund manager with homes in three European cities and a country villa, drives a Smart car, the little fuel-efficient, affordable, bubble-like vehicle that is ubiquitous in this part of the world. But when it comes to his social life, there are expectations to be met. That's when he turns to the Circle Club."Sometimes you want to go to an elegant dinner, and you can't go in a Lamborghini!" the goateed Raucci said over tea in the lobby of Milan's five-star Bulgari Hotel. "Maybe I'll go to dinner in a Bentley, or an Aston Martin, or whatever best suits what I'm wearing. If I'm wearing a tuxedo, maybe I'll take a dark-colored Bentley with a light-leather interior. It matches perfectly!"The Ferrari 430 is for yourself," he continued. "You don't even take your girlfriend in one of those, they're so noisy." These are choices that the average rich guy just doesn't have, not unless he owns 20 cars. "And that's not my situation," Raucci said. This concept of bella figura runs deep in Italian society. It might govern superficial appearance as well as behavior, language and customs. As sociologist Franco Ferrarotti once put it, the bella figura is an Italian obsession that allows substance to be ignored for style. It is the art of public performance.And so the Circle Club taps into an ingrained national instinct. The Circle Club was founded by Riccardo Schmid, a commodities trader and businessman who lives in Milan. Its members pay about $26,000 to join, which entitles them to a number of points; points are used to "pay" for use of one of dozens of cars, five helicopters, a couple of small planes and other items. When members run out of points, they pay the fee again.Schmid, 49, said his aim is fixated less on image-building and more on giving people luxury "without the hassles of ownership." The enterprise distinguishes itself from run-of-the-mill rental companies by offering only the creme de la creme, he said, and by offering the latest models before anyone else.For all but the richest of the rich, he said, it doesn't make sense to own a hyper-powered car that is practical for driving only a few days a year. Plus, with these temporary possessions, the user avoids maintenance, garaging and depreciation, not to mention the huge outlay of money.Other reasons to borrow instead of buy: insurance and Italy's notoriously high taxes.Such luxury "gives you pleasure, you can discuss it with friends, you can appreciate it," Schmid said."We give access to people who wouldn't have the possibility." He cites the example of a professor from Turin who regularly takes a train to Milan so he can drive around, and be seen driving around, in a red Ferrari.In its first year, the club has admitted about 150 members, most of them living in Milan and between the ages of 30 and 50. Schmid hopes to expand. Only three of the members are women: a professional athlete, a plastic surgeon and a marchesa.Schmid said the club probably appeals more to men because of its emphasis on fast cars, in a country whose society is still very patriarchal and where men are more often expected to display status.Certainly, for members such as Raucci, sexy roadsters are the star attraction. Italians, he said, love nice cars more than residents of other countries where he has homes ? Britain and Germany. "Fashion comes from Italy because we like to dress well and we like sports cars," he said. "People who are successful want a nice car, and in Italy that goes for every male, in all classes. It's a passion. For 80% of the male population, it's a must."Schmid points to his stock with pride, especially the new Ferrari 599 GTB, which he says usually requires a three-year wait to purchase. Soon to be added to the inventory: an orange Lamborghini."You get pleasure when you drive a Ferrari or a Lamborghini around," Schmid said. "You get to show off a little. And I don't see anything wrong with that." Raucci acknowledged the cachet that comes from zipping along roads with the roar and the whiff emitted by mighty engines. But it's not just bella figura, he insisted."At the end, you discover you are not doing it to impress your friends, but for the sensation you get. You become sophisticated."http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-bella18feb18,1,1113270.story?coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=1&cset=true
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Friday, February 16, 2007
Italians Focused on Law of Universe NOT Mortal or Cause & Effect :) :)
A couple of reasons Italians seem to have disdain for mere mortal laws.
Italians undervalue the law of cause and effect, and overvalue the law of the universe
More specifically.
Italy has about 90,000 laws on the book, where France had 7,325 and Germany 5,587. "The problem is with so many rules, it's almost impossible to obey them all, and they are applied badly," "Italians are almost forced into illegality by a poorly functioning system."
The Vatican with promises of salvation, with it's own series of admonitions, that don't seem to fit current standards. Nod and ignore.
Italy's history between 1520 and 1860, almost 350 years of "Foreign" fragmented Exploitive Rule, rule. Faced with greedy and hostile authority over many chaotic centuries, Italians fell back into what is often called "familism," the idea that only the family can be trusted. Everything outside the realm of family and clan can be ignored — or tricked into submission.
The cynicism of that period has carried over, with Italians even since their "Reunification" have not had confidence in their own politicians. Many of the centrist politicians who have governed Italy since World War II were plenty corrupt. Currently as an example, 25 of the Italian Parliament have been convicted of crimes, mostly for corruption.Therefore, if our leaders don't follow the laws, why should we?
Italians consider themselves saints, heroes, improvisers and artful fixers; and above all we are cunning,"
And then too, don't forget their incredible "Individualism"
"We undervalue the law of cause and effect," said Lisa Tumino, who runs a bed and breakfast here near the Vatican. "We overvalue the law of the universe."
This nugget was mined with a single, simple question: Why was Tumino, in her beat-up white Nissan, illegally parked on Via delle Fornaci, along with two dozen other drivers, on a recent rainy day when they clogged traffic, made the roads more dangerous and acted, in fact, against the law?
Boiled down, Tumino was saying: No sterile, one-size-fits-all rule book applies here. Italians prefer a more individual justice for their reality and the long history that shaped it. In this case, ancient streets don't allow for adequate parking.
But every now and again, Italians wake up to the unpleasant reality that, however lightly it can be explained away, breaking the rules is also part of Italy's malaise....
Beppe Grillo, the Italian political satirist, keeps a running list on his Web site of members of the Italian Parliament or Italian members of the European Parliament, 25 in all, who have been convicted of crimes, mostly for corruption.
Just last week, an Italian newspaper reported the existence of a new little town outside Naples, of 50 houses and 435 apartments, for which not a single building permit had been issued. About 31,000 illegal structures reportedly went up in 2005 alone.
Just last year, Italy slid into the last place in Europe for direct investment from the United States, after the economy had struggled for years. Businesspeople, both foreign and Italian, complain that the complicated culture of rules — those broken, as well as those impossible to understand — is one major reason.
Paolo Catalfamo, now managing director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy, recalled the six years he spent managing an American investment fund here.
"The issue I spent most of my time on was trying to explain to my headquarters in San Francisco why the rules they received had to be interpreted," he said.
"They didn't get the concept that rules don't have one meaning only, that they have many meanings. They had a very hard time."
Like most things in this nation, built on layers of the past, physical and mental, it is not always easy to explain why this is.
The standard answer encompasses Italy's fragmented history, of often arbitrary regional rule by foreigners, local nobles and a church with claims of the blessing of God.
On the latter subject, some experts claim that the Catholic Church, which grew up here, holds no small responsibility: Sins can be committed, then forgiven.
There is no single standard for salvation; each person's life is weighed on its own.
Relatives worried about where their dearly departed ended up can pray for personal intervention from some 2,500 saints — a system perfectly calibrated for Italy's individualistic ethos.
Faced with greedy and hostile authority over many chaotic centuries, it is argued, Italians fell back into what is often called "familism," the idea that only the family can be trusted. Everything outside the realm of family and clan can be ignored — or tricked into submission.
"We are a people of saints, heroes, improvisers and artful fixers; above all we are cunning," a 1986 study on Italian values concluded, finding the nation's mind set little changed over time. "Our cunningness consists of believing that others will take advantage of us if we do not first take advantage of them."
The state responded to its own weakness by imposing too many laws. Alexander Stille, a Columbia University professor who has written several books on Italy, cited figures several years ago showing that Italy had about 90,000 laws on the book, where France had 7,325 and Germany 5,587. But they are badly enforced: Italy also has the slowest courts in Europe.
"The problem is with so many rules, it's almost impossible to obey them all, and they are applied badly," said Stille, who most recently wrote "The Sack of Rome." "Italians are almost forced into illegality by a poorly functioning system."
While many of the centrist politicians who have governed Italy since World War II were plenty corrupt on their own, many experts argue that this anti-rules culture reached it apex in the political career of Silvio Berlusconi.
Stille goes as far as to argue that Berlusconi, who was twice elected prime minister, was so canny that he created a political constituency out of tax cheats and people with illegally built houses.
"If you ask me for 50 percent or more in taxes," Berlusconi once famously said, "it's unjust and I feel morally justified, if I have the possibility, to evade them."
And, dutifully, after both of his elections, in 1994 and 2000, he introduced amnesties for unpaid taxes and illegal houses.
In the last two weeks, in the anger over the death at the stadium, the question has risen whether anything can be done to change things.
The short answer, most experts say, is: probably not. The government of the new prime minister, Romano Prodi, is weak, with power spread thinly among nine coalition parties.
Still optimists hold out hope: Catalfamo, of the American Chamber of Commerce, says that even if foreign investment is low, it is easier to do business in Italy now than it was 10 years ago. Others note that the nation's political class is old and cannot hold on forever.
Peter Kiefer and Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting.
EU Sides with Italy in "Foibe" Dispute
Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader has criticised the European Union’s stance over his country’s diplomatic squabble with Italy concerning World War II victims.
Zagreb and Rome exchanged angry notes this week after a speech by Italy’s president Giorgio Napolitano commemorating World War II massacres of Italians by Yugoslav partisans raised the ire of his Croatian counterpart Stipe Mesic.
Napolitano described the killings as “a wave of hate and bloody fury, and a Slavic expansionist design”.
Mesic responded by saying the speech contained “traces of open racism, historical revisionism” and political aggression.
The EU appeared to side with member country Italy after EU Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen said the “language used by the Croatian president was inappropriate, or seemed inappropriate.”
She did not comment on Napolitano’s speech.
In a special press conference today, Croatian Premier Sanader accused Ahkrenkilde’s statements of being “profoundly one-sided and unacceptable.”
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
"Foibe" Igniting Furious Row
Keep in Mind that Croatia is attempting to join the EU, and Italy is interested in Compensation for current property claims and compensation from Croatia, similar to the Polish claims currently presented to Germany, and of Jews already settled.
Italy and Croatia Reopen Old War Wounds
Guardian Unlimited
Ian Traynor
Tuesday February 13, 2007
Italian diplomats called off visits to Zagreb and summoned the Croatian ambassador in Rome for a stiff talking-to; and the Italian prime minister, Romano Prodi, attacked Croatia after its president, Stipe Mesic, accused his Italian counterpart of racism and trying to rewrite history.
Croatia and Slovenia were stunned by a weekend speech by Italy's president, Giorgio Napoletano, devoted to the suffering of Italians in former Yugoslavia towards the end of the second world war.
Mr Prodi and his foreign minister, Massimo D'Alema waded into the row yesterday, with Italian officials implying that while Italy had faced up to its fascist past, Croatia had yet to do so.
"We don't need any lessons in fascism from Italy," quipped a Croatian politician after Mr Mesic said the Italian statesman's speech smacked of "open racism, historical revisionism, and political revanchism".
The dispute has to do with the pogroms and population shifts enforced at the end of the second world war all across central Europe, but it also touches on sensitive current property claims and compensation demands.
Just as millions of Germans were kicked out of central and eastern Europe and many of them killed when the Third Reich collapsed, so, after the fall of Mussolini and the capitulation of Italy, were Italian fascist occupiers and indigenous Italian communities expelled from the eastern Adriatic - the areas of Dalmatia and Istria that belonged to Yugoslavia and now form parts of Croatia and Slovenia.
It is estimated that 150,000 Italians were kicked out by vengeful communist partisans under Josip Broz Tito, and that 15,000 were killed. Many of the corpses were dumped in the thousands of caves that perforate the limestone karst of Dalmatia and Istria.
Mussolini's fascist movement had annexed the eastern Adriatic before the war and occupied it during the war. Mr Napoletano further outraged the Croats by conferring a medal on an Italian fascist governor of a stretch of Dalmatia who was executed in 1947 after being tried for war crimes by the Yugoslavs.
Observers were surprised by the strength of the language used by both sides, since both presidents are former communists with roots in the wartime partisan movements who fought guerrilla wars was against the fascists.
Similar rows are currently simmering between Germany and Poland since a German lobby has gone to the European court to reclaim property lost at the end of the war. But the German government opposes the German claims and distances itself from the German lobby. Observers noted that had a German president accused Poland of barbarism and bloodlust, as Mr Napoletano had accused the "Slavs", the international impact would have been immense.
The issue of Italian suffering at the end of the war in former Yugoslavia was brushed under the carpet for decades. But two years ago, the rightwing Berlusconi government in Rome established a day of remembrance for the victims, and last year a publicly funded Italian feature film on the events was screened to huge impact in Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia.
In former Yugoslavia, the film was seen as a sentimental outrage that falsified history, demonised "Slavs", and failed to provide any context for the revenge meted out against the Italians.
Italian officials have made it clear that Croatia could run into problems with its EU bid unless it is more accommodating towards Italy. Zagreb fears it may face demands either to return or sell property in what are now much coveted holiday hotspots in Dalmatia and Istria.
"Foibe Massacre" Commemoration Creates Rift with Croatia
Italy President Napolitano's speech on Saturday to Commemorate the Italian victims of the "Foibe" Massacres, caused Croatia's President Mesic to respond crisply, and create an angry exchange.
The "Foibe" marked the deaths of thousands of Italians who were pulled from their homes, tortured, shot and thrown into mountain crevasses by Communist Yugoslav partisans, AFTER Italy had abandoned the Nazis and joined the Allies. during and at the end of the war. Some victims were thrown — sometimes still alive — into Alpine crevasses known in local dialect as "foibe," and the atrocities became known as the foibe killings.
While reading the following Report, keep in mind the timeline: Italy did not join Germany as an Ally until June 1940. The alllies invaded Sicily July 10, 1943, Mussolini was ousted July 25, 1943 by the Grand Council, who instructed Marshal Badoglio to begin secret negotiations with the Allies to end the fighting and to come over to the Allied side. That armistice was signed September 3, 1943. The Germans in Italy surrendered April 29 1945.
Therefore these Massacres did not happen until AFTER Italy surrendered and in some cases TWO Years after Italy surrendered , and became an Ally Co Combatant.
Also the reference to "Brutal Italianization", was similar to the US "Assimilation" of Immigrants attitude, and the US "Don't speak the Language of the Enemy" Brain wash campaign.
The Italianization program encouraged Non Italian residents in areas with overwhelming Italian residents attend Italian language schools and churches and speak only the Italian language in PUBLIC. Even Italian Citizenship was offered to many who accepted.
This type of distortion is either stupidity or bigotry.
A particularly interesting aspect of this "disagreement" is that Both Napolitano and Mesic were/are Communists, and Communists were basically responsible for the Massacre, and that the Leadership of both Italy and Yugoslavia, (Croatia, was then part of Yugoslavia), after the war were Communists, so it was not advantageous for either side to make the massacre "public", and the story was therefore buried/ ignored.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
"Foibe" Massacres raised in Answer to Croatian President Mesic's Claims
This week Croatian President Stipe Mesic made statements that the crimes after World War II had been the consequence of fascist crimes.
That is a LOT difficult to believe,since Croatia like Italy was an Ally of Germany during WWII, and the Croatian Ustache were as blood thirsty as the SS.
The Foibe massacres were mass killings attributed to Yugoslav partisans during and shortly after WWII against Italians. This bloodshed was the consequence of an exodus of Italians forced by the Yugoslavs from Istria, an ethnic cleansing of innocent civilians.
These Mass Killings of ethnic Italians were committed after the capitulation of Italy on September 8, 1943, and in 1945 when Yugoslav partisans under Tito's command entered Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia what had historically been a multiethnic borderland. In the aftermath, the city of Treiste and the surroundings came, not without controversy, under Yugoslav military administration.
Estimates of the number of victims range from between 2,000 and 20,000, according to data gathered by a mixed Slovene-Italian historical commission established in 1993.This estimate does not include those killed in current Croatian territory.Prominent historians estimated the total number of victims at about 5,000. The killings of 1943 were the beginning of organized ethnic cleansing, while the episodes of 1945 appear to be both ethnic and political cleansing that drastically reduced the Italian population of Istria and Dalmatia between 1945 and 1947.
The Foibe have been a long-neglected subject in mainstream political debate, only recently garnering broader attention with the recent publication of several scholarly books and historical studies. It is thought that after World War II, politicians of Western European countries wanted to put mutual uncomfortable "past" deeds behind and focus on the problems the Cold War presented.
'Italians are Victims of Slavic Expansionism'
Giorgio Napolitano, president of the Italian Republic, commented on crimes over Italians by ‘Slavic expansionists’.
On occasion of the marking of the anniversary of the peace accords of 1947, the Italian President stressed in Rome that he would no longer remain quiet about the “bloodthirsty hatred and Slavic annexionistic tendencies”.
-- These tendencies have taken the shape of ethnic cleansing, especially in the peace accords of 1947 – Napolitano said.
He stressed that the tragedy of Italians had not been spoken of because of international conformism.
-- Now that Slovenia has joined the European Union and when Croatia is becoming a candidate for accession, it must be our obligation to tell the truth – Napolitano said.According to the Jutarnji list daily, Napolitano thus wished to respond to Croatian President Stipe Mesic’s statement that the crimes after World War II had been the consequence of fascist crimes
http://www.javno.com/en/croatia/clanak.php?id=20108
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
How US Military Can Captivate an Italian Woman- Stars & Stripes
This author has an American Father and Italian Mother, resulting from a WWII meeting. She writes for the Stars and Stripes, and is giving advice to US Military serving in Italy.
Her Parents story is very touching.
I have one complaint with Ms Jontz.
Italian women complain vociferously because Italian Men don't find Marriage an immediate NECESSITY, because the Men's Moms enjoy doing a lot of the work, that the Wives abhor doing anyway, and probably wouldn't do. :)
Then the Italian women report marrying later in life, because they are enjoying being single til later in life.
Now why should they complain, when it is apparently what they want anyway???????
Love Language It is possible to talk your way into an Italian woman’s heart
Stars and StripesBy Sandra Jontz, Scene,
Sunday, February 11, 2007
It can work: True love, then and now
Mom married an American.
She blazed new trails, so to speak, within her family and among her friends. As the youngest of four Bombaci children, Mom was the first to marry, but she also broke my grandmother’s heart when she not only left Sicily, but also moved clear across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States.
I love their love story.
See, Mom wanted to learn to speak English, and an Italian friend of hers, Nello, worked at the U.S. Navy base at Sigonella. Though Nello spoke English perfectly, the little matchmaker figured he’d introduce Maria, 19, to this very nice, and very single, American sailor, a petty officer third class named David. What better way to learn to speak English than from a native speaker, Nello reasoned.
Dad says he fell in love the moment he heard Mom’s voice on the telephone.
Their first face-to-face meeting — after three months of talking on the phone — happened in front of the Jolly Hotel in downtown Catania. Dad was 24, kind of tall, and his pants legs were too short for his frame. Mom noticed him — and the highwaters — from down the street, and remembers laughing with her friend Loretta at the American sailor’s fashion sense, or the lack thereof.
She sort of chickened out at the last moment, for as they approached the sailor, she introduced Loretta as Maria.
Dad called her bluff. He knew who was whom. Love ain’t all that blind.
Back then, Mom says, young Italian women sought to marry Americans. “They thought it would be a better life for them,” she said.
It wasn’t something she sought, however.
