Italy and Israeli "Fragmented" Political Systems Similar Pros and Cons vs "Two Party " Sytems

Menachem Gantz, a journalist based in Rome for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, believes that Italians are "frustrated" and don't expect any change from the upcoming general elections.

According to the Israeli journalist, there are also many similarities between Italy and Israel, first and foremost the fact that "usually the political crises match".

Gantz goes on to explain that the "Fragmented Party" system in Israel and Italy are quite similar, and represent similar problems, especially when the coalitions are evenly divided, and threats from "sliver" parties can cause "confidence" votes that threaten the Prime Minister position, or force New Elections.

"We have only just avoided early elections because at the end of the month of January the Winograd Commission evaluated on the outcome of the war in Lebanon and that jeopardised the government of [Israeli prime minister Ehud] Olmert," said Gantz referring to the report by the commission to shed light on how Israel managed the conflict in 2006.

Ehud Olmert's leadership was spared because the Labour leader and defence minister Ehud Barak "decided not to withdraw from the coalition," and as such "the eventuality of a vote in Israel today seems a little further away."...but looming.

Two party systems offer more stability, but less flexiblity, and wide swinging changes with the change of Presidents.

Election Focus: Italy as seen by an Israeli Correspondent

Adnkronos International Italia - Roma, Lazio, Italy

February 28, 2008

Menachem Gantz, a journalist based in Rome for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, believes that Italians are "frustrated" and don't expect any change from the upcoming general elections.

Rome, 26 Feb. (AKI) - Italians are "desperate" and "frustrated", according to Rome-based Israeli reporter, Menachem Gantz. Even after April's general election, they feel there is "no guarantee that the reality will be different and there will not be a repetition of the current scenario," he argues.

Gantz, correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, told Adnkronos International (AKI) that Italy lacks any sign of "change, growth - the closing of a chapter for the opening of a new one."

"Elections are a democratic celebration and it is for this reason that Italians, who may be critical of the United States, look at the American elections as a celebration," he said.

Gantz told AKI that the two main alliances or political parties "cannot pit themselves fiercely against each other" or "offend each other" or have "an election campaign with low-level accusations" and then find that after the polls that they have to work together.

According to Gantz, in this electoral race, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi "has so far conducted an election campaign with a lower profile than the one in 2006", also because the candidate who really has his work cut out for him is the outgoing mayor of Rome and leader of the newly formed centre-left Democratic Party (PD), Walter Veltroni.

Gantz said that even though elections are always a fascinating event, these Italian elections are "forced", and "the Italians are not as content and enthusiastic".

As such it is difficult to explain the "details" of the Italian electoral campaign to Israel and Gantz instead uses news stories to show the relevance and impact of the polls.

Gantz said an example would be "speaking of the crisis involving [Italian national carrier] Alitalia, explaining how the election campaign touches this question, what is the position of the [anti-immigrant] Northern League party or that of the Left," without getting caught up in the "daily developments".

Israelis are likely to pay more attention to Italian politics, once the vote is over and the results are known and "when the new government is formed," said Gantz.

"It all depends on who will be the new foreign minister," he told AKI.

"Compared to previous elections, these are in some way different in terms of Italy's ties with Israel, mainly because today Italy is the principle force to the north of Israel," said Gantz referring to the Italian contingent in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) which was deployed to southern Lebanon after the conflict in the summer of 2006 between Israeli troops and guerrillas from Shia militant group Hezbollah.

"As such, the consequences of the vote, even if their are not immediate, could be of interest to Israel," Gantz told AKI.

According to the Israeli journalist, there are also many similarities between Italy and Israel, first and foremost the fact that "usually the political crises match".

"We have only just avoided early elections because at the end of the month of January the Winograd Commission evaluated on the outcome of the war in Lebanon and that jeopardised the government of [Israeli prime minister Ehud] Olmert," said Gantz referring to the report by the commission to shed light on how Israel managed the conflict in 2006.

In the end, Ehud Olmert's leadership was spared because the Labour leader and defence minister Ehud Barak "decided not to withdraw from the coalition," and as such "the eventuality of a vote in Israel today seems a little further away."

According to Gantz, this is similar to the way in which the smaller centrist Udeur party in Italy pulled out of the government coalition, citing a lack of support for its leader, the former justice minister Clemente Mastella, who together with his wife was implicated in a corruption probe.

This led to the resignation of former premier Romano Prodi in January, the dissolution of parliament and the calling of fresh elections on 13 and 14 April.

Gantz said that Barak's decision to remain in the ruling Israeli coalition, "was not dictated by personal reasons, but was taken in consideration of the requirements in a very delicate period of dialogue with [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] Abu Mazen which continues".

In such a context,"Barak could not be the one who would drag the country into an election campaign that in the end would do nothing but waste time," said Gantz.

The correspondent of Yedioth Ahronoth also highlighted the "particular relationship" between Israel and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"His government represented an improvement in the ties between the two countries and Berlusconi was closer to Israel because he could have a dialogue with the Arab world and with Israel, clarifying that there is no discussion over the existence of Israel or the security of the state of Israel," said Gantz.

"This message has been passed on even to certain elements of Italy's centre-left," said Gantz, referring to the fact that Walter Veltroni, as the mayor of Rome, chose every year to personally travel with Roman students to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

As for the current situation in Italy, the long-running Naples rubbish crisis is the story that has struck Gantz the most. He said that it is "sad to see Italians, the same people who can unite around a television to donate money to Africa, close their eyes to refuse to see the catastrophic and humiliating situation in Naples."

The latest refuse emergency in Naples began on 21 December 2007 when the rubbish collectors stopped gathering the garbage because there was nowhere to put it. Pictures of streets overflowing with garbage, street protests, and rubbish bins set alight and blocked roads have filled the pages of the Italian and foreign media in the past months.

Gantz said that his "dream" is to see in Italy the same manifestation of solidarity which has been seen in the last few days in Israel with regards to the residents of Sderot, the city that has been the target of daily attacks from the north of the Gaza Strip.

"Italy is a united country and must demonstrate that it is united in its difficulties and not abandon one part of its land in this way, despite the difficulty and complexity of the case," said Gantz.

"Thinking of my country and the city of Sderot, which is inside the unquestionable borders of Israeli territory, I see tens of thousands of Israelis travel to this city to shop to contribute to the city's local economy in a sign of solidarity with the residents," Gantz told AKI.

"This is an important gesture, that with my great love for Naples, I would like to see also in Italy," he said.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Politics/?id=1.0.1915680035

Italy "Food Fraud" Police on Alert

EU Court has ruled that only Cheese from Parma can be called "Parmesan".
The same day Italy Police seized about 1,000 hams because the meat was branded with fake Parma prosciutto trademarks. Similar restrictions are in place for items like "Champagne" from a region in France , and "Gooseliver" from Germany only, "Feta" cheese from Greece, and the march is on with numerous items from various countries seeking protection for their countries "specialties"

EU Court Says Parmesan Cheese Must Come From Italy
Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Italian cheesemakers have been fighting to protect their Parmesan
Deutsche Welle - Germany
February 28, 2008

The European Union's highest court has upheld the bloc's principle of protected food names, ruling that only "Parmigiano Reggiano" -- or those cheeses made in Italy -- can be sold as "Parmesan."Everyone knows it, and virtually everyone enjoys it: grated Parmesan cheese sprinkled across a steaming bowl of pasta. But, it's been a hotly contested good, with countries wrestling over its name. This week, the European Court of Justice, located in Luxembourg, rejected the idea that "Parmesan" is a generic name undeserving of protection. "Only cheeses bearing the protected designation of origin (PDO) 'Parmigiano Reggiano' can be sold under the name 'Parmesan,'" the court decided, likely giving a boost to cheesemakers in Parma and the surrounding area in northern Italy. The PDO system gives the cheese the same protection benefiting other European products, such as French camembert, which must come from Normandy, or champagne, which must come from the French region of the same name. Only products made in the place were the foods were first created can be sold under the traditional name. Germany not responsible Only the cheese produced in the area around Parma may be called "Parmesan" But there's a hitch. The court also ruled that Germany did not have the responsibility to police or take action against non-Italian Parmesan suppliers whose products were on German supermarket shelves. The European Commission in Brussels had taken Germany to the European Court of Justice for failing to protect Parmigiano Reggiano's PDO rights by not prosecuting the sale of "Parmesan." "A member state is not obliged to take on its own initiative the measures required in order to penalize the infringement on its territory of PDOs from another member state," the ruling stated. The court said that it was up to Italian authorities to prosecute. "Still a victory" The European Commission and Italian cheesemakers were pleased with the verdict nonetheless. "The court has upheld the basis of our PDO system," Commission agriculture spokesman Michael Mann said, as cited by Reuters news service. "Parmesan is not a generic product -- you can only call it that if you follow the specifications of Parmigiano Reggiano." "We lost the case because it was specifically about our thinking that Germany had a legal responsibility to prevent the sale of these products," he added. "The glass is half-full and half-empty," Igino Morini, spokesman of the Parmigiano cheesemakers' group, told DPA news agency. "Germany has been acquitted, but the court has recognized that the term 'Parmesan' can only be used for Parmigiano Reggiano." Cheesemakers in the Italy who traditionally make Parmesan have been struggling to protect their product from cheaper, lower-quality copies from other areas. The name "Parmigiano Reggiano," as well as the cheese's specific geographical origin and manufacturing process, won legal protection as a PDO in the EU in 1996. Italy has the greatest number of PDOs -- 165 -- of any EU-member state. France has the second highest number, with the two countries sharing 40 percent of the total 772 products, including 78 types of cheeses. The EU's list of protected names for farm products also applies to translations of the registered term or name across the 27-nation bloc.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3152168,00.html

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Italy's Food Fraud Police Seizes Fake Ham
CNN - USA
February 28, 2008


ROME, Italy (AP) -- Italy's food fraud police say they have seized about 1,000 hams because the meat was branded with fake Parma prosciutto trademarks.Police said Wednesday the prosciutto isn't dangerous to eat. But the ham wasn't made by Italy's premier prosciutto makers, who can use the name Parma, the Italian city famed for the delicacy.The dry-cured Parma ham must age for at least a year in special conditions.Those selling the falsely-branded ham risk steep fines and a criminal record. Police believe consumers have already bought and ate some of the prosciutto.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/02/27/fake.ham.ap/

Italian Heritage in Wales Boosted By £50,000 Oral History Project

Decades of films such as The Godfather have left the Welch with an image of Italians as a nation with more than its fair share of dangerous and menacing gangsters. But, in reality, the long and colourful history of Wales’ Italian communities proves that, away from the big screen, they have a rather softer side in Wales. The Welch are easily satisfied, and are very impressed by the fact that the Italians brought them frothy cappuccino and smooth authentic ice cream. [What about the Culture, opera, cuisine, art, etc )But in any event, the Welch are so appreciative, that the Italians living in Wales have been given nearly £50,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to record stories of those who emigrated since the 1950s.Volunteers will be trained to interview immigrants and produce an exhibition telling their stories.Fund manager for Wales Jennifer Stewart said: "This project will stir up a lot of emotions and memories and tell the hidden stories of the Italian community who have made such a contribution to the economic growth of Wales.

Italian flavour added to our culture
by Sally Williams, Western Mail

DECADES of films such as The Godfather have left us with an image of Italians as a nation with more than its fair share of dangerous and menacing gangsters.
But, in reality, the long and colourful history of Wales’ Italian communities proves that, away from the big screen, they have a rather softer side in Wales – not least for having brought us frothy cappuccino and smooth authentic ice cream.
As Wales prepares to face Italy in the Six Nations, the memories of many Italians who settled here, bringing ice cream parlours and cafe bar culture with them, are to be recorded for posterity thanks to a large portion of Lottery cash.
The Christian Association of Italian Workers has been awarded £49,500 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to tell the life stories, in a travelling exhibition, of a host of Italians who migrated to Wales.
The exodus across Europe started during the Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, with the results soon felt in towns and villages across the Welsh Valleys, according to cultural historian Peter Stead.
“Things were bad in Italy then and many Italians came here from the Bardi region,” he said.
“They settled in the Welsh Valleys, which were joyless places, and they opened ice cream parlours and cafes, known as Bracchi, which offered young people an alternative to the pub.
“They became integrated very rapidly and their sons were soon playing rugby.”
Welsh rugby star Robert Sidoli’s father Primo came to Wales from Bardi – a region near Parma in the north-west of the country – around 40 years ago to search for work.
He now owns the Busy Bee fish and chip shop in Merthyr and both of his sons have represented Wales at international level.
Sidoli junior said, “The name Sidoli in Bardi is a bit like Williams in Wales. There are so many of us. We always went to Bardi for holidays once a year.
“There was an offer on the table to play for Italy a few years back but, as much as my Italian roots are very important to me as it makes me who I am today, it was never in my heart to turn my back on Wales as it was a dream come true to slip on the red jersey.”
As well as becoming cafe owners, many Italians also worked in production industry including farming, mining and tinplating.
Comic actor Victor Spinetti’s grandfather was a farmer from Northern Italy, who “walked and worked” across France before getting a job as a coal miner in Ystradgynlais, Powys.
He said, “There was a great interest in coal then and it was like a gold rush.
“My grandfather would work in the pit and send the money he had saved back to the Italian farm, which is still there, to buy livestock.
“He told my father he would have a better life in Wales too and he came and opened Joe’s Chip Shop.
“He didn’t want to go back to Italy. He knew that if he did, he would be shot by Mussolini.
“When I signed up for National Service they told me I could choose to be Italian or Welsh and I couldn’t believe it.
“I was born in Cwm, grew up in the Wye Valley, educated in Monmouth and never thought I was anything else but Welsh.”
Spinetti, who has made films with the Beatles and Richard Burton, said his nationality was not normally a “tribal issue”.
He said, “The only time The Beatles got a bit tribal was when we were in a car in the Bahamas and George Harrison started singing the Liverpool anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone.
“But they never called me ‘spaghetti’.
“Burton and I appeared in Under Milk Wood and shared a love of poetry. One day he said to me, ‘Let’s have some poetry now, you’re not Welsh, you’re Bracchi shop you are’.
“So I read him a poem, Cwm Cemetery.
“He said, ‘Good God, that’s Wales that is, who wrote it?’
“When I told him I’d written it he asked for a copy. The next night we were both at an Italian evening where Burton was guest speaker and he read out my poem in his mesmerising, booming voice.
“Someone asked him, ‘Who wrote that?’
“He pointed at me in the crowded room and I was described as Welsh that night by the acting Prince of Wales.
“I will be excitedly supporting Wales today.”
The parents of 78-year-old Domenico Casetta moved to Wales in 1947 when his father, a specialist moulder, was recruited.
And after completing his studies and military service, Domenico left Turin, aged 24, for a job in the tinplate industry at the Steel Company of Wales in Swansea.
He said, “After World War II there was a shortage of men to work in heavy industries yet the market was expanding rapidly.
“It led to opportunities for Italian migrants. I worked in an architects’ practice in Swansea before settling in Cardiff.
“The only thing I really missed about Italy in the first years was the weather.
“Both my wife and my three daughters speak Italian and, although they are Welsh, they have a passionate affiliation for Italy.
“Wales is now my second home – but I shall cheer for Italy.”
But Joseph Gambarini, owner of The Prince’s Restaurant in Pontypridd, said that his heritage would not stop him supporting Wales this afternoon.
“Despite my name, I feel more Welsh than Italian and will be supporting Wales because I want them to win the Grand Slam,” he said.
Jennifer Stewart, the Heritage Lottery Fund manager for Wales, said the award of the money to the project would arouse similar memories for families across the country.
“This project, featuring photographs and interviews, will stir up a lot of emotions and tell the hidden stories of many people who have contributed to the cultural and economic growth of Wales.”

http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/02/23/italian-flavour-added-to-our-culture-91466-20513834/

Veltroni Outlines Radical Italy PM Campaign Platform

Veltroni - former Rome mayor - trails center-right leader Silvio Berlusconi ahead of the election April 13-14, but recent opinion polls show the gap is narrowing, with one poll Monday putting it at six points.
Veltroni took note of the European Commission's Italian economic growth forecast for 2008, predicting exports will suffer as a result of the strong euro and the global slowdown, while consumer spending will slow due to higher prices. The commission expects Italy's economy to expand by just 0.7% this year, down from a forecast of 1.4% made in November and much lower than the 1.8% growth rate for the average of the 15 countries sharing the euro. Veltroni proposed reducing the number of deputies in the lower house of parliament to 470 from the current 630, and that of senators to 100 from 315. Both the lower house and the Senate now have legislative functions, with approval from both houses required to pass laws. Veltroni would make the lower house deal with national legislation and the Senate mainly handle regional issues.Veltroni also said he plans to halve the number of ministers to 12, and pledges to cut costs come as Italians have become fed up with the privileges and perks of the Italian political class. Other plans include tax cuts, new public infrastructure, including high-speed trains, and measures to increase security, and boost national competitiveness.His rival Berlusconi is due to present the center-right program in about two weeks, which is expected to also include significant tax cuts to boost economic growth. Veltroni's tax cuts will probably be for the middle class, while Berlusconi tax cuts will be for corporations, using the "trickle down theory".when any economist will say that putting more money in the consumers hands, results in more spending, creating more jobs!!!!!!!

Italy's Veltroni Pledges Tax, Spending Cuts Ahead Of Polls
Mon, February 25 2008
Italy's Veltroni Pledges Tax, Spending Cuts Ahead Of Polls

ROME -(Dow Jones)- Italian center-left leader Walter Veltroni Monday pledged to kick-start the country's ailing economy by cutting taxes, red tape and public spending as he presented his electoral program ahead of the April general election.
With the euro zone's third-largest economy at risk of recession due to the global economic slowdown and strong euro, Veltroni called for a "new growth pact".
Veltroni - former Rome mayor - trails center-right leader Silvio Berlusconi ahead of the election April 13-14, but recent opinion polls show the gap is narrowing, with one poll Monday putting it at six points.
"In 1993, Italy was saved from economic crisis thanks to an economic-financial stability pact. Today, we need a new growth pact," Veltroni said in the program of his Democratic Party, formed last year from the merger of the two largest parties in the center-left coalition.
Italy's currency slumped and the country was forced to slash interest rates during the European currency crisis in 1993. Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was called from the Bank of Italy to head an emergency government that started to fix the country's public finances so that Italy could join the euro.
Veltroni plans to cut spending by half a percentage point of gross domestic product from the first year - and by a full point in the following two years - by measures that include tying public wage hikes to productivity and reducing the number of local authorities.
He wants to bring down Italy's huge debt - at 106% of GDP, Europe's highest in relation to the size of its economy - to below 90% by selling state assets, although the program didn't provide a timeframe.
Italian income tax rates would be cut by one percentage point a year from 2009, while tax breaks would be offered for female workers, starting in the economically depressed south, to coax more women into the workforce.
"Our program is realistic and ambitious," Veltroni told a news conference.
His rival Berlusconi is due to present the center-right program in about two weeks, which is expected to also include significant tax cuts to boost economic growth.
The European Commission Thursday halved its Italian economic growth forecast for 2008, predicting exports will suffer as a result of the strong euro and the global slowdown, while consumer spending will slow due to higher prices.
The commission expects Italy's economy to expand by just 0.7% this year, down from a forecast of 1.4% made in November and much lower than the 1.8% growth rate for the average of the 15 countries sharing the euro.
Some economists are even more pessimistic, warning that the Italian economy could fall into recession at the start of 2008 if the euro remains strong and oil prices stay around record highs.
-By Luca Di Leo, Dow Jones Newswires; +39 06 6782543; luca.dileo@dowjones ; http://www.djnewswires.com/eu http://www.fxstreet.com/news/forex-news/article.aspx?StoryId=fad01707-c248-48d7-9540-2d0e4e485470

Italy's Center-Left Leader Veltroni Outlines Campaign Platform for April vote
PR-Inside.com (Pressemitteilung) - Wien,AustriaAP ROME (AP)
February 25, 2008

ROME (AP) - Italy's center-left candidate for premier outlined his campaign platform Monday, saying he wants to reduce the number of lawmakers and Cabinet ministers to cut costs and speed up decision-making.Walter Veltroni said that if elected premier at April elections, he would propose reducing the number of deputies in the lower house of parliament to 470 from the current 630, and that of senators to 100 from 315.Both the lower house and the Senate now have legislative functions, with approval from both houses required to pass laws. Veltroni would make the lower house deal with national legislation and the Senate mainly handle regional issues.Veltroni also said he plans to reduce the number of ministers to 12, adding that the move should help speed up the decision-making process. Currently, there are about twice as many ministers in the outgoing government of Premier Romano Prodi.«Our idea is that of a faster country, free from vetoes and other constraints,» Veltroni told reporters.Veltroni's pledges to cut costs come as Italians have become fed up with the privileges and perks of the Italian political class.Other plans announced in Veltroni's program include tax cuts, new public infrastructure including high-speed trains and measures to increase security and boost national competitiveness.Veltroni, 52, is up against conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi, who entered the race as a front-runner, according to opinion polls.The April 13-14 elections were called three years ahead of schedule because Prodi's center-left government fell last month after only 20 months in office. Veltroni resigned as Rome's mayor earlier this month to concentrate on campaigning.As part of his campaign, Veltroni is touring Italy aboard an eco-friendly bus. http://www.pr-inside.com/print455125.htm

NASA International Space Station "Harmony" Module Built in Italy

Space Shuttle Mission STS-120 successful launch on Oct. 23, 2007, and landing on Nov. 7 concluded a 15 day mission. After traveling 6.25 million miles on 238 orbits of the Earth, they were home. The primary payload carried aboard Discovery was the Italian-built U.S. "Harmony" module, formerly known simply as Node 2.
This pressurized module is key to the following three shuttle flights set to carry the European Columbus lab and the two pressurized Japanese Kibo modules. "Harmony" provides the connecting point between these modules and the U.S. Destiny laboratory already in place, forming an international crossroads in space.
Under contract of the Italian Space Agency, Alenia Spazio in Turin, Italy, led a consortium of European sub-contractors to build the node.
It was built for NASA under a barter agreement with the European Space Agency in exchange for the launch of the European Columbus Laboratory by the space shuttle to the International Space Station.
"Harmony" Physical Description: The aluminum node is 7.2 meters (23.6 feet) long and 4.4 meters (14.5 feet) in diameter. Its pressurized volume is 75.5 cubic meters (2666 cubic feet), and its launch weight is approximately 14,288 kilograms (31,500 pounds)....

Space Shuttle Mission STS-120

Space Shuttle Mission STS-120 successful launch on Oct. 23, 2007,and landing on Nov. 7 concluded a 15 day mission. After traveling 6.25 million miles on 238 orbits of the Earth, they were home. The primary payload carried aboard Discovery was the Italian-built U.S. "Harmony" module. This pressurized module is key to the following three shuttle flights set to carry the European Columbus lab and the two pressurized Japanese Kibo modules. "Harmony" provides the connecting point between these modules and the U.S. Destiny laboratory already in place, forming an international crossroads in space.
After liftoff, he orbiter chased the International Space Station until the rendezvous on the third day of the mission.
With the shuttle safely docked to the station, the hatches were opened and one of the first orders of business was a crew member swap, with Dan Tani joining the station crew in exchange for Clayton Anderson, who would return to Earth aboard Discovery after a five-month stint at the station.
European Space Agency astronaut Paulo Nespoli acted as spacewalk coordinator as Stephanie Wilson, Dan Tani and Anderson worked from inside using the station's robotic arm to remove Harmony from Discovery's payload bay and bring it into position beside the Unity module.
The following day was the "grand opening" of Harmony, which was named by schoolchildren. The module added 2,666 cubic feet of additional volume to the station, increasing the living space by nearly 20 percent. After Discovery's departure, the station crew will relocate Harmony to its permanent location at the end of the U.S. Destiny lab.
In the ensuing three days, spacewalk repair plans were prepared round the clock on the ground while the astronauts prepared tools and repair materials in space. Using strips of aluminum, a hole punch, a bolt connector and 66 feet of wire, the crew constructed hinge stabilizers that would take the pressure off the damaged hinges on the solar array. They insulated tools with tape to protect against electrical currents produced by the array. .
Gaining experience during missions like STS-120 is key as NASA makes plans to return to the moon and travel on to Mars.
http://www1.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/sts120_mission_overview_prt.htm

"Harmony" - Node 2
The installation of NASA's Harmony Node increases the living and working space inside the station to approximately 500 cubic meters (18,000 cubic feet). It also allows the addition of international laboratories from Europe and Japan to the station....
Harmony provides a passageway between three station science experiment facilities: the U.S. Destiny Laboratory, the Kibo Japanese Experiment Module, and the European Columbus Laboratory.
It also provides connecting ports for Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules, the Japanese H II Transfer Vehicle and the Pressurized Mating Adapter 2 to which space shuttles dock. The Space Station Robotic Arm, Canadarm2, can operate from a powered grapple fixture on the exterior of Node 2.
Under contract of the Italian Space Agency, Alenia Spazio in Turin, Italy, led a consortium of European sub-contractors to build the node.
It was built for NASA under a barter agreement with the European Space Agency in exchange for the launch of the European Columbus Laboratory by the space shuttle to the International Space Station.
Physical Description: The aluminum node is 7.2 meters (23.6 feet) long and 4.4 meters (14.5 feet) in diameter. Its pressurized volume is 75.5 cubic meters (2666 cubic feet), and its launch weight is approximately 14,288 kilograms (31,500 pounds)....
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/node2.html

Rediscovering Jacob Riis; Advocate of Italian Immigrants

Jacob Riis was one of the first and most effective crusaders to take up the cause of New York’s slums. He was able to spotlight the plight by photographing and then publishing a book in 1890 titled: "The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York, with 100 Photographs of the Haunts of Poverty and Vice in the Great City, in which Italian Immigrants were heavily featured. He authored at least 11 other books including "Out of Mulberry Street", obviously Italian centric. Today, he is remembered as one of the urban poor’s greatest advocates, as well as strangely something of a bigot, a man who believed in the racial science and ethnic categorization in vogue during his lifetime. A new book, "Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York," seeks to reframe Riis’s legacy by asserting that it is better to understand his empathy for the immigrant slum than to dismiss him as just a dogmatist bent on civilizing the immigrant castes. , By showing the conditions of the slum dwellers, by showing his audiences pictures of starving children, homeless men and damp sweatshops, he was able to provide visual incentive for the raising funds for the uplifting of the slums.Riis was not a serious photographer. He had the idea that photography could reveal the conditions about which he was writing. In 1888, after some personal resistance, he began taking pictures."He made a discovery, By using photography, he could shout to the conscience".

Jacob August Riis (1849-1914), born in Ribe, Denmark, was the third of fifteen children born to Niels Riis, schoolteacher and editor of the local Ribe newspaper, and stern father, and Carolina Riis, a homemaker. In 1870 he emigrated to America, was a carpenter, then journalist and slum reformer, created new standards in civic responsibility regarding the poor and homeless in his reporting of New York City slum conditions. At age 25, Riis proposed to Elisabeth Gortz a second time, the first being when he was 16. This time she accepted.As one of the urban poors greatest advocates, Riis wrote: How The Other Half Lives (1891),The Children of the Poor (1892; new edition, 1902),Out of Mulberry street (1896), a collection of fiction, A Ten Years' War (1900), The Making of an American (1901; new edition, 1913), his autobiography, The Battle with the Slum (1902), Children of the Tenements (1902), The Peril and the Preservation of the Home (1903), Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen (1904), The Old Town (his birthplace) (1909), Hero Tales of the Far North (1910), Neighbors: Life Stories of the Other Half (1914).

Defending Jacob Riis
Jewish Daily Forward
By Eli Rosenblatt
Wed. Feb 20, 2008

Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York
By Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom
The New Press, 288 pages, $35.