“It wasn’t for me. I had a good family. Unlike your daddy, I didn’t fall in love with him at first. It was not until he left that I knew that he was the guy. I missed him.”
After three dates — three chaperoned dates — Dad was transferred from Sigonella to Japan. They maintained a long-distance courtship. More than two years later, Dad returned to Italy to seek permission from Mom’s family to marry her.
Nonna (grandmother in Italian) acquiesced.
It’s a marriage that has lasted 38 years.
They still hold hands. And kiss. He still opens the door for her.
Before he retired — rather traded in a military, and then gunsmithing, career — to become a full-time granddaddy, Mom would occasionally slip a love note into the lunch she prepared for him daily.
He still calls her his bride.
They love being in love — with each other.
So, how should an American go about conquering the heart of an Italian fanciulla?
“I don’t know. I had nothing to do with it,” Dad says. “It was God. I guess he got tired of baby-sitting me. He said: ‘I’m sending an angel to you. You pay attention to her and do what she says.’ Mommy is the angel that God sent.”
— Sandra Jontz
So, in this land that inspired Casanova and spawned “the Italian Stallion,” how do American guys compete with Italian men for the hearts of Italian women?
It boils down to a few key words: sincerity, respect, spontaneity, understanding.
This story, though written from the viewpoint of Italians — mostly women — can really apply across the spectrum. And while it might be particularly relevant around Valentine’s Day, it can be useful any time of the year.
Nearly four decades ago, my Italian mom was swept off her feet by a dashing U.S. sailor. Back then, an American husband was generally viewed as a hot commodity, she said.
There was romance simply in the notion of marrying a U.S. servicemember: a hero who would whisk a damsel to a better world. Americans were mysterious and gallant, not to mention gainfully employed, world travelers and mature.
Oh, how a few decades — and a shrinking world — can change perceptions.
Today, women find men of many nationalities mystifying, alluring, brave and desirable — making the competition a little tougher.
But “real men” don’t need to rely on pick-up lines that often elicit groans or snickers from their intended targets:
“Do you have a map? I keep getting lost in your eyes.” (Those eyes will be hard to see because they’ve rolled to the back of her head.)
“If I could rearrange the alphabet, I’d put ‘u’ and ‘I’ together.” (She’s just thought of a few choice letters of her own.)
Italian Daniela Mazzarino, a 36-year- old hotel event organizer who lives in Rome, suggests: “Try being sincere. You can start by saying ciao.”
Notice the operative word: “start.”
“You had me at hello” might have been a great line from the Hollywood flick “Jerry McGuire,” but most men shouldn’t stop there.
Italian women hold to the notion that men should make the first move, said Louisa L., who didn’t want her last name used.
Once you’ve made the introduction, keep talking.
“Express yourself,” advised the 27-year-old Neapolitan, now studying financial health management in Milan.
“[American men] don’t express themselves very much,” said Louisa. “They are very silent. It goes beyond the language barrier. Americans, I guess, are just shy when it comes to talking. Share with us an extra word or two.”
Ask her out for coffee.
Ask her for a tour of the city.
And don’t be shocked, turned off, dismayed, alarmed or disgruntled if your first “date” includes a lot of her friends, cautioned one Italian man, Francesco Cirillo.
“Italian women don’t want to appear to be ‘easy,’ ” said the journalist. “Not the ones you’d want to bring home to Mom, at least. They want to be respected. They want to be courted.”
Gentleman, read that last sentence again, the one that ends with “courted.”
Now, that doesn’t mean you have to buy a woman flowers or dinner.
A woman wants a guy to be impulsive, creative — and communicative; to pay attention to her.
Louisa had a wonderful time with Petty Officer 3rd Class Luke Memmel. They dated for about a month before she reluctantly had to transfer to Milan for her studies.
“He was very easy to talk to, once he warmed up,” she said. “Americans are very spontaneous, very experienced. They leave their homes when they are much younger than Italians. But they’re very silent. We wish they’d speak more.”
Don’t make chatting a chore.
So what if you don’t speak each other’s language perfectly, she said. “We managed to communicate because we wanted to communicate,” Louisa said.
And if all else fails, you might gain a funny memory from the effort.
Memmel, for example, said he used to confuse the words dentro, meaning “inside,” and dietro, meaning “behind” or “in back of.”
Once, while shopping at the Ikea furniture store in Afragola, the young woman he was dating at the time lost sight of him. She called out: “Where are you?”
“Sono dentro di te,” he replied loudly.
“When half the store turned around and looked at me, I figured I used the wrong word. I meant to say ‘I’m behind you,’ ” Memmel said.
For Mazzarino, Italian men are more romantic, gentler and great lovers.
“I would want no other man than an Italian,” she said.
Perhaps. But she does not speak for all women. American gentlemen, here’s your edge: Some of us are not into “mama’s boys.”
I’m talking about Italian men who still live at home and are pampered by mothers who wash and iron their work clothes, fold their underwear, cook their meals, pay their bills. Men in their 30s.
Sure, there are cultural — and financial — limitations involved in getting your own place in Italy. But you shouldn’t let your mother take care of you.
“So, that’s true,” Mazzarino said, sighing. “That’s not really the most attractive thing about them.
“I think a lot of Italian women don’t find that very attractive. At least, that’s not what I’m looking for in a man.”
So there you have it, gentlemen. Maybe, when you’re out vying for the heart of that fanciulla, you can sophisticatedly exploit your upper hand.
Just don’t blow with a lame pick-up line.
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=140&article=43458
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Berlusconi's Charisma Keeps Him in Spotlight and Contention
Berlusconi Still in Italy's Spotlight
By Alessandra Rizzo Washington Post The Associated Press
Thursday, February 8, 2007
ROME -- The past 10 months have been rough for Silvio Berlusconi: He lost power in a contested election, fainted at a political rally, underwent heart surgery and was rebuked very publicly by his wife for flirting with other women.
Yet, despite the setbacks, the former premier remains at the center of the political stage _ still captivating Italians with his charisma, if not his policies......
Berlusconi's return to the public spotlight comes at a time of difficulty for Prodi's government, which has been plagued by a rift between radical leftists and reform-oriented moderates.
Berlusconi claims "the left will never accept going to the polls because they would certainly be defeated."....
According to Berlusconi, opinion polls commissioned by his Forza Italia party show that the conservative coalition is some 15 percentage points ahead of the ruling center-left. As to his own popularity rating, he says it is nearly 30 percentage points higher than Prodi's.
Berlusconi's polls are often criticized as unreliable and self-serving. But independent polls have found dissatisfaction with Prodi's government.
A significant test will take place this spring when millions of Italians vote in local elections. It will the first substantial balloting since the April general election that ousted Berlusconi after five years in power.
Berlusconi's popularity, most analysts agree, has more to do with his charisma than his policies. Many Italians see him as one of them _ even though he is a billionaire media baron, Italy's richest man.
Italians loved the public spat with his wife, Veronica Lario, that turned Berlusconi's marriage into a kind of real-life soap opera. The squabble occupied pages in domestic newspapers, forced TV executives to reschedule their evening talks shows and gave rise to all sorts of commentary: playful, serious and sociological.
"Dear Veronica, here's my apology," Berlusconi wrote. "Forgive me, I beg you. And take this public show of my private pride giving in to your fury as an act of love. One of many."
By most accounts, Berlusconi was able to turn what might have been a public embarrassment into a success. Even Prodi's spokesman, Silvio Sircana, gave Berlusconi a perfect 10 in communication skills.
Italian reports said the couple spent a quiet evening at their villa in Milan after Berlusconi's apology. Lario, in an interview with Corriere della Sera on Wednesday, said her gesture made her feel "at peace with myself."
"Mutual respect is a fundamental thing, especially at our age," she told the Milan daily.
Some analysts say that in recent months, Berlusconi's showmanship and media savvy have masked the lack of a clear political agenda on several key issues, from reform of the electoral law to his own succession at the helm of the conservative bloc.
A series of health woes fueled speculation about the political future of a man who is 70 and in 13 years has been the conservative candidate for premier four consecutive times _ he won twice and lost twice.
Berlusconi seems to have recovered well on nearly all fronts.
A week after he was hospitalized for fainting during a speech to party supporters in Tuscany, Berlusconi showed up at an anti-government rally in Rome.
Then, in December, he went to the United States to have a heart pacemaker implanted. Weeks later, he appeared on the cover of gossip magazine Chi holding his two grandchildren.
"Super Grandpa!" read the banner headline.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020800887.html
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
In Italy, a National Sex Scandal, Without Actual Sex or Actual Scandal
In Italy, a National Sex Scandal, Without Actual Sex or Actual Scandal..... But, a Lot of Drama!!!! :)
In Italy a Sex Scandal is soaring "Opera", in the US it is tawdry "Peep Show" .
An enormously interesting observation: So successful was this "scandal" that opponents of Berlusconi now accuse him of orchestrating it for political advantage. :) :) :)
The Italians Know How To Do It Right
Thursday Thoughts
By Maggie Gallagher:
The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
February 8,2007
I want an Italian sex scandal.
In Italy, they know how to have a national sex scandal without any a) actual sex or b) actual scandal. And yet the Italian version ends up so much more deliciously, scandalously erotic than the earnest American version.
Take Gavin Newsom, for example. He's the young, glam Catholic mayor of San Francisco who first burst into the national news by unilaterally licensing thousands of gay couples to marry in San Francisco, contrary to state law - which even the California Supreme Court couldn't quite approve, but no matter. He and his beautiful wife, now an anchor for Fox News, became the new Dem power couple ("The New Kennedys" slobbered the Harper's Bazaar photo spread). Their brief, bicoastal marriage faded to a quiet divorce in 2005, but the young, handsome and definitely not-gay bachelor mayor's solo glitterati quotient soared anyway: Seventy percent of San Franciscans in recent polls said they wanted to re-elect the mayor this November.
How can a bachelor mayor have a sex scandal these days, anyway? It was once famously said of a Louisiana Democrat that unless he was found in bed "with a live boy or a dead girl," his re-election was certain. Seeing as Newsom is the mayor of San Francisco, I would have thought his scandal possibilities were even more limited, but somehow the boy-mayor has managed.
Give the man credit for the clearest, most comprehensive confession ever seen on the American political stage: "I want to make it clear that everything you've heard and read is true, and I am deeply sorry about that."
"Everything" in this case includes having sex with his secretary, who was also the wife of his good friend and campaign manager. We know all this because the secretary/wife felt obliged to confess her sins as part of her alcohol rehab journey. This week, the mayor announced his own outpatient alcohol rehab journey is just beginning.
The thing about American sex scandals is that they seem so puritanical: so grim, so unpleasant, so, well, tawdry. I suppose it's good for public morals.
In Italy, they do things differently. There, when the wife of the former (and perhaps future) Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi sent her husband a public letter demanding an apology for his attentions to other women, it was also all over the news. ("If I weren't married, I would marry you immediately," the 70-year-old Berlusconi reportedly told one woman at a VIP party after a TV awards ceremony broadcast.) Veronica Lario, 50, a former actress, told her husband: "I see these statements as damaging my dignity. To both my husband and the public man, I therefore demand a public apology, since I haven't received any privately." She pointed out: "I have faced the inevitable contrasts and the more painful moments that a long conjugal relation entails with respect and discretion."
At this point, I'm trying to imagine how, say, an American presidential candidate would be advised to respond if such a letter from his wife was published in The New York Times. What would Dick Morris do?
I don't know, but probably not this: "Forgive me, I beg you. And take this public show of my private pride giving in to your fury as an act of love. One of many," wrote Berlusconi in a public response.
Nobody went into rehab. Instead, his wife withdrew to a convent for three days to contemplate her reaction to his public apology. (She ultimately decided to accept.)
So successful was this "scandal" that opponents of Berlusconi now accuse him of orchestrating it for political advantage.
Sigh. If we cannot have dignity in high office, could we demand a higher quality of drama, please?
http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm?newsid=17826747&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=6
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
US Ready to Elect Italian American President?
The Real Question is : Is US Ready to Elect Someone "Connected" to Mafia?
And since 84% of all Americans believe that ALL Italian Americans are "connected" to the Mafia,
(that is directly or by relatives or friends), that seems like a tough road to hoe.
Cuomo was rumored to be unwilling to be "smeared" in considering a presidential bid.
Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 as a VP candidate with Mondale, was plagued by unfair rumors about some of her husbands associates.
Rudy Giuliani, with a strong reputation as a prosecutor, and a popular hero of 9/11, still had to endure the Village Voice, digging deep and revealed that Giuliani's father spent 16 months in Sing Sing for robbing a milkman. It isn't clear whether or not Giuliani knew about his father's crime, which happened before he was born. In the USA Network movie version, Woods-as-Giuliani is shocked by the news about his father, and calls Barrett, the editor, a "panty-sniffer."
Ready to elect Italian American?
The Journal Martinsburg Journal - Martinsburg,WV,USA John McVey
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Everyone is asking if Americans are ready to elect a woman president or a black president. I wonder if Americans are ready to elect a president whose name ends in a vowel.
Remember Mario Cuomo? The very popular governor of New York was the Democrats’ golden boy back in the 1980s. His name was on everyone’s lips after he gave a rousing keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.
But he never sought the Democratic nomination. Why not? He probably could have won the nomination. We’ll never know if he could have been elected president. He would have gone up against Ronald Reagan or George H. Bush.
Maybe Cuomo didn’t want to challenge such a popular president in Reagan, who had defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and annihilated Walter Mondale in 1984.
George H. Bush easily defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988, carried to victory at least in part because of Reagan’s overwhelming popularity. If Reagan could have run for a third term, I think he probably could have been elected.
By the way, the first Bush was the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1833 and was only the fourth sitting vice president to be elected president. In addition to Van Buren, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the only other sitting vice presidents elected president.
When it came time for Bush to run for a second term, he was coming off the resounding defeat of Saddam Hussein in the first Iraq war. His approval ratings were among the highest ever recorded. No Democrat wanted to take him on, except some little known guy from Arkansas.
By the time the election rolled around in 1992, Bush’s ratings had plummeted to some of the lowest points ever recorded. He was perceived as not being able to relate to ordinary folks. You might recall the grocery store checkout fiasco where it seemed like Bush had never been to a grocery story before.
Could Cuomo have beaten Bush in 1992? Maybe.
Running for his fourth consecutive term as governor of New York, Cuomo was swept out of power and the national limelight in the 1994 Republican revolution led by Newt Gingrich and his contract on ... I mean with America.
Also, 1994 saw the final nail in the coffin of the classic liberal wing of the Democrat Party of which Cuomo was a member in good standing. By then, he was out of step with mainstream America; his time had come and gone.
Did his Italian American heritage play any role in Cuomo’s decision not to run for president? Did he feel that Americans were not ready at that time to elect an Italian American president and he didn’t want to run and lose? It was the subject of political punditry at that time.
So, 14 years later, could Americans be ready to elect someone whose name ends in a vowel like Rudy Giuliani?
Just by running for the nomination, the former New York mayor and hero of 9/11 will be the first Italian American to run for president or any kind of American other than someone of northern European descent. Geraldine Ferraro, Mondale’s running mate in 1984, was the first Italian American and the first woman to run for national office on a major party ticket.
Are we ready to elect a Hillary or a Giuliani? How about a Garcia or Yamaguchi or Kowalski? Or will we feel more comfortable with the Anglo-Saxon Edwards or Scottish McCain?
Of course, Barack Obama just blows this whole hypothesis all to heck.
http://www.journal-news.net/columns/articles.asp?articleID=6907
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Saturday, February 10, 2007
"I Build the Tower": Film about Simon Rodia's Watt's Tower
The Watts Tower, in Los Angeles CA, (East of LAX, and South of Downtown LA, more specifically ; East of Central Ave and South of Century Blvd, adjacent to South Gate and Lynwood,) now in the center of the Los Angeles Black Community, is probably the single most important source of pride to that community.
Watts Towers, is a collection of 17 interconnected structures, two of which reach heights of over 99 feet (30 m). The Towers were built by Italian immigrant construction worker Sabato (Sam or Simon ) Rodia in his spare time over a period of 33 years, from 1921 to 1954. The work is a superb example of non-traditional vernacular architecture.
Rodia has been hailed by Buckminster Fuller as "one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century."
"One man's artistic fantasy is here given substance: fanciful spires pieced together over a period of thirty-three years from steel reinforcing rods and wire mesh, colorfully decorated with seashells and fragments of broken dishes and bottles." An "Idiosyncratic, exuberant monumental urban art, created by one inspired individual".
Simon Rodia,was born in 1879 in the town of Campania in southern Italy. He came to America at the age of 12. Rodia worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania and eventually moved to the west coast, and worked in rock quarries, logging, and railroad camps as a construction worker. He married and had two children.
Rodia without benefit of special equipment, scaffolding, or drawing board designs, and he worked alone on his towers using simple tile-setter's tools and a window washer's belt and buckle. Rodia surrounded his house with three tall slender towers; a patio; a gazebo containing a circular bench, 3 bird baths, and a spire 38 feet tall; and a structure he called the "Ship of Marco Polo" which has a 28-foot tall spire. All of this is enclosed in walls build by Rodia and decorated with an assortment of embedded objects and materials.
It is a strange tale, starting with the dream, the effort, the vandalism by unappreciative neighbors, Rodia abandoning his completed Towers, driven away by the enormous abuse he received, the determination by the City to tear it down, the equal determination by conservationists around the World to preserve it, the battle between the Towers and the Crane used to test the safety of the Towers,(the Crane lost), and now the Reverence with which it is held by ALL.
"I BUILD THE TOWER," the feature-length documentary on the Watts Towers and their creator, Sam Rodia, has been selected by The Museum of Modern Art in New York City to be part of Documentary Fortnight, MoMA's annual festival of non-fiction films. The film will be screened at 6 pm, Monday, February 19, 2007, in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters at the Museum, 11 West 53 Street.
Directed, written and produced by Edward Landler and Rodia's great-nephew, Brad Byer, the film depicts the life of the immigrant Italian artisan who single-handedly created the monumental mosaic-covered spires of reinforced
cement known as the Watts Towers in South Central Los Angeles. Rodia has been hailed by Buckminster Fuller as "one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century."
Recognized in Variety as "the most complete visual account of Rodia and his masterpiece," the film has been praised by director Ken Burns as "wonderful, lyrical and compelling" and by critic Leonard Maltin as "heartfelt and
fascinating." Incorporating archival and family materials and the involvement of the Watts community, production has included shooting in Rodia's southern Italian birthplace, the San Francisco Bay area where he lived before and after his years in Watts, and Watts itself where the towers stand as a unique embodiment of natural structural principles.
The music for the film - based on aria themes by Giuseppe Verdi - has been arranged for classical orchestra and ensemble by Robert Israel and for jazz ensemble by Nate Morgan. It also features a hip-hop song - conceived and
arranged by Byer and Landler - with Rodia himself as lead vocalist and music composed and arranged by Michael Abels.
For further information, contact www.ibuildthetower.com where DVDs of the documentary and CDs of the film's music are also available for purchase.
Great Buildings Web Site: http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Watts_Towers.html
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Towers
Brief and Photos: http://www.narrowlarry.com/nlwatts.html
Photos: http://www.misterpants.com/library/wattstowers/
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Friday, February 9, 2007
Italian Film Festival in Albuquerque ???
Plans for the very successful Hollywood based Lionsgate Films to build Studios in Albuquerque and nearby Rio Rancho, prompted Ronaldo Patrizio-Steiner's decision to launch a Film Festival scheduled this week.
Patrizio-Steiner selection of Italian Films as the spotlight of the First Festival was a combination of the large number of Italian Americans in the area, and his admiration for the power and longevity of Italian classic movies.
The dozen films he chose are: La Strada, Moonstruck, Bread and Tulips, La Dole Vita, Cinema Paradisio, Big Night, The Godfather, Ciao Profesore, Il Postino, Life is Beautiful, Two Women, Nine Good Teeth
www.italianfilmfest.org.
Notte di film a Rio Rancho: First film festival comes to city
Rio Rancho Observer - Rio Rancho,NM,USA
By TomTreweek February 7, 2007
Cultures will collide in Rio Rancho for the next four days: that of the city's emerging film industry and that of its many Italian-Americans.
Beginning today, Rio Rancho will host its first film festival spotlighting a dozen Italian films spanning five decades, including one considered one of the best movies of all time.
There will be a dozen Italian films shown in Rio Rancho and Albuquerque, and the Performing Arts Center at Rio Rancho High School will show 10 of them through Sunday.
Festival founder Ronaldo Patrizio-Steiner said plans for Lionsgate Films in Rio Rancho and Albuquerque Studios helped fuel his decision.
"Since New Mexico is trying so hard to have a film industry here, it's just another reason we should have a first-rate film festival," he said.
Patrizio-Steiner described the first effort as "bare bones," but expected the project to grow in the future, eventually extending beyond Italian movies.
"There's another 12 well-known films, and then you get into more esoteric things," he said.
The future for the film festival will likely reflect Patrizio-Steiner's love of movies that fall outside the mainstream, as he often tries to find foreign movies that are not shown at major theaters, he said.
He chose Italian films for the first festival because of his own heritage and that of the many area residents who share his ancestry. He also felt these movies would have the most impact on viewers.
"They were films that I thought would resonate with people over a long period of time," he said.
Patrizio-Steiner also wanted to demonstrate the power and longevity of Italian classic movies.
His stance became much stronger with the inclusion of a movie the American Film Institute rated as the third-best film of all time - behind only "Citizen Kane" and "Casablanca" - in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather."
But the film festival is not only to showcase the work of Italians, as there is also a charitable component. All revenue from the $7 ticket sales will go to the University of New Mexico Children's Hospital.
"I think Children's Hospital is universally embraced," Patrizio-Steiner said. "It's hard not to do things for kids."
Sponsorships, he said, have already paid the festival's other costs, including use of the theaters and rights fees to display the films.
For those who plan to attend many movies, there is a $50 movie pass that allows the holder to attend any film at any location. For more information, call 856-9501 or visit www.italianfilmfest.org.
http://www.observer-online.com/articles/2007/02/08/news/story2.txt
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Berlusconi: Flirtatious or Cuckhold???? And Poll says Veronica Wrong
In this latest uproar on Berlusconi, regarding his wife Veronica, demanding a public apology via a Letter written to La Repubblica, the Rome newspaper, always a strong critic of Berlusconi, which I reported on February 4,
55% of Italians thought it was wrong of Veronica, and only 33% thought it a good idea.
Her Public and Strong Remarks were in response to several flirtatious remarks reported overheard being said to a few extremely attractive women.
One of the Remarks said to fellow guests about Mara Carfagna, a former Beauty contestant winner and now an MP for his Forza Italia! party was: "Take a look at her! I'd marry her if I weren't married already."
Said to Aida Yespica, former Miss Amazonia was: "I'd go with you anywhere".
I've heard much worse at dinner parties when wives have said about another women's husband as an obvious compliment. " He is terrific, I wouldn't fight too hard if he was trying to get in my bed". And the Wives response was
Good Luck, But he's All Mine!!!!
And "I'd go with you anywhere", (as an escort) is a far cry from "Lets go to my Suite this evening, and plan on having breakfast there in the morning"
A Troubled Marriage
His wife Veronica's Very PUBLIC and very CHIDING remarks are puzzling since, Rumours that Mr. Berlusconi's marriage is in trouble have been circulating for years.
The Affair
The Remarks are even more puzzling since in 2002, Berlusconi appeared to suggest his wife was having an affair with the philosopher and mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari. At a joint press conference, he flabbergasted the visiting Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, by saying: "I think I'll introduce him to my wife , he's much better looking than Cacciari.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,,2003269,00.html
Another version of Belusconi's comment was Peter Popham in Pandemia: " Last October... Denmark's dashing young Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was in Rome for talks. He and Silvio held a press conference. With that cocksure, cruise-ship-crooner grin of his,...Berlusconi remarked, "Rasmussen is the most handsome prime minister in Europe." The grin twitched a little wider, out came those uncannily gleaming teeth. "I think I will introduce him to my wife, because he is even more handsome than Cacciari."
At his side, Rasmussen's own smile froze on his face. What on earth was the Italian talking about? Berlusconi was alluding to rumours doing the rounds that he had been cuckolded by a bearded Marxist philosopher called Massimo Cacciari, a former mayor of Venice and a university professor.
Berlusconi, A very prideful man, PUBLIC ALLY admits that he has been cuckolded?????
But it gets even better!!!!!! Veronica " obliquely added her own endorsement to her husband's amazing "cuckold" declaration. "My daughter Barbara has enrolled in the philosophy faculty of San Raffaele University, where Cacciari teaches," she told the reporter with no prompting. "It seems an ideal situation, don't you think?"
AND you can add IRONY to the Situation: " Berlusconi first clapped eyes on his future wife, then a hopeful young actress, at a production of a play called "The Magnificent Cuckold". !!!!!!
But I ask you, if Veronica had/has an Affair with Cacciari, and it is so commonly known that Berlusconi makes Public Reference, to take some of the "sting" out of it, AND Veronica more than INFERS that her daughters studying at the same university that Cacciari teaches is "ideal" .....WHERE Does she get the GALL to be INSULTED by Berlusconi's Flirtatious Remarks, and PUBLIC ALLY DEMAND an APOLOGY ????????
http://www.pandemia.info/2003/07/24/scene_da_un_matrimonio_la_veri.html
Berlusconi Remarks about Women
And regarding his Remarks about women, I find no offense at all. In fact, I find them particularly amusing, especially when said to stuffy, pompous, pretentious, two faced, fork tongued , hypocritical politicians. For instance:
Berlusconi on women
At a congress of an allied party: "I notice some extraordinarily pretty legs around here."
Addressing Germany's then chancellor, Gerhard Schrцder: "Let's talk about women and football. You, for example, Gerhard. You've had four wives. What can you tell us about women?"
On France: "I love France and continue to love it. You only need to count up the girlfriends I've had there."
Commenting on his government's opposition to moves to earmark a fixed proportion of seats in parliament for women: "We very much like [having] women in parliament - especially beautiful ones."
BERLUSCONI'S WIFE WRONG TO GO PUBLIC, POLL SAYS
Life in Italy
ANSA
February 7, 2007
Rome- Veronica Lario's decision to publicly scold her husband Silvio Berlusconi for his roving eye was ill judged, most Italians appear to think.
According to a poll issued on Thursday by research group Ipr Marketing, only 33% think it was a good idea for Lario to air her grievances in a letter to Italian daily La Repubblica.
For 55% of respondents, Lario was wrong to go public while 12% said they had no opinion on the issue.Lario's actions won more support among women, with 37% saying they approved compared to 29% of men.More than 30% said they thought Lario's decision was politically motivated.
The public spat between Lario and Berlusconi held the country in thrall on Wednesday, as well as making headlines
around the world.British daily The Times even carried a spoof letter from the former premier to his wife.
Lario, an ex-actress who goes by her stage name and has been married to the centre-right leader for 27 years, stunned Italians by discarding her famed reserve and demanding a public apology from her husband for belittling her with his flirting.
In her letter published on the front-page of La Repubblica, Lario referred to comments Berlusconi reportedly made to several young and glamourous showgirls during a gala dinner given after a top TV award ceremony last week.
"My husband made remarks I find unacceptable: 'If Iweren't already married, I'd marry you straight away' and
'I'd go anywhere with you'."These statements undermine my dignity and, given thage, political role and family situation of the person who said them, cannot be written off as playful comments," Lario said in the letter, which was all the more embarrassing for Berlusconi since it appeared in the country's leading left-wing daily.
Within hours, Berlusconi had duly apologised with another letter faxed to Italian media organisations."I treasure your dignity in my heart even when a lighthearted joke, a gallant remark or a momentary trifle comes out of my mouth.
"I beg you to forgive me," said the billionaire media tycoon, who admitted that his marriage was undergoing a
period of "trouble and turbulence" but told his wife that it was "sure to end in sweetness, like all true love stories".
Born Miriam Raffaela Bartolini, Lario is Berlusconi's second wife and, at 50, is 20 years his junior.
Berlusconi left his first wife for Lario, smitten after seeing her perform topless in a Milan play called The
Magnificent Cuckold about a philandering husband.
They have three children: two daughters, aged 22 and 20, and a son, aged 18.Despite being the wife of one of Italy's best-known public figures, Lario has always kept a very low profile. She said in her letter that she did not like breaking
this "reserve" and was doing so partly to protect her dignity as a woman but also to set an example for her children.
The youthful-looking Berlusconi, who has admitted to aface lift and a hair transplant, has always cultivated a
playboy image and been linked by the gutter press to a string of young and beautiful women.
The recipients of his reported admiration at the gala dinner were Venezuelan model and showgirl Aida Yespica and
Mara Carfagna, an ex-showgirl whom he made an MP with his Forza Italia party.
Lario's open criticism of her husband's behaviour sparked a political debate, with many centre-left and opposition women lawmakers defending her. Most male politicians took a different view, saying that Lario should have kept her grievances private. The case dominated the Italian media, with TV current affairs shows ditching their scheduled programmes to cover it.
Even the Church weighed in, with Cardinal Ersilio Tonini saying that Lario's letter had "stirred my heart".
It is not the first time that Berlusconi's comments about women have landed him in trouble. He sparked tensions with Finland in 2005 by saying he used "playboy tactics" on Finnish President Tarja Halonen to persuade her to make Italy the site of an EU food agency.
On another occasion, Berlusconi astonished Americanjournalists by urging Wall Street businessmen to invest in
Italy because the country had "gorgeous secretaries".
[RAA: You use what works, and since Wall Streeters are well known for being "hound dogs", and think with their penis, Berlusconi's comments would seem MOST effective!! :) :)]
http://www.lifeinitaly.com/news/news-detailed.asp?newsid=4291
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Maltese Admit Crass; Envy Italian Eye for Beauty
This is Malta. We don't go in for bridges of poetry. We just lay the planks across.
Bridge-building is something that we in Malta have not taken much to heart, since we consider the exercise as simply one of getting people and merchandise from one place to another over a drop or ravine. We are crassly utilitarian.
We do not think of bridges as possibly being objects of beauty. The Italians do, but not we. The highways of Italy, in particular are remarkable for the number of spectacular and poetic bridges that cross them, or that the roads themselves cross.
Simply slapping down a horizontal slab of metal grid or concrete passage never occurs to the Italians as sufficiently beholden to eyes bred on beauty.
Not in Malta. We go for the cheapest and the most humdrum, with the hateful expression that betrays our mediocrity, on our lips or in our thoughts: "Mhux xorta?" (It's all the same). Mhux xorta? is always on our tongue.
Bridging the Gaps in Malta
Times of Malta
Norbert Ellul-Vincenti
February 6, 2007
So this morning, on one of my usual early walks across the spectacular Valletta Waterfront (much credit there to the builders), I notice that after long months of late re-structuring, the bridge across the new mouth of the inland water has been laid. It is steel, straight and plain.
What a fool I was to expect something to feast the eye. This is Malta. We don't go in for bridges of poetry. We just lay the planks across. The result was exactly as I had feared while nursing a glimmer of hope.
Perhaps we should have taken a page from the new Archbishop's book. Mgr Paul Cremona has gone on record as saying that he thinks he is a good bridge-builder. Bridge-builders and fence-menders are experts that greatly benefit society, though it must be admitted that fences may hedge people separately rather than bring them together. They use tact and good-handling to bring people into harmony.
But bridge-building is something that we in Malta have not taken much to heart, since we consider the exercise as simply one of getting people and merchandise from one place to another over a drop or ravine. We are crassly utilitarian.
We do not think of bridges as possibly being objects of beauty. The Italians do, the Spanish, the Swiss and the Germans, but not we. The highways of Italy, in particular are remarkable for the number of spectacular and poetic bridges that cross them, or that the roads themselves cross.
Simply slapping down a horizontal slab of metal grid or concrete passage never occurs to the Italians as sufficiently beholden to eyes bred on beauty.
Not in Malta. We go for the cheapest and the most humdrum, with the hateful expression that betrays our mediocrity, on our lips or in our thoughts: "Mhux xorta?" (It's all the same). Mhux xorta? is always on our tongue.
"Xorta l-ilma bahar," we say, recognising that mediocrity does not get you anywhere beautifully. We require more than zalzett and hobz biz-zejt to exist. We crave beauty. Man does not live by bread alone.
While we are on the subject of bridges, and remembering the heavy jolts of decades on the Regional Road Bridge, we may wonder why a major bridge can reach restoration age without a way having been found to make clean, unbumpable joints on the driving surface. One would have thought that it would have been no great invention to make movable parts of the bridge surface to meet not at an angle but on a gentle tarmac curve, so that bumps on the bridge and jolts on the cars' suspension system could have been avoided.
The bridge that connects Bahar-ic-Caghaq with Gharghur is about the only poetic one in Malta, but that was built a long time ago and we can hardly take credit for it. So was the one now leading the masses into Valletta and hosting a bazaar of weird eatables, drinkables and wearables. Bridging a gap on supporting arches of stone is about as far as we dare go. Otherwise we opt for the straight horizontal.
Whether in the fields or in towns, across valleys or between towers, we have not yet coveted the beauty of Mostar Bridge or Birmingham's Iron Bridge, and the thousands of others that pepper more creative countries. Solutions such as the one in Strait Street between law courts, are hard to find. The panzer steel bridge beneath St Elmo, on the way to the breakwater in Valletta, bathroom-blue painted, is as unsightly as any.
Have I opened my mouth too early for the Waterfront bridge? Will somebody quickly write in to say that it is really going to be in keeping with the rest of the creativity? I hope they do. I hope nobody needs a layman's advice, and that bridge-building in Malta is breathing deep and fresh from newly-opened windows.
Far be it for me, as a layman who knows nothing about bridge-building, to put into question Malta's seasoned national engineering qualities in the bridging compartment. But why may I not comment, for I have crossed many bridges in my life when it came to crossing bridges?
I have danced in the middle of them, contemplated the murky floods below without yearning for suicide and pushed along with the proverbial water under many of them. So here goes. I wish we could learn a thing or two from Calatrava's ways of joining up divided banks. And it doesn't have to be Calatrava even.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/core/article.php?id=249718
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Eritrea Struggles to Save it's Italian Archetectural Gems
The British had turned over the bothersome port of Massawa, to Italy in 1885, and Italy's control of all of fragmented Eritrea was formalized in 1889 with the signing of the Treaty of Uccialli with Emperor Melinik II of Ethiopia, whom the Italians helped gain power by providing him with armaments, and who immediately reneged, claiming being tricked/stupidity. The Italians controlled Eritrea from 1889 until 1941,
Italian administration of Eritrea spared no expense to create themselves a "home away from home. and brought improvements in the medical and agricultural sectors of Eritrean society. Furthermore, the Italians employed many Eritreans in public service (in particular in the police and public works departments) and oversaw the provision of urban amenities in Asmara and Massawa In a region marked by cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity, and great conflict, a succession of Italian governors maintained a notable degree of unity and public order. The Italians also built many major infrastructural projects in Eritrea including the Asmara-Massawa Cableway and the Eritrean Railway.
As Italians they built. Four square kilometers of downtown Asmara now known as the "historical perimeter," and is is a fascinating mixture of Italian Novecento, neo-classical, Gothic, rationalist , art deco, Romanesque, and Renaissance-inspired .Vast pavements were constructed for the Italian passaggiata , lined with plush cafes to take a cappuccino. Villas surrounded by gardens overflowing with bougainvillea and frangipani constituted the residential areas -an explosion of taste and color.
Although many buildings are suffering from the ravages of time and adversity, central Asmara still has the feel of a pleasant Italian town. The UN is being urged to assist in preserving this Eritrean Architectural Treasure.
As compared to the prosperity of the Italian Administration, currently Eritrea is one of the poorest countries in the world, with over 60 percent of the population living below the poverty line.
"Eritrean Architecture is Like a Frozen Music" - Ali Abdu
All Africa. com
Shabait.com (Asmara)
By Corinne Archer
Asmara
January 20, 2007
A soaring plane, a surging ship, a swirling staircase. Disconnected as they may seem, these elements all come together in Asmara, capital of Africa's newest country Eritrea, in a veritable Aladdin's Cave of architectural riches. The symbolism characterizes the eclectic buildings of this extraordinary city, which is now slowly revealing itself to the outside world.
For more than three decades, Asmara's hidden wonders were kept secret as civil war raged through the craggy mountains, narrow valleys, and desert plains of Eritrea -then a province of Ethiopia. Guerrilla fighters struggling for independence from successive oppressive rulers finally marched into their newly liberated capital in 1991 and, with peace, Asmara's unique architecture was at last brought out into the open.
Straddling a plateau over two kilometers high, the "city in the clouds" houses one of the highest concentrations of modernist buildings anywhere in the world. It was an experimental playground for the Italian colonizers of the early twentieth century, whose architects and builders were given free reign to dabble to their heart's content.
The result is a mishmash of inspired engineering, packed into an area of four square kilometers, which fits together in the most charming way imaginable. Futuristic buildings depicting the new fascination with machines in the early 1900s stand alongside the simple rationalist styles of the 1930s and the austere monumentalism of the fascist era.
As fascism waned, this too was reflected in the architecture with a return to rustic, classical villas. Intermingled with these various styles are fabulously ornate buildings, such as the Asmara Theatre, the former palace and the Roman Catholic cathedral -neo-classical designs, with touches of Gothic and flourishes of art deco.
But all this history requires preservation, a fact that was quickly acknowledged by the new Eritrean authorities. After the war, hurried and unplanned construction began sprouting everywhere to the horror of world-renowned architects like Naigzy Gebremedhin.
Realization of the threat dawned, and the government placed a building embargo on Asmara's historical center. Naigzy returned to his native Eritrea in 1994 to establish a national environmental program, and became the independent country's first director of environmental protection.
Aided by World Bank funding, he launched an initiative known as the Cultural Assets Rehabilitation Project (CARP) in a bid to save the buildings, many of which had started crumbling badly due to war, isolation, and neglect. He worked as the coordinator of CARP until his retirement in 2004, serving without pay in recognition of the many sacrifices made by fellow Eritreans in achieving the nation's independence.
Before liberation, Naigzy trained as an architect and city planner at various institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lectured at the faculty of building and architecture at Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa. He then went into private practice and his many projects included preparing the masterplans for campuses of the new university system in Ethiopia. When the brutal military regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam ousted Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, Naigzy joined the Nairobi-based UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) where he headed projects dealing with urban planning and its environmental aspects. In 1994 he left the UN and went to work for his newly independent country.