As incredible as this might seem to some, the generation born in the 1980s has no knowledge of a dangerous New York City. Criminals, the crack epidemic and the streetscapes of starving children are largely foreign to them, rooted more in images of the developing world than in the everyday life of a young Manhattanite. Frustration on our blocks is hidden behind the juice bars, sushi joints and real estate brokers’ fees.Jacob Riis, who immigrated to New York City from Denmark in 1870 at the age of 21, may very well have had an experience akin to a young man arriving here today from a small town in Middle America. The third of 15 children, Riis began working as a carpenter. Later, as the struggles of a booming metropolis took hold, he became a police reporter. Eventually, he became known as a man whose Protestant faith impelled him to take up the cause of New York’s slums. He would become famous for photographing the tenement dwellers and the conditions in which they lived. Today, he is remembered as one of the urban poor’s greatest advocates, as well as something of a bigot: a man who believed in the racial science and ethnic categorization in vogue during his lifetime.A new book, "Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York," seeks to reframe Riis’s legacy by asserting that it is better to understand his empathy for the immigrant slum than to dismiss him as just a dogmatist bent on civilizing the immigrant castes. For Daniel Czitrom and Bonnie Yochelson, the authors of the new book, a fresh look at his photography is a way to expand our view of Riis and, in turn, to understand the ways that equality for immigrants was attained at a time when race science was accepted as fact. "There is a disconnect between his photographs and his writing," Czitrom said in an interview with the Forward. "His prejudices and ethnic stereotypes give way to his humanizing images." To support this claim, the book contains a beautiful insert of photographs and illustrations from the Jacob A. Riis Collection at the Museum of the City of New York.Best known for his 1890 book "How the Other Half Lives", Riis was also well known for traveling the country with picture slides, lecturing to Christian charity organizations about the conditions of the slum dwellers, most of whom were Italian, Jewish, Irish or African American. By showing his audiences pictures of starving children, homeless men and damp sweatshops, he was able to provide visual incentive for the realization of the gospel’s teachings. With his own evangelical leanings, and the New Testament alive in the countryside, Riis became a pioneer of photojournalism at a time when newspapers often didn’t have the technology or funds to print photographs. According to Czitrom, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, As Riis tried to connect with an audience of turn-of-the-century, wealthy white Protestants, he was probably aware that playing on their prejudices in his words while pulling at their heartstrings with his images was a way to provide funds for the uplifting of the slums.“Riis had his own values as a crime reporter, which were at the core of his work. He had a tremendous intimacy with the poor, and was skeptical of Tammany Hall," remarked Bonnie Yochelson, an independent curator and historian of photography "It is easy from the perch of the 20th century to dismiss him by saying, ‘Look at this racism!’ I don’t know if it was his personal belief as much as a strategy."As it turns out, Riis was not a serious photographer. He had the idea that photography could reveal the conditions about which he was writing. In 1888, after some personal resistance, he began taking pictures.“He made a discovery," Yochelson said. "By using photography, he could shout to the conscience".Riis’s entrepreneurial and theatrical intentions are also examined in the new book. In the same year that he began his photography, Riis submitted a cover page for his slide lecture to the Library of Congress’s Copyright Office, titled "The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York. With One Hundred Illustrations, Photographs From Real Life, of the Haunts of Poverty and Vice in the Great City, Jacob A. Riis as Author and Proprietor." He was attaining financial success, and eventually he built a house in the Richmond Hill section of Queens. “He had his commercial interests," Yochelson said, "but he kept his beat as a crime reporter throughout his career and wrote daily articles, lectured, wrote for national magazines, local papers and published 10 books. His camera is just a piece of the puzzle."According to the authors, the goal of the book is to appeal to anyone interested in the history of New York. "We also want to create a dialogue between history and photojournalism." Yochelson remarked. "Riis was not a straw man but a real photographer."Eli Rosenblatt is a writer who lives in New York City. http://www.forward.com/articles/12735/#

Sicilians Claim to be Continent, Not Mere Island, Because of Remarkable Varieties

Certainly if I were to retire to Italy, the choice of locales would be difficult. It might drive me to live in an RV and just continually travel around the country, Well of course I'd have a little Fiat (and maybe a Vespa) in tow to navigate the narrow streets of some small villages, or some mountain villages. Yes, Tuscany is so rich in culture, and Venice is so captivating, but Sicily is a world of it's own, and is now being discovered by Europeans and even Northern Italians looking for second homes. Sicily fascination has much to do with its variety. Those varieties are of landscapes, microclimates, gastronomic traditions, and heritages of culture because of its history of Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans and the Spanish.

In Sicily's Sun, Real Estate is as Mixed as the Island Landscape
International Herald Tribune
By Kate Singleton
Thursday, February 21, 2008

MODICA, Sicily: When Sicilians claim that their homeland is a continent, not an island, they are not trying to redefine geography. They are simply drawing attention to the remarkable variety of landscapes, microclimates, gastronomic traditions and historical heritages to be found here.
Variety is also the distinguishing characteristic of the Sicilian property market. Prices, which have been rising as much as 20 percent a year, still seem reasonable, especially to north Europeans but even to Italians from Milan and Turin. There are plenty of handsome townhouses with frescoed ceilings, palaces with some original furnishings, country villas surrounded by lemon groves, fortified farmsteads and even the odd castle.
...You will find people courteous and welcoming and the quality of life remarkably high.
"We had been mulling over buying in the South of France, then went to Sicily on holiday and thought, 'This is it!,' " said Deborah Greatorex, an interior designer based in London. "So we started looking on the Internet and found www.sicilianhomes.com, which had just the right property for us."
"Angelo Campagna, who runs the agency with his wife, is an architect of Sicilian origin who has worked in London," Greatorex said. "Doing the place up with him has been exciting and relatively easy."
Greatorex paid €500,000, or $725,000, for a mid-19th century villa with 3.6 hectares, or 9 acres, of land, including 365 olive trees and a small vineyard. It is on the northeastern slopes of Mount Etna, a short drive from either the sea or winter skiing on the summit. An extensive restoration - including addition of a swimming pool, a tennis court and a maze - has cost a little more than €500,000.
A reliable real estate agent is essential in Sicily. Properties for sale are not always advertised; prices are not always declared; and the sellers may be several heirs, some of whom have long been living abroad.
Sicilian Homes operates largely in the areas best known to visitors: Taormina in the east, with the towns on Mount Etna just behind it; and Cefalù, on the Tyrrhenian Sea between Palermo and Messina.
In recent years Ortigia, the historic center of Syracuse on the southeast tip, has joined the list of favored locations. A small island of great antiquity and charm, it is linked to the mainland by a bridge and has been revitalized by investment and renovation.
Ramsay Gilderdale handles properties from Syracuse through what is known as the Baroque Valley in southeast Sicily: Ragusa, Modica, Scicli and Noto, which have acquired recognition as Unesco World Heritage Sites for their gloriously ornate architecture.
After years in London as a successful actor and screenwriter, Gilderdale decided in 2004 to settle in Modica, where he has opened an agency that caters to clients from the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and beyond. Real estate is offered at a wide range of prices on the site www.modicasa.com, while properties over €1 million are listed at www.baroccoproperty.com.
"Half of the people who come to me are looking for a 200- to 300-square-meter country property with some land and a nice view, and about 20 percent for a townhouse," Gilderdale said. He thinks this pattern of looking for 2,100 to 3,200 square feet of land may change when a new airport opens at Comiso, a 30-minute drive from Modica. The airport is expected to absorb the low-cost air service that now flies into Catania, plus other traffic.
"People investing in a second home for shorter visits throughout the year don't always want land," Gilderdale said. "The towns around here are eminently liveable. Many districts are pedestrian, offer wonderful views and have shops and some excellent restaurants a 10-minute walk away."
Gilderdale described the Sicilian property market as "vibrant." Country and town properties are available for as little as €60,000, though for a building of particular architectural interest the starting price is nearer €250,000.
For €500,000, he has a palazzo in Modica, part of which has its original silk wallpapers, frescoed ceilings, ceramic flooring and period furnishings, all in good condition.
Most of the less expensive properties need major rebuilding, which means applying for permits. In addition, many places also require approval from both a heritage commission and an organization of civil engineers that ensures appropriate earthquake precautions are taken.
Gilderdale can introduce purchasers to a Sicilian architect who has worked abroad and who speaks French, Spanish and English. The architect's focus is on energy-saving and environmentally sound materials, including the lovely pale local stone.
Jeremy Smith, of www.sicilypropertyco.com, is part of a multilingual team that includes an archaeologist, whose expertise in local history can be invaluable during renovation.
Though based in Catania, Sicily Property represents real estate across the island. Its current listings include several farms overlooking the west coast. Known as a "baglio," such a property consists of a fortified house facing a shady courtyard. Beyond the walls are vineyards, olive groves and pastures.
One such is Baglio Catalano, near Marsala. Built in the local tuff stone, this grand complex features a main house with balconies overlooking a 52-hectare estate with 2,700 mature olive trees. Occupied until a few years ago, it is on the market for €1.8 million.
Smith considers this western tip of the island ideal for those wishing to invest in property on a grand scale - for a wine estate or with a view to creating a boutique hotel. The airport at nearby Trapani is served by Ryanair, Air One and Meridiana and the main roads are good and toll-free.
He agrees with his colleagues, however, that the southeast, between Ragusa and Syracuse, is particularly promising. "If you like small towns with little squares," he said, "then this is the area to go for. The history is so stratified and tangible, from the Greeks to the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans and the Spanish." http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/21/style/resicily.php

Italy Beware; Malware (virus, worms, spam) Goes Global

Two years ago International "Malware" (virus, worms, spam) was one to two percent. Now it is six to seven percent , and it's growing." Cyber criminals are turning their targets on the growing markets around the world, creating localized content in native languages or targeting specific interests of that nation. One recent example noted by McAfee was an Italian spam attack. The email, written in perfect Italian and only sent to the nation of Italy, said the recipient may be the target of a government investigation and they should click on a link to see if they were under investigation. Guess what was on the other end of that link? Hint, it wasn't an Italian government server.

Yo Quiero Antivirus. Malware Goes Multilingual
Internet News. Com
By Andy Patrizio
February 22, 2008

Never ones to pass up a growing market, cybercriminals are turning their targets on the growing markets around the world, creating localized content in native languages or targeting specific interests of that nation. That's the main takeaway from McAfee Avert Labs global malware trends Sage report, called "One Internet, Many Worlds." For the longest time, Americans and English-speakers were the targets, but the crooks are going global. The growth of emerging markets like BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) has served to make them targets as well. "Two years ago, we couldn't have had this conversation," Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager for McAfee's Avert Labs, told InternetNews.com. "Most malware and spam was 95 to 98 percent English, directed at people who speak English. Now international malware is six to seven percent of the total instead of one to two percent, and it's growing." With 23 languages in the European Union alone, McAfee's researchers found that cybercriminals are either hiring locally in different nations or swapping code written in different languages so they can target specific countries. "When you try to expand a business into a new geography, you look for resources that speak the language and know the nuances. So they are trading languages or farming it out to people who speak the local languages," said Marcus. [cob:Related_Articles]One recent example noted by McAfee was an Italian spam attack. The email, written in perfect Italian and only sent to the nation of Italy, said the recipient may be the target of a government investigation and they should click on a link to see if they were under investigation. Guess what was on the other end of that link? Hint, it wasn't an Italian government server. In China, with more than 137 million computer users, the currency is online games. Asia is ripe with persistent virtual worlds that charge a monthly fee to play, and McAfee found the majority of the malware in China is password-stealing Trojans designed to grab not the login and password to a bank, but to games like "World of Warcraft" and "Lineage." In Japan, peer-to-peer file sharing networks are extremely popular, and thus popular targets for theft. Not of money but the contents of the user's hard drive. The most popular network there is called Winny, but it's frequently under attack due to misconfiguration of the software. The motivation, though, is unique: many of the attacks on Winny users are from people angry the users are engaging in theft. One virus, called Antinny, would delete audio and video files being shared by Winny users, and then berate the victim for their intellectual property theft. This gave Marcus a laugh. "You'd never see such righteous indignation like this in the U.S., where someone wrote a program to destroy audio and video files people are sharing, and then it taunts you for doing it," he said. In Brazil, a nation that has strongly embraced online banking, cybercrooks are going after online banking information with sophisticated social engineering scams written in native Portuguese to trick Brazilians into giving up personal information. In 2005 alone, the Brazilian Banks Association estimated losses at about US$165 million. The rise in international malware is just a logical follow on to the growth in international markets. With everyone from semiconductor firms to cell phone companies talking about international growth, it stood to reason that those markets would be targeted eventually. "Many more parts of the world are coming online and a lot more people around the world have disposable income. If you are apt to use online payment and online buying and selling they are likely to target your money," said Marcus. The problem is only growing. At the start of the year, McAfee identified around 528 new pieces of malware per day. By the end of 2008, it expects to see 750 new pieces per day. The Sage report is available through the McAfee Threat Center.

www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3729626

Mafia Defector Apologizes for Hollywoods and Mafia Creating Italian Negative Stereotypes

Francesco (Frank) Fiordilino, a contrite former Bonanno crime associate, whose testimony against former Bonanno boss Joseph Massino and soldier Baldassare (Baldo) Amato contributed to their convictions, that earned him a reduced sentence. Then with no benefit to himself, and with sincerity, was the first member I am ever aware of to acknowledge the Negative effect of the Mafia on Italians Image. "I apologize as well, especially to anyone of Italian background, by conspiring and utilizing our culture in the same manner the entertainment industry does with its stereotypes. ... Hollywood intensified my love for that life, and in the process blindsided what being Italian meant."

Mafia's a Farce, says Bonanno Turncoat
New York Daily News
By John Marzulli , Staff Writer
Friday, February 22nd 2008

A contrite former Bonanno crime associate trashed the Mafia as "a farce" at his sentencing for murder yesterday in Brooklyn Federal Court.Francesco (Frank) Fiordilino was then rewarded for his cooperation against Bonanno big shots with a sentence of time served plus 30 days."Cooperating witnesses are essential to achieving justice, and you have done your part," said Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis.Fiordilino, 37, pleaded guilty to shooting drug dealer Thomas Sajn in the throat in 1993 in Ridgewood.Sajn wasn't immediately killed by the gunshot, so a second assailant cut his throat, nearly decapitating him.At the time, Fiordilino was paying his dues, making espresso and cappuccino at coffee shops under the control of the crime family. His uncle, Frank (Cheech) Navarro, was a made member of the Bonanno family.Fiordilino was after Sajn's drug money and also wanted to prove to gangsters that he was capable of committing a murder. But after the feds arrested him in 2002, Fiordilino decided to change sides."I'm totally at peace with my decision to defect," Fiordilino said yesterday. "I no longer have to lie, cheat or pretend anymore."He acknowledged the taking of Sajn's life was "cowardly," and reflected on the hypocrisy of the Mafia."The mob was and still is a farce that's built on deceit, venom, greed and destruction," he said. "As for loyalty and respect, I never seen it. I could recall hundreds of conversations in which guys would sit around a table bad-mouthing each other. I'm so glad that's behind me."Prosecutor Greg Andres said Fiordilino's testimony against former Bonanno boss Joseph Massino and soldier Baldassare (Baldo) Amato contributed to their convictions."I apologize as well, especially to anyone of Italian background, by conspiring and utilizing our culture in the same manner the entertainment industry does with its stereotypes. ... Hollywood intensified my love for that life, and in the process blindsided what being Italian meant," Fiordilino said.

jmarzulli@nydailynews.com http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/02/22/2008-02-22_mafias_a_farce_says_bonanno_turncoat.html

Italians, Israelis, etc. Where Does Allegiance of Americans With Dual Loyalties Lie?

I was Born in America, have an Italian Passport, and having Jewish Blood, ADL Abe Foxman's comments below give me pause.

Foxman seems to confuse a Pride of Heritage, with Taking Actions or Positions that Favor one Nation, to the Disadvantage to the other.

If as an American I were to wish the Best for Italy, or Israel, no Harm , No Foul.

But if I were to Support the US to take Actions in Support of Italy or Israel, that would be Damaging to US Interests, that seems like it would be Disloyal to the US, if Not Treasonous.

The article had 54 comments at the time I read it. Some reassuring, some revealing, some disturbing.

1 in 3 Americans: US Jews More Loyal to Israel

The Jerusalem Post Haviv Rettig February. 19, 2008

One-third of Americans believe that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States, according to figures presented to the Knesset on Tuesday by Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman.

"This belief is so out of sync with everything else happening in America, with the fact that there's so much acceptance of Jews in all phases of life - academia, commerce, media, politics," Foxman told The Jerusalem Post. " When Joe Lieberman ran for vice president [in 2000], there was very little talk about double loyalty." Now, "because of the phenomenon of Mearsheimer and Walt and Jimmy Carter, this whole discussion as to whether Jews are disproportionately powerful in foreign policy - the conspiracy thesis - in the mainstream," Foxman added.

Will this atmosphere "intimidate Jews from not acting out as publicly and as openly in exercise of their rights and in support of positions they believe in? Will Jews begin to feel intimidated when they speak out about Iran? That's my concern," Foxman noted. "This will not trigger anti-Semitic violence, but it is poisoning the atmosphere when it's more and more legitimate to debate the loyalty of Jews on American campuses. This is classic political anti-Semitism."

"US Jews are very uncomfortable with this [issue]," commented MK Colette Avital (Labor), a member of the Knesset Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Committee where Foxman was speaking on Tuesday. She told the Post that the figures indicated "a failure to explain - I hate to use the word hasbara - that you can be loyal to both. In the US, people can live with several identities, such as Italian-Americans and African-Americans, and Jewish Americans should be seen in that context."

Foxman also told MKs that, despite a drop over the past 30 years in the percentage of Americans holding anti-Semitic attitudes from 30 percent to 15%, the figure still stood at 35 million adult Americans. Meanwhile, between 2005 and 2007, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in America dropped from 1,757 to some 1,350.

Foxman was quoting the ADL's 2007 "Survey of American Attitudes Towards Jews in America," which put the figure of Americans who believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US at 31%, a number roughly unchanged since at least 1992.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1203343707194&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Influence of 20,000 Chinese in Milan

As a follow on to My Report about the Chinese presence in Prato (near Florence) and the Fashion Industry, this article gives insight to the presence and transition/assimilation of Chinese Immigrants in Milan.

The New Chinatowns

Corriere della Sera

Marco Del Corona

19 febbraio 2008

No more workshops, fewer warehouses and more shops. Pilot study of 20,000 Chinese in Milan.

They used to run workshops but not any longer. Behind the frosted glass of the old artisan stores, they occupied the big basements below Via Morazzone and Via Bruno in Milan’s Paolo Sarpi district. Not any more. The Chinese workshops are no more. The workers used to sew handbags from dawn each day, beginning again at dawn the next day. That’s all over. The traditional industry that once characterised the area can no longer be found anywhere in Chinatown.

In 2001, there were sixteen businesses but now there are none. Via Paolo Sarpi has changed and that’s one of the signs. The wholesale trade that worries residents and poses problems for the mayor, Letizia Moratti (such as the scuffles on 12 April last year) is expanding but retail shops are growing even faster. Chinatown is changing even as we speak. It is moving fast and pointing out trends, given that one quarter of all Chinese residents in Italy live in Lombardy. Now it is experiencing a sea change in services.

Today’s snapshot is profoundly different from the picture as recently as five years ago. A new study updated to 2007, edited by Daniele Cologna with the Codici social research agency, focuses on Chinese entrepreneurship, showing that demographic data and investigations in the field are often at odds with the widespread perceptions held by Italian residents of the district and Milan. First of all, the population of the Sarpi district adjoining the city centre, and delimited by Via Canonica-Via Procaccini-Via Ceresio-Via Montello-Via Maggi, is more than 90% Italian. On 31 December 2006, only 5.8% (6.5% in 2004) of the 14,000 Chinese resident in Milan lived in the district. “We should add temporary residents”, explains Mr Cologna, “but that means a maximum of 300 people sleeping in the dapu (dormitories), of which there are about fifteen that sleep twenty people each. Whichever way you look at it, there are fewer than a thousand Chinese residents in total”. The Chinese are concentrated elsewhere in the northern area.

Chinese, but not only Chinese, go to Chinatown to work. Between 1,000 and 1,500 people are employed in the area. It was in the early 1930s that the Canonica-Sarpi district received its first immigrants from Asia and when inflow from the People’s Republic began again in 1984, that was where the newcomers went to live and work. But restructuring, gentrification and rising property prices during the 1990s put rents beyond the reach of the new arrivals, forcing textile workshops out of the district. Some moved out to the area between Milan and Monza and many others went to the Gallarate textile district.

Chinatown shed Chinese residents as wholesale businesses multiplied, replacing Italian-owned shops. The Chinese pay well and in cash, with money collected through guanxi, the network of family and friends that underpins traditional Chinese entrepreneurs. Today, only about one business in five in the district is Italian.

According to Mr Cologna’s report, the signs of further development are already appearing. "n increasing number of Chinese wholesalers are opting to convert their businesses into retail shops or move out" spontaneously delocalising and abandoning a district that is unsuitable for such a concentration of wholesale activity. In 2006, according to the Chamber of Commerce, only 18% of the 2,822 Chinese-owned sole traders in the province of Milan were based in Chinatown.

The upshot is that growth in wholesale business has been overtaken by the vibrant service and retail sectors, which now no longer restrict themselves to a Chinese clientele. Out of 482 businesses registered in Chinatown -three times as many as there were six years ago -53.3% are wholesalers, an increase of 342.2% over 2001, when there were 64.

But there are now 111 retailers, more than six times as many (+640% with respect to 2001, when there were 15). They cover a range of sectors, especially food, telephones and clothing but there is a wine shop, a fish shop and a fresh tofu shop. If we add other service businesses, such as bookshops, estate or travel agencies, the sixteen restaurants and the internet cafés, retail service businesses account for 41.3%.

Elsewhere in north Milan, Chinese have taken over Italian-owned businesses, adds Mr Cologna, and continue to run them without any overtly ethnic label. These include bars, newsstands and hairdressers. "The older wave of Chinese immigration appears to have peaked", partly because the traditional source area - the coast around Zhejiang - has a large, prosperous development hub in its main city, Wenzhou. The disappearance of the Chinese-owned workshops means that fewer Chinese workers can be employed by Chinese entrepreneurs.

Immigrants from the People’s Republic now scatter across the region to work for Italians, especially immigrants from the new areas, the northern regions of Liaoning, Heilongjiang (mining areas with declining heavy industry) and the Shandong peninsula, who have no support network in Italy. The figures do not reflect a ghetto or a community that shuts itself off from society. The Chinese might misspell "hairdresser" two different ways on the same shop window, or open restaurants offering "warm food", but according to the national statistics institute ISTAT they are the second most numerous group attending Italian language courses for adults. Their passport is still Chinese but Italy beckons. Chinatown is a staging post, not a destination.

English translation by Giles Watson

"Made in Italy"....by Chinese Immigrants ??

When an Italian Fashion house charges $1,470 for a purse, is it too much to expect them to pay Italian workers a decent wage, when there is a high unemployment rate? How greedy can a company be, to not only allow illegal immigrants to do the work Italians should do, but permit the illegal immigrants to be over worked, underpayed, living in squalor, with no benefits, nothing more than sweatshops with deplorable conditions and virtually indentured workers.

The fashion houses argue, it's better than the alternative: moving all production offshore. Really? How??

Shame on the Schmata Industry!!! [Yiddish for Clothing Industry]

The 'Made in Italy' label: Read the Fine Print

It's a crazy competition. In fact, you can't compete" said Andrea Calistri, decrying the use of cheaper Chinese labor in Italian manufacturing. His family business has been making handbags for top designers for more than half a century. Calistri has formed 100 Percent Italian, a consortium of 65 small companies, to promote traditional Italian craftsmanship.Many of the famous leather goods from Tuscany are now produced by Chinese, laboring there in sweatshop conditions.

Los Angeles Times By Tracy Wilkinson, Staff Writer
February 20, 2008

PRATO, ITALY -- The "Made in Italy" label conjures images of little old men and women in aprons and spectacles, stooped over wooden tables, cutting leather and sewing by hand in workshops that dot the hills of Tuscany.

It certainly doesn't make you picture Chinese immigrants toiling long hours in ramshackle, poorly illuminated sheds, and then sleeping in small rooms behind thin plywood right there in the factories.

These days, the coveted "Made in Italy" label on those Prada bags and Gucci shoes, which can quadruple a price, may not mean what it used to.

Thousands of Tuscan factories that produce the region's fabled leather goods are now operated and staffed by Chinese. Though located in one of Italy's most picturesque and tourist-frequented regions, many of the factories are nothing more than sweatshops with deplorable conditions and virtually indentured workers.

Chinese laborers have become such an integral cog in the high-fashion wheel that large Chinatowns have sprung up here and in Florence. Signs in Chinese, Italian and sometimes English advertise prontomoda (ready-to-wear). At the main public hospital in Prato, the maternity ward on a recent morning was a cacophony of 40 squalling babies, 15 of them Chinese. "Mi chiamo Zhong Ti," one of the crib tags said -- "My name is Zhong Ti."

In Prato, Tuscany's historic and industrious textile center 10 miles northwest of Florence, Chinese who are legal residents make up about 12% of the population (and probably close to 25% when illegal Chinese are counted, police say).

For the big-name clothing labels, Chinese-staffed workshops provide an important way of keeping costs down by supplying cheaply and quickly made purses, shoes and other products. It helps the fashion houses compete and, many argue, it's better than the alternative: moving all production offshore.

But for legions of Italian craftsmen and -women who try to maintain painstaking but costly old-style practices, the cheaper Chinese labor is deadly.

"It's a crazy competition. In fact, you can't compete," said Andrea Calistri, whose third-generation family business has been making handbags for top designers from voluptuous leather and buttery suede for more than half a century.

In a way, this is representative of the dilemma facing Italy as a whole: How do you compete in a hard-edged global economy while maintaining the standards that give a native craft its panache?

Three categories of problematic production plague the Italian fashion industry.

First there are the out-and-out counterfeits, part of a multibillion-dollar fraud denounced the world over. Consumers have long been aware of the fakes and knockoffs, made God-knows-where, that are hawked on street corners or out of the trunks of cars. Italian financial police last year conducted 250 raids on workshops in Tuscany alone and confiscated tons (literally) of cheap bags and shoes bearing fraudulent Prada, Fendi and Nike insignia.

Then there is the gray area of shoes and bags assembled at least partially in China, India, Malaysia and other low-cost locales, then brought to Italy for a final buckle, heel or strap. These items can, somewhat questionably, bear "Made in Italy" labels.

Finally, there are the products made completely in Italy but by Chinese immigrants. That's often technically legal. But it crosses the line when the workers are in Italy without proper documents and labor conditions for them are especially nasty.

Italian law governs safety in the workplace, the number of hours that can be worked and the minimum wage, among other rules, but the law is often flouted.

And so, it is possible that a fancy store may have expensive designer bags made by Chinese workers in Italy displayed next to the same bags made, also in Italy, by Italian workers, Calistri says. One cost 20 euros (about $30) to produce, the other 250 euros (about $365). The price tag is the same, often many hundreds of dollars.

That's plain wrong, Calistri says. "When you have a product like Prada or Dolce & Gabbana, you are not supposed to use illegal workers," he said. "If a customer pays 1,000 euros [about $1,470] for a bag, he has a right to expect not only the best materials and the best creation but also a respected legal process.

" 'Made in Italy,' " he said, "means tradition, know-how and standards. . . . It means not only made in Italy, but made in the Italian way."

Calistri has formed a consortium composed of 65 companies, all small like his. They call themselves 100 Percent Italian.

In his workshop during a recent visit, women (and they are mostly women) in crisp white lab coats were attaching gilded bows to pink satin clutches for Roberto Cavalli, while a computer-guided laser sliced thin sheets of soft leather for designs by Bulgari or Donna Karan. Under bright fluorescent lighting, other women hand-stitched the suede inner pockets of another batch of designer bags.

The next step to distinguish their work, Calistri says, is to implant microchips in handbags; with the chip, a consumer can check authenticity on his or her cellphone.

The top fashion labels remain largely aloof from this seedy side of the business. They say abuse is a marginal practice. However, in making use of a chain of suppliers and subcontractors, they can turn a blind eye, and do so, in the opinion of Calistri and other craftsmen like him.

An enormous portion of subcontractors today are Chinese, according to the Italian financial police, who monitor their activities. From fewer than 100 in Tuscany in the 1990s, the number of Chinese factories, workshops and related businesses in Prato and Florence had soared to 5,300 last year, said Police Capt. Edoardo Marzocchi.

Police have shut down many after raids exposed poor living conditions, lack of residence permits for foreign nationals and the failure to pay taxes. In one raid last year, police discovered a clandestine factory when neighbors reported unexplained comings and goings of Chinese.

In the factory, police found living quarters complete with small cells for sleeping and a shrine for prayer. No one spoke much Italian, except for one Chinese woman who seemed to be in charge. In broken Italian, she said she couldn't produce papers for any of the workers because they were "on tryout" and in the country temporarily. Police say that explanation is usually a ruse.

The Chinese workers "self-exploit," said Ye Huiming, a 28-year-old immigrant who serves as informal liaison between the Chinese community and city officials in Prato.

"They spend a lot of money to come here and then they have to pay off their debts," Ye said. "They'll work 14 hours a day, they'll work at night, whatever it takes to accomplish that.

"They don't come here to see the Michelangelos."

The movement of Chinese into the Italian garment industry has transformed this part of a country that only relatively recently has had to face the changes brought by large-scale immigration. Tuscany now has the largest percentage of Chinese residents anywhere in Italy.

Chinese who have immigrated legally are settled and have moved up in the world, Ye said. There is the beginning of a second generation, Chinese who speak Italian well (even with a Tuscan accent) and follow the rules. One-third of all Chinese here are under 21.

Ye came to Italy 18 years ago as a 10-year-old with his mother, who worked long hours sewing in a factory, where the family also lived. Today, Ye is a businessman with his own apartment, a Chinese wife whom he met in Prato and a new baby.

Still, he said, the climate is souring because of prejudice and misconceptions, especially when Chinese are blamed for undermining the Italian economy by dumping cheap products into the market.

Driving through Chinese neighborhoods and sprawling industrial parks in Prato, the presence is unmistakable. Inside warehouses visible behind Chinese billboards, seas of blouses and jackets hang from racks outside, shiny black BMWs and Chinese people on bicycles share the streets. Chinese bridal shops, real estate agencies, florists, discos and restaurants have replaced Italian businesses in some areas.

The Chinese in Tuscany are becoming a more permanent fixture, but the vast majority are still tied to the fashion industry. Their role, and any abuse of workers or labor codes, in a sector that is so important to Italy, is generally a taboo topic. Calistri's group is unusual in wanting to talk about it. Another rare exception came in a television documentary this year called "Luxury Slaves," broadcast by "Report," a "60 Minutes"-style program on RAI-3, an Italian state channel.

It exposed the exploitation of Chinese through the use of subcontractors and the questionable practices behind the "Made in Italy" label. It sent earthquake-size shock waves through the top fashion houses, most of which refused comment. A few said they thought the claims were exaggerated and, besides, they could not be expected to be on top of all their suppliers.

The documentary reported that Prada had ended its dealings with one sweatshop when the company was made aware of its work. Asked by The Times for comment, a Prada spokesman issued a statement that said the company "controls directly each phase of the production process" at 14 factories it owns in Italy. Every supplier, the statement added, must comply with Prada's "very strict quality standards" and sign a pledge of ethical conduct.

The [Prada] spokesman declined to answer questions, saying the people at Prada were too busy. It's the season, after all. New York Fashion Week was in full swing, the fall collections filling the runways.

wilkinson@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-madeinitaly20feb20,0,7852016.story

Sliwa Does Penance for Italian American Slur with Paddling and Mouth Washing

My Report dated February 14, was titled : "Polak Radio Host Curtis Sliwa Apologizes for Claiming 1 in 5 Italian Staten Islanders 'Mobbed Up" but the apology .I thought was lame.

However, he was encouraged to go further, and visited a predominant Italian Senior Citizen Center on Staten Island where he not only issued a "mea culpa" then he got down on his knees, made the sign of the cross, clasped his hands as if in prayer and took his punishment like a man: He had his bottom paddled with a wooden spoon and his mouth washed out with soap by an Italian grandma.

The Italian Seniors were touched by his humility, and gave Sliwa Valentine chocolates to take away the taste of the soap..... and I withdraw my "Polak" reference.

Making the Punishment Fit The Crime

Sliwa paddled and fed soap as payback for his slur against Island

Staten Island Advance

By Judy L. Randall

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Curtis Sliwa did his penance on Staten Island yesterday.

First there was his mea culpa to a roomful of senior citizens for having trash-talked the borough by insinuating the Island was all mobbed up.

Then he got down on his knees, made the sign of the cross, clasped his hands as if in prayer and took his punishment like a man: He had his bottom paddled with a wooden spoon and his mouth washed out with soap by an Italian grandma.

Said Sliwa: "If I have insulted or besmirched anyone on Staten Island, I apologize."

The scene, at the Arrochar Friendship Club in South Beach, was orchestrated by Republican City Council members Vincent Ignizio and James Oddo. While they're fans of the radio shock jock, they said he went too far earlier this week, and Ignizio called the Guardian Angels founder to suggest he say he was sorry. And say it on Staten Island.

The flap started with news of the big Gambino crime family bust and word that Islander Joseph Vollaro had ratted them out. Vollaro's wife, Trisha, didn't know anything about his alleged mob ties, her family claimed -- something Sliwa found hard to believe.

"This is Staten Island," Sliwa told a tabloid reporter. "I could swing a dead cat around my head, and every fifth person I would hit is organized crime."

Although Sliwa hasn't disavowed the quote, he reiterated yesterday that it was printed "out of context." He said he meant to imply skepticism that Vollaro's wife didn't know whom she was serving at her restaurant, Dock's Clam Bar and Pasta House in Tottenville.

"Every fifth person would mean you have close to 100,000 people in organized crime on Staten Island, and there aren't that many people left [in the mob]," Sliwa told the Advance after his public flogging, his mouth, chin and teeth still bearing the remnants of the bar of white Ivory soap that senior Frances Cammarata had playfully shoved into his mouth.

Still, Sliwa allowed that his remarks could be seen by some as playing into one of the worst stereotypes about Staten Island.

"I think some would think that," he said.

In organizing the event, Ignizio brought the props -- spoon and soap -- saying, "They are reminiscent of my younger days. Let me just leave it at that."

"He made a stupid comment and he needed to apologize," added Ignizio. "Whenever anybody has a bully pulpit and they espouse anti-Italian sentiments, they ought to apologize."

"I think it's smart of him to nip this in the bud," said Oddo. "He has a shtick, but this was shtick that crossed the line. In his heart, he knows better." ...

Yet the seniors were in a forgiving mood yesterday. They laughed and applauded Sliwa's appearance, and nodded knowingly as he discussed his Italian heritage. He called himself "a son of Brooklyn who has a part of me in Staten Island," and ended his remarks with, "Where are the canolis?"

Mrs. Cammarata, of South Beach, who was chosen to administer Sliwa's punishment because of her sense of humor, called Sliwa "a gentleman."

"Sometimes we don't mean things the way they come out," she said.

Amy Votinelli, Friendship Club site coordinator, gave Sliwa Valentine chocolates to take away the taste of the soap.....

Judy L. Randall is a news reporter for the Advance. She may be reached at randall@siadvance.com.

http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=709358

Italy Foreign Aid Overlooked

The US is considered the wealthiest, strongest and most influential nation. It is also considered the most generous. But Not calculated as a % of GDP !!!!

Italy contributes .02 % of GDP , while the US lags behind at .17 %. But even more so, around the world for numerous years, many have criticized the US for cutting back on its promised obligations and responsibilities, and that furthermore, when it has provided aid, it has been tied to its own foreign policy objectives

• Aid is primarily designed to serve the strategic and economic interests of the donor countries;
• Or [aid is primarily designed] to benefit powerful domestic interest groups;
• Aid systems based on the interests of donors instead of the needs of recipients’ make development assistance inefficient;
• Too little aid reaches countries that most desperately need it; and,
• All too often, aid is wasted on overpriced goods and services from donor countries.

The article below outlines Italy's Aid to Sierra Leone, Battling to re-build six years after a brutal civil war, and is ranked the least developed country in the world. Italy has provided Aid also to Mali, Senegal, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau, among many others, particularly Libya, Ethiopia , Eritrea, and Somalia, former Protectorates.

US and Foreign Aid Assistance: http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp#RankingtheRichbasedonCommitmenttoDevelopment

Italy boosts Sierra Leone Food Aid
AFP The Times - Johannesburg,Gauteng, South Africa February 19, 2008
FREETOWN - Italy has extended 10 million dollars to help boost food production over the next three years in Sierra Leone, the African country’s Agriculture Minister Sam Sesay said. The deal will help "significantly contribute to food security through support for a modern competitive and commercially vibrant agriculture sector," Sesay told AFP. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) will provide the technical back-up to the scheme. Other states set to benefit from similar Italian-backed projects in the region include Mali, Senegal, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau, according to the Italian fund’s representative in Freetown, Arturo Rollo. Battling to re-build six years after a brutal civil war, Sierra Leone is ranked the least developed country in the world under the United Nations Human Development Index. http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=709358

Italians, French, Spanish and Germans Would Back Obama, Only British Prefer Hillary

Italians, French, Spanish and Germans Would Back Obama, Only British Prefer Hillary

This year's US election has aroused HUGE interest in Europe, which seems keen to end eight years of often testy relations with the George W. Bush administration.

Democrats top FT poll in Europe

The Financial Times Limited

February 18 2008

The French, Italians, Spanish and Germans would back Barack Obama in the US presidential poll if they had a vote, while the British would prefer Hillary Clinton, a survey suggests.

An FT/Harris opinion poll of more than 5,000 Europeans found that the two Democrats were by far the most popular candidates, with Mr Obama winning between 35 per cent support in Spain and 45 per cent in Italy. In the UK, Mrs Clinton had 28 per cent support compared with Mr Obama's 23 per cent.

On the Republican side, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani (who has now quit the race) were the two most popular candidates.

The online poll was conducted between January 30 and February 8.

In a separate FT/Harris poll of 1,020 adults in the US, Mr Obama (22 per cent support) narrowly beat Mrs Clinton (21 per cent). Mr McCain was in third place with 14 per cent.

US election surveys are normally restricted to likely or registered voters, whereas the Harris survey sampled all adults, and reflects a snapshot of how the US feels on this issue.

This year's US election has aroused huge interest in Europe, which seems keen to end eight years of often testy relations with the George W. Bush administration.

www.ft.com/uselections

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c21433da-ddc3-11dc-ad7e-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Book: "Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food" by John Dickie

Italian cuisine was the first developed cuisine in Europe, Most experts agree that Italian cooking became the "Mother Cuisine of Europe" in 1533 when Catherine de'Medici went to France to marry King Henri II. She brought teams of expert cooks to France who delivered France the secrets of the most sophisticated cuisine yet developed at that time.

"Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food" by John Dickie

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

From Publishers Weekly

In this revelatory history of gourmet Italy from antiquity to today, Dickie , examines the centuries of religious, political and sociological events that effectively thrust Italian food into today's global limelight. Though it begins with the requisite gnocchi, lasagna, tagliatelle and tortellini, this bittersweet historical narrative quickly dispels the romantic notion that contemporary Italian fare has been the prideful plate of the rural peninsula and peasants throughout the ages.

Dickie tracks the country's culinary saga to medieval times, during which the impoverished would have been less likely to eat bistecca alla fiorentina or risotto alla milanese (had either existed), as they were to subsist on banal fare like turnips and polenta, with little concept of epicurean taste or pride. He notes that it was the urban areas, replete with food markets and money, that enabled foods like Parmigiano-Reggiano and mortadella to become Italian staples.

As Dickie shows, the mainstream American concept of Italian food is a modern-day notion developed as a mixture of the multiple identities of the country's cities. Boisterous, gluttonous stories—some verging on salacious—are balanced by accounts of paucity in this look into Italian history and its edibles. (Jan.) Reed Business Information

Reviews

"Revelatory history of gourmet Italy from antiquity to today...Boisterous, gluttonous stories -- some verging on salacious -- are balanced by accounts of paucity in this look into Italian history and its edibles." -- Publishers Weekly

"A book that is as much a feast of horrors as delights...[Dickie's] book is hard to fault: densely researched, enlightening, and consistently moreish." -- The Sunday Times (London)

"A literally mouth-watering read, which counters the misconception of "Italian" cuisine, as well as the myth that it originated among peasants." -- The Herald

"A clever and provoking account of Italy's history...informs as well as enlightens." -- The Guardian

"Lots of books are written with passion about Italian food, precious few backed up with the deep historical background here presented in allegro con brio style by a clear-headed historian who rubbishes some too-persistent myths and replaces them with factual narratives no less fascinating. Dickie shows how Italian regional cuisines developed and some dishes became global icons.

If we are what we eat, who wouldn't want to be Italian?" -- The Times (London)

Italy Has Inspired English Artists and Architects For Last 250 Years

I had no idea that Italy was such a great Influence on English Artists and Architects For the Last 250 Years.

Roman Holiday

Guardian Unlimited - UK

Saturday February 16, 2008

Pompeo Batoni made his name painting the wealthy young Britons who flocked to admire Italy's antiquities on the Grand Tour. Why, after 200 years, do their journeys and the art they commissioned still matter, asks Jonathan Jones

Thomas Dundas poses like a dancer in Pompeo Batoni's portrait, an elegant leg resting casually on a masterpiece of classical sculpture. He gestures towards the recumbent Vatican Ariadne, while in the courtyard behind him we can see the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön and Antinous - when this was painted in about 1764, they were the most famous works of art in the world. The scene is the Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican, and this painting of a Briton abroad records a cultural obsession with Rome that has inspired some of the greatest British works of art.

The Grand Tour is one of the most famous chapters in our cultural history. In the 18th century, it became an indispensable part of a gentleman's education to make the journey across Europe and over the Alps to Italy, to admire the artistic treasures of Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Naples. English aristocrats so abounded in Italy's cultural capitals that Johann Zoffany could paint a crowd of them draping themselves among the Raphaels and Renis in The Tribuna of the Uffizi; the picture had to keep growing to show more and more men of influence in the red-walled, pearl-shell-ceilinged octagonal chamber of Florence's picture gallery. When they got to Rome, these same individuals would like as not commission portraits from Pompeo Batoni, whose prosperous career is about to be celebrated by the National Gallery in London.

Batoni started out as a decorator of churches in a late baroque manner, but he found a much more dynamic market among the super-rich young Britons who flocked to Rome to be seen looking at the Apollo Belvedere and to enjoy the fireworks, horse races and courtesans.

Looking around Batoni's gallery of silked nonentities, it is tempting to wonder why, after 200 years, anyone should care about the journey they made or the art they commissioned. Here is the portrait of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham, 6th baronet, beautifully done out in mustard and gesturing at what looks like a cardboard stage-set of a classical vista; the painting must have made a fine souvenir. Yet not every aristocrat was a powdered fop, even though Batoni made them all look as if they'd had their brains removed by Frankenstein on their way down through Switzerland. Many landowners went home, heads filled with antiquities, to landscape their estates in the manner of Claude and to collect the treasures still being dug out of ancient Italian soil; it is to the Grand Tourists that we owe half the treasures in the British Museum, from the Portland Vase (acquired by the Dowager Duchess of Portland in 1784) to the stupendous "Roman" vase imaginatively assembled from antique fragments by Giambattista Piranesi and sold to Sir John Boyd in the 1770s. And with them they took artists, who brought back more than souvenirs.

The Grand Tour was so much more than a snobs' excursion. Before the aristocrats - and after them - came the artists. The real heroes of the British obsession with Italy are not men like Alexander Gordon, 4th Duke of Gordon, who is said to have sat blank-faced in his carriage while the renowned neoclassical theorist JJ Winckelmann lectured him on the sights of Rome and who was portrayed by Batoni hunting in the Campanian countryside, but these artists and writers, mostly of humble or middle-class birth, who travelled to be inspired. Their journeys to Rome transformed British culture. This is their narrative - a people's history of the Grand Tour.

It begins in London's Covent Garden, a teeming, democratic piazza today as it was in the time of Pepys and Hogarth. For four centuries, its street entertainers have performed in front of the incongruous backdrop of Inigo Jones's austere St Paul's Church, with its portico in the severe Tuscan order - the oldest classical church in Britain and one of the first relics of our national dream of Rome. When Jones consciously emulated Roman public spaces such as Piazza Navona and Piazza del Popolo to plan Covent Garden piazza in the 1630s, he gave London life a classical grace years before the Great Fire and Wren's rebuilding.

Italy sounded like a place of wonders to the son of a London cloth-worker of Welsh descent living in Shakespeare's London, where characters such as Julius Caesar and Prospero declaimed from classically designed theatres. Something of magic and the occult is inscribed in Jones's architecture, which makes it more fascinating and compulsive the more you think about it. No one knows how Jones got from his humble origins in Smithfield to being a professional artist and architect, but by the turn of the 17th century he was in Italy, studying the classical tradition. He wasn't impressed by the architecture of Michelangelo and his "mannerist" imitators, who insidiously subverted the classical orders. Instead - especially after his second visit to Italy in 1613-14 - he admired the north Italian architect Palladio, who in the later 16th century systematically revived a purer classicism. Palladio's buildings in Vicenza and Venice invent an abstract, harmonious architecture for which he claimed the authority of the ancient Roman writer Vitruvius. In the National Gallery is a portrait by Veronese of Daniele Barbaro displaying his famous translation of Vitruvius, with Palladio's illustrations, that so inspired Jones.

Vitruvius explains that Roman temples embody mystical mathematical ideas. Architecture is like music, he says, and like a musical harmony it is all about proportion. All architectural proportion is derived from the ideal shape of a human body. This is where it gets spooky, if you're a fan of pulp intellectual fiction, for the most famous attempt to illustrate Vitruvius's notion of "ideal" human proportions is Leonardo da Vinci's star-shaped man, gorily recreated in the Louvre in The Da Vinci Code. And this really was, for imaginations such as those of da Vinci and Inigo Jones, a secret code, the key to everything: there is a mystical mathematics at the heart of the universe. So some minds have felt since the time of Pythagoras. You hear it in music, you sense it in architecture. I felt it the other day in a room in Greenwich.

Jones's groundbreaking journeys to Italy - he was the first British visual artist to make what was then an arduous trek - got him a job as court architect to Charles I. His masterpiece, I think, is the Queen's House at Greenwich. Its Great Hall is a wonderful cool space with its black and white symmetrical floor tiles and its square coffered ceiling - so you think when you first enter from below. Climb the spiral staircase, though, and walk on the precarious wood-railed gallery, and you realise it is something much more bizarre than that.

It is not just a square-shaped room, but appears to be a perfect cube. Right here in Greenwich time stops, the passing show dissolves before your eyes, and you realise you are standing inside geometry, inside a mathematically exact form. It is a Vitruvian utopia. This is the most spectacular, stunning example of the same classicism that creeps up on you more insidiously in Jones's Banqueting House in Whitehall - notorious as the room from one of whose windows Charles I stepped to be beheaded. Go to Greenwich and experience the arcanum that is the Queen's House; it will blow away any lazy idea that classical means Georgian means conservative. The vision of Inigo Jones pays eerie homage to the mystery and sublimity of Rome.

Jones came from common stock, but rose to a powerful position at the doomed court of Charles I, where classical taste jostled with baroque opulence. The paintings in the Banqueting House are by another northern European besotted with Italy - Rubens - and Jones's patron was Lord Arundel, who amassed a formidable collection that included not just ancient sculpture, but also Leonardo's notebooks. (Did the designer of the Queen's House study Leonardo's "geometrical games" in the Codex Arundel, now owned by the British Library?) So his story doesn't destroy the myth of the Grand Tour so much as enrich it. But the point is that, while aristocrats went to Italy to collect, it was the artists they took along who saw the true magic of its art and architecture.

What is influence? If Inigo Jones was just a passive copier of Italy, he'd be of minor interest. What makes him one of the greatest British architects is the unmistakable Britishness of his style - the funny ways he twists the classical tradition. His attempt to demonstrate in a posthumously published work that Stonehenge is a Roman temple is typical of his genius: he responds to the rugged, bleak stones in the British landscape. His own buildings have that same native austerity.

In the 18th century, the constant flow of aristocrats from England to Italy provided artists with an audience for Italian views: the painters Joseph Wright of Derby, Richard Wilson and Thomas Jones were some of the most brilliant who made the trip. All these artists found a drama and passion in the Italian landscape that wasn't just to do with ruins and history. Italy came to symbolise a wilder, hotter, more passionate life than you could experience at home; to compare the Welsh landscapes of the gentleman artist Thomas Jones with his Italian oil sketches is to see a man brought to life by travel. Wilson, his impecunious teacher, was as obsessive and passionate as Inigo Jones in his cult of the classical. And Wright of Derby's views of Vesuvius erupting, red fire in the Neapolitan night, are a reminder that Italy's landscape inspired science as well as art - Charles Lyell's observation of the clam-eaten ruins at Pozzuoli inspired him to postulate laws of geological change in his Principles of Geology (1830-33).

By the 1760s, tourism to Rome was the most important fact in European culture. A style was forged - neoclassicism - that was truly international in its belief in the moral example and aesthetic excellence of antiquity. Batoni gradually adopted this style, abandoning the baroque putti and melting honeyed air of his early paintings for the crisp statuesque proportions of his Grand Tour portraits. The same plain precision is what makes British paintings such as Wilson's view of Tivoli at Dulwich Picture Gallery or Wright's scintillating nocturne of fireworks over the Vatican at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool such neoclassical monuments. And yet, these "international" artists are almost too slavish to Rome. Only after the traditional Grand Tour was cut short by Napoleon did a British painter make true masterpieces from his love of Italy.

Even if the Grand Tour had never stimulated any other artist, the cult of it would be justified by JMW Turner alone. It wasn't until the Napoleonic wars were over and he was already an established artist that Turner visited Italy. Shaped by his admiration for Wilson, he more than anyone else brought a northern eye to the southern landscape. In the National Gallery, you can compare Claude's Italian sea ports with Turner's Dido Building Carthage. Turner's vision of the ancient Mediterranean has that tough texture, that harsh London air even in its acute heat and fire, that makes him unmistakably a traveller, not a native, in the south. His aching, mind-stretching vistas of classical architecture glinting white like jewelled bones in the blinding light are some of the most astonishing miracles in all art.

When did the Grand Tour end? In Boston, you can visit an Italian Renaissance palace. Meticulously recreated for the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner from fragments of Italian buildings, it is proof that Americans took up the collecting manners of British aristocrats. American creative artists - Henry James and John Singer Sargent - were still entranced by Italy in the early 20th century. Even after the second world war, trips to Italy were formative experiences for the painters Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly. In fact, Twombly has spent his creative life in the orbit of Rome much like a modern Claude or Poussin.

Does Rome still have anything to teach artists and architects, now that we can all go for the price of an Easyjet trip to Ciampino airport? Walk around London, past the dome of St Paul's with its homage to Michelangelo and Brunelleschi. Look at Norman Foster's "Gherkin". The architect of London's greatest contemporary building has evidently stood in the Belvedere in the Vatican, looking with pleasure and creative fire on the giant pine cone mounted on its staircase. Pompeo Batoni, 1707-1787 is at the National Gallery, London WC2, from February 20 to May 18. Book tickets on 0870 906 3891 or at www.nationalgallery.org.uk

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2257172,00.html

The Italian Immigrant Experience In Lockhaven PA

The Italian Immigrant Experience In Lockhaven PA

Lock Haven Express - Lock Haven,PA,USA

By Matt Connor

February 16, 2008

It takes only a glimpse at the front page of any newspaper to see that the immigrant experience in the U.S. remains a topic of great interest to most Americans.

Today, the issue of illegal immigration, for example, is a matter of contention from the large urban centers on both coasts to the Hazleton area here in the Keystone State.

But throughout American history, the arrival in cities and towns of foreign-born individuals has inspired both open hospitality and thinly-veiled hostility, in roughly equal measures.

Clinton County is no different than any other locale in that respect. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Irish, German, Polish and Italian immigrants poured into Lock Haven and surrounding areas, lured by the promise of employment on the developing railroads and other large building projects.

In 1883, a reporter for the Clinton Democrat newspaper made his way to a workman’s camp near Mill Hall, where 140 Italian immigrants were working on the then-ongoing construction of the Beech Creek, Clearfield and Southwestern Railroad.

The account by the unnamed reporter is alternately admiring and disparaging, but paints a fascinating picture of life among the Italian laborers of the day.

“The most prominent object (in the camp) was the board tent — of no considerable dimensions — in which the entire horde sleep,” the reporter related of the Italian workmen at the site. “It consists of a series of floors about a foot and one half above each other and reminds one of a cabinet whose shelves are compactly filled with specimens. For, beginning at the bottom, each floor is filled in rotation by its tawny occupants, a unique bedroom, indeed, but not desirable on these cool spring nights, especially to the ‘end men.’”

After finding a supervisor (one Carmine Grandazzo, of Naples) who spoke fluent English, the reporter walked among the men and observed various rounds of “gioco alla desspeto,” a card game, as well as much pipe smoking, baking and animated conversation.

“Though strangers in a strange land they spend their dolce far niente (idle) hours playing on the accordion and singing the sweet songs of Sunny Italy,” the reporter noted.

Twenty years later, the Clinton County Times included another account of the Italian experience in the area, in this case of a group of laborers working on a public works project near Woolrich. It’s an account, however, that clearly demonstrated the prejudices and misperceptions of some members of the local community.

In the politically incorrect language of the era, the paper reported: “The ditch of the Chatham Water Co. having been completed, the ‘dagoes’ have left. Their coming here appeared to be the signal of distress — murder, theft and anxiety. They were gazed upon as mortal curiosities, but, after all, it could not be doubted that within each Italy’s sun-kissed breast there beats a human heart, and within each bosom there was carried the crucifix of their Saviour.”

The article continues: “Their mode of living and hardships endured with a humped back in the ditch through thick and thin, gave ample recompense for the petty foraging they did in gathering up a few wasting apples, etc. During their stay here, there was no murder among them or any of our citizens, and their presence at church and behavior might have been corrupted only by some of our own more civilized manhood.”

While it can be safely said that most immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries found Clinton County to be tolerant of their lifestyle and culture, it’s also clear that tensions between recent arrivals and established locals continued throughout the period.

In at least one case, a derogatory comment directed at a local Italian American seems to have led to violence and death.

According to a series of articles published in the Clinton County Times, on Labor Day evening, Sept. 7, 1925, Jersey Shore resident Howard Wagner and his friend Donald Charles became involved in a fist fight with an Italian American they believed to be Raimondo “Jack” Valentino, a resident of Avis, where the fight allegedly took place.

According to Charles’ account, Valentino approached both Wagner and Charles and demanded to know if Wagner had called him a - well, let’s just say Charles claimed Valentino accused Wagner of using racially insensitive language.

According to Charles, Wagner readily admitted to using a racial epithet. That’s when a "melee" broke out between the three men, and Wagner ended up knifed in the abdomen.

The 28-year-old Wagner survived for four days after medical treatment, and then succumbed to peritonitis. Valentino was arrested for murder and placed in Clinton County Jail.

In the trial that followed, Valentino claimed innocence, chalking his indictment on the charges to a case of mistaken identity. He had not, he said, been involved in the incident at all.

He was nonetheless found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life imprisonment. A subsequent request for retrial was refused, and Valentino began his incarceration in late March of 1926.

But in November of 1931, Valentino’s sentence was commuted, and the charges against him reduced to second-degree murder. He became eligible for parole sometime in 1935. At that point the story ends. What happened to Valentino in the years that followed has been lost to history.....

Today, many of the descendants of the Italian laborers who settled in the Susquehanna Valley in the last century are among the most prominent business, political and civic leaders in the community, and the intolerance their grandparents and great-grandparents may have faced has been largely relegated to the past.

But let us never Forget!!!!! And Honor What Their Sacrifices Made Possible For US!!!!!!

http://www.lockhaven.com/page/content.detail/id/501302.html?nav=5009&showlayout=0

Marcianise, Small town in Southern Italy, Sends Half of Italy's Boxers to China Olympics

Italians are Boxing Clever

Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney,New South Wales,Australia

Antonella Ciancio

February 17, 2008

A hard-luck town in southern Italy is turning its young hotspurs into contenders and champions.

A three-year-old boy punches a boxing bag with a pair of big gloves. Nearby, his father is training a group of wannabe champions. Out in the street a poster reads: "Marcianise, Land of Boxers."

This town of 40,000 north of Naples, whose once rural landscape is now scarred by bleak factories, has reason to be proud of its boxing tradition.

Half the members of the Italian team who have qualified for the Beijing Olympics were born in this modest town.

"The inhabitant of Marcianise is born with a great desire to be in punch-ups so we have a very easy task," chief coach Domenico Brillantino says during a sparring session at the Excelsior Boxe, the club he founded 30 years ago.

"We prepare them, we try to mould their desire to fight so it's within sporting rules. And we turn them into champions."

The Excelsior, which is Latin for "higher", is housed rent-free in an elementary school. Far from the glitzy arenas seen on television, it has a story of self-denial to tell.

"When I see my picture on the cover of a glossy magazine I see a whole life of sacrifices that started when I was 10 years old," world amateur heavyweight champion Clemente Russo, one of the sport's most popular athletes, says during a training session at a police sports centre outside Rome.

"I was 14 but I was still going to school. I used to wake up at six and go running in the dark, in the cold and rain," adds Russo, his eyes glazing over as he recalled his early training in Marcianise.

Three of the four Italian boxers who have so far qualified for the Games - Russo, lightweight Domenico Valentino and flyweight Vincenzo Picardi - were born between Naples and Caserta, just north of Marcianise.

Only Roberto Cammarelle - who claimed the world amateur super- heavyweight title in Chicago last year - comes from northern Italy, though his parents moved from the Basilicata region in the south. His fellow boxers in the Italian police team say he has "southern blood in his veins".

"Many of the greatest Italian fighters come from Caserta and Marcianise," Italy's boxing federation president Franco Falcinelli says.

"Our fighters are in very good shape," he adds, hoping more will clinch an Olympic berth at the first European qualifying tournament in Pescara at the end of this month.

Having become little more than a niche sport compared with the halcyon days of the 1970s and '80s, boxing is surging back on the amateur stage, Falcinelli explains.

The number of athletes joining the Italian boxing federation has been rising every year and, as confirmation of an increasing interest in Italy, Milan will stage the International Amateur Boxing Association world championships next year.

No matter if safety regulations, such as the headguards amateur boxers must wear in the ring, have diminished what once was considered the biggest attraction - sweat and blood.

"I like amateur boxing, it's one of the fairest sports I know," says Cammarelle before jumping into the ring to spar with his fellow policemen.

Every year dozens of young fighters from southern Italy join the Italian team, many of them taking up boxing to get into shape.

Then comes passion, says Olympic bronze medallist Angelo Musone.

"Boxing changed my life forever," says Musone, 44, who, after hanging up the gloves, now sits on the Italian federation's board.

His photo, with those of past and present champions, forms part of "stars corner", a handmade poster decorated with golden stars which hangs on a wall at the Excelsior gym.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/beijing2008/italians-are-boxing-clever/2008/02/16/1202760664729.html

Italy's ENI Reaches 1 Billion Agreement with Chavez's Venezuela for Nationalization

Historically, Powerful Nations have either Intimidated Smaller Mineral Rich countries, or Installed and or Supported Puppet Governments to award "Sweetheart" deals to that Powers Corporate/Trading Interests to "Raid" that country's riches.

In early 2007, Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez gave some of the world’s biggest oil companies a choice: turn over majority control of their projects to a state-owned company and remain as minority partners, or face a complete nationalization of operations in Venezuela’s Orinoco River basin. Ultimately, Exxon and ConocoPhillips opted to leave, while BP and Norway’s Statoil decided to stay.

Venezuela is among a small but growing number of resource-rich countries to put the squeeze on international corporations. Russia early this year pressed both BP and Shell into turning over majority stakes in Russian gas operations to state-owned Gazprom. Bolivia nationalized gas and oil fields, and Ecuador used troops to take over Occidental Petroleum’s holdings. It is not just the oil and gas sector facing renationalization. Zimbabwe’s government said in June it would nationalize the country’s uranium as well as its coal and methane projects. To the resource-rich developing states involved in such moves, it is an important signal of sovereignty.

Exxon and ConocoPhillips have lobbied the US Government to "demonize" Chavez, as a Narco Dictator (although elected), a Terrorist Haven, and freeze Venezuela's assets in the US, (10 x reasonable value) and threaten Venezuela with military action, even though Chavez's agenda is similar to that of Hillary and Obama.

ENI of Italy on the other hand has chosen to be "civilized" and negotiated a $1 Billion settlement [Or perhaps, ENI wasn't able to convince Bush to 'bully" Chavez on it's behalf :)

Petroleos de Venezuela Says Agreement With Italy's ENI Reached

Blooberg News By Matthew Walter February, 16 2008

Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the state oil company, said it has reached an agreement with Italy's largest oil company, Eni SpA, for compensation for a Venezuelan oil field the government took over in 2006.