Naigzy's love for Asmara and its remarkable heritage is infectious. You gaze in awe at the old Fiat Tagliero garage constructed in the shape of a plane with its two enormous concrete wings ready for take off. You wonder at the sight of the Bar Zilli, built to mimic a ship whose bow juts out into Martyrs Avenue -named after the tens of thousands who gave their lives for the country's independence. You linger over a macchiato in the panelled art deco interior of the Cinema Roma cafe with its zinc top bar alongside the former projection equipment, kept in the foyer as an exhibit.
"This is a city where experimentation with modernism is unparalleled anywhere else in the world," Naigzy points out.
He says much of the Italian architecture in Asmara is Novecento and rationalist. The designs are simple, straight lines as evidenced in the apartment blocks dotted around the city or commercial buildings such as the Hotel Selam -a classic example of the rationalist style.
Round the corner there are more treasures in store. Naigzy takes you inside a delapidated, unprepossessing apartment block. You are stunned by the sight that greets you -a perfectly preserved spiral staircase of yellow-painted concrete swirls that make you feel giddy as you follow them to the top of the building. An Italian experiment with interior decoration.
The Italians, who controlled Eritrea from 1889 until 1941, spared no expense to create themselves a "home away from home." But the building spree really took off in the 1930s when fascist leader Benito Mussolini decided to use the territory as a springboard from which to expand his African empire. Between 1935 and 1941, as Italians flooded into the colony, Asmara's population grew tenfold.
Eritreans were not allowed into the area now known as the "historical perimeter," where vast pavements were constructed for the Italian passaggiata , lined with plush cafes for the well-heeled colonizers to pause and take a cappuccino. Solidly-built cinemas, hotels, and restaurants in a variety of styles were erected for their entertainment. Pastel colored villas surrounded by gardens overflowing with bougainvillea and frangipani constituted the residential areas -an explosion of taste and color.
Walking down Liberation Avenue -the palm-fringed main thoroughfare that has undergone a series of name changes -the eclectic range of Asmara's architecture is on full view. Rationalist blocks of flats hug the sides of imposing, severe fascist buildings such as the former party headquarters, now the Ministry of Education Across the road is the art deco Cinema Impero with its nearby cafй terrace. Further up lie the gigantic Romanesque-style Catholic cathedral and the Renaissance-inspired Asmara Theatre. Although many buildings are suffering from the ravages of time and adversity, central Asmara still has the feel of a pleasant Italian town. The altitude means the climate is temperate and the filtered sunlight bounces off the multi-colored buildings, creating hues of pale greens, yellows, and pinks. And from every corner, the tell-tale sign of a cafe society -the pervasive aroma of roasting coffee.
But Naigzy fears that grinding poverty in Eritrea could hamper the continuation of much-needed conservation efforts. The World Bank project is set to expire at the end of this year. "Given the lack of financial resources, it is likely that conservation work will be given a low priority," he says. "The needs of architectural preservation pale in contrast to health, nutrition, and education."
Eritrea is one of the poorest countries in the world, with over 60 percent of the population living below the poverty line. And the territory has been devastated by war, occupation, and natural disasters for hundreds of years.
Wedged in the Horn of Africa between Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Sudan this tiny nation of nearly four million people is strategically situated along 1,000 kilometers of Red Sea coast. Its location has resulted in a steady stream of invaders and occupiers over the centuries -Turks, Egyptians, Italians, British, and Ethiopians. Each of these foreign occupiers has had a distinct impact on the creation of an Eritrean identity, resulting in a resilient and fiercely independent people. Eritrea, which is equally divided between Moslems and Christians, was given its name by the Italians, taken from 'Mare Erythraeum' meaning Red Sea in Latin.
The British took over the colony in 1941 after defeating the Italians at the Battle of Keren. But they were never very interested in their new acquisition and in 1952, the UN decided Eritrea should be federated with Ethiopia as an autonomous entity. However, ten years later Emperor Haile Selassie annexed the territory using acts of Eritrean armed resistance as a pretext. Thus began one of the longest civil wars in African history. Eritrea's struggle for independence was mostly fought in isolation after the superpowers took it in turn to support Ethiopia. But the seemingly formidable foe was defeated, the victorious Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) entered Asmara in 1991 and two years later Eritrea's independence was formalized in a referendum.
Eritrea was peaceful for a while. The guerrilla leaders strove to turn themselves into politicians and create new institutions for the fledgling state. But in 1998, war again broke out with Ethiopia -this time with the EPLF's erstwhile allies, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) who had taken control of Ethiopia the same year as Eritrea gained its independence. A skirmish over the border town of Badme flared up into a full-scale war that lasted two years with the loss of tens of thousands of lives. The situation remains tense with the border closed and still to be demarcated.
"The current no-war-no-peace situation will impact negatively on any initiative aiming to raise investment funds," warns Naigzy, who is co-author of the seminal book Asmara: Africa's Secret Modernist City , which brought the capital to the attention of the world.
But the Eritrean government plays down any suggestion that historical preservation is about to take a back seat. In fact it was CARP, which is administered by the Eritrean Ministry of Tourism, that sponsored Asmara's recent nomination to the World Monuments Fund 2006 list of 100 Most Endangered Sites , a move they believe will aid in their effort to harness private-sector support for restoration of the city.
"This is an equal priority for us, along with other programs," says Information Minister Ali Abdu. "The past is very important in order to build the future." The conservation project, he says, will continue with a budget under the Ministry of Tourism.
However private investors are now paying hard currency for empty plots both within the historic perimeter and in urbanized parts of Asmara. Naigzy is afraid that investors, who have paid dollars for prime land, will want to maximize their return by building "high and wide."
"Persons who have fought against concrete monstrosities may be in for a rude shock," he says. "I hope and pray that one is wrong with this dire prediction."
Ali Abdu seeks to allay any fears in this regard. He admits there have been "one or two mistakes," but stresses that the government is very aware of this potential problem. "We do have a say with the private investors," he says. "We are protecting the historical buildings and we emphasize the importance of this to the investors."
The government, he says, is endeavoring to separate the old and the new by building a modern city around the historical center.
Naigzy acknowledges that up to now the moratorium on new construction or even substantial modification within the historical perimeter still holds. "This is remarkable," he says. "Is it the result of detached and unadulterated responsibility? Difficult to say. The economy is in stagnation mode, hence no construction."
Whatever their politics and beliefs, Eritreans have one thing in common -an unbridled devotion to their capital city. And the government has continued the trend of building unusual monuments in the city center. Rather than cultish statues or distasteful memorials to commemorate the independence of their country, they built a monument in the form of a huge pair of sandals -the Shidda worn by the freedom fighters.
Far from denouncing the architecture as a colonial reminder, as in so many other African countries, Eritreans believe their capital is unique. It is this belief that might well propel the push for continued preservation.
"Our architecture is like frozen music," says Ali Abdu. "It's like wine -the longer it stays, the better it tastes. It is magnificent -very, very unique." His favorite buildings, he says, are the art deco pastel post office on the main square, and the former Fiat Tagliero garage.
"African countries are very quick to destroy their architecture," he adds. "But it's not bad to remember the past. You can't cancel history, you can learn from it."
Naigzy agrees. "Eritreans in general and the citizens of Asmara in particular seem to have thoroughly appropriated the colonial architecture, to the extent of almost perceiving it inherently as their own," he states. "There is most definitely a feeling that Asmara is a unique city in Africa, indeed, in the world."
http://allafrica.com/stories/200701210021.html
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia
"The Poet, The Count and The Peddler" by Anthony Bottagaro
Local Denver author Anthony Bottagaro’s novel, The Poet, The Count and The Peddler, (Rockaway Press, 2006).has been described as “a beautiful slice of the American immigrant experience,” “a provocative and unforgettable story,” and a story that “values the oppressed and reveals the oppressors.”
The Book is translated into a stage performance that features Bottagaro as Mario Ferrara, an old Sicilian American immigrant who captivates the audience with bits of wisdom, witty anecdotes, and thought-provoking commentary while he offers some magical trinkets from his mysterious pushcart. As Mario, Bottagaro takes the audience on a fanciful and intriguing journey sprinkled with history and Sicilian folklore.
Mario the Peddler to benefit Italians of Denver
North Denver News
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
DENVER — The Colorado Historical Society has partnered with local author Anthony Bottagaro to help raise funds for the upcoming Colorado History Museum exhibition, Preserving Colorado’s Communities: The Italians of Denver.
On Feb. 23 at 7 p.m., Bottagaro will perform Mario the Peddler, a one-man live show that breathes life into the gutsy main character of Bottagaro’s gritty best-selling novel, The Poet, The Count and The Peddler (Rockaway Press, 2006). The 75-minute premiere performance features Bottagaro as Mario Ferrara, an old Sicilian American immigrant who captivates the audience with bits of wisdom, witty anecdotes, and thought-provoking commentary while he offers some magical trinkets from his mysterious pushcart. As Mario, Bottagaro takes the audience on a fanciful and intriguing journey sprinkled with history and Sicilian folklore.
A novelist, speaker, and social activist with a spiritual perspective, Bottagaro wrote the novel and created the live performance as avenues to deliver a larger message of love, peace and justice. He has presented his message to religious and political leaders from around the world, including members of the U.S. Congress and State Department, the White House, the United Nations, and even Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. “All my life experiences, good and bad, have molded me into who I am—a peddler of words,” Bottagaro said. “I live every day knowing without a doubt that we can create a world more human and more divine.”
Bottagaro developed Mario the Peddler as a creative fundraising tool for nonprofit organizations and will be performing it for the first time at the Colorado History Museum.
“Tony is on a mission to evoke the love and connection that we all have for one another,” Maria Scordo Allen, Denver’s Vice Consul of Italy noted. “His ability to transform the provocative Italian American character and messages from his book into a live performance helps Tony reach out even more while giving nonprofits an opportunity to raise funds for their own important programs and initiatives.”
Bottagaro’s novel, The Poet, The Count and The Peddler, has been described as “a beautiful slice of the American immigrant experience,” “a provocative and unforgettable story,” and a story that “values the oppressed and reveals the oppressors.”
Tickets are $50, which includes admission, an invitation to the Italians of Denver exhibition opening reception, and a $29.95 hardcover copy of The Poet, The Count and The Peddler. Call 303/866-3639 to purchase tickets or visit www.coloradohistory.org.
In 2002, the Colorado Historical Society began conducting oral histories, collecting photographs and artifacts, and researching families, businesses, and organizations. The result of these efforts will culminate in the exhibition Preserving Colorado’s Communities: The Italians of Denver, which will feature compelling personal stories and more than 200 rare artifacts and photographs. In addition, the archives will be made available to the public through the Colorado Historical Society’s Stephen H. Hart Library. The exhibition opens April 19, 2007 at the Colorado History Museum.
http://northdenvernews.com/content/view/646/2/
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italy's Patrick Staudacher: Newly Cowned World Super-G Ski Champion
Staudacher became Italy's first world ski champion since the great Alberto Tomba.While Tomba last won world championship gold in the slalom and giant for Italy in 1996, the last Italian to win in a speed event was Zeno Colo, who won the downhill in 1952.
The difference between seventh place and first place was just 0.04 secs !!!!!!
Super-G gold gives Staudacher thoughts of Tomba
France 24
AFP News Brief
by Justin Davis
February, 6, 2007
Newly-crowned world super-G champion Patrick Staudacher blushed with embarrassed pride after becoming Italy's first world ski champion since the great Alberto Tomba.
The 26-year-old stunned race favourites Bode Miller, the defending champion, and aging Austrian ace Hermann Maier to claim the biggest prize of his career in a season of no World Cup podiums so far.
Austria's Fritz Strobl took second with Switzerland's Bruno Kernen in third.
Like Staudacher, there was also a surprised joy for the pair who had been forced to qualify for their respective teams' super-G outfits.
For Miller, whose slalom performances have taken a massive tumble this past year, another error-strewn performance in a discpline in which he really should have done better left him in 24th place at 1.34sec behind.
The 29-year-old American is now under pressure to perform in Saturday's blue riband event of the downhill, in which he is defending champion.
Maier finished in seventh, missing out on a fourth world super-G medal by just 0.04secs.
With few chances to make up time on the bottom part of the course, Staudacher's superb start and almost flawless run proved crucial.
"I had a solid run, but the best I thought I would finish was fifth or sixth," said Staudacher, whose best result this season was a fifth place in the downhill.
"I think I got the benefit of having a relatively early start. But I also skied well."
While Tomba last won world championship gold in the slalom and giant for Italy in 1996, the last Italian to win in a speed event was Zeno Colo, who won the downhill in 1952.
Staudacher began his career as a slalomer, but he went positively red when the great Tomba's name was mentioned in the same breathe as his.
"It's a great feeling to be the first Italian world champion since Alberto. I'm very happy and proud, but I'm also finding it hard to believe what I've just done," he added.
Another 18 racers followed the Italian down the Olympia course, which was bathed in sunny, clear conditions after four days of inclement weather.
But only Strobl, the 2002 Olympic downhill champion, came close to pushing the him off the top step of the podium.
In what could be the Austrian's final season of competition, Strobl said he hoped this result would help convince team bosses that he's worth a place on their downhill team.
"I met Bruno (Kernen) earlier in the week and we had a coffee. And we realised that neither of us had an automatic place on our super-G teams. Now, we both have a medal," he said.
"I'm feeling good. It's up to the team bosses now to decide for the downhill."
Kernen grabbed the bronze by just 0.02 over Austrian Christoph Gruber and fellow Swiss Didier Cuche, who tied for fourth place.
He admitted to being shocked when Maier failed to beat his time.
"I almost couldn't believe it when Hermann Maier was at the finish. It's a very emotional moment for me. I almost can't believe it.
"A lot of times during my career I've been on the wrong end of the hundredths of a second. Now, I'm on the right side
http://www.france24.com/france24Public/en/administration/afp-news.html?id=070206112328.0ak6a3jk&cat=world
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Expat Austrailian in Rome. I'm Home. Not Going Anywhere!!!
It is Interesting and Amusing to Hear more than about Tourists, but those who chose to LIVE in Italy.
When in Rome... the English teacher
When in Rome
Paul Anthem,
February 7, 2007
In the first of a series on expats in the city of Rome
Francoise Blackburn, is a teacher from Australia, who was devastated when she was almost forced to leave.
I came here on holiday and never went home. I'd had a long-held ambition to come to Rome; I saw the film "Only You" (a romantic comedy set against a stunning Italian backdrop) and that was it, I was hooked.
But I was just on one of those European tours that people do. Then I met an American girl and she just said one day: "What if we lived here"?? That was it, the idea was in my head. I went on to Greece and Spain but I knew then that I'd be coming back.
I was lucky enough to get a job straight away, with a hostel near Termini where I was staying. But it didn't pay enough so I started teaching English like thousands of others who come here to live.
In the mornings these days I get up at about 09.00, a luxury I probably wouldn't have doing a standard job back home. I live quite near the school I teach at, in Via Cola di Rienzo. I've been in Prati for about three years but I've lived all over, in S. Paolo, S. Lorenzo, Testaccio, and shared with Italians, Americans, Germans, South Koreans, you name it.
In the mornings I'll teach from 09.30 until about 14.00; it's fine if the students are talkative, and the more you get to know them the more you want them to do well. You get a good Italian perspective on life. For example some don't understand why I'm here They think the quality of life back in Australia sounds great and it must be much easier to make ends meet. They have a point, but for me back home is the norm, been there and done that.
I'd say many of my students now are reluctant learners To be honest they don't have much time for study given their jobs and the hours they do. They're frustrated they can't speak English and tell me how lucky I am that I can ? it's really made me take it less for granted.
I don't miss home. I regret the fact I can't just jump on a plane as I could if I were English, for example, and pop home for a weekend. But it's not so difficult living abroad these days, not when you have email and phone cards. I also keep up to date with the news at home, especially through The Age and Herald Sun websites.
At home it's difficult for them to understand this. One of my family might say: Oh Francoise, remember Mrs Smith from our road, she ran off with the police chief?? and I'll be like, I know, I read it online, in fact I told you!
Between teaching I'll usually go home for lunch. I find I cook a lot more now I'm here. When I was in Greece I got a crash course from some Italian friends I met. Now I can do a decent salsiccia and broccoli pasta or, of course, the Roman amatriciana. OK, I might leave the pasta in too long or not get quite the right amount of salt, but it's major progress from coffee and toast.
I have to admit my Italian's not great though. I did a couple of courses when I got here, but generally I'm teaching English all day, where you insist the students DON'T speak Italian.Then mixing with English-speaking friends at night. I had an Italian boyfriend for two years; he simply refused to speak any English, and though that drove me mad, I did learn some Italian I had no choice.
It nearly all went to waste last August though, when I thought I'd have to leave Rome for good. Basically I got a call from the police, out of the blue, to say my visa was not being renewed and I had 15 days to leave the country. I was trying to speak to people to see what was going on but of course it was August, and most people had disappeared for the holidays.
I wasn't officially deported but I was "invited to leave". I had to go back to Melbourne; I was distraught I didn't want to leave Italy, I felt settled. I lost six kilos with the worry. I went to the Italian consulate in Melbourne and it turned out there'd been a mix-up over my visa. Ridiculous. Now it's all resolved, thankfully, and I managed to keep my job. I think it brought home to me how happy I am here in Rome, and the longer I stay the more settled I feel.
I can get up a bit later here, get paid for talking with students, eat out late at night for a decent price and take off for the country at weekends. And today I was sitting outside in Campo de Fiori on a Sunday afternoon in January sunshine. That can't be bad. It's fair to say I hope to be here for a while yet.
http://www.wantedinrome.com/articles/complete_articles.php?id_art=465
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
"My Father Il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini's Son" by Romano Mussolini
It is unprecedented in the publishing field to allow someone who holds a totally contrary view to that of the author to have a 21 page introductory essay included.
Alexander Stille is a Reknown Anti Italian historian who obviously is interested in trying to maintain a one dimensional cartoonish caricature of Mussolini, and is Not interested in permitting a more personal view of Mussolini, Nor having the passage of time allow historians to step back from the hysterical writings immediately following WWII.
MY FATHER IL DUCE
A Memoir by Mussolini's Son
Romano Mussolini
Introductory Essay by Alexander Stille
Kales Press; dist. W. W. Norton;
Publication Date: November 1, 2006;
Hardcover, Fully Bound, Jacketed
5 ? x 8 ? inches, 200 pages
18 historical photos
ISBN: 0-9670076-8-2
Price: $27.95
Publication date: October 30, 2006
In this complex, controversial memoir, Romano Mussolini (September 26, 1927- February 3, 2006), the last surviving child of dictator Benito Mussolini, contributes his unique perspective to the growing body of work that portrays Il Duce's era.
Through the son's portrait of never before publicly shared memories and feelings, my father il duce (brings alive the domestic scenes of his childhood as well as snapshots of his father's public role, particularly when it intersected with the author's own youthful experiences. He also relates in detail the memories of his mother, Donna Rachele, who lived until 1979 and often spoke with her son about his father. All of these memories provide glimpses into the character of the man that even his own family referred to as Il Duce.
Romano Mussolini portrays a father devoted to a deeply traditional concept of Italian patriarchal family life, including mistresses on the side, and a family man whose preference would have been to come home for lunch and dinner every day and to his devoted wife every night, were it not for his intense responsibilities to the fascist movement he had founded.
The son's memories, sorted by chapter, but not presented chronologically, shift between his own recollections of time spent with his father to the years after Mussolini's death in 1945. The prose lingers and then artistically moves forward, melancholy to fierce to vulnerable, like the notes of the jazz music the author played during his acclaimed musical career.
We learn that Il Duce never raised his voice with his children, but rather, "one of his famous stern looks was enough to make us nervous." That he loved to hear his son play piano-indeed during their final time together, April 17, 1945, his last words were "Ciao, Romano, continue playing."
Romano Mussolini tells us too that Il Duce liked to relax by watching movies at home. His favorites were those with Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, and especially those starring Charlie Chaplin. Romano cites Modern Times and The Gold Rush as two of his father's favorite Chaplin movies, but ironically does not even allude to The Great Dictator-a Chaplin spoof on Mussolini himself in which Il Duce fails miserably.
The son presents Mussolini as a man who was supremely convinced that he was the master of his life: "'Everything happening around me,'" my father used to say, "'leaves me indifferent. I consciously choose 'Live dangerously' as my life's motto. As an old soldier, I say, 'If I advance, follow me. If I retreat, kill me. If they kill me, vindicate me.'" He saw his existence in scenes of high drama.
In this memoir, Romano Mussolini does not truly ponder the consequences of his father's alliances and dictatorship, though with at least one notable exception that he gave considerable thought to his personal anger toward Hitler for "stabbing my father in the back at his darkest hour." Instead, he seeks to render concrete the memories that he held silent over a lifetime before they were lost to history.
The fascist order that Mussolini created and imposed upon Italy is one that Italians and students of history the world over are still interpreting. Indeed, his legacy was centerstage in the recent Italian elections in May 2006, and one of the deputies in the Italian parliament today who represents his alliances is Alessandra Mussolini, the author's daughter and defender of her grandfather.
As the trend of a more temperate historical reanalysis in Italy continues, in particular regarding the role of fascism, some of this kinder, gentler Mussolini is already widely accepted.
Thus, my father il duce (in Italian Il Duce Mio Padre) was published to great attention and controversy in Italy in 2004 (Rizzoli), and quickly became a best-seller. The son often appeared on Italian national television and in newspaper interviews. In part, this illuminated that fascist supporters are alive and well, while simultaneously confirming even among nonsupporters, the ongoing attraction to the cult of personality Mussolini masterminded.
In Italy, this public discourse about Mussolini is common, and Italy does not hide from that which can be uncomfortable. However, for a North American audience, that are much less sophisticated, more accepting of government propaganda, and not well versed in the hidden agendas of some historian/authors, the US publishers felt it was important to establish a context for this memoir.
Those publishers however could not have chosen a more ideologue or slanted person to write the Introduction.
The introductory essay to My Father Il Duce is a bit like putting a Warning Label that states: "This is contrary to everything I want to believe, so therefore treat it as fiction".
The author reached his goal of living to see the publication of his memoir in Italian in 2004. As for this English-language edition, he earlier expressed approval of the front cover design. On January 1, 2006, he received the translated English language manuscript of his writing. During the last month of his life, he approved it. Romano Mussolini died on February 3, 2006, at age seventy-nine in a Rome hospital soon after heart surgery.
His death made international news in a way characteristic of a celebrity. The New York Times obituary reported:
In the 1950's and 60's he was in the vanguard of Italian jazz with his group the Romano Mussolini All Stars, and he played with American greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Chet Baker. Mr. Mussolini gained even greater international fame with his first marriage, to Anna Maria Scicolone, the sister of the actress Sophia Loren....Despite his own scrupulous avoidance of politics, politicians from Italy's right wing-parties widely lauded Mr. Mussolini and his family name in statements they released: "Romano knew how to make us love him for his humanity, his art, but also for the dignity and coherence with which he defended his family from attacks and demonizations."
Through Romano's worldwide celebrity and apparent well-regarded nature, his words in defense of Il Duce, albeit ones he no doubt wrote as a son who loved his father, offer a rare insider's perspective on history that is valuable to society in our quest for a deeper understanding of tyranny.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++===========
Some of the reviews out include:
"An interesting self-portrait of faith, and the blinding power of a son's love."
-Publishers Weekly
"Offers insight into Mussolini's complex character...a readable and controversial memoir."
-Library Journal
"A riveting story [that] reveals the human and family side of a complex historical figure. Highly recommended."
- Midwest Library Review
=============================================================================================
About the Author
Romano Mussolini, born in Italy (September 26, 1927 - February 3, 2006), went on to become a distinguished jazz musician, recording ten albums, most notably the internationally acclaimed Jazz Studio 7. He collaborated with some of the greatest jazz artists of all time including Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Tony Scott.
Yet after World War II, the self-taught musician faced a bitter struggle to assimilate back into society. In Rome, he said he sold chickens to survive. His surname was cursed and for a while he performed music under the stage name Romano Full. Eventually, he came to realize the marketing advantages of his true surname and resumed his identity as Romano Mussolini in the 1960s when his All Stars ensemble won critical acclaim.
His whole life he refrained from discussing his father's legacy until publishing at age seventy-seven in 2004 in Italy, "before it was too late," his memoir Il Duce Mio Padre (My Father Il Duce). His first marriage was in 1962 to Maria Sciccolone, a jazz singer and younger sister of famed actress Sophia Loren. The couple had two daughters, Elisabetta and Alessandra, though ultimately divorced after years of marital estrangement. In 1990 Romano married the actress Carla Puccini, with whom he had a daughter Rachele. Both wives and their children survive him. He lived in Rome until his death.
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Ancient Italian Lovers
Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in a tender embrace and buried outside Mantua, just 25 miles south of Verona, the romantic city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale of "Romeo and Juliet."
It‘s Quite unique, "Double burials from the Neolithic are unheard of, and these are even hugging.
Neolithic Era (aka The New Stone Age) is marked by the transition from roaming and hunting to an agricultural
society and begins around 9000 B.C. follows the Mesolithic, and ends about 2000 BC
Ancient Lovers are Unearthed in Italy
The Ottawa Recorder
Associated Press
By Ariel David
February 7, 2007
ROME - It could be humanity‘s oldest story of doomed love. Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in a tender embrace and buried outside Mantua, just 25 miles south of Verona, the romantic city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale of "Romeo and Juliet."
"As far as we know, it‘s unique," Menotti told The Associated Press by telephone from Milan. "Double burials from the Neolithic are unheard of, and these are even hugging."
Experts will now study the artifacts and the skeletons to determine the burial site‘s age and how old the two were when they died, she said.
The find has "more of an emotional than a scientific value." But it does highlight how the relationship people have with each other and with death has not changed much from the period in which humanity first settled in villages and learning to farm and tame animals, he said.
The two bodies, which cuddle closely while facing each other on their sides, were probably buried at the same time, possibly an indication of sudden and tragic death, Bondioli said.
He said DNA testing could determine whether the two were related, "but that still leaves other hypotheses; the ‘Romeo and Juliet‘ possibility is just one of many."
http://www.newsone.ca/ottawarecorder/ViewArticle.aspx?id=57534&source=2
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Obit: Frankie Laine, 93; 21 Gold Records, 100 Million Sold
Francesco Paolo LoVecchio was born March 30, 1913, the eldest of eight children of Sicilian immigrants who settled in the Little Italy neighborhood of Chicago. Laine said he came from a "big and poor, but happy" family.
As a youngster, Laine sang in the all-boy choir at church, but first became excited about music when he listened to Bessie Smith singing "Bleeding Hearted Blues" I felt cold chills and an indescribable excitement," Laine said.
It was his first exposure to jazz and the blues, which drew him into music.
At 18, with the Depression underway and his father out of work, Laine hit the road as a dance marathoner. Altogether, he participated in 14 marathons, coming in first on three occasions, and made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for dancing 145 days straight.Laine said the life of a marathoner wasn't as grim as was portrayed in the 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" based on the Horace McCoy novel.
"As bizarre as the whole business sounds today, it was a decent method of keeping body and soul together during the Depression," he said. "I gained experience, insights into human nature and I learned how to handle big crowds." Besides, he said, some of the attention he got then "helped light a spark of hope that maybe I had a shot at bigger and better things."
But Laine would not hit it big until his mid-30s. Until then, he would live the tough life of an undiscovered musician in the depths of the Depression. He traveled from city to city, often without enough money for a hotel or a decent meal.
He finally broke through with his rendition of "That's My Desire," that hit the so-called Harlem pop charts first, which recorded sales to black record buyers, then crossed over.
"That didn't surprise me," Laine said. "In my leaner days I failed many an audition because, I was told, I sounded 'too black.' … I'm certain the confusion was the direct result of the music that influenced me while I was developing my style. I guess I became the first of the so-called blue-eyed soul singers."
As successful as he was, he never received as full a recognition he deserved because he fought attempts to make him a crooner, and preferred to use his voice like an instrument.
"Years before Elvis Presley, Laine brought a potent blend of blues, jazz and country to popular music," jazz critic Don Heckman said. "Rarely acknowledged in Laine's work, he sang with the easy, loose phrasing and imaginative articulation of jazz performers."
During his career, Laine sold well over 100 million records and had 21 gold records. He was hugely popular not only in the United States but also in Britain and Australia. His hits included "Mule Train" and "That Lucky Old Sun."
Frankie Laine, 93; sang 'Mule Train,' theme for 'Rawhide'
Los Angeles Times
By Claudia Luther
Special to The Times
February 7, 2007
Frankie Laine, the singer with the booming voice who hit it big with such songs as "That Lucky Old Sun," "Mule Train," "Cool Water," "I Believe," "Granada" and "Moonlight Gambler," died Tuesday at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego. He was 93.
Laine entered the hospital over the weekend for hip replacement surgery but suffered complications from the operation, said his friend A.C. Lyles, a longtime producer at Paramount Pictures. According to Laine's family, the singer died of cardiovascular disease.
In all, Laine sold well over 100 million records and had 21 gold records. He was hugely popular not only in the United States but also in Britain and Australia.
Even after his popularity crested with the rise of rock 'n' roll, Laine was heard for many years singing the theme to the western TV series "Rawhide," which featured a young Clint Eastwood and ran until 1966.
Most of those who remember Laine for his biggest hits would hardly know that his body of work included "Baby That Ain't Right," "Rosetta" and many other songs that were more in the style of what Laine considered his roots — jazz and blues.
"Years before Elvis Presley, Laine brought a potent blend of blues, jazz and country to popular music," jazz critic Don Heckman said. "Rarely acknowledged in Laine's work, he sang with the easy, loose phrasing and imaginative articulation of jazz performers."
Laine started out in jazz but was sidetracked by arranger Mitch Miller, who fashioned Laine into a popular artist.
"When I told him I'd probably lose all my jazz fans [with these songs], I was right. I did," Laine told David Kilby of Australian Broadcasting Corp. "But he said I would pick up a lot of other kind of listeners, and I did, so he was right, too."
Miller produced most of Laine's hits in the 1940s and 1950s, including "Mule Train" and "That Lucky Old Sun." He said he loved Laine's voice because it sounded like "the blue-collar man, the guy who didn't know where his next paycheck was coming from."
At first, Laine refused to do "Mule Train."
"You can't expect me to do a cowboy song," he told Miller. "I won't do it!"
But Miller persuaded him to record it, and it was one of Laine's biggest hits.
Though Laine was big of voice, he said he didn't like being referred to as a "belter."
"I was just trying to emphasize the rhythmic aspects of the songs I sang, using my voice the way a jazz soloist uses his instrument," he said in "That Lucky Old Son," his 1993 autobiography, written with Joseph F. Laredo. " 'Crooning' may have the more commercial style, but it wasn't for me."
Francesco Paolo LoVecchio was born March 30, 1913, the eldest of eight children of Sicilian immigrants who settled in the Little Italy neighborhood of Chicago. His father was a barber whose customers included Al Capone; his maternal grandfather was the victim of a mob hit. Laine said he came from a "big and poor, but happy" family.
As a youngster, Laine sang in the all-boy choir at church, but first became excited about music when he listened to one of his mother's records on a windup Victrola: Bessie Smith singing "Bleeding Hearted Blues" with "Midnight Blues" on the flip side.
"The first time I laid the needle down on that record I felt cold chills and an indescribable excitement," Laine said.
The record was his first exposure to jazz and the blues, which drew him into music.
At 18, with the Depression underway and his father out of work, Laine hit the road as a dance marathoner. Altogether, he participated in 14 marathons, coming in first on three occasions. He and his partner, Ruthie Smith, made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for dancing 145 days straight (although he disputed Guinness, saying that he and Smith danced for 146 days).
Laine said the life of a marathoner wasn't as grim as was portrayed in the 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" based on the Horace McCoy novel.
"As bizarre as the whole business sounds today, it was a decent method of keeping body and soul together during the Depression," he said. "I gained experience, insights into human nature and I learned how to handle big crowds." Besides, he said, some of the attention he got then "helped light a spark of hope that maybe I had a shot at bigger and better things."
But Laine would not hit it big until his mid-30s. Until then, he would live the tough life of an undiscovered musician in the depths of the Depression. He traveled from city to city, often without enough money for a hotel or a decent meal.
Times like that, which he described in his autobiography, were not unusual: "Armed with $40 and a letter of introduction from Hoyt [Kline]" — a friend of Louis Armstrong — "I headed off for my second shot at New York. With my club experience and those new songs, I figured I'd be singing in about a week. It took me three days to get in to see the radio executive, and 15 minutes for him to show me the door."
Before long, he had used up "my pathetic little bankroll" going from club to club for auditions. He would sneak into hotels and sleep on the floor — at least until he got thrown out. Then he got a break — an audition at WINS radio, where he got a $5-a-week job singing on a live half-hour show.
It was the WINS program director who changed his name from Frank LoVecchio to Frankie Lane. (Laine altered the spelling to avoid confusion with another singer with the same last name.)
Years more of moving around, working other jobs and testing his talent eventually brought him to Los Angeles, where he hung out at clubs like Slapsy Maxie's and Billy Berg's. It was at Billy Berg's that he met Duke Ellington, Art Tatum and many other legends. And it was there that he would occasionally get to sing for free before eventually being hired.
Even this did not provide an unbroken ladder to success, but eventually Laine got a chance to record a few songs for Mercury Records. He decided he wanted to do an old song he had heard years ago, "That's My Desire," but he couldn't remember it well enough to sing it the way it was written, so he improvised.
"Desire" was the song that proved to be the breakthrough for Laine, although it took almost a year. First it hit the so-called Harlem pop charts, which recorded sales to black record buyers.
"That didn't surprise me," Laine said. "In my leaner days I failed many an audition because, I was told, I sounded 'too black.' … I'm certain the confusion was the direct result of the music that influenced me while I was developing my style. I guess I became the first of the so-called blue-eyed soul singers."
During 1947, "Desire" got more air play, even in Europe. By fall, Laine got his first royalty payment for the song: $36,000. He was 34.
After rock 'n' roll hit big, Laine was considered old hat. He remained popular in Europe and Australia, and he caught a second wind recording the theme songs for "Rawhide," Mel Brooks' movie "Blazing Saddles" and many commercials, including one for Campbell's Manhandlers soups.
He also kept performing, traveling widely with his wife, actress Nan Grey. After her death in 1993, he stayed closer to his home in San Diego, where the couple had lived since 1968. He married Marcia Ann Kline in 1999.
In "Off the Record," a book of interviews with popular music icons, Laine told author Joe Smith, the former chief executive of Warner Bros., Elektra and Capitol records, that if he could change anything about his success, it would be to "make it happen maybe 10 years sooner."
"Ten years is a good stretch of scuffling," Laine said. "But I scuffled for 17 years before it happened, and 17 is a bit much."
In addition to his wife, Laine is survived by his brother, Phillip LoVecchio of Chicago; daughters Pamela Donner of Sherman Oaks and Jan Steiger of Coeur D'Alene, Idaho; and two grandsons.
Services are pending.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-laine7feb07,1,1340769.story?coll=la-news-obituaries&ctrack=1&cset=true
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
"Merchant of Venice" and "Jew of Malta" Condemned. BUT How about the "Sopranos"?
Leslie Camhi is getting her knickers in a twist because she finds that two long time classics written by one of the greatest playwrights of all time, and the other a highly regarded playwright, are being played on Broadway, and she feels they are less than complimentary toward Jews.
I wonder what Leslie has said in the past about the printed word denigrating other Ethnics. I would be particularly interested in hearing what Leslie had to say about the "Sopranos".
Was it Freedom of Speech, Not Stifling Creativity, Not having to be PC, Not being so Sensitive, After all some of it is True, etc, etc, etc,
It's called Hypocrisy, or merely being Self Centered????!!!!!!
The (Elizabethan) Jewish Conspiracy
Talking to Theater for a New Audience about restaging anti-Semitic classics
The Village Voice
by Leslie Camhi
February 5th, 2007
New York Jews, wringing their hands about the rise of anti-Semitism abroad, need look no further than Broadway, where a couple of money-grubbing, blood-lusting members of the tribe are currently hogging the spotlights. At the Duke Theater, Academy Award-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, in collaboration with Theater for a New Audience, is starring as Shylock, the immortal usurer of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice; and on alternate nights, as Barabas, the outrageously villainous lead in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.
Both plays trade in stereotypes with a long history of murderous consequences. Consider one recent example. Last year, Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, was kidnapped and tortured to death in a Parisian suburb; his abductors, members of a multi-ethnic immigrant gang, said they assumed his family would pay a handsome ransom, because "all Jews have money." As Marlowe's play opens, with the merchant Barabas "discovered in his counting house, with heaps of gold before him," it's clear we are entering an imaginary territory fraught with violent and conflicting emotions.
Theater for a New Audience's artistic director, Jeffrey Horowitz, started planning this season of works exploring images of Jews as outsiders two years ago. (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 19th-century forgery "documenting" a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, had already appeared as a soap opera on Egyptian television, but Iran's president had not yet publicly denied the Holocaust or called for Israel's destruction.) Later this month, the company will perform readings of four 20th-century dramas, chosen by its literary adviser, Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold. And in April, it will perform British director Neil Bartlett's stage adaptation of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, whose Fagin was based upon a notorious 19th-century Jewish criminal.
"I didn't set out to make my version of Rachel Corrie," Horowitz told me recently, referring to the one-woman show about the American activist killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza, which arrived in New York following months of controversy. "But I suspected there would be sensitivities to the plays," he continued. "Are they anti-Semitic or are they about anti-Semitism? We wanted to open up that discussion."
It's unlikely that Shakespeare or Marlowe had ever met a Jew. The majority of medieval British Jews, some 2,000 souls, had been expelled from England in 1290; by 1592, when Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta, disloyalty to the Church of England was punishable by death.
The notoriously shady Marlowe, whom historians suspect of both spying upon and fomenting Catholic dissidence, was drawn to the Jew as a figure of shifting allegiances and sheer defiance. At first, his Barabas merely glories in his wealth. Yet when the Catholic Knights of Malta unjustly seize his goods to pay a debt owed to the Ottoman Turks, he vows revenge; bodies (fruit of his machinations) begin piling up, and soon a convent full of nuns lies dead.
F. Murray Abraham (son of a Syrian Christian and an Italian Catholic) has acted plenty of Jewish roles before, though this may be the first time he's entered a scene bowing and scraping with a Yiddish accent. His Barabas repeatedly "plays the Jew," feigning submission to further his aims.
"The play is funny, offensive, horrible, shocking in parts, and then funny again," says its director, David Herskovitz, whose manic Malta fairly bursts with competing claims of bigotry, greed, and corruption. "Is it an ugly comedy or a comic nightmare? I could never pick one or the other."