Venezuela's oil and energy ministry confirmed the agreement today in an e-mailed statement. Eni Chief Executive Officer Paolo Scaroni said yesterday the company had agreed to accept book value for its stake in the Dacion oil field in Venezuela. Each side declined to say how much was paid.

In a 2006 filing the Securities and Exchange Commission, Eni said the Dacion field had a book value of 654 million euros ($959 million).

To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Walter in Caracas at mwalter4@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: February 16, 2008 11:34 EST

To: NYTimes; One Italian in a Funk Can Generate as Much Happiness Static, as Three Danes on Cloud Nine.

Last Month, the New York Times, reported on a Cambridge Univ. Study that:

"Italians are the least happy of 15 Western European nations. Denmark ranked No. 1 in happiness."

Susan Spano a writer for the LA times who spends a great deal of time in Italy responds:

"One Italian in a funk can generate as much happiness static, as three Danes on cloud nine.

Clever retort !!!

But further I would say, I am suspect of Englanders measuring Happiness,..... who are rather dour unless drunk :) :)

Further, the alleged reasons reported for such Italian "funk", i.e. "political chaos, organized crime, retrograde culture and economic stagnation" are either inaccurate, distorted, overblown, and show no understanding for Italian composure when faced with "difficulties".

It seems that Subway Bombings in London and Terror Threats in England, Immigrant Riots in France, and Denmark count for little.

Hey, Italy, Why So Blue?

Los Angeles Times

Susan Spano, Staff Writer

February 16, 2008

When I was in Rome last month, Italians were digesting an article that ran in the New York Times about the “collective funk” into which the country has fallen, purportedly because of political chaos, organized crime, retrograde culture and economic stagnation that is expected to put it behind Spain in the near future.

Many Italians took issue with the notion that the country is suffering from long-term, apparently untreatable clinical depression. The New York Times article was based on a University of Cambridge study, which found that Italians are the least happy of 15 Western European nations. Denmark ranked No. 1 in happiness.

So finding out whether Italians are really depressed will be high on my agenda when I move to Rome next month.

On the other hand, I would guess that one Italian in a funk can generate as much happiness static as three Danes on cloud nine.

http://travel.latimes.com/daily-deal-blog/?p=1350

"Beast of Bolzano" Returned to Italy to Serve Life Sentence - In Luxury ?

1925 _ Michael Seifert, an ethnic German, is born in Landau, a German-speaking town in the Ukraine, then a Soviet republic.
1944-45 _ Seifert serves as an SS prison guard at the Bolzano Transit Camp in northern Italy He becomes known as the «Beast of Bolzano» for cruelty to prisoners.
1945 _ Seifert drops out of sight after the camp is permanently closed with the release of the last 3,500 prisoners.
1951 _ Seifert immigrates to Canada after lying about his past. He claims he was born in Narwa, Estonia, and hides the fact that he had been a Nazi prison guard.
1951-1998 _ Seifert lives a normal life as an immigrant in Vancouver, British Columbia, working in a sawmill. He marries and has children, becomes a Canadian citizen and retires.
1999 _ Italian authorities notify Seifert that the government has charged him with serious wartime offenses and that he faces prosecution. Italy alleges that Seifert beat, tortured, starved and killed prisoners at Bolzano.
2000 _ Seifert is tried in absentia before an Italian Military Tribunal in Verona, which convicts him of nine of 15 charges and sentences him to life in prison. Italy requests his extradition from Canada.

Seifert engages in a series of Appeals that are heard at successive levels winding up in the Supreme Courts in Canada and Italy that are rejected.

The Italians are far too humane. They do not have the Death Penalty. Doctors will determine whether Seifert is well enough to serve out his sentence in a prison cell, or Seifert could be incarcerated in a hospital ward in the prison, or put under house arrest in a person's house who volunteers to "host" him. This "host" house could possibly be a "palazzo" , and he could be living his remaining years in splendor. Justice ?

Nazi Returns in Italy to Serve Life Sentence USA Today February 16,2008

ROME (AP) ? Extradited from Canada, an 83-year-old former SS prison guard who witnesses say laughed as he tortured inmates in an Italian detention camp was jailed Saturday near Naples to start serving a life sentence for war crimes. Michael Seifert used a cane and leaned on the arm of a policeman as he walked with shuffling steps upon arriving early Saturday at Rome's Ciampino airport. He was whisked away to Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison. A military tribunal in Verona had put the Ukrainian-born Seifert on trial in absentia and convicted him in 2000 of nine counts of murder committed while he was an SS guard at a prison transit camp in Bolzano, in the Alpine area of South Tyrol. He has acknowledged being a guard at the SS-run camp but denies being involved in atrocities. Seifert, who has lived in Canadasince 1951, had unsuccessfully fought efforts by the Canadian government to strip him of his citizenship based on allegations that he hid his past when he entered the country. "Justice has been done," said Marisa Scala, who was a key witness at trial of Seifert, whose notoriety for cruelty earned him the nickname "Beast of Bolzano." Prosecutor Bartolomeo Costantini said a medical exam will help determine if the elderly Seifert is well enough to serve out his sentence in a prison cell. "His legs were a little wobbly after he got off the flight," likely due to the stress and the long journey, Costantini said by telephone. Seifert has a pacemaker but otherwise is apparently healthy, he said. If doctors deem it necessary, Seifert could be incarcerated in a hospital ward in the prison, or put under house arrest. Italy rarely keeps very elderly inmates in prison, and Italian state TV reported that supporters were already trying to find someone willing to host him in their home. Scala, who was held for two months in the Bolzano camp, told Italian state radio that her memories were still strong of the convicted criminal: "chubby, with ruddy cheeks," and known as "Misha," the Ukrainian diminutive of his first name. "I saw him kill a young man of 18 who was in the cell across from me," Scala recalled. "I saw Misha begin to torture this poor young man, sticking his fingers in his eyes. They tortured him for three nights." "The third night, I heard (the inmate) gasping, calling out, 'Mama! Enough! I'm dying.' And the next morning they took his body away," Scala said. Seifert "was always laughing. When they did those things they laughed," Scala said. At his trial, witnesses testified that Seifert starved a 15-year-old prisoner to death and tortured a woman before killing her and her daughter. In 1944 and 1945, the Bolzano camp served as a transit point for Italian resistance fighters, Italians drafted for factory work, German army deserters, and Jews, who were being shipped north. Last month, Seifert lost a bid to have the Supreme Court of Canada consider his appeal seeking to stop his extradition to Italy. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-02-16-italy-nazi_N.htm#uslPageReturn

The Cycling Worlds '08 in September - The Art of Winning, Italians Do It Best

Italy just can't get enough World Champions - The Italian love affair with world champions is a national obsession, from football to Formula One, being the best of the best is the ultimate goal for many of the country’s top sports stars, and for a relatively small population, they do have their fair share. This is never more obvious than with cycling’s World Road Race crown.

Italy is second only to Belgium in the number of Pro World Road titles. Italy's World Champs include Alfredo Binda in 1927, Learco Guerra in 1931, Coppi and Bartoli’s in the 40's and 50's, Fausto Coppi in 1953, Ercole Baldini in 1958, Vittorio Adornio in 1968, Marino Basso in 1972, Felice Gimondi in 1973, Francesco Moser in 1977, Beppe Saronni in 1982, Moreno Argentin in 1986, Maurizio Fondriest in 1988.

The early 90's saw Gianni Bugno achieve consecutive wins, followed by Mario Cipollini in 2002. Currently Paulo Bettini is writing history with his gold collection, and if he does manage to take double Olympic wins this season and a third consecutive world title

Worlds '08: The Art of Winning, Italians Do It Best

Pez Cycling News
By Nick O'Brien

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Italy just can't get enough World Champions - As I look down the 2008 Calendar, one event to savour is the Worlds this September in Varese, Italy - cycling’s spiritual home and with Bettini defending "his" title, this is going to be one race not to miss.

The Italian love affair with world champions is a national obsession, from football to Formula One, being the best of the best is the ultimate goal for many of the country’s top sports stars, and for a relatively small population, they do have their fair share. This is never more obvious than with cycling’s World Road Race crown, and whilst I'm sure there are many reasons for their continued success, my own favourite theory is that being the best in the world is what every Latin male believes he is from birth!

I say this with total respect, (and an Italian wife), but the majority of Italian boys are convinced from an early age by their mothers that the world revolves around them... so its only a short stop to then convince yourself that you're the best. Then armed with this inbuilt confidence they start to apply it into other areas of their lives, including sport if they have the talent, so when it comes time for the 'worlds' performance they have the inbuilt advantage of already thinking they are numero uno, number one. Simple as it may sound I'm sure this plays no small part in why being world champion is so revered and important to them... unfortunately it also manifests itself in less talented Italians convincing themselves they are also the best at almost everything else, but we'll leave that to Freud.

But enough theory let’s look at the facts. Second only to Belgium in the number of Pro World Road titles, the very first wearer of the Rainbow jersey was Alfredo Binda in 1927, a true legend, as if winning the title for himself 3 times was not enough, he later became National coach and masterminded many of Coppi and Bartoli’s Grand Tour wins in the 40's and 50's which kind of makes him a cycling God even today, a decade after he died.

The role of National coach is still a position held in the utmost esteem, and whilst it can be a poison chalice, get the result and you are made. From the Tifosi to the Press everyone has an opinion and the weeks leading up to selection for the squad play out like a reality TV show, with everyone from wives & girlfriends to the bloke who once beat Daniel Di Luca in a grade school 'egg & spoon' race chucking in their half pennies worth.

It does make for a great build up though and illustrates the national pride they have in THEIR squadra. The only other Italian to win the title in the early days was Learco Guerra, who won in 1931 at Copenhagen, the following year Binda took his record third victory in front of a partisan crowd in Rome. The love affair had begun, but it was not until twenty years later that the true scale of this affair was revealed. Varese was the venue in 1951 and a massive 1.5 million fans lined the route to see the Swiss Ferdi Kubler beat homeboy Fiorenzo Magni. Magni later blamed a mix up with team mates for his defeat, but the race is still remembered as one of the greats and still holds the record for number of spectators - (I'll be exploring the Varese effect in a later article).

In 1953 Fausto Coppi restored national pride winning in Lugano, Switzerland followed in 1958 by Ercole Baldini in Reims. Ten years later and the worlds were back on home turf at Imola with Vittorio Adornio obliging with the biggest win of his career. Marino Basso sprinted to the title at Gap in 1972 and a year later Italy again delivered with Felice Gimondi winning in Barcelona. 1977 saw the the worlds really living up to its name with the first championship outside of Europe in San Cristobal, Venezuela won by the superb Francesco Moser, enabling him to start adding oh so cool rainbow decals to his bikes, a tradition that was used from the early days and is now taken to the extreme with the likes of Bettini 'branding' up with total rainbow coverage from shoes to sunglasses.

Talking of fashion faux pas, if you do see a weekend warrrior flying along a Milano strada in full replica world Champ kit it’s not what it seems, most likely it is the 'real thing' as Replica Rainbow is a huge Non Non! in Italy, which goes to show what high respect the title holds.- you've got to earn the right to wear that jersey.

Next ...My personal all time favourite Italian world champion has got to be Beppe Saronni, winner in 1982 at glorious Goodwood, he personified what a world champion should look and act like for me, on top of his Claret Colnago, slicked back hair, immaculate on and off the bike, his season as world champion was ridden at the highest level. Proud as a peacock in "his" jersey, he still rates it as one of his best wins from a huge palmares. 1986 saw the Worlds in the US with Colorado Springs and Moreno Argentin doing the honours, whilst Maurizio Fondriest got on the top step in 1988 at Ronse, Belgium.

The early 90's saw Gianni Bugno achieve a guaranteed free grappa in any bar he entered for the rest of his life with consecutive wins in Stuttgart & Benidorm, followed in 2002 at Zolder by Mario Cipollini with a win that helped crown "il re leone" as one of the best road sprinters of all time, he obviously respected the title in his own way, as it’s rumoured he commissioned a rainbow coloured Brietling watch to celebrate - pure Cipo bling.

Finally, and bringing us right up to date, Paulo Bettini is currently writing history with his gold collection, and if he does manage to take double Olympic wins this season and a third consecutive world title (and I wouldn't bet against it ) you can only imagine the celebrations that the Tifosi will be throwing - just don't invite Mama.

http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/?pg=fullstory&id=5663

American "Instant Gratification" vs Italian "Deserving"

A rather amusing discussion of Consumerism, particularly regarding Home Purchases, between an American Consumerist and his Italian Father in Law.

Brother, Can You Spare One-Point-Seven Million, at 6.25%?

The Huffington Report Evan Handler February 13, 2008

......

But my gripe of choice today is about the so-called "mortgage industry crisis," because its root causes (and the complicity of many Americans in the dynamic) are so emblematic of more widespread problems in our society.

In case any readers are unaware, we are a society based on credit. People here think they can afford things if they're able to borrow enough money to possess them. Though it might be difficult for many Americans to grasp the notion, this is a serious flaw in logic.

As with many of my breakthroughs in perception, this one was precipitated by my exposure to my wife and her family. They are Italian citizens. Her parents have never lived outside the small town near Bologna where they were born, and she has only resided stateside for the past six years. Her father was a mechanic, as was his father, fixing lawn mower engines, motorcycles, and automobiles, until he trained himself to design software for industrial routers (the kind that shave metal, not the kind that send wi-fi signals) that would allow him to manufacture parts for agricultural machinery in his own factory, which was attached to his house, all by himself. The machine makes a hell of a racket through the wall when you're sitting in the living room, and the smell of industrial lubricant permeates the home. But the inconvenience (just like the inconvenience of living with his mother until he was in his forties, and my wife was nine) has allowed him to recently retire with a good amount of savings, and as the owner of several pieces of property.

And when I say "owner," I mean "owner." My father-in-law has never taken out a mortgage for a term longer than five years. Neither, I have learned, have most Italians. When they borrow money to buy a house, it's for five years maximum. They've never even heard of a thirty-year mortgage. When I explained one to an Italian bank loan officer, he stared at me in horror. What they'd think of the common American practice of refinancing a house repeatedly, sometimes annually for eight and nine years running, I can only imagine. They just don't buy what they can't afford, or won't be able to pay off in a reasonably foreseeable time period -- and when they use the word "afford" its meaning is "to be able to pay for completely, and own outright."
"It's like when I go to the store," my wife says. "I give away the money, and I take something home. The money is gone. And what I take is mine. Because I paid for it. Until I do that, I don't own anything."

According to this thought process, anyone who's put twenty thousand dollars down on a four hundred thousand dollar house doesn't own anything. And, if their mortgage is for thirty years they won't own anything until that time period is up. If they refinance for longer and longer periods, they'll never own anything during their lifetime. As the currently accelerating foreclosure rate demonstrates, their thought process is right.

Except many Americans won't agree. They'll point to their title, and the paperwork that says they own their home; they'll point to their pink slip that says they own the car they make payments on. They'll point to their credit card bills, and to the television they charged that's hanging on the wall of their mortgaged home. They'll insist that buying on time is a perfectly legitimate, time-tested way of getting to live well in the little time we've got. But foreclosures are exceedingly rare in Italy. People don't lose their homes. Because they don't pretend to own them when they really don't. In fact, they don't live in them at all unless they pay rent to the actual owner, or have paid for it in full - or plan to within just a few years - themselves. If they can't afford to do either of those things, they keep living with their parents, like my brother-in-law does. And he's thirty-nine.

Yes, I find the prospect horrifying as well. Don't worry Mom and Dad, I'm not moving back in. But, no matter how unthinkable the practice of living with your folks well into adulthood might seem, it's less financially insane than thinking you can "afford" a home simply because someone is willing to lend you enough money to move into it.

My wife and I would like to own a home, but we still rent. Modest houses in nice Los Angeles neighborhoods start at around a million dollars (and by "nice," I ain't talkin' Beverly Hills). The nicer parts of Santa Monica, near the ocean eleven miles west of us, cost considerably more. There, it's one point eight million just for the "dirt," as the real estate agents like to say - meaning that's the cost of a single residential lot with no structure on it. Yet at every open house we see the same thing: a parade of young couples who seem to be seriously shopping for the million-dollar two-bedroom town house, or the four-bedroom with a pool for three-point-five.

"How can they afford it?" I wonder out loud.

"They can't," says my wife.

"But the properties all sell," I go on. "Someone's going to move in here."

Because they're going to borrow two million dollars," she'll say. "They're not going to own anything." Then, as she passes the BMW parked out front, "They don't even own this car."

She's right. They don't. But they do get to drive it.

At least, that is, until something goes wrong.

A couple of years ago my father-in-law made the stunning statement that he'd like to help us buy a house. I explained our finances to him and told him what I thought we could afford, with the help of a traditional thirty-year fixed rate mortgage. He looked at me like I was nuts.

"No, no, no...listen to me," I said. "We can put this much down, helped by you, and we finance the rest. We borrow it."

His eyebrows arched.

"Hold on...hold on. First of all, we get a tax deduction for all the interest we pay. You see? Then, with interest rates so low, we can make just about as much by investing the cash we have left as the borrowed money is costing us. We'll be using the bank's money for thirty years at almost no cost!"

Which is true. We could. And most American's do. But "no cost" doesn't mean "no risk." Which the Italians seem to understand, and Americans don't.

"What if someone loses their job?" my father-in-law asked. "What if someone gets sick? Then you have nothing."

Or, as many who are now getting burned might ask, "What if my loan rate adjusts?" Or, "What if the value of the house goes down?"

But my father-in-law's caution, and the caution of Italians in general, doesn't prevail here. It's seen as quaint, or even foolish. If the money's there and it's cheap, the thinking here goes, you'd have to be nuts not to use it. Go for broke, some might say. And that might be exactly what you'd end up doing.

Except now the government is going to get into the act by helping to "save" some of the more misguided borrowers who were preyed upon by criminally negligent lending institutions. Or, those lending institutions will all help each other, and themselves, by taking measures to stave off costly foreclosures (if the prices of homes fall too much, or sales decline enough, the finance companies lose as well). But it's not just those companies that have been negligent. So has the government that's now coming to the supposed rescue. By imposing no effective oversight, and by aggressively encouraging every American to live in a structure they can't actually afford to own -- which they're now going to continue to do, through late-game interventions.

I keep hearing about how many Americans will be hurt if housing prices fall precipitously. Entire neighborhoods will be devastated. But those prices have gone up as much as five hundred percent over the last ten years. Prices should come down. And the only ones who'll be burned will be those who bought when prices were already ridiculously inflated, or who continued to borrow against houses whose "value" bore no relation to reality. That kind of borrowing is speculation, pure and simple. It's a bet that prices will go up forever. And when you bet, sometimes you lose.

Besides, even if a number of people do get burned, for all those who suffer financial losses, won't an equal number be helped who wouldn't have been able to afford a home if prices stay so high? Why shouldn't those who've been more prudent and sensible have the opportunity to buy at lower prices as the market adjusts itself down? It seems to me the entire system is geared toward rewarding those who take what could be considered ill-considered risks. What about those people who've stayed on the sidelines, realizing that the buildup in prices is unsustainable? That "adjustable rate" or "all interest" loans are unjustifiable? Who've waited patiently, perhaps even wisely, for the correction to occur? Are we really so committed to our credit-based way of life that we're willing to see those people penalized, while the speculators are protected? It appears so.

As with some of my other posts, I expect there'll be at least a percentage of people who'll say, "If you like Italy so much, go live over there." But I don't want to. It's a mess, for a whole different set of reasons. The government is corrupt, barely functional, and bleeding the people dry. (If you want to read some social commentary about Italy that'll put my American rants to shame, check out Beppe Grillo's blog, or read about him in the February 4 New Yorker.) But at least the people there have sense enough to protect themselves from the greed of their lawmakers and their lawmakers' corporate partners. They haven't bought anyone's argument that the most important thing in life is to get to possess that which you can't afford to actually own.

When my father-in-law heard me say, "But, by your reasoning, we won't be able to buy a house at all. Or we'd have to buy one so small, or so far away, that we wouldn't want to live there," he just shrugged. "So what?" he seemed to say (he doesn't speak English, so I'll never know for sure what he meant). "I lived with my crazy mother for forty-two years. Your wife slept in a dresser drawer, in our room, when she was a baby. Just how much more than that do you think you deserve?"

A lot, a lot of Americans seem to say. No matter what the risk. No matter what the possible cost.
Of all the proposed solutions, the only certain, long-term one would be the most unthinkable to many: stop buying what you can't afford to own. Meaning, what you can afford to pay for, completely, today -- or at least within a short-term time period, during which you actually plan to continue to inhabit what you've bought. Insane, you think. Right? But that's the way most of the rest of the world lives, and always has.

As my father-in-law might ask, "Just how much more than that do you think you deserve?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-handler/brother-can-you-spare-on_b_86535.html

Americanism: An Indictment From a Euopean/Italian Perspective

It is Not the Patriot that blindly beats their chests and claims America to be the Best NO MATTER what we do,

Instead it is the Patriot that is is constantly vigilant, and is willing to criticize actions when our country "gets off track" in diverging from our "elevated vision", that we were once the one to be emulated.

It took only Eight years of the "Black Sheep" of the Bush family to drive the Reputation of the US from Penthouse to Outhouse.

I can not begin to summarize this lengthy article, which if read carefully you will see why Europeans don't Envy us, nor do the Arabs, but the European Allies do resent the Arrogance with which the US treats them , and that the Arabs don't envy "Our Way of Life", they actually think of us as degenerates, they merely want us to STOP our Colonialistic, Imperialistic Invasions/Occopations, and go home so the Arabs no longer have to fight for their Freedom from Occupation and Puppetry.

One of the finer articles I have read for the True Patriot.

Americanism: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

On Line Journal
By Gaither Stewart
Contributing Writer
February 14, 2008

ROME -- It is a paradox that the Americanism of which Americans are so proud is the source of the pandemic anti-Americanism throughout the world. Precisely the same Americanism of which Americans boast generates a worldwide antipathy toward them. And today, not just toward the US government, but in many places -- to begin with in Iraq, as testified by bloggers from there -- that antipathy, that hate, is directed against Americans in general.

“We hate Americans!"

One wonders if there is some great misunderstanding at play. Is this a cultural matter? A lack of true information about Americanism and what it stands for? Are Americans simply misunderstood in the world?

However that may be, the nature of Americanism as it is understood by the majority of Americans and that perceived and experienced by non-Americans are so diametrically opposed that sometimes the two concepts seem to concern different historical times and different geographical places; Americans and the others seem to inhabit different worlds.

So what is it, this Americanism? From my vantage point I experience forms of Americanism chiefly in the context of the hegemonic tendencies, bullying globalization, arrogance, militarism and imperialism of the United States of America. One glaring, arrogant example is the construction of yet another US military base in the ancient city of Vicenza in north Italy, where (anachronistically) American soldiers in military dress jog over the cobbled streets of the city center, as if it were wartime, as if it were theirs, past cathedrals and Palladium architecture, weaving and dodging among startled women and children. This military display is a form of the Americanism become anti-Americanism in Europe. In this particular case the insistence on making of small and vassal Italy an aircraft carrier at the service of imperialistic America has alienated much of north Italy.

But speaking of Americanism I don’t have in mind only American militarism and its preemptive wars! Not by a long shot. I have in mind the homeland. For there is something in the exaggerated patriotism in the homeland itself that the others out there experience firsthand. Those others who know America well detest the super patriotic, Amerika über alles America -- the foreign specialists and US-based foreign journalists and academics and scientists, even those foreigners in the arts attracted by one of the admirable aspects of "America" -- these days increasingly hard to find -- i.e. the velocity and high ceiling afforded new ideas.

Even bedazzled non-American tourists of the kind who visit Disneyland and Las Vegas, who know little about American life, instinctively see the super patriotic flag-waving, Star Spangled Banner singing America as vulgar expressions of Americanism.

Finally, such worldviews coincide with the Americanism pinpointed, analyzed and criticized by a small but growing group of awakened Americans.

The implications of the term Americanism had long lingered in my mind before recently I heard the word used in an Italian talk show in reference to America’s foreign wars. My spontaneous thought was, okay, but that’s much too reductive. The thing is, once you use the word in that one context, it’s like opening Pandora’s box; you have to be prepared to take the next step and delve into what Americanism really is.

Je vous demande pardon! if I immediately begin to skirt too much around the edges. My excuse is that the subject is too menacingly broad to undertake in a single article. Still, digressions sometimes inevitably lead back toward the bull’s eye. Or, to use the old Italian seaman’s term, avanzare di ritorno -- advance by return. And for that matter the first paragraph above already pinpoints the target.

Where troubles melt like lemon drops...

The overly sweet, overly optimistic image returns like a leitmotiv. It both repels and attracts, the land that I heard of, the land that exists only in the imagery of dreamers. What I have in mind is a pet theme, the famous go-to-war-for "American way of life," which for me again underlines America’s persistent claims of a monopoly on morality.

What is it, this American morality? This righteousness? Is it our religious roots in the fable of the Puritan settlers, those super religious people who in their hardships were bigots, perhaps also practitioners of incest and racists soon morphing into dogmatic chauvinists who early-on labeled their dissidents and different-thinkers witches and demons.

Pre-Americanism! The same Americanism initiated then which today fosters the rights of the rich to become richer, the strong to trample the weak and the contempt for and the crushing of anything smacking of the social in our land, real trade unions and, heaven forbid, universal health care.

Meanwhile, out in the empire, as long as it is distant, the Puritan legacy instills blindness to the use of cluster bombs from the stratosphere and hidden torture in places with foreign names like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib . . . and while our neighbors in Haiti eat dirt, literally.

When I asked a friend and writer colleague in heartland America what he understands by Americanism, he stunned me and overwhelmed me with the following: "From birth I have been immersed, enculterated, inculcated, and surrounded by the myriad toxic components of the ‘American Dream’ or ‘Americanism.’ There are some admirable aspects to ‘America’ but by and large we live in a spiritual/psychological sewer"

He then listed two dozen aspects of Americanism, which I repeat here: narcissism, greed, hyper-individualism, consumerism, capitalism, corporatism, faux democracy, media whoredom, asphyxiation of the Left, Christian fundamentalism, Mammon worship, moral retardation, militarism, imperialism, celebrity worship, wars on drugs and terrorism, prison industrial complex, mean-spiritedness, self-absorption, American exceptionalism, bullying, anti-intellectualism and the abandonment of many uninsured and homeless in the wealthiest nation on earth.

Whew! That is article, essay, denouncement and indictment.

The indictment raises many questions: Is that t he American way of life? Do you recognize the indictment -- for an indictment it is -- as representative of "our way of life"? As Americanism? But most important do you accept and hold to that "way of life?”

Meanwhile more and more people of the world are answering, non merci, nein danke, no, grazie, no, muchas gracias, we can live without the American way of life.

Isms and more isms

The Greek "ism suffix is a devilish affair indeed. Those three letters continue to create problems when applied to religious, philosophic, political or artistic movements or to tendencies or qualities of certain persons or groups: misunderstandings and disputes, hate and love, blind faith and war on whomever doesn’t fall in line. "Ism" wanders from Classicism to Futurism in the arts, from Romanticism to Realism in literature and from Nazism to Communism in European 20th century politics.

Today the West -- the Occident! -- uses the word Islamism in a negative sense -- much as the word Communism or terrorism still emerges from a magician’s sleeve by a slick sleight-of-hand for our enemies in general -- to slander Islam and the Islamic religion, its peoples and nations as something negative or to condemn political adversaries.

At the same time others too are adopting the term Americanism. The way it is viewed is crucial. The Americanism seen by the others is America’s excessive admiration for non-admirable displays of American culture. For its unjustified optimism . . . where troubles melt like lemons drops. For its insistence on calling things by their opposites, such as peace for war. For the political correctness and false questions of “taste” and “sensitivity,” as Joan Didion once recalled, in the demand for more information about what really happened on 9/11; it was not the "appropriate time."

In this sense the difference between Americanism and anti-Americanism is like the two sides of the same coin. The two concepts are the black and the white. Americanism becomes the backside of the moon. In Italian it is common to use the word Americanata to define an ostentatious, negative and unreliable action; an Americanata reveals the negative nuance of Americanism. A bad American film is always an Americanata.

The bitter truth is that the Americanism of many Americans, who, sheathed in their false consciousness, believe they are exceptional and the envy of the world, is an illusion. An illusion! A mirage in the desert. For the others out there, there is something childlike about their blind faith in their supposed superior lifestyle and phony democracy that sometimes even sparks a feeling of commiseration and pity in other peoples who tend to consider them at the very best spoiled but dangerous brats.

And they continue to sing where troubles melt like lemon drops. . . .

There was a time after World War II when other peoples imitated the way Americans speak, dress, walk and think. No longer! Once Americans were welcomed everywhere. No more! The aura of the "American dream" once made of Americanism a cult. Now the others do not understand why they feel unwelcome in America; they do not understand the reigning terrorism mania; they cannot understand the wars.

Although Americans have been spoiled, foreigners are becoming aware that the former personal freedoms that were once the key to Americanism have diminished. (Pardon these generalizations but sometimes in such matters surveys and polls and data are useless.) Though without comparing charts and scales on salaries and rents and economic aspects of life, Europeans realize their living standards are higher. Admittedly on the other hand, they do not yet appreciate the difficulties or the extent of the unfairness many, many Americans face -- unemployment and precarious employment, lack of basic health care, homelessness.

For arriving foreigners 10 fingerprints and body searches at US entrance points serve to accentuate the sensation of "America-fortress-against-the-world and aggravate America’s globalization-imperialism urge. Europeans’ former positive, envious feelings toward America have vanished in the swirl and whorl of US militarism. The reality is that except in personal cases, few Europeans aspire to live in the USA today. As a rule only the very poor of the world seek to immigrate to the USA....

Since the majority of people of the world seem to be infected with the disease, anti-Americanism is a good starting point to understand Americanism. But first, one wonders why has anti-Americanism contaminated the world? Once, the US government blamed it on the nefarious European Left and Radical Chic and Communists and also on Europe’s green envy of the American way of life.

That the real European Left from Sartre on has always been wary of America is true, but never as today.

Instead the real reasons as seen from Europe and Latin America stem first of all from stupid, arrogant and self-defeating US foreign policy. At the same time, French or Dutch can hardly believe the ignorance and naiveté of Americans about the world. While many Americans boast of their anti-intellectualism and their president has trouble finding strange places like Kenya or even Afghanistan on the map, the “green" media inform French and Italians that the waste and consumerism in the USA is destroying planet earth and Germans and Scandinavians are realizing that American democracy is a sham and has defiled the very word.

People are more and more aware that the USAPATRIOT Act and legislation subsequent to 9/11 have eroded America’s civil liberties. That the divide between rich and poor has never been more profound, the word "social" is taboo, and American capitalism has become more and more savage and vicious. For many others, American culture seems to be limited to mall shopping and TV sports, while America’s absurd theories of exportation of democracy and globalization as a solution to world poverty are widely scoffed at: exportation of democracy means war and globalizations means loss of jobs in Italy or France.

Europeans are right to wonder why Americans, even well intentioned people of the Left, cannot see the obvious. The answer is that their continuing faith in a mythical Americanism blinds them. And their false consciousness created and maintained by disgraceful corporate media that distorts the concept of freedom of the press.

American conservatives twist things around and point out that foreigners don’t know the USA. Nothing is more false! Europeans are well-informed about the USA. In these months, day after day, arrive into peoples’ homes news and talk shows about the USA and its incomprehensible money-based electoral system. People are familiar with South Carolina and New England and Colorado. Italian TV and press have their correspondents following the primaries today because it matters to Europe, to the world, who is elected, they believe (naively). In this, Europeans show their good faith. They still believe there is a difference between America’s two political parties, when they could be suggesting and advising and pleading for third and fourth parties in the USA -- in their own interest -- something Americans seem loath to do.

Each new school shooting somewhere in the USA, each new massacre in Iraq and Afghanistan, the death tolls of US and European casualties, and analyses and media coverage of US events, the decline of the US economy, the falling stock market in New York and the threat of recession are all part of Europe’s daily fare.

I was perplexed this morning when my wife, an Italian, asked me in all sincerity as to why what happens in the USA is so important to the rest of the world. My point is that though the world studies the USA, the others out there in the world are terrified of what the next foolhardy, dangerous and unpredictable act this big oaf of a child will pull off in the name of its Americanism.

European American specialists often return to those Puritan individualists I mentioned earlier "who so passionately believed that they could individually establish a direct relationship with God," who emigrated to North America and invented "an explosively new and radical ideology" that justified "an individualist rather than a social view of property."

The decline of that idea we are all witnessing shows that in an individualistic world that is wholly private we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us. According to even a minimum social philosophy (which for Washington and US capitalism is straight out of Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Mao’s Little Red Book), one simple but pressing need would be publicly owned TV with the (impossible) mandate to provide a universal public service to guarantee ordinary citizens core news and comment free of hype and spin. While the U.S. spends little money on public TV, European governments finance and aggressively regulate broadcasting content so that state TV has remained more complete and in some countries surprisingly free.

American private broadcasters instead plead the First Amendment’s commitment to absolute free speech, making public interest regulation almost impossible.

The impusle for U.S. hegemony in the world (not included)

...Carlos Fuentes’ masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz, the gist of which is that one cannot commit what North Americans have committed and expect to be loved. The historical imperialistic, hypocritical, vicious, greedy and vulgar attitudes of the United States are the model for America’s drive for world hegemony and its urge to control other peoples. From the beginnings of the nineteenth century until the present era, the United States has attempted to export its "American dream". Hypocritically that manifest destiny vision tried to superimpose Protestant values, a capitalist free market and a consumer society onto a culture foreign to such Protestant values.

The results: Shouts of "Death to the Yankees" today echo similar protests ringing out from Afghanistan to the Middle East.

It is fact that more and more peoples of the world consider America evil, distant and cut off from the rest of humanity. I believe American people too, no less than Europeans, could bear up under the reality that the message of Americanism is not true. You know, people do not need to be lied to. Most can take the truth. Or they might prefer the truth after they get used to it; our minds after all have the task of distinguishing between true and false.

Still, it continues to be bizarre that we live our little lives inside our shell and have no idea of what is taking place on the outside. Only a thin wall separates our shell of comfort and ease from the exterior world where torture continues. In my mind, the kind of Americanism spoken of here, a lifestyle based on comfort and ease, reflect anti-reality, anti-man, anti-life.

If anything, we have to learn to live without illusions.

No matter how clever, how perceptive and well grounded its positions, official America -- and many Americans -- seem to see Iraq and Iran, Kosovo and Algeria, from a virtual point of view. Europeans see those peoples instead as real places in a real world. A fundamental difference in attitude toward war is that Europeans know what war is on home soil. They know that war is not peace. War means suffering and destruction and death. War does not bring democracy.

A glaring assumption of Americanism is that the US military is a force for good (as reactionaries like to put it). That the US is the guiding light for the world, and is in sole possession of moral authority.

Cold War revisionism (Deleted)

Conclusion

For anyone with eyes to see it is clear that the reasons for the clash of the United States with the world today -- while its presidential candidates traipse around the electoral circuit speaking of the new wars to come -- are to be found in that complex of historical, social and political factors and the false values, which constitute today’s Americanism. That is, "our way of life" in the name of which our increasingly illegitimate political leaders pontificate and send our troops, "our boys," around the world, which, far from defending social justice or the downtrodden, serves to separate the people of America from the rest of the world.

A growing number of Americans realize that the time has arrived for a radical shift in American thinking. All those little placards of the electoral campaign bearing the word change reflect the necessity. Yet, with the Americanism mindset described above, revolution is still hardly conceivable in the minds of the masses.

A close analysis and dissection of the American values that constitute Americanism will be necessary in order to create a new set of values -- a new mindset that will include a basic conception of social justice to counteract and replace the pervasive and visible sense of gloom and hopelessness in the obesity of consumerist America.

And that, I hope, I believe, is where people like us count.

Gaither Stewart is a senior contributing editor at Cyrano's Journal Online. Originally from Asheville, NC. he has lived his adult life in Germany and Italy, alternated with residences in The Netherlands, France, Mexico, Argentina and Russia. After a career in journalism as a correspondent for the Rotterdam newspaper, Algemeen Dagblad, he began writing fiction. His collections of short stories, "Icy Current Compulsive Course, To Be A Stranger" and "Once In Berlin" are published by Wind River Press. His new novel, "Asheville," is published by www.Wastelandrunes.com He lives with his wife, Milena, in Rome, Italy. E-mail: gaither.stewart@yahoo.it

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2953.shtml

Polak Radio Host Curtis Sliwa Apologizes for Claiming 1 in 5 Italian Staten Islanders 'Mobbed Up"

Former McDonald's Store Manager, Vigilante (Guardian's Angel), Radio Host of "Inside City Hall" and Polak ,Curtis Sliwa, in a newspaper interview claimed that in predominately Italian American Staten Island, that one of five were "mobbed up".

Sliwa later gave into political pressure and apologized. The article said Sliwa was going to wash his mouth out with soap, which I believe was an "analogy", but I will promise to brush my teeth for calling Sliwa one of Archie Bunkers's least favorite people,..... a Polak.

For those who don't know, Polak is a derogatory term for someone of polish ancestry. I said I promised to brush my teeth. :)

Radio Host Curtis Sliwa Apologizes For Staten Island Slur

NY1-NY,USA February 15, 2008

Radio host Curtis Sliwa washed his mouth out with soap Tuesday following backlash over a controversial comment he made about Italian Americans and Staten Island.

During a newspaper interview, he said that one out of five borough residents were mobbed up.
The "Inside City Hall" regular gave in to political pressure and agreed to the sudsy apology at the Arrochar friendship club.

"Clearly, the statement was made out of context, so if people were offended, if Italian Americans think I'm maligning them, I apologize," said Sliwa.

“I think the comment came off the top of his tongue too quickly in my opinion, but I think him apologizing for it speaks a lot to his character," said Staten Island Assemblyman Vincent Ignizio. ....

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=3&aid=78430

Comic Beppe Grillo: To Germans: "Please Declare War on Us!" We'll Surrender- You'll Make Us Efficient !!!

Comic Beppe Grillo is a justifiable unrelenting critic of the Italian Political establishment. It is possibly even more corrupt than US politicians.!!!

Of course Beppe is Not serious, But his statement sure is an attention getter, and in order to deliver a message, you've got to get your audience's attention.

Yes, I admire the German Efficiency, if that means giving up Italian Warmth and Passion, I'll Pass.

Teutons Takeover Tiramisu? Just Make It Efficient, Italian Says

Grillo, who goads politicians, has been called the Michael Moore of Italy

Would Italy really trade "La Dolce Vita" for a dose of Teutonic efficiency? One outspoken Italian comedian thinks the remedy for his country's ills lies in a good, old-fashioned military takeover.

Deutsche Welle -World

February 13, 2008

"Take my country -- please!"

In a twist on Henny Youngman's comic one-liner, a beloved Italian comedian satirically appealed to Germany to do something it has done repeatedly in the past: launch an invasion.

"Italy is appealing to the fraternal Germans: Please declare war on us!" pleaded stand-up comic Beppe Grillo. "We'll be happy to surrender. You're our last hope.

Neapolitan garbage heads to Bremen

"We are already sending you garbage from Campania [the Naples region]. Please take away our politicians too. We'll pay you well to do so!" Grillo said.

The comedian was referring to a deal struck last year between Italy and Germany that has seen garbage from Naples is being carted by train to Bremen for incineration, as part of a one-off effort to ease weeks-old waste build-up in the Italian city.

And, of course, Grillo -- sometimes referred to as "Italy's Michael Moore" -- he was putting a slight twist on his usual shtick, which is based on poking fun at chaos and corruption in Italian life.

Sixty governments, and counting

Grillo made his comments -- which played off the stereotypes of Germans as being über-organized and militarily avaricious, as well as the Italian penchant for toppling and building governments at the drop of a hat -- in an interview with German newsweekly Die Zeit. The interviewer had asked for his two cents on the latest collapse of the Italian government and the resignation of Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

Grillo, who has been banned from Italian TV but plays live to large audiences in big Italian venues, reserved especially scathing remarks for opposition leader and former government head Silvio Berlusconi. The media mogul, who owns three major television channels and Italy's biggest publishing group, is seeking a comeback in the April general election.

The bliss of being Berlusconi- Elections are a snap if you own the media

German Chancellor Angela Merkel ought to think about becoming a media magnate herself, Grillo said.

"If Merkel had three channels and 40 newspapers and magazines, she would not need to form a grand coalition," Grillo said. "She would just get 80 percent of the votes at every election. Why don't you suggest this to Merkel?"

No word form Grillo on whether the benefits of a possible Teutonic takeover -- ostensibly, a responsive democracy and efficient public service -- would outweigh the culinary and lifestyle negatives.

Could Italians live with German cuisine?

Sauerkraut instead of spaghetti? Beer over Barolo? More pretzels than pancetta? Maybe he should think twice about his invitation to invade.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3125450,00.html

US Supreme Court Justice Alito: Growing Up Italian in New Jersey

US Supreme Court Justice Alito reflects on the Discrimination that his Father a College Graduate faced trying to obtain a job in the Trenton schools due to his low social status and background as an Italian immigrant.

Alito, 57, said he is unhappy with [the Negative Stereotyping] Italians are often portrayed in popular culture. "The most prominent image of Italians in popular culture is the image of the Mafioso," he said. "There's an insidious connection popular culture often makes between being a gangster and being Italian."

The stereotypes [Defamation] have to be BATTLED, Alito said, because it's important to tell the TRUE stories of ancestors.

Thanks to Bert Vorchheimer

Growing up Italian in Jersey

Alito reflects on ethnic heritage

The Times of Trenton, New Jersey

By Megan DeMarco

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Special to the Times from AP

NEW BRUNSWICK -- When Samuel Alito Sr. graduated from the former Trenton State Teacher's College he faced difficulty obtaining a job in the Trenton schools due to his low social status and background as an Italian immigrant.

He probably never imagined his son would one day become the second Italian-American U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Justice Samuel Alito Jr. recalled for an audience at Rutgers University yesterday the struggles his parents and grandparents faced as Italian immigrants, and the ethnic stereotypes that exist to this day.

Alito, a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, and the fifth justice from New Jersey, spoke in honor of the fifth anniversary of Rutgers' Italian Studies program. He said his talk, "Reflections on Growing up as an Italian-American in New Jersey," was intended as less of a scholarly lecture and more of his own personal reflections.

Alito was born in Chambersburg, the Italian neighborhood of Trenton. After he was born, his parents bought a house in Hamilton where he grew up and eventually attended Steinert High School. "It was a very pleasant place to grow up," he said.

Alito said his parents were raised in a distinctively Italian-American household. His grandparents, he said, did not change their way of living when they came to the United States from Italy.

"The transitional generation is my parents' generation," he said. When he looks back on his childhood, he said, it surprises him "how Americanized my family and my friends' families became in such a short time."

Alito said when his father had to specify his ethnicity on any type of form, he always put down American.

"He had earned through hard work the right to be called simply an American, period, not any type of hyphenated American," Alito said.

When his father graduated high school his family did not have the means to send him to college, but he received a $50 scholarship and attended Trenton State Teacher's College, now The College of New Jersey. Although he could not at first get a job, Alito said that his father became a park ranger and eventually was able to obtain a regular teaching position in the Trenton public schools. He later obtained a master's degree from Rutgers, and served in World War II.

Alito, 57, said he is unhappy with the way Italians are often portrayed in popular culture.

"The most prominent image of Italians in popular culture is the image of the Mafioso," he said. "There's an insidious connection popular culture often makes between being a gangster and being Italian."

As examples, he cited scenes from "The Godfather" movies that connect Italian food with being a gangster and the opening montage of "The Sopranos" TV show, which links New Jersey to the gangster lifestyle. He said many pizza businesses, such as Little Caesar's or Capone's, are named for gangsters or gangster movies.

Alito lived for a time in West Caldwell, the same area of New Jersey where the fictional Tony Soprano was supposed to live. Alito said that a friend from California once sent him a map of Sopranos-related locations, and asked Alito to put down where his house was on the map.

The stereotypes have to be battled, Alito said, because it's important to tell the true stories of ancestors.

"I think it's important the true stories of immigrants be heard," he said. He encouraged the audience to forget about popular culture's image and "see the truth about a profound American experience."

Since taking his seat on the high court in January 2006, Alito has generally sided with other conservatives on the court, including his fellow Trenton native Antonin Scalia. During his talk, Alito did not discuss any of the cases that have come before the court.

http://www.nj.com/news/times/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1202965550245950.xml&coll=5

Justice Alito Criticizes 'Sopranos,' Italian-American Stereotypes

Kudos to US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who "gets it". Unfortunately Supreme Court Justice Scalia doesn't.

Justice Alito Criticizes 'Sopranos,' Italian-American Stereotypes

USA Today

By Chris Newmarker, Associated Press

Thursday, February 14, 2008

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Watch out, Tony Soprano: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr. whacked the popular show Thursday for spreading stereotypes about Italian-Americans.

During a visit to Rutgers University, Alito complained the hit HBO television drama The Sopranos not only associated Italian-Americans with the Mafia, but New Jerseyans as well.

"You have a trifecta - gangsters, Italian-Americans, New Jersey " wedded in the popular American imagination," Alito said at an event sponsored by the university's Italian studies program.

Alito lived for nearly two decades in a West Caldwell home in the same area of New Jersey where the fictional Tony Soprano was supposed to live. Alito told the gathering of about 100 people that a friend in California once sent him a map of Sopranos-related locations.

"He wanted me to put down where my house was on the map," Alito said to laughs.

Alito's comments about The Sopranos, which went off the air last year, were part of a larger talk in which the U.S. Supreme Court justice and New Jersey native lamented that there are too many stereotypes about Italians in the United States.

He said the real story of Italian people who came here, some succeeding and some failing and going back to Italy, needed to be preserved because it told something about the United States' "true nature as a nation of immigrants."

The 57-year-old Alito was born in Trenton, grew up in Hamilton Township and attended Princeton University before going to law school at Yale.

Last year, Alito and his wife moved from West Caldwell to northern Virginia so he could be closer to his new job.

Alito said he was glad journalists scrutinized his family history during his confirmation, giving him a free genealogy.

He marveled how his father and grandmother arrived in the United States at Philadelphia not too far from where he eventually served as a federal appeals court judge.

"The contrast of what I was doing there and what they looked like disembarking to prominent Philadelphians is very striking to me," Alito said.

Since taking his seat on the court in January 2006, Alito has generally sided with other conservative members of the court, including his fellow Trenton native - Antonin Scalia.

During the talk, Alito did not discuss legal issues or any of the cases the court has confronted during his tenure.

His appearance came on the heels of a controversial interview by Scalia that aired Tuesday on the British Broadcasting Corp. during which Scalia discussed harsh U.S. interrogation techniques.

Scalia said aggressive interrogation techniques could be appropriate if authorities needed to quickly learn where a bomb set to explode was located or discover the location or plans of a terrorist group.

"It seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say you couldn't, I don't know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn't do that," Scalia said in the interview.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2008-02-13-alito-sopranos_N.htm

Prostitution Changing in Italy -Two Tier

The modern Italian prostitute, are technology- savvy women who often held degrees, preferred political talk shows over ‘reality’ programs and were content with their line of employment.

The single largest category of prostitutes today is students (27%), followed by housewives (18%) and women who held regular part-time jobs and, from time to time, receive clients at their own home for a little extra cash to help make ends meet.

Today 34% hold degrees or diplomas, 11% speak at least one foreign language correctly, 9% read five or six books a year and 38% read at least one newspaper a day.

Over 50% of prostitutes today prefer to watch a political talk show, news analysis program or history documentary over the popular reality shows.

In the majority of the cases women engaged in this profession by choice and 43% considered it a temporary situation.

.However, this contrasts sharply with the foreigners coming from Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, with particular concentrations here, in the region around Rome, of Albanians and Nigerians.

Many are duped into the trade, while others see it as an opportunity to make money quickly and return to their own countries and live comfortably.

Prostitution changing in Italy

Italy By Web Editor. February 12th, 2008

Prostitution in Italy has undergone a transformation in terms of both those who practise the profession and where and when it is practised.

According to a study carried out by the Sexologists Association, prostitutes in Italy today are no longer the old-style, uneducated working class girls who walk the streets.

The modern prostitute, the study said, were technology- savvy women who often held degrees, preferred political talk shows over ‘reality’ programs and were content with their line of employment.

The single largest category of prostitutes today is made up of students (27%), followed by housewives (18%) and women who held regular part-time jobs and, from time to time, receive clients at their own home for a little extra cash to help make ends meet.

This latter group includes employees of call centers but also factory employees and white collar staff.

In the majority of the cases women engaged in this profession by choice and 43% considered it a temporary situation.

The work hours have also changed and today 26% of prostitutes prefer to exercise their profession in the early afternoon, from 1pm to 3pm, while only 16% still opt for the night.

One of the biggest changes among prostitutes is their socio-cultural profile.

Today 34% hold degrees or diplomas, 11% speak at least one foreign language correctly, 9% read five or six books a year and 38% read at least one newspaper a day.

Over 50% of prostitutes today prefer to watch a political talk show, news analysis program or history documentary over the popular reality shows.

In regards to where the profession is practised, today’s prostitutes prefer their own home to the traditional sidewalk, considering it more safe and comfortable, with 21% entertaining clients for no more than three hours and 17% no more than four hours

http://www.italymag.co.uk/2008/news-from-italy/general/prostitution-changing-in-italy/

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Exotic Imports Have Captured Italy's Sex Market

New York Times

By Celestine Bohlen

July 9, 1997

On summer afternoons, before the sun sinks behind the pine forests on Rome's western edge, a dozen or so young African women take up their places on either side of a remote commuter road, scanning the traffic for customers.

Then, about 6 P.M., the shift changes. The African women leave, ceding their spots to transvestites from South America who stay until the sun sets, before moving to the safer glare of the city's lights.

On another commuter artery to the south of Rome, two young women from Ghana sit perched on a metal traffic barrier until two cars pull up, offering each a ride. Farther down the road stands a 22-year-old Romanian in short shorts and a skimpy T-shirt who says she is getting ready to give up prostitution and go back home.

''Another three months, and then I quit,'' said the Romanian, who came to Italy 16 months ago with a cousin looking for another line of work. ''I have put money aside, enough to buy a house or a store. I'm going to get married and then I'll be O.K.''

In the last 10 years, street prostitution in Italy has undergone a sea change: once the last resort of desperate Italian women, it is now a reflection of the shifting demographics of a country that used to see very few foreigners, except tourists.

And although the volume of immigration -- legal and illegal -- into Italy is still lower than in many other European countries, foreign prostitutes are a visible reminder that this country, once an exporter of emigrants, now has to make room for newcomers -- including those who earn a living on the edges of society.

''If you look, you don't see any Italian prostitutes on the streets because of the laws of the market,'' said Angelo Bonnelli, president of a regional commission on criminality. ''There is strong competition, and foreign women charge lower prices.''

There is more to the issue of foreign prostitution than the displacement of Italian prostitutes, most of whom -- with the exception of drug addicts -- have now retreated to apartments and massage or sun-tanning parlors.

Prostitution is not a crime in Italy, but aiding, abetting and exploiting prostitutes is, and according to recent statistics, such criminal activity is increasing. According to Mr. Bonnelli, the number of such arrests doubled in the Lazio region around Rome just in the last two years.

Police statistics also confirm that an increasing number of foreigners are being charged with crimes related to prostitution. Of the 737 people charged with exploiting or abetting prostitution in Italy in 1994 (up from 285 in 1990), one third were foreigners -- most of them from the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe. And of the 2,594 Albanians in Italian jails, 20 percent are being held on prostitution-related charges.

But to many, the most troubling development is the growing evidence that as many as 10 percent of the foreign prostitutes now working the streets and highways of Italy are really indentured servants -- bound to their jobs, even more than most prostitutes, by fear and by financial obligations incurred when they first accepted offers of a train or plane ticket, a visa and work in Western Europe's restricted job market.

''Sometimes they have been duped and then forced into prostitution,'' said Livia Turco, Italy's Minister for Social Affairs. ''Sometimes men promise them marriage or tell them they will find work for them, but once the women arrive, their passport is taken from them.''

''This is a form of modern slavery,'' said Ms. Turco, a member of Italy's center-left Government and the prime mover behind a clause in Italy's latest immigration bill that would give illegal immigrants now working as prostitutes a chance to leave the business in return for a temporary residence permit.

Other European countries are confronting a similar situation; according to one estimate, there may be as many as 500,000 women throughout Western Europe working as prostitutes. Experts in various countries, Italy and the Netherlands among others, have estimated that 1 in 10 is a victim of trafficking, a woman brought here from one of the dislocated economies of Eastern Europe, Africa or elsewhere and forced into prostitution.

In Italy, where the number of street prostitutes is estimated at 25,000, most of the foreigners come from Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, with particular concentrations here, in the region around Rome, of Albanians and Nigerians.

A recent study of 50 foreign prostitutes working in seven regions of Italy done by the International Organization for Migration, based in Brussels, found that the Albanians were usually recruited informally, through relatives or friends, whereas the Nigerians were the victims of a more organized operation.

One of the 10 Nigerians interviewed for the study described her ordeal as beginning at a disco in Lagos where someone suggested she could go to Europe to work and study. ''I paid a lot of money to an agency which organizes trips to Italy,'' she said in the anonymous interview.

''The money was not enough, and so I signed a contract where I promised to work as a maid for a family in Naples and I soon understood that my job was another one. I was threatened, and they said I had to pay, otherwise my family would have been threatened too.''

Cinzia, one of the two young women from Ghana who had taken up a position on a road south of Rome, said she came to Italy with ''a visa, a passport, everything,'' adding in English, ''I don't know how they organized everything.''

Silvia Angelini, a sociologist who works with Magliana 80, a social agency in Rome that distributes condoms to the prostitutes working on the city's outskirts as part of this society's effort to control AIDS and other diseases, says that in many cases the women are under the control of small-time operators.

''The stereotypical idea of the pimp is not really correct, but you sometimes get the impression that somone is in the shadows controlling the situation,'' said Ms. Angelini, who together with colleagues from Nigeria and the Balkans makes an evening tour four or five times a week in a minivan.

Some women, like the Romanian, insist that they have turned to prostitution on their own, as a way out of bad economic situation. But it is work that comes with its own rules, and its own schedules. She works from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M., then from 3:30 P.M. to 7 P.M on a road usually occupied by three or four other women.

According to the transvestites on the Via Lido di Castelporziano, most of them from Colombia, those rules are strictly understood and observed. ''During the day, you find the Africans here,'' a 22-year-old prostitute said. ''But after 6, it is ours.''

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE4D61439F93AA35754C0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

This Italian Election Is Different. Really.

For Three Reasons; (1) Instead of fragmented coalitions, Veltroni, at the head of the center-left "Partito Democratico", and Berlusconi at the head of the center-right, "Popolo della Liberta" will be running SOLO, transforming the election into a rare two party race (2) Veltoni, a former communist has spurned the communists, which deprives Berlusconi of his former favorite tactic of whipping up anti-Communist sentiment, and will have to talk policy (3) Berlusconi, with his Debt and Legal problems behind him, but still with a large ego may attempt on his third try to leave a positive legacy.

This Italian Election Is Different. Really.

The Business

London's First Global Business Magazine

From Dow Jones Newswire

Jennifer Clark

Monday, February 11, 2008

MILAN (Dow Jones)--Don't be fooled into thinking that Italy is heading into just another election despite the shocking prospect of Silvio Berlusconi becoming Italy's prime minister again.

This poll looks different for three reasons.

For one thing, the center-left and the center-right aren't fighting the coming election as part of huge coalitions. The center-left Partito Democratico's decision is to run solo. The center-right, lead by Berlusconi, has vowed to do the same. Berlusconi is herding his allies under a grouping called "Popolo della Liberta'."

This is a big change.

Instability and bickering in coalition governments was one of the reasons why Berlusconi's center-right fell short of its reformist potential in 2001-2006. Prime Minister Romano Prodi's nine-party coalition was unstable from the moment it won the 2006 vote as Prodi was preoccupied with keeping the alliance together, hobbling his administration's feeble efforts at reform.

With battle lines more clearly drawn between Partito Democratico and Berlusconi's new party, Italy's voters might have the rare luxury of an election dominated by policy rather than the fudge of coalition politics.

Secondly, Berlusconi's center-right alliance may gain less traction by whipping up anti-Communist sentiment, its favorite tactic for distracting voters from ineffectual government. In 1994, it was a potent part of Belusconi's appeal. And even in 2001, one of his standard lines at his raucous political rallies was the need to free Italy from the death grip of the radical left.

The center-left Partito Democratico has spurned any coalition that includes Communist parties, boding well for its own program that won't have to pay lip service to outmoded ideas. The PD's leader Walter Veltroni is a former communist, but the party abandoned its Communist roots in the early 1990s. It may yet prove optimistic, but this might spur Berlusconi to thinking more seriously about policy.

There's also a chance Berlusconi might change his legislative priorities this time around. His media group Mediaset is more diversified and less in debt than it was in the early 1990s, providing less of an incentive for Berlusconi to confuse his personal business interests with governing the country.

By slashing the penalties and shortening the statute of limitations for false accounting, amid other controversial changes to Italy's legal code during the 2001-2006 government, Berlusconi has put his legal problems behind him.

So this time, Berlusconi may be running with an eye for securing his place in history. He's said he needed another term in office to make his mark.

The Partito Democratico should give him a run for his money but it's running around 10 percentage points behind Popolo della Liberta' in the polls.

So Berlusconi may well get that chance. For Italy's sake, at a time of sluggish growth and the world's biggest financial crisis for decades, let's hope he doesn't blow it.

(Jennifer Clark is Dow Jones Newswires' Milan Bureau Chief, and has covered Italian business since 1994. She can be reached on 39 02 58 21 99 04 or by e-mail: jennifer.clark@dowjones.com)

http://www.thebusiness.co.uk/news-and-analysis/497931/this-italian-election-is-different-really.thtml

Lieutenant Giuseppe “Joe" Petrosino Revisted

Joe Petrosino was born in southern Italy in 1860, and emigrated to NYC with his family in 1873, and at 18 was shining shoes for a living, then a street sweeper, and was promoted to foreman within a year, and in 1883 realized his dream, and was appointed to the police department.

In 1890, Joe Petrosino was promoted to detective, the first Italian-American in the city to achieve that rank, and assigned to root out crime in the Italian-American community.In 1895, then police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, promoted him to detective sergeant. A year later, he was promoted to lieutenant and appointed commander of an elite unit known as "The Italian Squad", whose primary focus was on a group known as the "Black Hand", which had been terrorizing Italian-Americans through the delivery of extortion letters, followed by bombings if the recipients did not pay up.

In 1909, Lieutenant Petrosino traveled to Palermo to further one of his investigations. After his mission was unwittingly disclosed to enemies, he was assassinated on March 12, 1909. His funeral procession was attended by over 250,000 New Yorkers, and in 1987 Kenmare Memorial Park in lower Manhattan was renamed in his honor.

“Joe" Petrosino Revisted

Ask the DA

The Brooklyn Eagle

By Charles J. Hynes
Kings County District Attorney

February 7, 2008

Q: I recently read about a famous New York City police detective who was killed in Italy in the line of duty. Can you tell me more about him?