So too, The Merchant of Venice ranks among Shakespeare's comedies, but in this dark and disturbing play, characters speak of Christian mercy while a man is stripped of his family, possessions, religion, and dignity. When Shylock, a figure much spit upon in Venetian society, extends a loan to his enemy, the wealthy (if temporarily strapped) Christian merchant Antonio, he demands as guarantee just this: a pound of the merchant's flesh. Surprise: Antonio defaults, and suddenly Shylock wants what is owed him.
"What they do to this Jew, and what he threatens to do in return, are both horrifying acts," says James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare and the Jews. "Productions that don't work tend to downplay one or the other."
In fact, Shakespeare's own father had been tried for usury, and his portrayal of Shylock is profoundly ambivalent: a cruel stereotype infused with a deep humanity. The Nazis staged The Merchant of Venice some 50 times but had to make substantial cuts, leaving out both Shylock's daughter's elopement with a Christian (which ran contrary to Nuremberg laws against intermarriage), and her father's desperate grief at this turn of events, which elicits our sympathy. Still, it's hard to imagine it as effective propaganda.
Glimpsed in previews, director Darko Tresnjak's emotionally precise production sets the play sometime in the near future, in an unnamed financial capital. But its truths are timeless. "It's not a play that celebrates diversity," the director said over coffee in Soho recently, referencing the casual racism of a figure like Portia, the play's romantic heroine and its closest exemplar of Christian virtue. "I think it's about how a certain population finds a way to hold onto its power and its money," he added.
And for Herskovitz, Marlowe's Malta remains uncannily resonant. "Here we have this marginal trade center in the Levant, which vividly dramatizes the overlapping, bumping up, and conflict-- complete with military power, racism, and religious righteousness--between European Christians, Ottoman Turks who are Muslims, and this other Jewish culture," the director says. "In that regard, though the play is set in the 16th century, its Malta is very contemporary."
http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0706,camhi,75717,11.html
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
"Living Italian" finally comes to Lehigh University Exchange Student
This young student took a while, but she DID get it!! :)
Carefree in Florence
The Brown and White
Lehigh University
By Elizabeth Callahan
A broad abroad, Columnist
February 5, 2007
I ate one of Florence’s most loved delicacies last weekend.
No, it wasn’t pasta, olive oil or wine.
It was cow intestine.
Yes, that’s right, beef innards.
It was my first experience at a real Italian restaurant where no one spoke English and the menu was in Italian.
I was in an adventurous mood, having spent the day perusing the Italian city that I now call home. I decided to branch from the familiarity of pollo (chicken) and order the Trippa alla Florentina.
It’s a Florence specialty, and all the food in Florence is amazing, so I was sure it would be fabulous.
Everyone around me in the restaurant had plates of wonderful pastas and meats. My roommate and I were anxiously awaiting whatever we had ordered.
Our waitress finally emerged from the kitchen, and out came a giant slab of bleeding meat for my roommate and something that looked like tentacles for me.
Not exactly what I was expecting.
I thought it was some sort of sea urchin at the time, but only later did I learn that it was actually cow intestine.
I was more okay with it being sea urchin.
I actually managed to order the strangest thing on the menu and attract a lot of strange glances from middle-aged Italians as I laughed hysterically while I tried my best to eat the tentacle-like food in front of me.
In a country where you don’t speak the language or know the customs, everyday things like ordering dinner, paying for a panini or finding your way to school become challenges.
Those challenges usually end in me making a fool out of myself as I try to communicate in a pretty pathetic mix of Italian, English, Spanish and hand gestures. I rarely get what I want or end up where I want to be, but I always see amazing sites along the way.
In Florence, everywhere I turn there is something beautiful, something to see.
Things I’ve studied in art history classes are suddenly in front of me. Looking at a photograph of a Michelangelo painting or a building by Brunelleschi is nothing like standing in front of the real thing.
And the Tuscan countryside is even more beautiful than it is in the movies.
I am trying to take my cues from the Italians and live a more care-free life, to really take time to enjoy the sites instead of just rushing around all the time.
Even though Lehigh’s campus is beautiful, as I run to class with my coffee in hand and iPod on full blast, I rarely take the time to look and enjoy it.
Here people just enjoy their walks to work or school, and take in the beautiful city around them as they walk instead of talking on their cell phones.
Cafйs in Italy don’t even offer coffee to go, because it is expected that you want to enjoy your coffee at the cafй. People here seem to live more in the moment and appreciate life in the city.
So, I’m doing my best to have this same mentality.
If I get lost, or order the wrong thing, I just laugh about it and enjoy it for what it is, an experience. ...
http://www.bw.lehigh.edu/story.asp?ID=20383
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italy Shows England How to React To Hooliganism
Italy immediately decided to ban all levels of football over the weekend and almost certainly for at least one more weekend until "appropriate measures and safeguards have been established" after the death of an Italian policeman.
This is unprecedented action, the kind that was never even contemplated in England in all those years when hooliganism was gestating and then being exported into every corner of the European game, a product leader which in its numbers and its scale exceeded anything ever seen before, even in some of the more warring examples of Italian volatility.
England points out that Italian is shocking "savage" in that In Italy stretching back to 1962, in 45 years, the death toll is seven.
But England conveniently forgets that is a fraction of the "carnage" caused TO Italian Juventus fans in Heysel, several years ago largely by the conduct of Liverpool fans. And it took not 45 years but roughly 45 minutes. AND there was NO Reaction by ENGLISH Officials, as there has been with Italian officials
Further more, JUST last week 11 policemen were injured, fortunately not fatally, as an estimated 500 Wolves fan expressed their anger at being defeated by West Brom.
England, is in no position to be ctiticising Italy when it was England Spawned the Hooliganism,and England's Behavior is still exponentially worse, and has taken NO Similar strong Measure to Send A Message!!!!!!
Italy's Swift Ban Sends a Message to England
Belfast Telegraph
By James Lawton
Monday 5, February 2007
The suspension of matches in Italy after a policeman dies in crowd trouble obliges our FA to look at themselves
Now the shame of Italian football is washed in the fresh blood of a Sicilian policeman some, especially it seems here in a land of football sweetness and towering profit, are saying it is some final, damning judgement. Maybe, but then maybe not. Perhaps the accumulation of match-fixing corruption and violence on the terraces and in the streets, and climactically the tragedy in Catania last Friday night, has pushed one of the world's great football nations to a unique point of responsibility.
The truth is there can be only one interpretation of the decision by the emergency administration of Italy's equivalent of the Football Association to ban all levels of football over the weekend and almost certainly for at least one more weekend until "appropriate measures and safeguards have been established".
This is unprecedented action, the kind that was never even contemplated in England in all those years when hooliganism was gestating and then being exported into every corner of the European game, a product leader which in its numbers and its scale exceeded anything ever seen before, even in some of the more warring examples of Italian volatility.
Interestingly, there could only be reflection when one English newspaper yesterday listed the trail of Italian football violence. There were some shocking examples stretching back to 1962, no doubt, but the death toll happened to be seven.
You may say that every football game ever played is not worth the unnecessary cost of an innocent human life, and there is certainly no way to comfortably measure a problem by counting up fatalities, but it does happen to be true that the cost to life in Italy, over 45 years, was only fraction of that caused to Juventus fans in Heysel, largely by the conduct of Liverpool fans. And it took not 45 years but roughly 45 minutes. What happened then? English football was banned from Europe - and, naturally, there was unsuccessful appeal.
This may go against the prideful assumption that English football has largely cured itself of institutionalised hooliganism, but if intelligent co-operation with the police has brought huge benefits, the problem, as it always will be, has not disappeared but is reassuringly dormant, a fact which was illustrated dramatically enough last week when 11 policemen were injured, fortunately not fatally, as an estimated 500 Wolves fan expressed their anger at being defeated by West Brom.
How serious will be the repercussions? No heavier, we can be sure, than when Leeds fans invaded the Elland Road pitch in the Seventies, and the club were required to play a few games on neutral grounds, or when they rioted on the south coast during a push for promotion in the Eighties. How sustained, come to think about it, was the official reaction to the attempts last season of Liverpool fans to overturn an ambulance containing the Manchester United player Alan Smith, who had just broken his leg.
The point here is not that Italian football is suddenly a paragon of strong-minded virtue - or that it has not inherited a malignant harvest after many years of refusing to face up to the long-terms consequences. No, it is not that - it is to say that however late the hour, Italian football has responded to the scale of its own problems in a most meaningful way.
Yesterday one Italian football lover Alessandro Berto contemplated an empty football field in a suburb of Padua, one where local junior teams normally split the calm of siesta time, and said, "Finally, they have done what needed to be done. They have told the idiots and the crazies that football cannot be reduced to something that is dangerous for decent people to attend.
"There is so much wrong with the game in Italy and it has lost so much respect, but at least there are doing something now. For the sake of a game which should be beautiful I hope it isn't too late."
One did not hear too much of that sentiment in English football circles when "fans" of the national team were raging through places like Marseilles and Brussels in the 1998 and 2000 World Cup and European championships, when in the first case the despairing chief executive of the Football Association, Graham Kelly, shrugged his shoulders in despair at the hopelessness of advocating serious sacrifice by the national game and agreed that the only solution was probably summary execution.
There was a more realistic possibility, when you thought about it, and Italy's embattled football authorities - who when they staged the World Cup in 1990 banned all alcohol on match days because of the presence of English supporters - may in their extremis have produced it. It is also true that, despite many reports to the contrary, that behaviour by England fans was much less than impeccable, something that can be confirmed by anyone who was either in Cologne to see them rampaging on the steps of the ancient cathedral or saw a recent television documentary on the currently unfashionable subject.
They have said, unlike the FA and almost all leading football men in this country when misconduct threatened to squeeze the life out the game before Hillsborough, decent grounds, and vast amounts of television money, that hooliganism is not a problem that can separated from football. If the game is where abusive and violent behaviour attaches itself as a gruesome, life-threatening parasite, then the oxygen it provides must be cut off - at whatever the financial cost.
Last week it was written here that Italian football was likely to live in a moral vacuum for some time, an inevitable consequence of confirmation that it was in so many areas rotten to its core. This provoked a thoughtful message from Italy. It said, "You say that Italian football is rotten, and maybe it is, but tell me another leading football nation that, whatever its moral health, is capable of winning a World Cup and relegating its most powerful club in the same year?"
Such is the terrible cynicism - and lingering beauty - of the Italian game. Yesterday an English headline proclaimed, "Italian football hunts for its lost soul." No one could argue with such an assessment as the widow of officer Filippo Raciti tearfully faced a suddenly empty life. But then by saying that no profit, no pleasure, could justify such waste, and that the alternative to violence-infected football, for at least some time, was no football at all, the Italian administrators may at last have launched a proper search for that elusive soul.
Certainly they have earned the right to a little suspended judgement, and nowhere more so than here.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/european/article2239340.ece
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Monday, February 5, 2007
Berlusconi Profile: He makes the Gags, She sheds the Tears
Profile: The Berlusconis
Sunday Telegraph
Guardian Unlimited
By William Langley,
January 4, 2007
He has the money, she has the looks. He makes the gags, she sheds the tears
....Berlusconi is back.Not back in office. Nor, yet, back in court. But most certainly back in the headlines.
Plastered across the front page of La Repubblica, the Rome newspaper on Wednesday, was a letter from Silvio's luscious, ex-actress wife, Veronica Lario, demanding that he publicly apologise for flirting with other women. "In the course of our relationship," she wrote, "I have sought to avoid conjugal conflict, even when my husband's conduct has created reasons for it. This conduct has a limit; my dignity as a woman and the example I must set for our children."
Short and balding, with the ingratiating smirk of a tip-hungry Neapolitan waiter, 70-year-old Berlusconi is no one's idea of a born romancer. Until you see him in action. He refuses to eat garlic lest it impairs the deadly allure of his presence, and once claimed that the guilt engendered by infidelity had made his hair fall out. Last year, he opened an election rally by pushing his speech notes aside and admiring the legs of the women in the front row. Silvio's response to his wife's complaints was, nevertheless, conciliatory. "Your dignity should not be an issue," he promptly wrote back. "I will guard it like the precious thing it is. Forgive me, however, I beg of you, and take this public testimony of private pride that submits to your anger as an act of love. One among many. A huge kiss. Silvio."
So far, so entertaining. But what did it all mean? Italy's three main news programmes gave over almost their entire evening broadcasts to the question. The country was enthralled. Political analysts filled studios. Relationship counsellors debated whether the public prints were a suitable forum for such matters, while feminists hailed Veronica's outburst as a rallying cry to downtrodden and discarded Italian women.
At its core though, the battle of the Berlusconis highlighted two related things; how much duller political life is without Silvo; and the peculiar nature of his marriage.
"We now have an abysmally boring government," explains Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the conservative Il Foglio, and a friend of the Berlusconis, "and suddenly, out of nowhere, there is this explosion of vitality and, OK, weirdness, that gets the heart pumping. People miss that style. It may not be healthy, but it's Italian."
On the face of it, the Berlusconis should be the complete package. He has the money, she has the looks. She studies philosophy, he watches football. He tells the gags, she sheds the tears. It was Silvo's supposedly oily overtures to two glamorous women MPs from his Right-wing Forza Italia party that triggered Veronica's outburst last week, yet by all accounts the couple have existed in a state of acute marital tension for most of their 27 years together.
'We are as different as night and day," Veronica, 50, admitted in an authorised biography published two years ago. She further revealed that she had never voted for Silvio (apparently being of a Leftist inclination) and confirmed the impression that the couple spend little time together. He lives, for the most part, in grand apartments in Rome, while Mrs B, describing herself as "the housewife of Macherio", stays at what is nominally the family home outside Milan.
Even when they are together, she complained, Silvio spends all his time on the telephone. "We will be in the countryside, looking at a beautiful sunset, and Silvio will have his mobile glued to his ear," she sighed. "Even at Christmas dinner he will take a mouthful of turkey and start talking on the phone." Not that love's last embers have died. During his first premiership, Silvio boasted that he sent his wife flowers every day. He even produced the florists' bills to prove it. Only later did it emerge that Veronica never received them. Someone else did. "She considered it humiliating," wrote biographer Maria Latella, "that flowers he had sent to another woman were attributed to her."
That their marriage has, nevertheless, survived is because of the foundations it was built on. For all the couple's current wealth (Silvio is listed by Forbes magazine as the 30th richest man in the world, with a Ј6 billion fortune) they come from humble beginnings, and share a refreshing disdain for the pomposity and formalities of public life. Veronica was born Raffaela Bartolini in Bologna. Her father, a low-level civil servant, died when she was a child, and her mother was forced to take a job in a local supermarket. By her teens she had grown beautiful and voluptuous, and after taking up acting at university gave herself the stage name Veronica Lario. It was in Milan, in a play called The Magnificent Cuckold, which required her to appear topless, that Silvio first saw her. He gallantly insisted later that it was her eyes that captured his attention.
Berlusconi was a bank clerk's son from Milan. Bright and ambitious he put himself through university by selling vacuum cleaners and, during summer breaks, singing aboard Adriatic cruise liners. The provenance of his early wealth is, to put it mildly, unclear, but he had a talent for meeting people who could help him, and it was with money borrowed from, shall we say, contacts in Sicily, that he first entered the property business. He left his first wife to marry Veronica, and they have three children together. Today, his vast interests include much of the Italian media, AC Milan football club and the country's biggest supermarket chain.
As a pairing, the Berlusconis could barely exist outside Italy. She rarely appears at state occasions, but when she does it is in eye-popping outfits to outshine every other political wife in sight. He goes down with the international set like a platter of rancid linguine; his ideas seen as dangerously populist, his sense of humour delinquent and his probity close to nonexistent. A Milan court is currently considering a case of alleged corruption brought against him last year in which David Mills, estranged husband of the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, is a co-defendant.
For all this, a large part of Italy - its eyelids growing heavier with each day of Prodi's yawn-inducing administration - cherishes him. "He embodies the Italian dream of being everything," admits La Repubblica's Left-wing editor Ezio Mauro. "Of pleasing everyone, of indulging himself completely, without giving up anything." In the same way, Silvio needs Veronica. Whatever their differences, and however much they embarrass each other. "She has always been a total passion," he told a magazine, shortly before last week's eruption. "When we met, I lost my head for her. She has never made me look bad. Never." Ridiculous, yes, but not bad.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/02/04/do0406.xml
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italy's "Ultras" complicate Hooliganism
The English as usual, will downplay how they invented Hooliganism, and completely out of control their Hooligan problem was, and how they unleashed it on an unsuspecting Europe.
Now the English speak in a superior manner on that which they infected others with.
There is one Big and Serious Distinction...... "The Ultras" .......
I rarely change Headlines in Articles, but this was SO Extreme and Chauvinistic, I CORRECTED!!
"Ultras" Pull the Strings in Italy Soccer
The Observer
Guardian Unlimited
Kevin Buckley in Milan
Sunday, February 4, 2007
'We have to learn from the English,' cry frustrated Italian commentators each time the face of calcio is scarred by an outbreak of violence. 'If they can solve their hooligan problem, why can't we?'
The similarities between Italy today and the violent dog days of the 1980s in England are striking: antiquated and dirty stadiums, no-go areas for police, inept sports authorities and dithering government ministers. But one key element makes the problem - and therefore any solution - different: the ultras.
The ultras - the extreme - are the most diehard followers who proudly sport the tag as a sign of their loyalty, be it to big-name Serie A clubs or to semi-professional squads in Serie D. In the top division, Internazionale, Milan and Roma have the biggest groups of ultras, while the most violent tend to be from medium-size clubs, such as Catania and Livorno.
Most card-carrying members are in their late teens or twenties, but many are in their thirties and forties. Most are male. Each group occupies a strictly delineated area of the curva - kop - usually behind the goal, displaying flags that often boast names from 1970s political urban violence - Brigatte, Commandos - although few now have political allegiances. Most ultra groups are not hooligans, but many are. Some are run as profitable commercial enterprises, often led by capi - bosses - made up of middle-aged men for whom it is a full-time job.
The violent minority hide among the majority, but after Friday's killing of a policeman at the match involving Catania and Palermo - a crime for which the ultras are likely to be blamed - Renzo Uliviero, chairman of the Italian federation of coaches, said: 'There aren't just a few of them, there are many. They are organised. They go to the stadiums to attack the police. Until we accept that fact then we really won't get anywhere.'
Uliviero should know. He once had to face down an ultras invasion of one of his training sessions. Unlike British football, almost all Italian stadiums are owned by local authorities, prompting much buck-passing when things go wrong. Alarmingly, two thirds of Italian grounds fail to meet safety standards, but clubs obtain 'temporary' safety certificates on a weekly basis.
Italian club chairmen routinely condemn ultra excesses, but in private they collude with the capi, often using them as unofficial ticketing agencies for some of the biggest fixtures in European football. Some clubs collude through fear - ultras have been known to invade post-match changing rooms when results are bad.
Ultras traditionally raise funds from charging membership subscriptions, with larger groups producing branded merchandise and taking 'commission' on ticket sales. The key to the ultras is their organisation, which is what makes possible the wonderful match-day choreography that dwarfs anything seen in England. Giant banners and flags are prepared at ultras-run bars or social clubs. But the same organisation and hierarchy is also what makes large-scale violence possible.