A: Lieutenant Giuseppe "Joe" Petrosino was a celebrated New York City police detective at the turn of the 20th century. Lieutenant Petrosino, who was assassinated in 1909 in Palermo, Sicily, is the only American police officer ever to have been killed in the line of duty on foreign soil.

Joe Petrosino was born in southern Italy in 1860. He emigrated to New York City with his family in 1873, and by the age of 18 was shining shoes for a living near police headquarters on Mulberry Street. He decided to become a police officer, but was rejected due to a deficiency in height. He became a street sweeper instead, and was promoted to foreman within a year. He ultimately was noticed by the head of the street cleaning department, who also happened to be a police captain. With the captain’s assistance, he was appointed to the police department in 1883.

In 1890, Joe Petrosino was promoted to detective, the first Italian-American in the city to achieve that rank, and assigned to root out crime in the Italian-American community. He was an adept undercover, who assumed roles as diverse as gangster and tunnel worker to ferret out information on criminal activities. In 1895, then police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, who had befriended him, promoted him to detective sergeant. A year later, he was promoted to lieutenant and appointed commander of an elite unit known as “The Italian Squad.”

The primary focus of The Italian Squad was on a group known as the Black Hand, which had been terrorizing Italian-Americans through the delivery of extortion letters, followed by bombings if the recipients did not pay up. To counteract the nefarious activities of the Black Hand, Lieutenant Petrosino founded the city and country’s first municipal bomb squad.

In 1909, Lieutenant Petrosino traveled to Palermo to further one of his investigations. After his mission was unwittingly disclosed to enemies, he was assassinated on March 12, 1909. His funeral procession was attended by over 250,000 New Yorkers, and in 1987 Kenmare Memorial Park in lower Manhattan was renamed in his honor.

For additional information visit www.brooklynda.org. To have your questions answered in a future column, send them to asktheda@brooklynda.org.

http://www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=4&id=18345

Italians Living Longer, More Couples With Children out of Wedlock

Life expectancy for Italian women (84.1) now only second in Europe behind French women (84.4), and second for men (78.6) behind the Swedes (78.9).

Italians are also having more children out of wedlock; indeed, children born from non-married parents reached 18.6 per cent of the total number of children born in Italy, versus 12.3 per cent in 2003. However, "natural" children are still far fewer in Italy than in some countries in Europe such as France and Sweden where 50 per cent of children are born to non-married parents.

Italy’s population is close to reaching 60 million and since 2006 has grown by over 390,000 largely due to longer life expectancy and immigration. However, Italians continue to have fewer babies than many countries in Europe with a birth rate of with 1.34 children per woman, which is under the European average of 1.51 children per woman, but is nonetheless above Italy’s historical low of 1.19 in 1995.

General: Italians Live Longer, More "de Facto" Couples.

Wanted in Rome

February 11, 2008

The latest statistics reveal that Italians are living longer than ever before and are having more children out of wedlock. Istat, the Italian institute of statistics, has published its demographic data for 2007, which illustrates an aging and growing population as well as changing social structures.

Istat’s figures confirm that Italy has a large aging population; indeed, 20 per cent of the population is over 64, as compared to 17 per cent in 1997. Life expectancy for Italian women (84.1) is now only second in Europe behind French women (84.4), and second for men (78.6) behind the Swedes (78.9).

Italy’s population is close to reaching 60 million and since 2006 has grown by over 390,000 largely due to longer life expectancy and immigration. The number of births has stayed constant and is higher than the number of deaths, which means that Italy has a positive population growth for the second consecutive year. However, Italians continue to have fewer babies than many countries in Europe with a birth rate of with 1.34 children per woman, which is under the European average of 1.51 children per woman, but is nonetheless above Italy’s historical low of 1.19 in 1995.

The most interesting points revealed by the 2007 statistics are those that reflect the changing social structure of the family. There were fewer marriages and more de facto couples in Italy in 2007 than the year before. Italians are also having more children out of wedlock; indeed, children born from non-married parents reached 18.6 per cent of the total number of children born in Italy, versus 12.3 per cent in 2003. However, "natural" children are still far fewer in Italy than in some countries in Europe such as France and Sweden where 50 per cent of children are born to non-married parents.

http://www.wantedinrome.com/news/news.php?id_n=4134

Lisa Lampanelli, Comedian: Fearlessly Foul, and on the Verge of Respectability

For someone who didn’t see live stand-up comedy until she was 30, Ms. Lampanelli, now 47 has a Grammy nomination for her "Dirty Girl" a CD taken from her Comedy Central special of the same name.

She is often compared to Don Rickles for the way she heckles the audience, lobbing insults that play on ethnic and social stereotypes

The idea of doing comedy came to her in 1990 while she was working as a party D.J., when she discovered that she enjoyed talking into a microphone, that culminated in her first successful stand-up performance "fashioned mostly around Weight Watchers jokes" and an invitation to go on the road with the headliner. 12 years later, a scorching roast of Chevy Chase at the New York Friars Club, broadcast in 2002 on Comedy Central, brought her national attention.

Since then she has appeared several times on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" and in small film roles, including one in the coming Owen Wilson comedy "Drillbit Taylor." She will make her debut at Carnegie Hall in May.

She says: "I love misbehaving."

Fearlessly Foul, and on the Verge of Respectability

New York Times

By Ann Farmer

February 10, 2008

ON a recent trip to the Canyon Ranch spa in Tucson the comedian Lisa Lampanelli was asked by a companion if she had ever won an award. "Dude, they don’t give awards to me," she replied, suggesting that her routines were laden with too many ribald jokes, four-letter words and sexually explicit stories to qualify.

The next day her publicist phoned to tell her she had been nominated for a Grammy Award for best comedy album for "Dirty Girl" (Warner Brothers Records), a CD taken from her Comedy Central special of the same name. "I woke up the next morning thinking maybe I’d dreamed it," Ms. Lampanelli recalled in a recent interview at a SoHo restaurant. "I called my publicist back and asked, ‘Did this really happen?’ ”

For someone who didn’t see live stand-up comedy until she was 30, Ms. Lampanelli has rapidly established herself. Last year she played clubs or concert halls almost every weekend. "It’s the only time I’m truly happy," said Ms. Lampanelli, now 47, who is also known for her appearances on Comedy Central celebrity roasts and "The Howard Stern Show," and who has several television projects in the works, including an animated pilot under consideration by Comedy Central.

She is often compared to Don Rickles for the way she heckles the audience, lobbing insults that play on ethnic and social stereotypes. In “Dirty Girl" she thanks an Asian-looking audience member for not staying home to practice his violin. She asks all the mothers to identify themselves by clapping, then adds, "Hispanic women, you don’t have to clap, that’s a given." And after she implores a 48-year-old white man to reveal his age, she says: "You look 73. Kill yourself."

“They aren’t even jokes," Ms. Lampanelli said. She uses the most blatant, politically incorrect quips so that people will laugh at the absurdity of them, she added, although she routinely encounters audience members who commend her afterward for sticking it to some group. "I feel sorry for those people," she said.

Although her routines often leave jaws hanging, Ms. Lampanelli said she never heedlessly hurts anyone: "As soon as I see a glimmer of that, I’m out." At times, though, especially when she was just beginning, her humor has backfired with audiences that didn’t know what to expect. The worst day of her performing career came seven years ago after a run of jokes at the expense of Italians, Jews and blacks. A latecomer called her a racist, yelling, "All you do is black jokes." Ms. Lampanelli, who often talks about her black boyfriends onstage, was livid. Then, to her surprise, she broke down crying, and the show disintegrated."They kind of walked out," she said. "You never forget that."

Last year, before a performance at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which is also home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, she came under attack from protesters who felt she went too far on the radio when she cracked that "God hates deaf people." Still, some deaf students attended, including Mich Gerson, 23, who sat up front near an American Sign Language interpreter. Ms. Gerson said in an e-mail message that while Ms. Lampanelli "gave all the deaf students hell," she and others in the audience found it very funny. "I don’t think she knew it," Ms. Gerson added, "but she was mocking a lot of the deaf community’s idiosyncrasies, which made her routine 10 times funnier."

While Ms. Lampanelli talks like a truck driver, she dresses pure girly-girl. In performance she resembles a ’50s housewife in her pearls, shirtwaist dresses and button-down sweaters. "The more conservative you dress, the more you can get away with," she said, twirling a long blond curl.

She suspects that her appeal also stems from the low self-esteem she projects. Often the butt of her own jokes, she ridicules herself for her weight and for being an easy catch. She likes to say that all her boyfriends have one thing in common: "my crummy taste."

Even she can be surprised by what pops out during her rapid-fire monologues, like the first time she told an audience that "AIDS is obviously the best diet ever."I thought, ‘Where did that come from?’"

The short answer is, her upbringing. She grew up in a middle-class Italian family in suburban Trumbull, Conn., and credits her mother for her loud voice, bold repartee and many of her best lines. (She repeats a favorite that begins with her mother complaining that menorahs appear too early in the holiday season. "These Jews get everything," Ms. Lampanelli mimicked. "They beat us to it every year.")

During her undergraduate years at Boston College and Syracuse University, she studied journalism. She worked for The Bridgeport Post in Connecticut, but she found community meetings dull and began plagiarizing her reports. "I got caught," she said, and she quit before she could be fired. She continued to dabble in editorial work for magazines like Rolling Stone and Spy, but eventually she came to realize, “Wow, I just do not like this job."

The idea of doing comedy came to her in 1990 while she was working as a party D.J., when she discovered that she enjoyed talking into a microphone. After a trip to a comedy club, she took a course in improvisation that culminated in her first successful stand-up performance "fashioned mostly around Weight Watchers jokes" and an invitation to go on the road with the headliner. A scorching roast of Chevy Chase at the New York Friars Club, broadcast in 2002 on Comedy Central, brought her national attention.

Since then she has appeared several times on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" and in small film roles, including one in the coming Owen Wilson comedy "Drillbit Taylor." She will make her debut at Carnegie Hall in May.

She said fans sometimes thanked her "for letting us see we’re all the same," but her reason for being a cutup is less altruistic: "I love misbehaving."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/arts/television/10farm.html?_r=1&ref=television&oref=slogin

Italians Want a US Democrat Prez - Veltroni To Be Italian Obama

See both articles "Veltroni as Italy's Obama" and "Italians Want a Democrat in White House" (58% vs 15%)

Veltroni as Italy's Obama

TVNZ - New Zealand
From Reuters

Feb 8, 2008

Walter Veltroni reckons there's something of Barack Obama about him.

"Yes we can!", the Rome mayor said in English at the end of a news conference this week to launch his campaign to be the next leader of Italy, borrowing the catchphrase of the Illinois senator who aims to be the first black US president.

Like Obama, Veltroni is hoping he can convince voters he is their best bet for change. At 52, he is a different generation to the charismatic former prime minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, his rival in Italy's two-month election race.

Berlusconi's centre-right coalition is at least 10 percentage points ahead in the polls and Veltroni is hoping for an Obama-style surge before the April 13-14 vote.

"I don't believe the doomsayers nor opinion polls. Look at Obama - three months ago nobody would have bet on him, now look where he is," Veltroni said when it was clear Italy would hold a snap election after Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned.

Prodi will not stand for re-election and has passed on the centre-left leadership to Veltroni who is offering a new-look left, modelled on, and named after, the US Democratic Party.

Obama is not the first prominent US Democrat to provide Veltroni with inspiration. He is an admirer of Bill Clinton and wrote a book on Robert Kennedy. The theme is clear, he wants jaded Italians to see him as a new breed of politician.

"I am convinced ... only a completely new political proposal, something the country hasn't seen for 15 years, can provide Italians with a good reason to vote," Veltroni said.

Veltroni was deputy prime minister in Prodi's first cabinet in 1996. But he has been away from national politics for a decade and, unlike Berlusconi who is contesting his fifth election, has never run for the top job.

New Blair?

The Partito Democratico, which he was elected to lead at a 'primary' last October, was formed via a merger between ex-communists and centrist liberal democrats.

In Italy's fragmented politics, Veltroni hopes the PD can mop up votes from Italians who would previously have supported an array of other parties and can bring the mainstream Italian left closer to the centre.

He said last year he shares with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair "the idea of the left as a wider area, more plural than was traditionally considered in the history of the Italian left".

Veltroni is a former editor of left-wing daily L'Unita and started his political career in the now defunct Italian Communist Party. He lacks Berlusconi's slick charm but opinion polls show Italians warm to his intellectual image.

The part-time novelist and movie buff - he created the Rome film festival - enjoys personal approval ratings of 50-60%, against 30-40% for Berlusconi.

His foreign policy would be similar to Prodi's, against the Iraq war but for intervention in Afghanistan, concerned for the fate of Palestinians but a friend of Israel.

Often accused of 'buonismo' - Italian for being too much of a Mr Nice Guy - the Rome mayor has sought to harden his image by cracking down on illegal settlements of Romanian immigrants in the city at a time when fear of crime, and foreigners, has become a major issue for many Italians.

He hints at tax cuts rather than more state spending to boost Italy's flagging economy and has resisted using the one weapon that has united the left over the last 15 years: bashing Berlusconi.

Paraphrasing one of his Democratic heroes, Veltroni said he wanted to run on his own merits, not as an anti-Berlusconi leader.

"When Robert Kennedy was running, he said: 'I am not running against a man, I am running for my country'. That goes for the (Italian) Democratic Party as well."

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/536641/1574199

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Angus Reid Global Monitor : Polls & Research

Italians Want a Democrat in the White House

February 10, 2008

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - Most people in Italy would like the Democratic Party candidate to win an upcoming presidential election in the United States, according to a poll by Istituto Piepoli. 58 per cent of respondents would prefer a Democrat as the new U.S. head of state.

Only 15 per cent of respondents would rather see the Republican Party nominee winning the American election.

The list of presidential hopefuls in the Republican Party includes former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Arizona senator John McCain, and Texas congressman Ron Paul. McCain—a Vietnam veteran—is currently the frontrunner in the race. The Democratic Party’s contenders are Illinois senator Barack Obama and New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On Feb. 2, Riccardo Pedrizzi—an Italian lawmaker with the right-wing National Alliance (NA)—offered his views on the race to the White House saying, "If I had to choose, for a lack of a better choice, I would go with the Republican and Vietnam veteran. But if we talk about predicting the outcome I think Obama will win, because he is the real novelty."

The presidential election in the U.S. is scheduled for Nov. 4.

Polling Data

Who would you prefer to win the U.S. presidential election?

A Democratic Party candidate	58%
A Republican Party candidate	15%
Other / Not sure	27%

Source: Istituto Piepoli
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 502 Italian adults, conducted from Jan. 21 to Jan. 28, 2008. No margin of error was provided.

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/view/29843/italians_want_a_democrat_in_the_white_house

Naples Garbage Crisis Over - - Reminder of London's 1979 "Winter of Discontent"

Berlusconi has been trying to "capitalize" on the Naples Garbage Mess, (or even "engineered " it) . One must recognize that previous rightwing Campania councils also failed to fix the problem, and that the city's woes stemmed from Mr Berlusconi's five years in office, not the last two of Mr Prodi.

While those who like to find any excuse to criticize Italy, or those Italian Right wing politicians who want to exploit the situation with their "Chicken Little" shrieks, have short memories, since less than 30 years ago, in that very "civilized" country of England, in The Winter of Discontent" not only did Garbage pile high in Central London's Leicester Square, but most transportation came to a halt for two months!!!!

Below are articles about the London "Winter of Discontent" and the Naples Rubbish Cleanup.

1978-1979: Winter of Discontent

Libcm.org

Alex Aspden

January 24th, 2007

In the winter of 1978-1979 in Britain. The 'Winter of Discontent' marked the largest stoppage of labour since the 1926 General Strike.

Harold Wilson's government, wanting to limit inflation agreed to cap pay increases for workers at limits set by the government.

First, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) struck , lorry drivers, petrol tanker drivers, public sector unions, railwaymen schools and airports, ambulance drivers, gravediggers

Another memorable strike occurring towards the end of the winter was that of the waste collection workers. With many collectors having remained out since January 22, local councils were running out of space for storing waste. Rubbish was piled high in Central London's Leicester Square after Westminster Council had allocated rubbish to be dumped there. The rubbish attracted rats and, rather indistinguishably, the conservative media, who used pictures of the Square in an attempt to discredit the strikers. Continuing its constant campaign throughout the winter criticizing the strikers through the medium of the "breakdown of public convenience", the pictures of the piled rubbish presented itself as yet another front on which to attack the workers. The waste collectors strike ended on February 21, when the workers accepted an 11% increase and an extra £1 a week with possible increases in the future, bringing an end to the winter long series of disputes.

Due to the lack of control many unions had over their members by this time, many strikes did not end immediately after the agreement, testimony to the initiative exercised by many rank and file workers throughout the period who were willing and able to work and initiate strikes outside of their union's control. Most had returned to work by the end of February after a total of 29,474,000 working days having been lost to strike action. The direct action help stem the tide of effective pay cuts by inflation eating up the value of their wages and won significant improvements for many tens of thousands of workers.

http://libcom.org/history/1978-1979-winter-of-discontent

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Centre-left at Risk of Sinking in Naples Rubbish

Financial Times By Guy Dinmore in Naples February 9 2008

The mountains of rubbish that piled up in Naples have mostly gone, thanks to the efforts of a former national police chief dispatched from Rome as a "garbage tsar".

But the lingering images, and smells, of the crisis could well translate into defeat at the polls for Italy's centre-left government.

Just as pictures of London wallowing in waste in the 1979 "winter of discontent" helped to sink the British Labour government of the day, so the mess in Naples is to be used by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's centre-right opposition leader, in his comeback plans for the mid-April general election.

Fortunately for the billionaire former prime minister, an investigation into alleged fraud and abuse of office by government officials has just reached the courts of Naples.

Pre-trial hearings began for Antonio Bassolino, the leftwing governor of the surrounding region of Campania, and 27 others, including his former deputies from when he previously served as garbage commissioner.

"Rubbish, jobs, security." Marcello Di Caterina, a textiles merchant and key organiser of the centre-right election campaign in Naples, ticked off the agenda.

"This crisis was a terrible loss of image for Italy," he said. He also recalled that clashes with police over rubbish had contributed in large part to Romano Prodi, the centre-left prime minister, losing a parliamentary vote of confidence on January 24.

For months, Mr Berlusconi has been preparing for action in Campania, where he lost only narrowly to Mr Prodi in the 2006 elections, when the centre-right claimed fraud in Naples....

...The new centre-left Democratic party, led by Walter Veltroni, Rome's mayor, appears to have hardly got off the ground in Naples.

Nicola Tremante, on the party's executive board, admitted the rubbish crisis would have an impact on voters. But he believed they would "see the whole picture" and understand that previous rightwing Campania councils also failed to fix the problem, and that the city's woes stemmed from Mr Berlusconi's five years in office, not the last two of Mr Prodi.

Acknowledging an exodus of young people because of violence and joblessness, he insisted crime statistics were improving. But the popular perception is different. "Even my wife and daughter think we are in a worse position now," he admitted.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f3bcefa-d6b2-11dc-b9f4-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

The Italian Crime Novel - Mafia No Where in Sight!

This is a golden era for Italian crime fiction.Carlo Lucarelli, Niccolò Ammaniti, Giancarlo De Cataldo, and Andrea Camilleri, the author of the superb Inspector Montalbano series, are just a few of the names that feature in the European bestseller lists. And then there's the Italy-based foreigners - such as Michael Dibdin and Donna Leon, who offer readers the Italian sleuths, Aurelio Zen and Guido Brunetti, respectively.

Since England gave the world detective fiction and America gave the world Noir writing, there's a certain amount of 'selling ice to Eskimos' about Italian writers' success in Anglo-Saxon countries. But we also bring our own touch to things. We don't do whodunits, for a start. We aren't interested in who the killer is, so much as examining what sort of society and institutions help create that killer.

The Anglo-Saxon crime thrillers are all about the triumph and restoration of order, of 'Elementary, dear Watson' deductions, of everything being resolved. By contrast, the modern Italian equivalent is about psychological and societal disorder; it's rooted in reality and maps the evil and corruption in politics and society, without offering resolution. For Italian writers, it's utopian to think that every crime can be cleared up, Agatha Christie-style.

Things have changed as rapidly in New York as they have in Italy, where the traditional, family-oriented, Godfather-esque model is largely silent and it controls nowhere near the amount of territory that it used to. In the major cities, we have mob penetration from the Russian, Chinese and Eastern European Mafias instead.

The Insider: My Part in Italy's Crime Renaissance

Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom

Giancarlo De Cataldo

Judge in Italian Criminal Courts, and Author

February 10, 2008

...I've heard all sorts of ludicrous defences in my 25 years as a judge in the Italian criminal court, in Rome - though the cases I cover are mostly grisly. And they've been a major inspiration for my other career as a crime novelist....

My best-known book, "Romanzo Criminale" (adapted into a movie in 2005), is about the Banda della Magliana, the organised crime gang that held sway over Rome in the 1970s and 1980s, and many of whose leaders I tried....

Anyway, my writings, even when inspired by real-life events, are ultimately fiction. Even after trying a case in court, there are still always gaps in the story. For example, I suspect the influence of the Freemasons on the Banda della Magliana has never fully been revealed.

But suspicions, suspicions, suspicions. We'll never know every last reason or motivation for why a crime is committed, or every last link in a chain of actions. And so, as a writer, I inevitably fill in the historical blanks with fantasy.

My books are just a small part of what is now a golden era for Italian crime fiction. Carlo Lucarelli, Niccolò Ammaniti and Andrea Camilleri, the author of the superb Inspector Montalbano series, are just a few of the names that feature in the European bestseller lists. And then there's the Italy-based foreigners - such as Michael Dibdin and Donna Leon, who offer readers the Italian sleuths, Aurelio Zen and Guido Brunetti, respectively.

Since England gave the world detective fiction and America gave the world Noir writing, there's a certain amount of 'selling ice to Eskimos' about Italian writers' success in Anglo-Saxon countries. But we also bring our own touch to things. We don't do whodunits, for a start. We aren't interested in who the killer is, so much as examining what sort of society and institutions help create that killer.

The Anglo-Saxon crime thrillers are all about the triumph and restoration of order, of 'Elementary, dear Watson' deductions, of everything being resolved. By contrast, the modern Italian equivalent is about psychological and societal disorder; it's rooted in reality and maps the evil and corruption in politics and society, without offering resolution. For Italian writers, it's utopian to think that every crime can be cleared up, Agatha Christie-style.

We're all good friends, too, regularly meeting for dinner or at crime-writing conventions. We were excited to be asked to one at Columbia University, in New York, last November, and to visit the home of so many great Italian-American crime stories. But we were crushed to find that there was little left of the Italian Brooklyn that Martin Scorsese depicted in Mean Streets. It's now a 'Little Odessa', overrun by Russians.

Things have changed as rapidly in New York as they have in Italy, where the Mafia has now become the Mafias. The traditional, family-oriented, Godfather-esque model is largely silent and it controls nowhere near the amount of territory that it used to. In the major cities, we have mob penetration from the Russian, Chinese and Eastern European Mafias instead.

It's a bleak picture, and Italian crime writing reflects that. Not that it's all about gangs and bosses. The most disturbing case I've tried was of a father-of-three who had lost his job just after losing his wife to cancer. Tormented by visions of his wife's ghost saying, 'Join me, and bring the girls with you', he stabbed his three young daughters to death and then set his house on fire, but his neighbour saved him. We sentenced him to 19 years in prison, but his real punishment was living with what he had done.

Yet, for all the bleakness, there are still moments of macabre humour. I remember trying one defendant, a university drop-out from a good family, who had chosen to kill his parents rather than admit that he hadn't got his degree. He wrapped their bodies in bin-liners, calling the police two days later and claiming he had just returned home to find his mother and father dead.

Heavily Edited.

Giancarlo De Cataldo is the editor of 'Crimini', a collection of short stories by Italian crime writers (Bitter Lemon, £8.99). He was talking to Alastair Smart http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/02/10/sv_insider110.xml

Spain Edging Past Italy GDP ??? Whoa ! Let's Reconsider !!!!

Spain's 10 year Boom, was built almost exclusively on the Housing Market, which like in the US has come to a Screeching Halt.

Their Great Leap forward has turned into a Giant Leap into the Great Abyss.

There will be 500,000 unsold new homes by the end of March - roughly the number built in an average year. 500,000 more were to be built this year, making the unsold stock worrying. About half the country's estate agents are already out of business.

Spain's Sprint Slows as Bricks and Mortar form Stumbling Blocks

Financial Times By Leslie Crawford February 7 2008

Eurostat, the European Union's data compiler, in December published a dry table that revealed a remarkable fact: Spaniards had become richer per head than Italians.

Anyone who knew Spain in the 1970s - when it was a byword for backwardness and governed by an ageing dictator - can only marvel at its political and economic transformation. Along with Ireland, Spain has been one of the unequivocal success stories of the EU, which it joined in 1986. The new member states of central and eastern Europe regard Spain as their role model, for the skill with which it used EU funds to spearhead its development.

But never did Spaniards think they would one day overtake in terms of per capita income one of the founding members of the EU. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister who faces a general election next month, boasts that overtaking France and even Germany by that measure is possible within five years.

Mr Zapatero's grandstanding, however, has been obscured by doubts. The end of a 10-year housing boom, coupled with financial turmoil abroad, is leading Spaniards to question the foundations of their leap forward. The Spanish sorpasso took place just as the country's growth was peaking. Might it prove as fleeting as Italy's famous overtaking of the British economy in the 1980s?

Moreover, its economy is now big enough to affect Europe's performance as a whole. "If residential construction in Spain contracts in 2008 as sharply as it did in the US in 2007, it could shave 0.2 percentage points off eurozone economic growth," Holger Schmieding of Bank of America wrote in the Financial Times last month.

During the peak of the construction frenzy two years ago, economists described the Spanish economy as a "monoculture" of bricks and mortar and worried that there was nothing to take its place if the building boom came to an end. Construction employed 13 per cent of the workforce. The banking system channelled 60 per cent of all credit to housing-related activities.

Spain was building more homes than France, Germany and the Benelux countries combined. It was consuming half of all the cement in the Europe and it was borrowing massively abroad. Economists agreed that Spain's credit-fuelled property boom accounted for most of the country's growth differential with the EU.

The credit squeeze hit Spain at its most vulnerable point in the economic cycle, with an overpriced and oversupplied housing market and families and companies deep in debt. As a result, the country is on the brink of a property slump that will affect employment, consumer confidence, bank earnings and the economy as a whole, according to a number of recently published reports.

IPE, a business school that specialises in urban planning and property, estimates that there will be 500,000 unsold new homes by the end of March - roughly the number built in an average year. Given government forecasts that 500,000 more were to be built this year, the unsold stock is worrying. About half the country's estate agents are already out of business, according to their trade association.

One consequence of the building slowdown is that unemployment has shot above the 2m mark. January's 6 per cent increase in the number of unemployed was the highest monthly rise in 10 years. Immigrants and temporary workers are feeling the brunt of the cuts. The end of the property boom is also worrying for Spanish commercial and savings banks, which have €290bn ($425bn, £217bn) in outstanding loans to property developers and are trying to cut their exposure to the sector.

Not everyone shares the gloom, however. Mr Zapatero is unabashedly confident about his country's economic prospects, on which his re-election prospects also depend.

"I am an optimist," he tells business. . He expects the economy to grow by "at least" 3 per cent in 2008. Mr Zapatero's Socialist party is promising to create 2m jobs over the next four years and to raise minimum pensions and wages. If the economy fails to grow at the predicted rate, Mr Zapatero thinks old-fashioned fiscal stimulation should do the trick. The government has a "comfortable" budget surplus of 2 per cent of GDP, he says, to get things moving.

Another reason for optimism is that Spain's big companies have used the profit windfalls of the past several years to diversify out of Spain. Joaquín Ayuso, chief executive of Ferrovial, the company that in 2006 bought BAA, the British airports operator, says: "Back in 1992, construction - mainly public works - was 90 per cent of our business and it was all in Spain. Then there was a devaluation and a recession.

"We had four horrible years. I was the director for construction then and I was convinced I would be fired. Those years taught us a lesson: that we couldn't depend on just one country, one business and one client, the government."

Today, 90 per cent of Ferrovial's assets are in the UK, Canada and the US; they include toll roads, airports and baggage handling. Less than 15 per cent of Ferrovial's income comes from construction.

Santander and BBVA, Spain's two big banks, have expanded abroad so that a big part of their business is based in Latin America and the UK, where Santander owns Abbey National. Telefónica, the former telecommunications monopoly, has also become world-scale.

Diversification means that even if Spain starts to flag, some companies will be able to cushion the blow with income from other parts of the world. Tighter credit conditions, however, will make it much harder for them to continue an acquisition spree that has included investments of more than €60bn in the UK alone.

In this jittery environment, resilience is a big advantage. What frightens some is the hubris that appears to have taken hold of Mr Zapatero and some of the business establishment. Only the government predicts Spain will grow by as much as 3.1 per cent in 2008. The International Monetary Fund estimate is 2.7 per cent. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecasts Spain will grow by 2.5 per cent.

"To draw up economic policy on the basis that we are going to grow by 3 per cent this year is unrealistic, even irresponsible. Not to recognise a problem is the first step to not solving it," says Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quiróz, of Freemarket, an economic consultancy in Madrid.

Complacency is also frightening because Spain could easily slip into Italy's "do nothing" malaise. For the moment, Europeans prefer to shop at Zara rather than Benetton. Iberia is a going concern whereas Alitalia is bust. Telefónica is a big shareholder in Telecom Italia rather than the other way around.

"Spain has undergone such a tremendous transformation in the past two decades. Now it has to take the next step," says Stefan Bergheim, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank. An inflation differential with the EU needs to be tackled. Productivity, which is low, has to be addressed and Spain must move on from bricks and mortar to find a more sustainable route to prosperity.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f05fcca6-d51f-11dc-9af1-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Italians Influence in Manchester England; "Little Italy"- Ancoats

We often forget how many "Little Italys" there are in England alone, in addition to those in Canada , Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and of course the USA, but there are few countries that Italian Immigration has not touched.

Ancoats, Manchester England is not particularly unusual, but for me the different stories never grow old.

Ancoats: Our Naples

Manchester Evening News - Manchester,England,UK

Paul Taylor
January 30, 2008

The ramshackle city streets are full of the sights, sounds and smells of Naples. Women stand gossiping in Italian on doorsteps, the aroma of sauces on the stove wafting out across the cobbles. Hand-carts go by, bearing ice cream produced in basements. Accordionists play Neapolitan serenades and less artful buskers crank their barrel pianos and hurdy gurdies on street corners, with monkeys in red waistcoats to collect the coins.

Dotted among the tumbledown streets are delicatessens selling pasta, olive oil and garlic-infused sausage.

It is the start of the 20th century and this could so easily be a scene from the urban melting pot of New York. But, no, this is Little Italy, Ancoats, Manchester - nestling at the edge of the city centre, where Oldham Road meets Great Ancoats Street, and home, at its height, to around 2,000 people of Italian extraction.

The story of how Little Italy flourished and then disappeared is little known. Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry aims to put that right with a new exhibition. The first wave of Italian immigrants came here in the 18th century to produce instruments such as barometers. But the second wave in the 19th century were farmers, escaping southern Italy in search of a better life.

Slum

"Ancoats was a slum with lots of back-to-back houses, so it was a cheap place to live," says Susie Elliott, a project officer at the museum. "The houses mostly had cellars which made perfect workshops for setting up your own business. A lot started making ice cream or manufacturing barrel pianos. There was the Blossom Street ice company, so they had a good supply of ice.

Before the Italians arrived, Ancoats had been home to many Irish people, but had a terrible reputation for drink, violence and crime. "The Irish blended well with the Italian community and crime started to die down," says Elliott. "The Italians introduced traditions which weren't based around alcohol and were very church-orientated. They had lots of societies, and it brought the area up. There are a couple of really early Manchester Evening News articles about how lovely the Italians had made Ancoats."

It's hardly surprising the Italians were so well-regarded; they brought us so many of the good things of life - ice cream, music, food and the marbled finery of many iconic buildings.

The exhibition will include the statue of the Madonna, still carried in the Whit walks, an old ice cream hand cart, and a football medal presented to an Italian-Mancunian team in Italy by the country's dictator Mussolini.

Rags-to-riches

Among the enduring stories of Little Italy is the rags-to-riches tale of accordion player Rudi Mancini, born in Gun Street, Ancoats in 1920, who later moved to Blackpool where he eventually owned the Queen's Hotel on South Promenade. He died in 1998, and was buried with his mother in the Italian sector of Moston cemetery.

"The best story is Domenico Rea, known as Manchester's Valentino," says Elliott. "He was this incredibly attractive, charismatic musician who would play accordion on the streets of Ancoats. He would serenade the mills, but one mill banned him from standing outside because he stopped production. The mill women would flood to the window to throw coins down to him."

But Manchester's love affair with the Italians ended abruptly in 1940 when Mussolini sided with Hitler in World War II. Winston Churchill declared "Collar the lot!" and Italian men were interned until Italy's capitulation. Many were held on the Isle of Man. Others were dispatched to Canada aboard the Arandora Star, but the ship was sunk off the west coast of Ireland with the loss of over 400 Italian lives.

A campaign is still being waged for an official apology. "The ironic thing is that the sons of the Italian immigrants were all serving in the British Army, but their fathers had all been interned," says Tony Rea, author of the book Manchester's Little Italy, who also runs a website devoted to the topic. "They had been here all their lives, they had built businesses, they were respectable people and had given the authorities no cause for concern. When the police came for my grandfather Marco Rea, they said they were sorry. They said they knew him and respected him and the Italian community, but it was an order they had to carry out. My grandfather had six sons serving abroad."

Ice Cream Wars

After the war, Manchester, like other cities, had its own Ice Cream Wars, with firms involved in white hot competition which descended into vendettas. But it was slum clearance in the 1960s which demolished those tumbledown homes and dispersed the Italian community for good.

Today, aside from the odd business bearing an Italian name, the only reminder of a once-thriving community in Ancoats is the annual Whit Walk, attended by over 1,000 people. The walk begins from St Michael's Church, itself closed in 2004 because of dwindling attendances.

The pride of the Mancunian-Italians lives on, though. Tony Rea, aged 45, worked in his family's ice cream business until seven years ago, and holds dual Italian and British citizenship even though he is the second generation of his family to be born in this country. He visits Italy twice a year and speaks the language.

"I tend to take the best bits of the British and the Italian ways of life and mix the two together," he says. "I eat Italian food every night."

Ancoats: Manchester's Little Italy is at the Museum of Science and Industry from Feb 8 until Aug 31. More about Little Italy at ancoatslittleitaly.com

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1034287_ancoats_our_naples

Italic Institute Critiques "Beyond Wiseguys: Italian Americans and the Movies"

I Reported on Roseanne De Luca Braun's documentary "Beyond Wiseguys: Italian Americans and the Movies" on January 13, 2008.

Rosario A. Iaconis, VC of the Italic Institute, had similar doubts, and expressed it in a Letter to Editor, below.

Here are excerpts from my prefacing remarks in my Report of January 13, 2008:

I commend De Luca Braun's efforts, but I have no high expectations, since Ms Braun, is unable to accept the source of Negative Stereotyping, the torrent of "mob" movies, which she acknowledges, YET she states "I relate to the characters. And in the case of a great work of art, I don’t view it as Italian-American " it’s American.".

That's absurd!!!!! How you view it is of no consequence, it is how 300 million Americans view it. And we KNOW the answer to that. "Mob" = "Italian"

I am also concerned about the fact that the greatest contributors to "our problem" are deeply involved with this Documentary.

People like David Chase, Spike Lee, and Mr. Chianese.

http://www.annoticoreport.com/2008/01/beyond-wiseguys-italian-americans-and.html

How Not To Honor Italian-Americans

Newsday, Long Island,NY,USA

January 31, 2008

Letters to Editor

Film producer Roseanne De Luca Braun's documentary effort to transcend the lurid stereotype of Italian-Americans as a semi-literate criminal underclass is undercut by her embrace of the very actors, filmmakers and producers whose careers are a testament to anti-Italian bigotry in the media ["Not married to the mob movie type," Part 2, Jan. 16].

Why couldn't De Luca Braun have produced an uplifting saga akin to "The Jewish Americans"? We celebrate Tinseltown's Jewish roots because they are a vibrant part of Americana. Though the scions of Italy also were present at the creation of Hollywood - and made equally witty and intellectually profound contributions - few members of the chattering class or the general public are aware of such a seminal role.

Instead, she chose to flatter the filmic malefactors of anti-Italian intolerance. One wonders how any Italian-American organization could have contributed funds to such a malodorous enterprise.

It is both a travesty and an outrage that the heirs of Virgil, Dante, Luigi Pirandello, Rudolph Valentino, Vincente Minnelli and Frank Capra are now best remembered as the dumbed-down spawn of Tony Soprano or Vito Corleone.

Rosario A. Iaconis

Editor's note: The writer is vice chairman of the Italic Institute of America, which promotes Italian culture and is based in Floral Park.

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opletb5557735jan31,0,7824064.story

Rudolph Valentino: Hollywood's FIRST Male Sex Symbol in "The Sheik"

"The Sheik" established Rudolph Valentino (Rodolfo Alfonso Piero Filiberto Gugliemi-May 6, 1895-August 23, 1926) ) as Hollywood's first male sex symbol with his playful treatment of the character, that captivated female audiences. It came on the heels of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", and preceded "Blood and Sand" and "Son of the Sheik".

His untimely end at 31, propelled him to iconic status, with over 100,000 people attempted to attend his funeral, and annual devotionals to his burial site. Valentino was one of the first to experience the same kind of fame as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_Valentino

Clips from 'The Sheik': His performance can seem campy by modern standards, but The Sheik made a matinee idol out of its star. Two outtakes: (1) 'If I choose, I can make you love me.', and (2) 'His hand is so large for an Arab.'

Other Material also available at the NPR Web Site.

Valentino's Sheik: An 'Other' Made to Swoon Over

NPR - National Public Radio by Neda Ulaby February 4, 2008

Italian-born actor Rudolph Valentino poses in costume in The Sheik.

In 1921, a silent film transported American audiences to a mysterious, faraway place - and introduced an exotic, erotic character to millions of fans. ("Son of the Sheik" in 1926)

The Sheik starred a smoldering Italian immigrant named Rudolph Valentino and featured a title character who bore little resemblance to the venerated Arab leaders commonly known as sheiks. Instead, the character was drawn from the pages of a best-selling romance novel by the wife of a British farmer.

Written in 1919, Edith Maude Hull's fictional The Sheik inspired a whole subgenre of desert romance, in which hot, swarthy Arabs kidnap reckless white women.

Valentino's playful treatment of the character captivated female audiences and established him as Hollywood's first male sex symbol. Mary Brewer Barkley, who was 13 years old when the film was released, recalls newspaper reports that young women were running off to the Middle East in the hope of being abducted by handsome Arabs.

"[Valentino] had this intent look and you would just say, 'Oh my,'" Barkley remembers. "And his hair was so pretty!"

The Sheik was less concerned with authenticity than with perpetrating a fantasy of sexual extremes; in doing so, it promoted stereotypes of the Middle East as a decadent, primitive culture.

"It sort of advanced the mythology of the Middle East as a place where [women] were either walking a hundred feet behind the men, or [were] just lounging around in the harem, waiting for the men to beckon them," says Jack Shaheen, a professor who studies Arabs in popular culture.

Though the movie actually softens the novel's rape scenes, both versions end with the proud beauty madly in love with her captor. In the 1920s, that part was just fine. But since a white woman was not supposed to end up with an Arab, a final twist in the movie reveals that the Sheik is, in fact, adopted. By blood, he's the son of an English gentleman and a Spanish lady, which Shaheen says, helps to create an ethnically acceptable happy ending that underscores Western ideas about the right to empire and superior masculinity.

Shaheen says that he hadn't seen a feature film challenging the notions of love and ethnicity put forth in The Sheik until three years ago, when "Yes, " with Joan Allen, was released.

"I think it's interesting to point out it took nearly a century to see a man from the Middle East honestly loving an American woman," says Shaheen.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18602260

Italians, American, British Youth - Too Much Video Fun To Consider Women's Ticking Clocks?

While Kate Muit thinks that Italian men stay at home with their mother; the British and Americans want to lead a life like an endless episode of Friends.. Nielsen Media Research surveyed American men aged 18 to 34 and found half of not-so-young men spend nearly three hours a day video gaming.

Muir, from a personal selfish standpoint, (and not touching on women's obsession with shopping) states:

Perhaps there’s nothing to complain of about this man-teen era, unless you’re a woman with a ticking biological clock, waiting for someone " anyone " to grow up. (Which means, give up your freedom, become entirely selfless, put the woman on a pedestal, allow a woman to satisfy her "maternal instincts", and have assume all kind of unfun responsibilities, and being a provider) :)

As the academic Kay S. Hymowitz writes in the latest edition of City Journal, the young man "lingers " happily" in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance.

Perhaps the man-teen’s retreat into a fantasy world of titans and totty merely reflects his lack of comfort in the real world, where daring, muscle and aggression (brutes and harassment) are no longer valued. (by who, and how did it get that way?) And how different is it from women slipping off into chick lit? If there is a crisis in traditional masculinity, perhaps the online game world provides a safe haven. Computer gaming offers a convenient escape from the domestic into the masculine, just as, last century, the gentlemen’s and working men’s clubs did.

For Hymowitz she was talking about an "escape" from the wife/home. Muir is talking about guys reluctant to get into that "trap" Yes, that does present a problem with women with "ticking clocks" .And the answer????

And maybe, they are being 25 cent psychologists, and should recognize that sometimes 'fun' is REALLY just "Fun"!!!! Nothing more complicated.

The Dark Ages

From The Times

Kate Muir

February 4, 2008

At my college evening class last week, two intelligent, thirtysomething suited guys " solicitors or managers to judge from their e-mail addresses " were talking about their new Xbox 360s and what transcendent joy was to be had from them. I eavesdropped more attentively. Apparently, in Gears of War, the smallest details of the largest battles were crystal clear, in widescreen! Surely they were discussing their children’s computer games? Xboxes are toys, after all.

Further chat revealed the professional gentlemen were childless. The Xboxes were toys for very big boys indeed. Worried, I went unto Google and retrieved this trend for you: Nielsen Media Research surveyed American men aged 18 to 34 and found 48 per cent of them had used a games console recently, and on average, it was for 2 hours 43 minutes per day. Yes, half of not-so-young men spend nearly three hours a day gaming.

Can this be true? Are British chaps really spending their life outside work alone in their bedrooms or living rooms with games on 50in LCD TVs? I assumed that, after adolescence, young men put away childish things and played amateur football, got amusingly drunk, instigated punch-ups, watched Big Brother or ineffectually pursued women. Yet here were men holding down serious careers by day, but infantalised by night in a virtual world.

I quizzed my sons, aged 10 and 13. "Are fathers playing these games alone, without their offspring as an excuse?" I asked. "Yes," they said. “They buy them for their kids, then play them themselves." One banker dad they knew was always on Age of Empires and Civilization. As for the Wiis in other people’s houses " well, you couldn’t get the adults off them, they said. Particularly the golf.

It’s worse than grown men building Hornby 00-gauge train sets in their attics, or constructing battles with painted toy soldiers. Only a few men did that, in secret, but now everyone is celebrating their inner geek.

Now, I recognise the amusement to be had strutting your stuff to Guitar Hero III and I know what’s in the Age of Empires, Second Life, World of Warcraft- type on-and-offline games, having been bored rigid over people’s shoulders, but what of the "mature"-rated video games? I’ve heard of the rude ones, such as Leisure Suit Larry, where Larry’s object is to divest himself of his leisure suit. Or the panting that goes on in the "Hot Coffee" patch in Grand Theft Auto. But what of the solicitor’s and manager’s favourite game, Gears of War.?

Off to the Istillplaygames.com website. Fans of Gears of War write of the non-stop assault course: "The bayonet is dead " long live its replacement: the baby chainsaw." And: "The sounds of the Locusts crying out as your chainsaw rips through them is one of the most satisfying things I’ve heard." Oh, yes. Look closely from now on at your solicitor and check for the madness in his red, screen-dry eyes.

Who knew that the generation who first became addicted to Pac-Man and Super Mario would turn out to be boys who never grew up? Man-teens sitting before their kiddy consoles like huge manatees.

But the games addiction is only a symptom of the extended childhood of the 21st-century hominid. Marriage, families and children are being delayed for as long as possible, replaced by conspiratorial flatmates and microwaved gastropub ready meals. Italian men stay at home with their mother; the British and Americans want to lead a life like an endless episode of Friends.

Perhaps there’s nothing to complain of about this man-teen era, unless you’re a woman with a ticking biological clock, waiting for someone "anyone " to grow up. As the academic Kay S. Hymowitz writes in the latest edition of City Journal, the young man "lingers " happily " in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in the unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but, in fact, it is to the early 21st century what adolescence was to the early 20th: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import."

Perhaps the man-teen’s retreat into a fantasy world of titans and totty merely reflects his lack of comfort in the real world, where daring, muscle and aggression are no longer valued. And how different is it from women slipping off into chick lit? If there is a crisis in traditional masculinity, perhaps the online game world provides a safe haven. Computer gaming offers a convenient escape from the domestic into the masculine, just as, last century, the gentlemen’s and working men’s clubs did.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article3304266.ece

"Ciao Bella" Iranian learns Italian Seduction Secrets From Teammates- Sassily Humorous

"Ciao Bella" (Swedish, Italian, English, Farsi dialogue). Mustafa, is a Swede born in Iran. A bright, athletic 16-year-old from a solid middle-class background, doesn't feel totally comfortable in the world of his parents or his peers, although he does an excellent job of masking it.

Dumped by his blonde g.f. during pic's opening moments, Mustafa frequently overhears casually racist remarks such as "he's one of them."

When Mustafa travels to Gothenburg's summer youth soccer tournament with his high school team, a clever series of events results in him playing on the Italian side. The confident, attractive Italians (portrayed as sex objects in playful locker-room scenes that reverse the way women are usually depicted) attract gaggles of gorgeous Swedish girls. Renamed Massimo by teammate Enrico (hilarious), Mustafa is transformed into a Latin lover, and one of pic's funniest bits involves Enrico demonstrating Italian seduction secrets.

Working-class beauty Linnea gravitates toward Massimo's suave manners and sense of style. For Mustafa, it's a dream come true, so he's forced to maintain his fraudulent identity and carry out his courtship in English.

Strong playing by leads and, the entire ensemble gives the situations a realistic intensity and winning charm. Likewise, tight script sustains a sassily humorous tone while managing to address serious issues including national stereotyping and an increasingly sexualized youth environment.

Ciao Bella - (Sweden)

Variety By Alissa Simon Monday February 4, 2008

Debuting helmer Mani Masserat-Aghat's delightful romantic comedy "Ciao Bella" takes on Swedish attitudes toward immigrants and foreigners with a pitch-perfect story about young love, sex, ethnicity and fear of being an outsider. Cut from the same cloth as smart coming-of-agers such as "Bend It Like Beckham," with plenty of English dialogue, the film should speak to international arthouse auds of all ages. However, frank but not graphic sexual content and open attitude toward abortion could limit travel in some regions. Pic opened in Sweden during late summer 2007, drawing strong reviews and respectable box office.

Like director Masserat-Aghat, protagonist Mustafa (Poyan Karimi, terrific) is a Swede born in Iran. A bright, athletic 16-year-old from a solid middle-class background, he doesn't feel totally comfortable in the world of his parents or his peers, although he does an excellent job of masking it.

Dumped by his blonde g.f. (who euphemistically tells him she wants someone "more prominent") during pic's opening moments, Mustafa frequently overhears casually racist remarks such as "he's one of them."

When Mustafa travels to Gothenburg's summer youth soccer tournament with his high school team, a clever series of events results in him playing on the Italian side. The confident, attractive Italians (portrayed as sex objects in playful locker-room scenes that reverse the way women are usually depicted) attract gaggles of gorgeous Swedish girls. Renamed Massimo by teammate Enrico (Oliver Ingrosso, hilarious), Mustafa is transformed into a Latin lover, and one of pic's funniest bits involves Enrico demonstrating Italian seduction secrets.

Working-class beauty Linnea (Chanelle Lindelle, poignant) gravitates toward Massimo's suave manners and sense of style. For Mustafa, it's a dream come true, so he's forced to maintain his fraudulent identity and carry out his courtship in English.

Strong playing by leads and, indeed, the entire ensemble of young actors gives the situations a realistic intensity and winning charm. Likewise, tight script sustains a sassily humorous tone while managing to address serious issues including national stereotyping and an increasingly sexualized youth environment.

Bright, natural-light lensing by Andreas Lennartsson emphasizes a multiethnic Sweden rarely seen onscreen and incorporates documentary footage of young people at the actual Gothia Cup.

Pacey editing, spot-on costuming and an unobtrusive score round out strong tech package.

A Gotafilm production, in co-production with Film I Vast, Sandrew Metronome. (International sales: Gotafilm, Gothenburg.) Produced by Olle Wirenhed. Executive producer, Christer Nilson. Directed by Mani Maserrat-Aghat. Screenplay, Jens Jonsson, from an idea by Maserrat-Aghat.

With Poyan Karimi, Chanelle Lindell, Oliver Ingrosso, Fridrika Tham, Arash Bolouri, Hussein Zazem, Jimmy Lindstrom.
(Swedish, Italian, English, Farsi dialogue)

Camera (color), Andreas Lennartsson; editor, Kristin Grundstrom; music, Martin Willert; art director, Teresa Beale; costume designer, Bara Pertman; sound (DTS), Andreas Franck; casting, Rolands Herna, David Fardhar. Reviewed at Gothenburg Film Festival, Feb. 2, 2008. (Also in Berlin Film Festival -- Generation 14plus.) Running time: 86 MIN

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117936056.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

"Super Mario" Do Parents Know What Kids are Watching? Drugs, Violence and Bigotry !!

Parents generally don't like to encourage their children to immerse themselves in the evils of the world. However, when drug indulgence and racism is pre-packaged in a seemingly family-friendly video game scenario, parents haven't questioned it. Somebody should.!!

Nintendo's "Super Mario" features the drug super powered Mario and his equally ludicrous and offensive brother Luigi.

"It's a-me, a-Mario!" it isn't difficult to see the bigotry layered throughout the Mario universe. I feel it is beyond unnecessary to frivolously inject the "a" sound between every word Mario says in an attempt to further classify him as an Italian stereotype. Let alone indicate that the character loves pasta and pizza.

While parents complain about the sex and violence seen in the "Grand Theft Auto", they seem oblivious to drug use and bigotry in "Super Mario"

People I Know

The Retriever Weekly University of Maryland Baltimore's County Newspaper By Charlie Griggs
Senior Staff Writer Tuesday February 5, 2008

Parents generally don't like to expose their children to the evils of the world. You will rarely encounter a parent who enjoys taking their kids to Satanic rituals or explaining to them the benefits of loathing those who are different than you. However, when hate is pre-packaged in a seemingly family-friendly video game scenario, parents don't question it. So I will.

Question: How many innocent children were corrupted this past holiday season by the sinister messages delivered via Super Mario Galaxy? Answer: Too many.

In Mario's first appearance back in 1981's Donkey Kong, he was only known as "Jumpman" This character was loved by millions in arcades all over the world. He was fun, quirky, fought giant monkeys and saved a princess. However, this image as the lovable hero soon diminished as Mario became an amalgam of Italian stereotypes and an infallibly positive influence on the drug market.

Throughout the course of Mario's video games he has been known to take mushrooms, allowing himself to power up. This habit, which today is referred to as shrooming, has proven to be nothing but detrimental in real life. While Mario gets bigger and stronger and acquires double health (a whopping six health bars in Galaxy) these side effects have been disproved time and again in real life. The memory disruption, headaches, and bad trips are never referenced in Mario's universe, in fact, his repetitive use of the psychedelic drug purports the opposite of these negative consequences.

If the pro-drug message that Mario's video games send to children isn't bad enough, he's embedding the element of racism deep into their minds as well. With such clever catchphrases as "It's a-me, a-Mario!" it isn't difficult to see the bigotry layered throughout the Mario universe. I feel it is beyond unnecessary to frivolously inject the "a" sound between every word Mario says in an attempt to further classify him as an Italian stereotype. Let alone indicate that the character loves pasta and pizza, an idea conjured up for the television show and that Nintendo liked so much they inserted it into their games.

While parents complain about the sex and violence seen in the Grand Theft Auto video games, they completely overlook their child's corruption at the hands of Nintendo and its discriminatory icon Mario. A character whose sinful indulgences and intolerant representations are creating more and more narrow-minded drug abusing youth every day.

So, the next time you turn on your electronic gaming console, your Wii or Nintendo 64 or whatever, remember that you are indirectly funding racism and illicit narcotics. Please take the time to think about your decision to play any game featuring Mario or his equally ludicrous and offensive brother Luigi. There are better things you can put your time and effort into, like improving the community or saving Darfur. This time Mario's gone too far. An entire galaxy rampant with red and green mushrooms with the proprietor of bigotry himself at the head of the realm. I won't stand for it and hopefully you won't either. Make sure you know what your kids are playing.

http://www.retrieverweekly.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=2911&format=html

Super Bowl? In Italy? Who Cares!! The US Elections, NOW You Have Their Attention !!

Italians showed a remarkable indifference to the Super Bowl, and could not tell you the teams and the city they represented.

People in America are more likely to watch cricket than Italians are to watch the Super Bowl.The only recognizable name was Tom Petty. and the Heartbreakers. Italians love American music. They just have no clue what the lyrics mean.

In Italy, people know every American presidential candidate, from Clinton and Obama to Huckabee and McCain.

Many people in Rome care about American politics more than Americans. Someone has to tell these Italians to get their priorities straight.

Interestingly, the Piepoli Institute in Italy was hired by the satellite channel Sky 24 News,to conduct a poll of Italians, and while Italians showed a preference for Clinton by a slight margin of 39% to 32% for Obama. However, 59% believed Obama would get the Democratic nomination.

The poll also found that 51% of center-right voters would prefer a Democratic for the next American president, while 15% supported a Republican and 27% had not made any decision. (See the second article)

Super Bowl? In Italy? Not a Chance

By Matt Kiebus
Columnist

Loyola College Greyhound

Baltimore,MD,USA
February 5, 2008

ROME -- The Super Bowl has already been played; the NFL season is over. This frees up Sundays for men everywhere to spend quality time with girlfriends and significant others, and unfortunately, it no longer gives people a viable reason to drink at 1 p.m. The gridiron is left dormant for the next few months.

Here in Italy, the locals could care less. The only recognizable name in Phoenix, Ariz., last Sunday was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Italians love American music. They just have no clue what the lyrics mean.

At home, people of all shapes, colors and creeds got together to watch the one thing that binds (and perhaps defines) us as Americans -- The Super Bowl.

That is what I used to believe and hold dear: Most people in the United States take the Super Bowl more seriously than their respective church doctrines. "It is more than a game, it is an event," we are told.The pre-game analysis consists of all-hair and all-wardrobe teams. Stuart Scott's eye starts to bother you more than ever. Chris "Boomer" Berman is way too excited. The Fox crew is making fun of Terry Bradshaw's illiteracy. The CBS crew is mocking Shannon Sharpe's speech impediment. Tiki Barber is pouting.

And I'm missing it all, the wonderful pageantry that is the Super Bowl.

In Europe, and specifically in Italy, people know every American presidential candidate, from Clinton and Obama to Huckabee and McCain. However, no one could pick Tom Brady out of a lineup of one-legged dwarfs. Many people in Rome care about American politics more than Americans. Someone has to tell these Italians to get their priorities straight.

The quest for the Italian football fan in Rome was nothing more than a complete failure. Whenever I asked the question, "Who do you want to win the Super Bowl?" I received the same perplexed look, as if I asked if I could've kidnapped their daughter.

From the Metro to the bus system, from Italian teachers to pizzeria workers, the answers came back the same: "Who?" … "What?" … and the ever-popular, "Why?"

No one knew the game was on a Sunday. Tom Brady is known as Gisele's boyfriend.

No one knows the rules. No one cares to learn them.

After unscientifically polling Italian teachers, host families, Metro workers and bus co-passengers alike, I came to the following conclusion: People in America are more likely to watch cricket than Italians are to watch the Super Bowl.

Not even the Manning family's witty commercials translate over the Atlantic Ocean. Manning? The gap in communication is larger than the one between Michael Strahan's teeth.

By the way, the game ended around 4:30 a.m. over here. No one was interested in staying up until dawn to watch grown men in tight pants and extensive pads release their childhood frustrations on each other.

Nevertheless, I held out some hope that Rome, one of the most well-known cities in the world, would at least show some interest in America's most famous sporting event, especially with a glut of out-of-towners like myself scattered here and there. I can only imagine what the people of Tuscany would've thought if I was there on Sunday evening. In case you don't know, Tuscany is home to wine and beautiful hills. Not exactly the best atmosphere for American football.

You will be hard pressed to meet an Italian who knows the names of the cities the teams are from, let alone the names of the teams themselves. However, I suspect if an Italian were to watch the Super Bowl, they would probably watch it for the same reason as those girls you go to respective Super Bowl parties with: the halftime show and the commercials. Both are worthless. Sort of like trying to watch American football in Italy.

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http://www.loyolagreyhound.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticlePrinterFriendly&uStory_id=9fa2ced0-7ffc-4729-bb6e-7dbbcbf71c47

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ITALIANS PREFER CLINTON BUT SEE OBAMA WINNING NOMINATION
ANSA - Rome, February 4, 2008

Although more Italians, if given the chance, would vote for Hillary Clinton, the vast majority believe that Barack Obama will be the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States, according to a new poll.

Carried out by the Piepoli Institute for the satellite channel Sky 24 News, the poll found that over 40% of Italians
are very interested in the American primaries and 56% liked the system, while 30% do not.

Among the 504 adults quizzed in the poll, 58% said that they would vote for a Democratic candidate in the November presidential elections, with 39% indicating a preference for Clinton and 32% for Obama.

However, 59% believed Obama would get the Democratic nomination because of the backing the Illinois senator has received from the family of the late president John F. Kennedy.

The poll also found that 51% of center-right voters would prefer a Democratic for the next American president, while
15% supported a Republican and 27% had not made any decision.

According to Sky 24 News director Emilio Carelli, what Italians like about the American primary process was that it
was ''an instrument of direct democratic participation''. ''Having clear and accepted rules is the foundation of
American democracy. And the race for president, while at times very harsh, always takes place in an atmosphere of
mutual respect,'' he added.

Italians' Contribution to Asia Seminar

How fascinating I never even gave it much thought.

Pondicherry University in Pondicherry, India, is located in a jurisdiction spread over the Union Territories of Puducherry, Lakshadweep and Andaman and Nicobar Islands.area, covering most of the southern tip of India. Founded in 1985 by the Government of India, it is an affiliating University with It has 25,000 students in its 57 affiliated colleges in addition to another 27,000 students in the distance education mode (Internet)

Seminar on Italians' Contribution to Asia to be Held

Chennai Online

Chennai,India
February 4, 2008

Contributions made by Italians to India and other Asian countries would come up for discussion at a one-day international seminar here on February 8.