Four Leeds fans were put in hospital with stab wounds on the club's last visit to Milan, in 2000. Local ultra leaders said that it took a couple of phone calls to put 50 of their people on the streets before the police knew what was going on. The 'punitive expedition' was in response to damage caused to an ultra bar.
Inside stadiums, where stewards are often ultra members, anyone entering the 'wrong' zone risks attack and groups following the same club sometimes clash. Last season, one group of Milan ultras was banned by the rest from the curva because of a disagreement over how to deal with Juventus ultras
The curva is a no-go area for the Italian police, who are poorly trained. Most earn less than Ђ2,000 (about Ј1,300) a month. The country's World Cup win last summer showed that on the pitch Italy has learnt the game better than its English inventors. But Friday's grotesque violence shows how it must also urgently learn from the English how to transform the game off the pitch, or this temporary shutdown may become permanent.
http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,2005692,00.html
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italian Friends: How do You Recognize ??
Not that I would need to Remind you if you are Italian!! :)
Thanks to Sal and Sharon Buttaci
FRIENDS vs. ITALIAN FRIENDS
FRIENDS: Never ask for food.
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Always bring the food.
FRIENDS: Will say "hello".
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Will give you a big hug and a kiss.
FRIENDS: Call your parents Mr. and Mrs.
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Call your parents mom and dad.
FRIENDS: Have never seen you cry.
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Cry with you.
FRIENDS: Will eat at your dinner table and leave.
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Will spend hours there, talking, laughing and just being
together.
FRIENDS: know a few things about you.
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Could write a book with direct quotes from you.
FRIENDS: Will leave you behind if that's what the crowd is doing.
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Will kick the whole crowds' ass that left you.
FRIENDS: Would knock on your door.
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Walk right in and say, "I'm home!"
FRIENDS: Are for a while.
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Are for life.
FRIENDS: Will ignore this.
ITALIAN FRIENDS: Will forward this.
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Soccer Hooliganism Spreads to Italy from England- Brings Strong Reaction
After an Italian Policeman was killed, and 70 people injured at Friday's top-flight derby match between Catania and Palermo, the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) suspended indefinitely all matches from children's leagues to the national team's friendly against Romania on Wednesday.
(CONI) also urged all clubs to break off all relations with violent fans.
The Italian government was now pondering keeping the suspension in place for at least two weeks and holding matches behind closed doors thereafter.
Italy Signals Crackdown on Hooligans
ABC News Monday, February 5, 2007
Stadiums which fail to adopt tough anti-hooliganism measures could be banned from staging football games next season, Italy's top sporting body warned on Sunday.
The ultimatum came after the recent death of a policeman in post-match riots.
At an emergency meeting after all soccer in Italy was suspended indefinitely, the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) also urged clubs to break off all relations with violent fans.
Stunned by the death at Friday's top-flight derby match between Catania and Palermo in Sicily, officials will hold off on deciding how long the suspension will last until after a meeting with the government on Monday.
Italian newspapers said the government was now pondering keeping the suspension in place for at least two weeks and holding matches behind closed doors thereafter.
"If the attack was extraordinary, the response has to be extraordinary as well," Interior Minister Giuliano Amato told La Repubblica newspaper.
"The fans are risking the possibility of never seeing soccer again - of being without soccer forever, with stadiums empty and barred."
Football stadiums across soccer-mad Italy were silent for the second day in a row with all matches from children's leagues to the national team's friendly against Romania on Wednesday cancelled.
Sunday's meeting by CONI, which was less conclusive than some commentators had wanted, followed national outrage over the death of policeman Filippo Raciti on Friday.
Although brawls at stadiums are common, images of hundreds of hooded fans chasing police and hurling flares shocked a nation basking in the glow of last year's World Cup victory after the indignation of a domestic match-fixing scandal.
A firecracker exploded in Raciti's face, which was initially considered the cause of death, though a prosecutor on Sunday said an autopsy showed it was due to a blow from a blunt object. More than 70 people were injured.
http://www.abc.net.au/sport/content/200702/s1840109.htm
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Friday, February 2, 2007
Obit: Gian Carlo Menotti, 95; Opera Composer, Founded Spoleto Festival
Menotti with all his great accomplishments will best be known for being "the modern composer who writes old-fashioned opera for the masses,"
Menotti once said "I wish I'd never started staging operas. It has taken so much time away from my composing,"
"I have wasted so much of my time directing other people's work."
Menotti's own compositions were so much in demand, that he had been called the most-often-performed living composer of opera.
Menotti's best known opera was "Amahl and the Night Visitors," His fifth opera, "The Medium" in 1946, marked his directing debut and was his first hit. The work had 211 performances on Broadway and later toured Europe.
His 1950 opera, "The Consul," won a Pulitzer Prize, was translated into 12 languages and was performed in more than 20 countries. The drama follows the trials of oppressed citizens frustrated by the bureaucracy of an unidentified European government.
He took as inspiration the Hieronymus Bosch painting "The Adoration of the Magi," and musically wove the touching tale of a disabled boy who offers his crutches — his only possession — to the three wise men to give to the infant Jesus. Because of his sacrifice, the boy is healed. NBC ran the opera for many years on Christmas Eve.
"The Saint of Bleecker Street," Menotti's 1954 opera about religious belief and doubt, was the only Broadway production to earn the cultural "triple crown" of the Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics Circle Award and New York Music Critics Award.
Later, Menotti's compositions and directing took a back seat to his organizing an international music festival in Spoleto near his childhood home. Its purpose was to encourage, discover and nourish young artists in the land of Menotti's birth, Italy.
The prolific Menotti wrote plays, poetry and short stories, and briefly worked as a Hollywood screenwriter at MGM. In 1984, he received a Kennedy Center Honor, which recognizes those who "throughout their lifetime have made significant contributions to American culture through the performing arts.
As late as 1986, Menotti accepted a commission from Placido Domingo to write the opera "Goya" about the Spanish painter.
Gian Carlo Menotti, 95; opera composer founded Spoleto music festivals
Los Angeles Times
By Myrna Oliver
February 2, 2007
Gian Carlo Menotti, who organized music festivals in Spoleto, Italy, and the U.S. and helped bring opera to the masses with his repeatedly televised Christmas work "Amahl and the Night Visitors," died Thursday at a hospital in Monaco. He was 95.
"He died pretty peacefully and without any pain," his adopted son, Francis Menotti, told the Associated Press.
Menotti was sought after worldwide as a director of operas composed by others, and he wrote his own, including two that earned Pulitzer Prizes.
"I wish I'd never started staging operas. It has taken so much time away from my composing," he told The Times in 1987, when he directed Puccini's "La Boheme" at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. "I have wasted so much of my time directing other people's work."
Nevertheless, Menotti's own compositions were also much in demand, and he had been called the most-often-performed living composer of opera.
His fifth opera, "The Medium" in 1946, marked his directing debut and was his first hit. The work had 211 performances on Broadway and later toured Europe.
His 1950 opera, "The Consul," won a Pulitzer Prize, was translated into 12 languages and was performed in more than 20 countries. The drama follows the trials of oppressed citizens frustrated by the bureaucracy of an unidentified European government.
"Amahl," the first opera written for television, followed in 1951.
Seen by former Times music critic Martin Bernheimer and others as "the modern composer who writes old-fashioned opera for the masses," Menotti had welcomed the commission from NBC to create a Christmas piece.
He took as inspiration the Hieronymus Bosch painting "The Adoration of the Magi," and musically wove the touching tale of a disabled boy who offers his crutches — his only possession — to the three wise men to give to the infant Jesus. Because of his sacrifice, the boy is healed. NBC ran the opera for many years on Christmas Eve.
"The Saint of Bleecker Street," Menotti's 1954 opera about religious belief and doubt, was the only Broadway production to earn the cultural "triple crown" of the Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics Circle Award and New York Music Critics Award.
Later in the decade, however, Menotti's compositions took a back seat to his new project: organizing an international music festival in Spoleto near his childhood home.
"Actually, the festival satisfied a very selfish need," he told his biographer, John Gruen. "I became so completely disenchanted with the role of the artist in contemporary society. I felt useless….
"I felt that the artist should become part of society — a needed member of society — rather than just an ornament," he said. "That's why I started Spoleto. I wanted to feel needed, and I wanted to see whether with my music and my knowledge I could help to re-create a so-called ideal city. My dream was not really to create a festival, but to create a small city wherein the artist would thrive and be one of its most essential members."
From its outset in 1957, the Spoleto event was billed as the Festival of Two Worlds. Its purpose was to encourage, discover and nourish young artists in the land of Menotti's birth, Italy, and the land of his adult triumphs, the U.S. But it would be 20 years before Menotti created the second venue, in Charleston, S.C. He broke ties with the Charleston group in 1993 after a dispute.
The prolific Menotti wrote plays, poetry and short stories, and briefly worked as a Hollywood screenwriter at MGM. In 1984, he received a Kennedy Center Honor, which recognizes those who "throughout their lifetime have made significant contributions to American culture through the performing arts."
In his later years, Menotti broke up the bustling household he had shared in Mount Kisco, N.Y., with composer Samuel Barber, who died in 1981. Menotti wrote the libretto for "Vanessa" and revised the libretto for "Antony and Cleopatra," both composed by Barber, his longtime companion.
To gain solitude away from his American and Italian friends, he bought an 85-room country house in Scotland built in 1699, and with his son set about refurbishing it.
From his Scottish mansion, called Yester House, Menotti continued to travel the world directing operas and composing. He accepted a commission from Placido Domingo in 1986 to write the opera "Goya" about the Spanish painter.
Menotti was born July 7, 1911, in Cadegliano, Italy, the sixth of eight children of Alfonso and Ines Pellini Menotti. His was an affluent family that lived on profits from a coffee plantation in Colombia.
Ines Menotti made sure that Gian Carlo, her favorite son, and all her other children learned piano, violin and cello; she frequently organized evening musicales to display their talents. Gian Carlo began setting verse to music at age 5, and at 11 wrote his first opera, "The Death of Pierrot."
His theatrical flair, which enabled him to make opera appealing to all walks of society, was first exhibited in puppet shows he staged for his family.
When he was 13, Menotti's family moved to Milan, where his mother enrolled him in the Verdi Conservatory of Music.
But a few years later, his father died, and the family coffee plantation fell on hard times. Ines Menotti sailed with her son to Colombia, trying to save the business.
Afterward, she and Gian Carlo came to the U.S., where the boy was enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. A letter from the wife of conductor Arturo Toscanini helped persuade composition professor Rosario Scalero to accept him.
It was at the institute that Menotti met Barber, also a student.
After graduating in 1933, the two men lived in Austria, where Menotti composed his first opera, one of the few he wrote in Italian, "Amelia al Ballo."
At the time, opera was unpopular, and Menotti told himself: "Well, I'll just write this one opera, and then I'll start composing all my symphonies, Masses and motets."
"I guess 'Amelia,' " he said after many years and many operas, "was the beginning of my end."
Menotti enjoyed special success in Southern California when the San Diego Opera commissioned him to write "La Loca."
The opera, based on the life of Queen Juana (known as "Joan the Mad"), was a 50th birthday gift for Beverly Sills. The work had its world premiere in San Diego in June 1979.
Although he spent most of his adult life in New York and his later years in Scotland and Monaco, Menotti retained his Italian citizenship.
He returned to Spoleto every summer, and celebrated his 90th birthday at the festival with a concert featuring Domingo and Renee Fleming.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-menotti2feb02,1,7493197.story?coll=la-news-obituaries&ctrack=1&cset=true
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
62 % of Italians 18 to 35 Still Live at Home !!!!!!
A whopping 62 per cent of Italians aged 18 to 35 still live at home !!!!!! Yes, This trend is common across the developed world, but Italy leads the way.
There are several commonalities, but the one big difference is, that I believe Italians REALLY like their kids at home, where many other parents yearn to have the house to themselves!!!I
Young people treat their 20s as an era of exploration and experimentation. It's a hedonistic decade of self-discovery, study, work, travel and romance. Long-term thinking is deferred in favour of adventure and experiences. Living at home makes sense. For one thing it's a great way to save while studying or waiting to make the next big purchase.
It is also a sanctuary for those returning from overseas trips with debt-laden credit cards, and the perfect retreat to heal a broken heart. Not to mention the full fridge, dinners on the table and laundry facilities.
There are also more practical reasons. University, after all, is not free, as it was in their parents' day, marriages take place much later, and a house is no longer affordable without significant savings.
Importantly, Youngsters nowadays don't feel the need to get away from suffocating parents, or rebel against them, since their Boomers parents were/are very "permissive/understanding".
Boomer Parents Give Kids No Reason To Leave Home
The Sydney Morning Herald
Neer Korn
February 1, 2007
The trend is for children to remain living at home longer. For their parents, the boomers, this is a double-edged sword: on the one hand they are flattered the kids want to live with them; on the other, they want to reclaim the family home as their own.
Young people treat their 20s as an era of exploration and experimentation. It's a hedonistic decade of self-discovery, study, work, travel and romance. Long-term thinking is deferred in favour of adventure and experiences. Living at home makes sense. For one thing it's a great way to save while studying or waiting to make the next big purchase.
It is also a sanctuary for those returning from overseas trips with debt-laden credit cards, and the perfect retreat to heal a broken heart. Not to mention the full fridge, dinners on the table and laundry facilities.
There are also more practical reasons. University, after all, is not free, as it was in their parents' day, marriages take place much later, and a house is no longer affordable without significant savings.
This trend is common across the developed world. Italy, it seems, is most affected. According to one study commissioned by the European Union, a whopping 62 per cent of Italians aged 18 to 35 still live at home.
The baby boomers have only themselves to blame. They have given their children no incentive to leave home and plenty of reasons to stay. For one thing, they all get along remarkably well. Being the boomers, they raised kids in households where sex, drugs, finances and relationships were discussed openly. In other words, the boomers have left their kids little to rebel against.
Ask the twentysomethings and they will tell you they do not mind living with their parents, that the parents are pretty "cool". Other than obvious areas such as fashion and music, for the most part there is little conflict between them. The generation gap was coined to reflect the boomers rebelling as teenagers against the ways of their own conservative parents. It was an apt description then and still applies to them today. The boomers are still rebelling against their parents' ways, challenging our perceptions and expectations of ageing.
Having the kids at home can be a huge ego boost for the boomers. They know it has more to do with free room and board, but it also means their kids are not averse to hanging out with them. It is the ultimate sign of having raised a close family. They also genuinely enjoy hanging out with their kids and their friends. They say it makes them feel youthful and keeps them in touch with the younger generation. This is something they certainly did not feel about their own parents.
At the same time, they are not thrilled about it. This is, after all, their time. For the past 20 years their lives have revolved around the kids. Money was tight and their needs were neglected to ensure their children had everything they needed. Their time was spent on the kids and their activities, and they were constantly chauffeuring them around.
Now they are supposed to be looking after themselves, and being selfish. They can afford to buy more expensive brands that won't disappear the day they are brought home, and desire to do so. It is a time to renovate, converting the kids' bedrooms into hobby rooms and removing the Blu Tack stains from walls that held posters of an array of ever-changing pop stars. It is a time to buy better furniture. It's also a time to revive romance. Boomer men are the new romantics. In focus group discussions they praise Viagra, smiling widely as they do so.
The kids, as nice as it is to see them and spend time with them, are getting in the way. One woman summed it up nicely by lamenting that she looked forward to having long baths and walking around the house naked. So if you're in your 20s and still at home and one day you find the locks have been changed, take the hint.
Neer Korn is a director of the social and market research company Heartbeat Trends.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/boomer-parents-give-kids-no-reason-to-leave-home/2007/01/31/1169919402354.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Fiat's "Bravo" to Determine it's Future???
Fiat is putting a lot of faith in the "Bravo", which is merely a revamped version of the disastrous "Stilo".
Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne claims that Stilo's electronics problems have been solved, that Bravo is offering only one version, has reduced the number of built-in extras, that has made it more price competitive.
Fiat's great wheeled hope launched in Italy
Reuters
Motor.com
By Gilles Castonguay
January 31, 2007
Milan, Italy - Fiat will take its first step towards meeting ambitious 2010 growth targets with Wednesday's launch in Rome of a car for the most important segment of the western European market.
The five-door Bravo will not only mark Fiat's return to the compact-car segment but also its effort to keep up the momentum gained from its quick recovery from the brink of collapse.
It will arrive in South Africa later this year.
Although strong sales of the Grande Punto last year led its key auto division to its first annual profit since 2000 last year Fiat has yet to prove sceptics wrong . Analysts such as Sanford Bernstein's Nicla Di Palma doubt it can repeat this success in a segment where it has failed to develop much of a presence in the last six years.
"It will be difficult for the Bravo," she said. "A disaster could repeat itself," she added, referring to the failure of the Bravo's predecessor,the Stilo.
Nevertheless Fiat, by reporting strong results quarter after quarter last year, has won the confidence of investors whose renewed demand for its stock nearly doubled its price in 2006.
Fiat has confirmed targets set under an ambitious growth strategy for 2007-2010, including a group trading profit of Ђ2.5-billion to Ђ2.7-billion.
The compact segment of the market (C segment) is important because automakers make more money from them than the smaller cars in their line-up . Sales in this segment have margins of four or five percent against a loss of one percent to a profit of three percent in the A and B segments, according to Di Palma.
The A and B segments comprise the smallest cars on the market, for which the Fiat brand is best known.
Fiat chief executive Sergio Marchionne has estimated the C segment to be the biggest part of the European market – about 25 percent of total sales – but Fiat's share has been paltry. In western Europe it was 15th with 1.6 percent in 2006 - though that excluded its Lancia and Alfa Romeo brands – and was far behind market leaders VW, GM's Opel and Ford, according to J.D. Power estimates.
The Bravo is seen as the key to demonstrating that Fiat has anything approaching a sustainable future. It's a revamped version of the Stilo and the first car to have been developed with Marchionne in charge.
In a bid to avoid the mistakes made with the Stilo - such as overly ambitious sales targets - it aims to sell a modest 120 000 units a year in tandem with Marchionne's view of never exaggerating the potential success of a new car.
Fiat brand head Luca De Meo has said the automaker had overcome Stilo's electronics problems and reduced the number of built-in extras that had priced it out of the segment.
Fiat has also made only one version of the Bravo compared with the Stilo's two. It is rolling out the Bravo at a time when few new models or significant upgrades by Volkswagen or other competitors in the same segment are coming on the road. - Reuters
http://www.motoring.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3655916&fSectionId=751&fSetId=381
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Why Studying Abroad? Dancing With Cute Italians!!
I don't write this stuff. I just Report it!! :)
Dancing With Cute Italians
Just one of many benefits to studying abroad
Daily Utah Chronicle
University of Utah, Independent Student Voice
Beth Ranschau
February 1, 2007
When was the last time you left the state? How about the country? Maybe... it's time to expand your horizons..
...You might think that a study-abroad course won't fit in with your schedule or that it's just something superfluous that rich kids do to have an excuse to party in Mexico, but studying abroad can actually be an affordable and enriching experience that may help you get closer to graduation.
Think that you don't have time to study abroad? Many summer programs take place in a five-week span and give students as many as eight credit hours....Besides earning college credit, the experiences are well worth the cost.
One obvious advantage of studying abroad is learning a foreign language. While we'd all like to believe that after two years of rigorously memorizing verbs and adjectives we'd be fluent in German, you'll probably be lucky if you can remember how to conjugate a verb a year from now. A study-abroad program in a foreign country forces you to use the knowledge that you've already gained in your language courses and put all that work into practice.
Beyond the advantages of language acquisition, experiencing another culture will help you understand the world better than the Travel Channel ever could. Many programs place students with host families. By boarding with a host family, students are actually exposed to new people, new food and culture. Even if your program doesn't house you with a host family, living in a foreign city gives you other opportunities to visit historical sites and interact with the local culture. ...
Attending the study-abroad fair today will allow you to talk to other students who have experienced study abroad and decide if it's something that will fit into your schedule. Even if you can't afford to study abroad this summer, planning ahead now will help you budget for a program next summer. If you don't have time to stop by the fair, students can also find information about programs, applications and scholarships simply by visiting the International Center's study-abroad Web site, www.sa.utah.edu/inter/sap.
And if the extra credit hours and the low cost don't convince you, consider this:...you can always explore other various "cultural activities," such as dancing with cute Italian soccer players. What better cultural experience could you ask for?
http://media.www.dailyutahchronicle.com/media/storage/paper244/news/2007/02/01/Opinion/Dancing.With.Cute.Italians-2690302.shtml?sourcedomain=www.dailyutahchronicle.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italian Hospitality Wows Korean Tourists
A Korean Attorney was naturally overwhelmed by the Historic Sites of Italy, but was Most Impressed by the reoccurring, sincere generous, behavior of the general Italian populace, who did it because of their nature, not because they stood to gain financially.
When she explained her experiences to my Korean friends who have lived in Italy, they were not surprised and explained to me that Italians are similar to Koreans in many respects. Both groups of people reveal a kind and unpretentious heart. In addition, Italians, like Koreans, display a fierce loyalty to friends and family and a willingness to go the extra mile.
The memorable Italian hospitality engendered a monumental gratitude to the Italian people, but also generated an envy and hope that Korean people could be equally hospitable to visiting foreign tourists so that Koreans can be immediately thought of as gracious as Italians.
She cites three particular examples, that had her breathless. (1) Her Tour Guide, (2) Ladies at an adjoining Lunch Table, and (3) a Newly met Law colleague.
The Memorable Italian Hospitality
Korean Herald Kim Jong-han Thursday, February 1, 2007
I guess you could say that our family loves Italy. We spent our 2005 Christmas vacation in Italy, and the experience was so enjoyable that we decided to go back and explore more of that country last year. During our recent trip, we gazed at the ancient ruins of Pompeii near Napoli, set against the majestic backdrop of the volcanic Mount Vesuvius. We strolled through the medieval streets of Florence, the town famous for Michelangelo's statue of David. Gliding through the ancient waterways of Venice on a gondola was truly a once in a lifetime experience. Browsing the fashionable boutiques in Milan, the city of high fashion, was fun and eye opening. From Prada to Loro Piana, Milan fully lived up to its reputation as the capital city of haute couture.
What made our visit to the European country so memorable, however, was not the impressive museums, ancient ruins or luxury boutiques. Instead, what left a lasting impression on my family was the incredible warmth and hospitality displayed by the Italian people on various occasions.
After spending a few days in Rome, we planned to travel to Venice by train. So, we waited at the hotel for our driver to take us to the train station. Our regular Italian guide, Riccardo Rosa, had told us the night before that he would not be able to take us to the train station because he could not find a baby-sitter for his baby boy. Instead, he assured us that he would arrange for another driver to take us to the station. We were surprised, therefore, to see a big van pulling up with Riccardo sitting in the passenger seat. As we would soon learn, Riccardo had come with his baby son because he was concerned that my family might get lost at the station and get on the wrong train. Once at the station, he personally guided us through the maze of people and led us to the correct train bound for Venezia. Riccardo certainly didn't come for the money as he understood that we would need to pay the new driver. While on the train, my family wondered what kind of a tour guide would engage in this type of service despite personal inconvenience.
In a hamburger restaurant located near the Duomo, the world-renowned cathedral in Milan, another instance of Italian hospitality surfaced. While bringing the food and drinks from the cash counter to the table where my wife was sitting, much to my chagrin, I clumsily spilled all of the drinks at the feet of the elderly Italian couple sitting next to my wife. I was horrified and embarrassed at the magnitude of the spill, and apologized profusely to the couple for the unwelcome mess. Instead of becoming upset, however, the elderly Italians smiled graciously and then unexpectedly offered us their own drinks. Through a translation, they explained to us that they did not touch the drinks and wanted us to have them because the line was too long to get new ones. We were speechless at their generosity to complete strangers and tourists that they will never see again. Even though we insisted on paying for the drinks, they refused to accept any money. Instead, they welcomed us to Italy.
A few days after the drinks mishap, I contacted a law firm colleague, Bruno Cova, for a brief get-together near our firm's Milan office. My initial thought was that we would likely meet for a quick coffee or lunch near the office to exchange information about our respective practices. To my surprise, however, he instead invited my entire family to spend a day in Torino and offered to give us a tour of the city that hosted the most recent Winter Olympic Games. Genuinely touched, but not wanting to cause undue burden and inconvenience to Bruno, I gently declined on the pretext that I was traveling with my wife and children. But Bruno insisted, even mentioning that he would invite his wife and children to make my family at ease. Where a brief lunch or coffee could have easily served a courtesy purpose, this gracious Italian gentleman insisted on a level of hospitality that not many in my culture would readily extend.
There was one common theme running through these three occurrences. In each case, the Italians who displayed such generous behavior did so purely out of genuine sincerity, not because they stood to gain financially. When I explained my experiences to my Korean friends who have lived in Italy, they were not surprised and explained to me that Italians are similar to Koreans in many respects. While on a superficial level, both groups of people may seem at times boisterous and impolite, a deeper inspection actually reveals kind and unpretentious hearts. In addition, Italians, like Koreans, display a fierce loyalty to friends and family and a willingness to go the extra mile.
The memorable Italian hospitality has engendered not only our gratitude to the Italian people, but also our envy and hope that Korean people can be equally hospitable to visiting foreign tourists so that they can write about their own experiences of memorable Korean hospitality upon returning to their home countries.
Kim Jong-han is a Hong Kong-based partner of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, an international law firm. He is a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and its law school. - Ed.
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2007/02/02/200702020043.asp
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
"Poseidon Pipeline Project" Will Link Italy to Middle East Gas Energy
The EU will finance 40% of a pipeline between Greece and Italy to diminish dependence on Russian Energy, and a void the possibility of a repetition of disputes like last year between Russia and its former satellites over gas pricing that disrupted supplies.
The Pipeline originating in Azerbaijan and transiting Georgia and Turkey will complete the segment between Turkey to Greece in 2008.
Greece and Italy Sign a Deal on Azeri (Azerbaijan) Gas
APA News Agency Azeri-Press Information Agency
February 1, 2007
Italy and Greece have concluded a cooperation agreement on construction of a natural gas pipeline linking Greece with Italy is due begin in June 2008, with completion slated for 2011, giving the European Union access to Caspian Sea and Middle East natural gas, the APA reports quoting AFP.
The Poseidon project is being promoted amid intensifying European debate over long-term energy supply and the diversification of sources of supply of natural gas.
The EU is the world’s biggest energy importer, with outside sources, notably Russia, supplying 40 percent of its gas and a third of its oil.
The Italy-Greece project’s significance is considered largely political, a demonstration of European will to reduce outside dependence, following a series of disputes last year between Russia and its former satellites over gas pricing that disrupted supplies. In January, the 27-member bloc unveiled a new energy action plan for cultivating non-Russian suppliers and alternative energy sources.
The euro300 million (US$390 million) link is one of a series of projects being promoted by the EU to reduce the 27-nation bloc’s dependence on Russian natural gas, most of which is now piped through Ukraine. The EU will fund up to 40 percent of the cost.
The initial 8bn cubic meters of transmission capacity of the gas pipeline between Italy and Greece will be 80 pct reserved to Edison SpA and 20 pct to Depa for 25 years.
Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum pipeline (Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey) delivering Azeri gas from Shah Deniz has been constructed. An additional arm linking Turkey and Greece will be attached to this pipeline in 2008. /APA/
http://en.apa.az/news.php?id=20241
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italian American in WWII Makes Escape from Germans Because he Speaks Italian
Pasquale D'Amato, at 90, recounts an amusing story of a horrible experience being captured in Italy by the Germans as an American GI.
How to "speak" Italian helped Amato in a ruse to ESCAPE the POW camp, but advice from a Italian civilian as to how to "walk" Italian KEPT him out. :)
D'Amato Makes Great Escape
Bristol Press - Bristol, CT, USA
By Jennifer Abel
January 22, 2007
Editor's note: It's been nearly 62 years since the end of World War II. Living veterans of the war are few and far between. Veterans who served time in a German prisoner of war camp are even harder to find, and those who successfully escaped from POW camps harder still. This story of such an escape is one of a series of articles on World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War veterans from Bristol, Plymouth and Burlington.
BRISTOL - Pasquale D'Amato, will celebrate his 90th birthday on Jan. 25. On his 27th birthday, in 1944, he was in Italy with other members of the Army's Third Ranger Battalion.
Five days later, Pfc. D'Amato was captured by the Germans.
"We were supposed to march in and take Cisternia, but after about eight hours of heavy fighting we were hopelessly outnumbered," D'Amato recalled.
The Americans surrendered. D'Amato and his fellow prisoners spent two days imprisoned in an old building on the outskirts of town. However, heavy Allied bombing raids made it too dangerous to stay there, so the Germans moved their captives to the town of Albano, where they spent another four days in a ramshackle building before being trucked to Rome for a propaganda parade.
"They had cameras to film us, the 'first Americans to march through Rome,'" D'Amato recalled. "Some Italian peasants cried when they saw us.
D'Amato's first prison camp was about 15 miles north of Rome. He spent a short time there before being moved to another camp near the city of Florence.
"My buddy Jim Adamson and I - he died about three years ago - we studied how things were so we could escape." Their original plan was to escape at night, until they learned that anyone leaving their barrack at night was shot on sight.
D'Amato soon observed that Italian civilians from the surrounding countryside did work in the camp. Furthermore, the Italians did not have to show passes to the German guards.
"I was pretty fluent in Italian," D'Amato said. However, there was no way he and Adamson could have passed for Italian civilians in their American Army uniforms, and they could hardly go shopping for new clothes.
"There were some South African prisoners who'd been in camp a lot longer than any of us," D'Amato recalled. "They wanted to trade their clothes for our uniforms. Their clothes were full of lice." D'Amato and Adamson made the "lousy" trade. They shaved their faces with the only razor blade in camp, property of their company commander.
There were 14 barracks in their prison camp. The two men stealthily made their way from barrack to barrack when the German guards turned their backs. At last, they reached Hut 13, in front of which lay an old piece of tile pipe.
The two men grabbed the pipe and tried to look like workmen. D'Amato did the talking for the two of them; he instructed Adamson to simply nod and say "si, si" to whatever was said.
They had to walk 150 yards to the camp entrance. Near the gate they ran into an unexpected obstacle: a work crew of five Italian teenagers overseen by a German guard. The Italians, recognizing an escape attempt in progress, dropped their shovels and gawked, but they said nothing and their German overseer didn't notice.
"At the gate, I told the guard in Italian that we had to deliver this pipe to a storage shed nearby," D'Amato said. The guard opened the gate and the two prisoners walked out with a desperately nonchalant air. They laid the pipe next to a broken-down German truck, grabbed some lumber off a nearby pile, and began to carry it across an open field, never looking back.
"It was three hours before the next roll call. I knew the Nazis wouldn't miss us until then."
Around the time that roll call took place, Adamson and D'Amato were walking by a main road. Two civilian men working in a nearby field hailed them, and one of them said, "I'll bet you escaped from the prison camp!" The Italian recognized them because of how they walked; he gave the escapees the valuable advice that they were walking too fast. Italians wouldn't walk that fast, he advised, so slow down and take it easy if you want to stay out of German hands.
The two headed for the hills at a more leisurely pace and began walking south, hoping to eventually reach the Allied lines. It took them five months to do so.
Meanwhile, back in the States, D'Amato's wife, Clara, had no idea what had happened to her husband. "The Germans never told the Red Cross they captured Pat," she said. On March 11, 1944, she received a telegram: the Secretary of War regretted to inform her that her husband had been missing in action since Jan. 30. It would be another three hellish months before she learned her husband was alive and safe.
By the time Clara received that first telegram, her husband and Adamson were living in a cave with five South African soldiers. The weather was too poor to travel. Sometimes civilians would bring them food; other times they would steal what they could from nearby farms.
"One name I'll never forget," D'Amato said. "Emilia Fiorenti. She'd bring us food when she could, Her friend told her, 'if you get caught the Germans will shoot you!' But she said 'I'm an old woman. I'm not worried.'"
"After the war I wrote her a letter," Clara said. "I wanted to thank her, and send her some chocolate - she said she loved chocolate. But the letter was sent back, marked person unknown. We never found out what happened to her."
D'Amato learned, much later, that two of his South African cavemates were later captured by the Germans and shot. "Being in civilian clothes, we could have been shot as spies," he said.
By the end of May, D'Amato and Adamson were in a town called Allumiere. That's where they heard that Rome was in American hands. "That seemed too good to be true," he said.
The townspeople soon learned they had two Americans in their midst, "and the ovation we received was something I'll always remember."
They saw two officers and a private - in American uniforms - riding by in a jeep, and were so happy they cried, from joy and relief. They identified themselves and were brought to Civitavecchia for interrogation and debriefing. "They burned our civilian clothes to kill the lice," he said. "Otherwise I would have kept them as a souvenir."
American policy was that soldiers who had been captured by the enemy and managed to escape were sent home rather than back to the front. D'Amato returned in June of 1944.
"I never used to talk about this," he said, "but a couple of years ago I started talking and it seems I can't stop. It must be because I'm getting old."
http://www.bristolpress.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17736353&BRD=1643&PAG=461&dept_id=10486&rfi=6
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italy Attempting to Galvanise World into Rejecting Death Penalty
Italy's latest attempt to galvanise the world into rejecting the death penalty began when Marco Panella, an MEP and civil rights campaigner, went on hunger strike after hearing that Saddam Hussein was to be executed.
Abolishing capital punishment is one of the few issues on which all parties in Italy's ruling centre-left coalition agree, and is also in accord with Europe's confirmed aversion to capital punishment across the world.
Mr Pannella's campaign prompted Mr Prodi to take up the challenge of putting the proposal before the UN's General Assembly.
But Britain shot down the proposal, saying privately that they did not wish to create difficulties for the United States. at a "delicate" time.
It is the second time that Tony Blair's government has torpedoed Italian efforts.The first was in 1999, when a last-minute British "no" killed the initiative.
Britain blocks Italy's Bid to Ban Death Penalty
Independent - London,England,UK By Peter Popham in Rome
31 January 2007
The Italian Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, was in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, yesterday, trying to persuade African heads of state to sign up to a global moratorium on capital punishment after Britain sank an effort to have the EU back the initiative as a bloc.
At the summit of the African Union, Mr Prodi called on the continent's leaders to endorse "the defence of life, the supreme and undeniable right even though it is often trampled underfoot". He went on, "We cannot remain indifferent in the face of this moral imperative. We must be for life and against death, as we are against injustice and suffering."
Italy's latest attempt to galvanise the world into rejecting the death penalty began when Marco Panella, an MEP and civil rights campaigner, went on hunger strike after hearing that Saddam Hussein was to be executed.
Abolishing capital punishment is one of the few issues on which all parties in Italy's ruling centre-left coalition agree, and Mr Pannella's campaign prompted Mr Prodi to take up the challenge of putting the proposal before the UN's General Assembly. But when his Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Massimo D'Alema, tried to obtain backing for the proposal at the EU foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels last week, Britain shot it down.
British diplomats said privately that they did not wish to create difficulties for the United States at a delicate time and they did not believe it was possible to do it now. Holland, Denmark and Hungary subsequently took the same view.
It is the second time that Tony Blair's government has torpedoed Italian efforts to spread Europe's confirmed aversion to capital punishment across the world. The first was in 1999, when a last-minute British "no" killed the initiative.
While in Ethiopia, Mr Prodi revealed he had met the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, to appeal to him to spare the lives of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death for infecting hundreds of children with HIV. He said Col Gaddafi had told him there were still "problems of reparations and compensation" but he would "reflect" on the issue.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2201104.ece
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
St Mark's Bell Tower in Venice Emulating Tower of Pisa
Italy Moves to Avoid Leaning Tower of Venice
Independent Online - Cape Town,South Africa
January 31 2007
Venice - One leaning tower is enough for Italy, according to local authorities in Venice, who plan to reinforce the foundations of St Mark's bell tower to stop it falling down.
The 99-metre campanile which dominates Venice's main square has long been known to contain a crack, but only now have authorities decided to act to ensure it does not get any bigger.
"When you have things like this, we can't know exactly what's going to happen," said Ettore Via, who as curator of St Marks is in charge of conservation of the basilica and its bell tower whose history goes back to the 12th century.
The bell tower was built after the existing 16th century structure collapsed in 1902. But the new tower was found to contain a fissure, discovered in 1939, which is very slowly spreading.
The work will involve wrapping a titanium belt around the tower's foundations, between one metre and three metres below the ground, at a cost of six million euros.
The project will start within the next six months and take a year and a half to finish.
The tower is not the only architectural treasure in Venice under threat.
The entire city - built on a lagoon and crisscrossed by canals - suffers from periodic flooding. The government has just begun a multi-billion-euro floodgate project aimed at stopping rising sea levels destroying the town.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa, in Tuscany, owes its characteristic lean to poorly made foundations. Conservation work has ensured the 12th century bell tower does not fall over
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=qw1170190443440B234
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net
Italians Smoking More Despite Ban
However it appears, it is Climate Change and the greater number of warmer autumn days that allowed Italians more time outdoors where they can still smoke legally, not their disregard for the new law.
Italians smoking more despite national ban
REUTERS
By Phil Stewart January 30, 2007
ROME – Italians are smoking more, even though their cigarettes cost more and a national ban has made it illegal for them to light-up in restaurants, bars and offices, according to a new study.
Italians smoked about 1 million kilos (2.2 million pounds) more cigarettes in 2006 than in 2005, the year Italy became one of Europe's first countries to ban smoking indoors.
The 2006 rise, reported this week by Italy's respected Ref economic research centre, followed three years of declining cigarette sales and followed surveys showing that hundreds of thousands of Italians had kicked the tobacco habit.
It also came despite an average 0.20 euro increase in the price of a packet of cigarettes, according to Ref.
The study coincided with a call from the European Union's health chief for the entire bloc to impose smoking bans. It also prompted calls for stricter enforcement in Italy and greater effort to educate Italians about the dangers of tobacco.
'Since 2005, there has not been an educational campaign. There haven't been enough inspections,' said former Health Minister Girolamo Sirchia, a former smoker who pushed for the national ban under the previous centre-right government.
The study suggested that weather, too, could have played a role, with warmer autumn temperatures allowing Italians more time outdoors where they can still smoke legally. Bars and restaurants have also now prepared more smoking areas outdoors.
Health officials say smoking kills 90,000 Italians a year. Data from the EU shows 19,000 non-smokers die from passive smoking each year in the euro zone.
A Health Ministry spokesman said the government was preparing a new programme to 'encourage a more healthy lifestyle' that aimed to reduce the number of smokers.
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=160972007
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20070130-0636-italy-smoking-.html
The ANNOTICO Reports
Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net