Academics from Italy, Japan, Sri Lanka and different parts of the country are expected to attend the seminar, a release from the Pondicherry University said here today.

The seminar, jointly organised by Asian Christian Studies in the University and the Saint Francis Movement, Italy, would focus on the contributions made by Italians as merchants, architects, scientists, educationists, anthropologists, missionaries and cultural delegates in the 16th to 18th centuries to India and other Asian countries.

Vice Chancellor of the University J A K Tareen would inaugurate the meeting.

http://www.chennaionline.com/colnews/newsitem.asp?NEWSID=%7BA7CE365C-A21D-4D0F-973C-BB664F7DD753%7D&CATEGORYNAME=NATL

Carnevale, began with Romans, then to Italians, to Paris, then to New Orleans, and Rio

Carnival starts around two weeks before Ash Wednesday and ends on Shrove Tuesday (Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras ), the day before Ash Wednesday.

The history of Carnevale and the Mardi Gras began with the Ancient Romans who celebrated the Lupercalia, a circus like festival not entirely unlike the Mardi Gras we are familiar with today, in mid February. When Rome embraced Christianity, the early Church fathers decided it was better to incorporate certain aspects of pagan rituals into the new faith rather than attempt to abolish them altogether. Carnival became a period of abandon and merriment that preceded the penance of Lent, thus giving a Christian interpretation to the ancient custom.

The Carnevale became important particularly in Venice and Viareggio,Tuscany, for the last 800 years.

The Parisians,then adopted The Carnevale and Mardi Gras in the Middle Ages, who seem not to pay it much regard currently, but exported it to America in 1699 with the French explorer Iberville to the New Orleans area.

The modern Brazilian Carnival finds its roots in Rio de Janeiro in the 1845s, when the city's bourgeoisie imported the practice of holding balls and masquerade parties from Paris. It originally mimicked the European form of the festival, over time acquiring elements derived from African and Amerindian cultures.In the late 19th century, the parade of groups of costumed people through the streets playing music and dancing, including both a percussion or music group and an entourage of revellers, was introduced.

Carnevale

ItaliansRUs

by Anthony Parente

Febuary 4, 2008

The Carnevale is one of the long standing traditions of the city of Venice. There is some question as to when the first Carnevale actually took place. It was either during the 11th century when Venice struck a deal that made them one of the most powerful maritime cities in the World causing the people to celebrate, or it was during the 12th century when the Repubblica della Serenissima won its independence and people rejoiced in San Marco square drinking and dancing.

No matter when the first Carnevale actually took place this event has turned into one of the greatest festivities in the world. One of the great traditions associated with the Carnevale is the costumes and in particular the masks worn by the people. Masks became such an integral part that the artisans that created them were even recognized with their own guild in 1436.

Throughout the history of the Carnevale many masks have been worn. Some masks only existed briefly and can only be found in art work. While others have passed the test of time and have been worn for centuries with some slight modifications. Masks can range from your favorite pet to aliens to figures of the Renaissance period. Of all the types of masks & costumes the Arlecchino, Pantalone, Pulcinella and El Dotor seem to be the most popular.

The Carnevale is a great opportunity for people to put on a costume and forget who they are. There are no worries of social class. You can be who ever you want to and enjoy the festivities to the fullest. The rich could mingle with the poor and in some cases men & women could go around and have sexual interludes with whomever they encountered without ever revealing their true identity.

If you are in Venice during the Carnevale and you are in need of a mask don't panic. You should be able to find them in almost every corner you visit or store you shop in. If you can't attend and want to get one for a souvenir you can try La Fondazione or Masks of Venice.

In recent years there has been a revival in the creation of masks, which has carried over to the people of Venice and once again the Carnevale has returned to one of the greatest festivals in the world.

http://www.italiansrus.com/articles/carnevale.htm

"Argitalians" making Italy a Growing Force in Rugby

"Argitalians" are Argentineans with Italian Ancestry.

For a long time Rugby was a secondary sport in Italy , although last year’s fourth-place finish in the RBS Six Nations Championship was their best so far.

But now with the ability for Argentineans of Italian ancestry able to secure Dual Passports so that now, Sergio Parisse, the new captain, Martin Castrogiovanni, Santiago Dellape, Ramiro Pez: are all key players in the Italy side, all of whom have opted to represent the Azzurri rather than their native country.

Old Alliance Bearing Fruit for The Italians

The Azzuri owe much to the might of their Argentine contingent

John Westerby

From The Times

February 2, 2008

The spectacular progress made by Argentina has been one of the happiest rugby stories of the past few years, but the contribution made by Argentine players to the development of another emerging rugby nation is often overlooked. While Italy have been growing as a force in European rugby " last year’s fourth-place finish in the RBS Six Nations Championship was their best so far " they have been bolstered by players of Argentine origin. Of the 30 members of their World Cup squad, no fewer than seven could be classified as "Argitalians"

Sergio Parisse, the new captain, Martin Castrogiovanni, Santiago Dellape, Ramiro Pez: these are all key players in the Italy side, all of whom have opted to represent the Azzurri rather than their native country. Most are playing on European passports gained through an Italian grandparent or, like Castrogiovanni, a great-grandparent. "Guys of my age in Argentina know that if they come from an Italian family, they have another option in international rugby," Castrogiovanni, the Leicester prop, said.

The backdrop to this exodus is provided by the powerful historical ties that bind the countries. In the late 1800s, many poor Italian families crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of the better life promised by Argentina’s booming agrarian economy. The flow of immigrants gained momentum again during the Second World War, which was when Castrogiovanni’s great-grandfather left Italy for Argentina.

Nowadays, when travelling in Europe, Argentinians are often told that they speak Spanish with an Italian accent. The reverse is probably true for the Argitalians in Italy’s Six Nations squad: their Italian is inflected with a twang of South American Spanish. The lack of a professional game in Argentina has led them to pursue careers in Europe, but they remain South Americans at heart.

“The decision wasn’t easy," Castrogiovanni said. "When I left home to play for Calvisano, Argentina were picking me for their Under-21s, but Italy wanted me to play in their national team. Some people called me a traitor, but I am happy with the decision." Born in Parana, north of Buenos Aires, Castrogiovanni now has 49 caps for Italy.

Alex Moreno, his Leicester team-mate, played three times for Argentina before moving to Europe and being head-hunted by Italy for the 1999 World Cup. In doing so, he followed the path trodden by Diego Dominguez, the most famous of the Argitalians. Dominguez, who had an Italian grandmother, won two caps for Argentina before playing in three World Cups for Italy. "When Diego went to Italy, he started calling all the guys with Italian passports," Moreno said. "That was where it all started, really."

Where Dominguez led, many have followed, but the mass migration may soon slow down. The Italian Rugby Federation is restricting its Under-19 and Under-21 teams to players raised in Italy. It may be more likely to succeed if the Pumas are accepted into the Tri-Nations, especially if that leads to the development of a professional structure in Argentina. Until then, the Pumas’ fans will have to be content with cheering on the men wearing the blue of Italy.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/rugby/article3288654.ece

Italian Soccer Champs to Star in "L’allenatore Nel Pallone 2"

Francesco Totti, Alessandro del Piero, Gianluigi Buffon, Luca Toni and Gennaro Gattuso have all taken on parts in "L’allenatore Nel Pallone 2", a sequel to an 80s comedy which features the adventures of a hapless football manager, played by Lino Banfi.

Italians Prove so Natural at Hamming it Up
South Wales Echo
ic Wales - United Kingdom
by Ian Carbis
Feb 1 2008

WHILE David Beckham has left for Hollywood in pursuit of his movie dreams, some of Italy’s World Cup-winning squad have already secured roles in a film.

Francesco Totti, Alessandro del Piero, Gianluigi Buffon, Luca Toni and Gennaro Gattuso have all taken on parts in "L’allenatore Nel Pallone 2".

The film is the sequel to an 80s comedy which features the adventures of a hapless football manager, played by Lino Banfi.

Naturally, they all play themselves, except Totti, who plays a lawyer.

Director Sergio Martino said: "Today’s players are like divas, so this is why it’s easy for them to act in front of the camera."
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/footballnation/football-columnists/2008/02/01/italians-prove-so-natural-at-hamming-it-up-91466-20423812/

WARNING: Jonah Goldberg is slightly Right of Attila the Hun. :) Some of what he says is accurate and illuminating, but beware.

WARNING: Jonah Goldberg is slightly Right of Attila the Hun. :) Some of what he says is accurate and illuminating, but beware.

The term "Fascism" is used by lIberals and Conservatives vs their foes, basically just as a code word for "evil." usually having no Idea as to what it's principles were, and that FDR built his "New Deal" on the concepts first instituted in Italy by Mussolini, and that Bill Clinton. and Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, and particularly John Edwards with his populism, follow Mussolini basic theories, albeit with more hugs than mugs.

One must keep in mind that Mussolini's father was a Communist, as was Mussolini, who had a Communist Mistress, who was a in a position to advance his career. Later Mussolini repudiated the Communists, and became a SOCIALIST, but a Right Wing Socialist who fought tooth and nail with the Right wing SOCIALISTS. The Left wing Socialists attempted to discredit Mussolini by labeling him a "Right Winger"

If you don't read this you will NEVER be able to adequately debate the subject. From the Salon and Washington Post.

"We're All Fascists now"

An interview with conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg, who argues that fascism is left-wing, not right-wing, and that contemporary liberals are fascism's intellectual offspring.

Salon Magazine By Alex Koppelman January 11, 2008

Jan. 11, 2008 | Jonah Goldberg is not a popular man among liberals. The son of Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent who played a pivotal role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he already had that as a strike against him when he began his career as a conservative political commentator in the late 1990s. A writer and blogger for the National Review and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, he's now a frequent target for the mockery of liberal bloggers.

But nothing has inspired the ire of liberals quite like Goldberg's new book, "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." There was the provocative cover, which adds a Hitler mustache to the familiar yellow smiley-face icon. Then there was the book's ever-changing subtitle. Originally "The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton," ...

In the book, Goldberg attempts to convince readers that six decades of conventional wisdom that have placed Italy's Benito Mussolini, fascism on the right side of the ideological spectrum are wrong, and that fascism is really a phenomenon of the left. Goldberg also attributes fascist rhetoric and tactics to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and describes the New Deal's descendants, modern American liberals, as carriers of this liberal-fascist DNA. In a sense, "We're All Fascists Now," as Goldberg puts it in one of his chapter titles. Salon spoke with Goldberg by phone.

What's the book about?

It's a revisionist history. It's an attempt to reconfigure, or I would say correct, the standard understanding of the political and ideological context that frames most of the ideological debates that we have had since, basically, World War II. There's this idea that the further right you go the closer you get to Nazism and fascism, and the further left you go the closer you get to decency and all good things, or at least having the right intentions in your heart.

For 60 years most historians have been putting fascism on the right, or conservative, side of the political spectrum. What are you able to see that they weren't?

There are a lot of historians who get fascism basically right. There are a lot of historians who don't. I think the Marxists have been part and parcel of a basic propaganda campaign for a very long time, but there are plenty of historians who understand what fascism was and are actually quite honest about it.

To sort of start the story, the reason why we see fascism as a thing of the right is because fascism was originally a form of right-wing socialism. Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist, he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I.

Originally being a fascist meant you were a right-wing socialist, and the problem is that we've incorporated these European understandings of things and then just dropped the socialist. In the American context fascists get called right-wingers even though there is almost no prominent fascist leader -- starting with Mussolini and Hitler -- who if you actually went about and looked at their economic programs, or to a certain extent their social program, where you wouldn't locate most if not all of those ideas on the ideological left in the American context.

You write about how historians have had difficulty defining fascism. How did you come up with the definition of fascism that you use in the book?

Well, yeah, it's very hard to come up with a definition of fascism. And one of the things that I've found that was kind of amazing in this process, especially since the book has come out, is how people can't let go of fascism as a morally loaded term for evil. [George] Orwell says fascism has come to mean anything not desirable as early as 1946, and it is amazing how it is so ingrained in our political psychology to see "fascist" basically just as a code word for "evil."

So anyway, I'm sorry -- my definition of fascism I get in large chunks from Eric Voegelin, the political philosopher. He wrote this book "The Political Religions," and I see fascism as a political religion. That doesn't mean I think there's some book, like a bible, that if you read it you will become a convert to this political religion. Rather I think it is a religious impulse that resides in all of us -- left, right, black, white, tall, short -- to seek unity in all things, to believe that we need to all work together to go past any of our disagreements and that the state needs to be, almost simply as a pragmatic matter, the pace-setter, the enforcer of this cult of unity. That is what I believe fascism is.

Related to your definition, at least as I read the book, was something that's been controversial about it. Especially because of one of the earlier iterations of the subtitle, ["Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods"] there's a perception that your argument comes down to things like both Nazis and liberals being proponents of organic food. Is that how it works? Because the Nazis liked dogs and I like dogs, I'm a Nazi?

No, no. I mean, I try to reject that kind of thing ... I don't believe that liberals are Nazis; I believe that if Nazism came to the United States it is entirely possible that liberals would be at the forefront of the battle to stop it. So would conservatives. I'm not trying to do any argument ad Hitlerum in this book.

But what I am trying to do, at least in the chapter that you're talking about, is show how -- [take] Robert Proctor, who wrote an award-winning, widely esteemed book called "I think we need to remember that something can be fascistic ... and not be evil"

Along those lines, you write, "What is fascist is the notion that in an organic national community, the individual has no right not to be healthy; and the state therefore has the obligation to force us to be healthy for our own good." And you cite the example of a state legislator who wants to ban using iPods when crossing the street. Under that definition, how are, say, seat-belt laws, helmet laws, laws against drunk driving, the drinking age, all that, not fascistic?

First of all, again, I think we need to remember that something can be fascistic just like something can be socialistic and not be evil. It can just be wrong ... And so I think you can make the argument that a lot of the things you cite are fascistic in one sense, but that doesn't mean they're automatically bad ideas. The autobahn was fascistic -- that doesn't mean that we should ban highways.

That said, a lot of the things you listed, if I heard you right, are laws for preventing people from harming others. And that is a legitimate function of government: to protect the general welfare, to protect people's privacy and property and lives. That is perfectly within the Anglo-American tradition of constitutional law and all the rest. But where you get into scarier territory is when you have people saying that you can't smoke in your own home or that you can't eat certain foods or that because of the healthcare system that we have and that Democrats want to expand, since harming yourself costs the taxpayer money, you have no right to harm yourself.

I mentioned seat-belt laws, which are really aimed at the individual who's supposed to be wearing the seat belt. And on the right, there's the Terri Schiavo debate.

Yeah. Well, but the Terri Schiavo debate is an interesting example. The Nazis were grotesque euthanizers. Long before they went to the Jews they started exterminating the mentally ill, the enfeebled, what they called "useless bread gobblers," people who couldn't contribute to the society. And there are all sorts of criticisms that I think are legitimate that you can aim at pro-lifers, but you can not argue that pro-lifers are somehow Nazi-like in their support of the pro-life cause, because it is exactly contrary to the way the Nazis operated to believe that every life is sacred.

You write, "[Liberalism] is definitely totalitarian -- or 'holistic,' if you prefer -- in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists."

Couldn't that just as easily be said of the American right? You've got, certainly, conservatives judging entertainment from political perspectives; I remember discussion on [National Review group blog] the Corner of the 2006 Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl through a political lens. There were "Freedom Fries" and boycotts of French food and wine. And, I mean, your wife worked for [former Attorney General] John Ashcroft, so you know that on the right, sex can certainly be political.

I will first stipulate right upfront that I agree with you that there are lots of places on the right where this is so, and I don't like that stuff either ... That said, I don't think that the equation between liberalism and conservatism goes as far as you would like to take it. You know, you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on.

I don't have any problem with liberals or conservatives criticizing stuff that goes on in the popular culture ... [I]t's when you want to dragoon the state into these things, everything from hate crimes to these early interventions in childhood. You read "It Takes a Village" and Hillary [Clinton] declares that basically we're in a crisis from the moment we're born and that justifies the helping professions from breaking into the nuclear family at the earliest possible age.

You have a lot of this stuff on the right, I agree. [George W.] Bush had his marriage counseling stuff that he wanted to propose, I didn't like that. I think Ashcroft gets a very bad rap, but one of the things I did not like was him basically having this philosophy that since the federal government was an agent for a left-wing agenda that therefore it should be an agent for a right-wing agenda. I agree with you to that extent, that that stuff is bad, and it constitutes a kind of right-wing progressivism that I really do not like and I see in people like Mike Huckabee and I see to a certain extent in compassionate conservatism, as I discuss at the end of the book.

You write about militarism being central to fascism, and a militaristic strain remaining in today's liberalism -- the war on cancer, the war on drugs, the War on Poverty. Why include the war on drugs formulation with liberalism? It was Richard Nixon who declared it, then it withered under Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan really brought it back and was the drug warrior.

I think that's probably a fair criticism. But I should start at the beginning ... What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization ... That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They're not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they're still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it's all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that's what I'm getting at.

As for the war on drugs part, I think you make a perfectly fine point, except I would argue that Nixon was not a particularly conservative guy. Measured by today's standards and today's issues, Nixon would be in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Next page: "I think the same thing applies to the radicals in the 1960's ... their actions were fascist"

You've talked about Mussolini remaining on the left and remaining a socialist, and in your book you've got a lot of quotes from the 1920s about that, but I'm wondering -- how does that fit in with what he wrote and said later, especially "The Doctrine of Fascism" in 1932?

I'd need to know specifically what he wrote in "The Doctrine of Fascism." It's been about three years since I've read it.

He says, for example, "Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right ', a Fascist century."

Yeah, I'm perfectly willing to concede there's a lot of stuff Mussolini says, but you've got to remember, by '32, socialism is starting to essentially mean Bolshevism. And if you get too caught up in the labels, rather than the policies, you get yourself into something of a pickle. The right in Europe back then was authoritarian; the right was a kind of right-wing socialism ... What was dead, according to intellectuals across the ideological spectrum, was 19th century classical liberalism.

But in the book you say, "Mussolini remained a socialist until his last breath," and in 1932 he's writing, "When the war ended in 1919 Socialism, as a doctrine, was already dead; it continued to exist only as a grudge," and he also says, "Fascism [is] the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism."

Yeah, but that's the point. Scientific and Marxist socialism, and certainly the people who subscribed to that stuff, was international socialism. That's what made Mussolini a right-winger, because he was against international socialism and he was for national socialism.

But [Mussolini] never gave up on the program of socialism, he never gave up on this idea that the state was the ultimate arbiter and director of economic arrangements. He never gave up on the idea that the rich should be brought under the heel of the state. And there's this funny thing -- we still live with these categories where nationalism and socialism are supposed to be these opposite things. This is sort of a hangover from the days where socialism was defined as international socialism and nationalism was defined as national socialism. But at the end of the day, nationalism and socialism are essentially the same thing. When we nationalize an industry, we're socializing it. And when we say we want socialized medicine, we're saying we want nationalized medicine. We need to understand that that's the context Mussolini was coming from.

And he said a lot of stuff. He was constantly changing his definitions of fascism and talking out of one side of the mouth, then out of the other side of his mouth, largely because of the sort of pragmatic idea he had about politics. But in terms of the policies he implemented and where he came to, once again, at the end of his life, he always clung to the policies that were associated with the left side of the political spectrum.

But he repudiated historical materialism, dialectical materialism.

Yeah. But I think the problem is you get into one of these sort of overly doctrinal, "let's go to the text" approaches where words get confused for things. Stalin never repudiated Marxism, but in almost every way, the checklist for the anatomy of fascism applies to Stalinism ... Saying that you still believe in the dialectic and the cold impersonal forces of history found in "Das Kapital" or "The Communist Manifesto" isn't an abracadabra thing where all of a sudden that means Stalin was really a Marxist or wasn't a fascist in terms of how he actually operated.

And I think the same thing applies to the radicals in the 1960s; quoting the Port Huron Statement doesn't really change what the radicals did in the streets when they were actually fighting, when they were blowing things up, when they were supporting the Black Panthers who wanted to assassinate police, when they were taking over universities. The fact that they said they were in favor of peace and Marxism is almost meaningless when compared to their actual actions, and their actions were fascistic.

What I thought was interesting about your definition of fascism was that nationalism seemed to be missing ... Stanley Payne, whom you quote and say is "considered by many to be the leading living scholar of fascism," in his definition of fascism, the first thing he says is that it's "a form of revolutionary ultra-nationalism." How does that fit with contemporary liberalism, which is often derided as being unpatriotic, anti-American?

That's a perfectly legitimate question. I think classical fascism, the fascism that we all think of when we hear the word "fascism" -- Italy, Germany and to a certain extent Spain, they were ultra-nationalistic, I don't dispute that, I think that is absolutely the case. I just would want to emphasize that that ultra-nationalism comes with an economic program of socialism. There's no such thing as a society undergoing a bout of ultra-nationalism that remains a liberal free-market economy. The two things go together.

I don't say that contemporary liberalism is the direct heir of Italian fascism. I say it's informed by it. It's like its grandniece. It's related, they're in the same family, they share a lot of genetic traits, but they're not the same thing.

I think that you do have nationalism percolating up in the form of left-wing economic populism, the John Edwards branch of liberalism, which is for raising trade barriers. He says time and again, the first thought of every economic decision of a president should be what protects the American middle class, which -- according to some fairly doctrinaire understandings of fascism, it's an ideology of the middle class, nationalist economics and all that kind of stuff -- there's some meat there. So I do think you do see nationalism in that regard, in terms of economics.

Today's liberalism, there's a strong dose of cosmopolitanism to it, which is very much like the H.G. Wells "Liberal Fascism" I was talking about ... These trans-national elites, the Davos crowd who really want to get beyond issues of sovereignty so they can organize and guide the planet on issues like global warming, invest a lot more in the U.N. I think that is much more of the threat coming from establishment liberalism today, but I do think there is a lot of nationalism there too.

Next page: "That's the fascism in Hillary Clinton's vision ... [I]t's hugs and kisses and taking care of boo-boos"

Payne also says that a "fundamental characteristic" of fascism was "extreme insistence on what is now termed male chauvinism"... How does that fit in with contemporary liberalism, especially Hillary Clinton, who was at one point in the subtitle of your book?

But there's another dystopian understanding of the future, which we get from [Aldous] Huxley's "Brave New World." That was a fundamentally American vision ... [T]he vision of the Huxleyian "Brave New World" future is one where everyone's happy. No one's being oppressed, people are walking around chewing hormonal gum, they're having everything done for them, they're being nannied almost into nonexistence. That's the fascism in Hillary Clinton's vision. It's not the Orwellian stamping on a human face thing, it's hugs and kisses and taking care of boo-boos. It is the nanny state. That is a much more benign dystopia than "1984," but for me at least, it's still a dystopia. An unwanted hug is still as tyrannical or as oppressive -- not as oppressive, but an unwanted hug is still oppressive if you can't escape from it ... [O]ne of the biggest distinctions between what I'm calling liberal fascism ... and classical fascism, is that classical fascism was masculine and violently oppressive and today's liberalism is feminine and not oppressive but smothering with kindness.

One of the things Mussolini also wrote in "The Doctrine of Fascism" was, "In rejecting democracy Fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism, the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress." So I'm wondering again how that fits.

I'm not trying to dodge anything, I just would have to look at it in the context and see where he is coming from on that. I do think that there is a fundamentally undemocratic passion running through parts of contemporary liberalism.

Again, invoking lines from something Mussolini wrote and trying to say, "This contradicts what we see in front of us," has some utility, but it can only take you so far when you have to look at what Mussolini actually did. Mussolini was a pragmatist ... Pragmatists say what's useful. They do what's useful. There are other things you could point out in Mussolini's record that are inconvenient for me. For a time he was a free trader, in the very early days of fascism ... What unites, in some sense, fascism and contemporary liberalism and a lot of other isms is their pragmatic sense that the government is smart enough and morally empowered to do good wherever and whenever it sees fit. That is an undemocratic and illiberal perspective.

And you say you're not calling liberals Nazis, but...

I must say it 25 times in the book.

Yeah. But the cover has the smiley face with the Hitler mustache. Does that undermine that message and lead to some of these reactions?

Well, I'm perfectly glad to concede that people who do judge books by their covers or think it's more important to read a title rather than read a book will be confused and jump to conclusions. But these are people that I don't generally respect. The cover was Random House's invention, and I'm still sort of ambivalent about it, but you make covers to sell books, you make titles to sell books, even though my title comes from a speech by H.G. Wells ... The cover, the smiley face with the mustache, is a play on something I explain on basically Page One of the book, and it's a reference to what George Carlin and Bill Maher call smiley-face fascism. And if you can't get past the cover and the title, then you're not a serious book reader and you're not really a serious person.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/11/goldberg/

Sticks and Stones
Who has more affinity with fascism -- liberals or conservatives?

Washington Post Review by Michael Mann
Sunday, February 3, 2008

LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning By Jonah Goldberg; Doubleday, 487 pp. $27.95

National Review editor Jonah Goldberg says he is fed up with liberals calling him a fascist. Who can blame him? Hurling the calumny "fascist!" at American conservatives is not fair. But Goldberg's response is no better. He lobs the f-word back at liberals, though after each of his many attacks he is at pains to say that they are not "evil" fascists, they just share a family resemblance. It's family because American liberals are descendants of the early 20th-century Progressives, who in turn shared intellectual roots with fascists. He adds that both fascists and liberals seek to use the state to solve the problems of modern society.

Scholars would support Goldberg in certain respects. He is correct that many fascists, including Mussolini (but not Hitler) started as socialists -- though almost none started as liberals, who stood for representative government and mild reformism. Moreover, fascism's combination of nationalism, statism, discipline and a promise to "transcend" class conflict was initially popular in many countries. Though fascism was always less popular in democracies such as the United States, some American intellectuals did flirt with its ideas. Goldberg quotes progressives and liberals who did, but he does not quote the conservatives who also did. He is right to note that fascist party programs contained active social welfare policies to be implemented through a corporatist state, so there were indeed overlaps with Progressives and with New Dealers.

But so, too, were there overlaps with the world's Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, as well as with the British Conservative Party from Harold Macmillan in the 1930s to Prime Minister Ted Heath in the 1970s, and even with the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations. Are they all to earn the f-word?

The only thing these links prove is that fascism contained elements that were in the mainstream of 20th-century politics. Following Goldberg's logic, I could rewrite this book and berate American liberals not for being closet fascists but for being closet conservatives or closet Christian Democrats. But that would puzzle Americans, not shock them. Shock, it seems, sells books.

What really distinguished fascists from other mainstream movements of the time were proud, "principled" -- as they saw it -- violence and authoritarianism. Fascists took their model of governance from their experience as soldiers and officers in World War I. They believed that disciplined violence, military comradeship and obedience to leaders could solve society's problems. Goldberg finds similarities between fascism's so-called "third way" -- neither capitalism nor socialism -- and liberals who use the same phrase today to signify an attempt to compromise between business and labor. But there is a fundamental difference. The fascist solution was not brokered compromise but forcibly knocking heads together. Italian fascists formed a paramilitary, not a political, party. The Nazis did have a separate party, but alongside two paramilitaries, the SA and the SS, whose first mission was to attack and, if necessary, to kill socialists, communists and liberals. In reality, the fascists knocked labor's head, not capital's. The Nazis practiced on the left for their later killing of Jews, gypsies and others. And all fascists proudly proclaimed the "leadership principle," hailing dictatorship and totalitarianism.

It is hard to find American counterparts, especially among liberals. Father Coughlin and Huey Long (discussed by Goldberg) were tempted by a proto-fascist authoritarian populism in the 1930s. Some white Southerners (not discussed) embraced violence and authoritarianism, as did the Weathermen and the Black Panthers (discussed) and rightist militias (not discussed). Neocons (not discussed) today endorse militarism. Liberals have rarely supported violence, militarism or authoritarianism, because they are doves and wimps -- or at least that is what both conservatives and socialists usually say. To assert that the Social Security Act or Medicare shows a leaning toward totalitarianism is ridiculous. The United States, along with the rest of the Anglo-Saxon and Northwestern European world, has been protected from significant fascist influences by the shared commitment of liberals, conservatives and social democrats to democracy. Fascism is not an American, British, Dutch, Scandinavian, Canadian, Australian or New Zealand vice. It only spread significantly in one-half of Europe,, with some lesser influence in China, Japan, South America and South Africa. Today it is alive in very few places.

A few of Goldberg's assaults make some minimal sense; others are baffling. He culminates with an attack on Hillary Clinton. He quotes from a 1993 college commencement address of hers: "We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves." Such vacuous politician-speak could come from any centrist, whether Republican or Democrat. But Goldberg bizarrely says it embodies "the most thoroughly totalitarian conception of politics offered by a leading American political figure in the last half century." Is he serious? He then quotes briefly from her book It Takes A Village. "The village," she wrote, "can no longer be defined as a place on the map, or a list of people or organizations, but its essence remains the same: it is the network of values and relationships that support and affect our lives." One may question whether that is a profound definition or a banal one, but does it deserve Goldberg's comment that here "the concept of civil society is grotesquely deformed"? Whatever Sen. Clinton's weaknesses, she is neither a totalitarian nor an enemy of civil society.

In an apparent attempt at balance, Goldberg indulges in very mild and brief criticism of conservatives who are tempted by compassionate (i.e., social) conservatism, though here he uniquely refrains from using the f-word. In the book's final pages, he reveals his neo-liberalism (though he does not use the term). Since neo-liberalism, with its insistence on unfettered global trade and minimal government regulation of economic and social life, merely restates 19th-century laissez-faire, it is in fact the only contemporary political philosophy that significantly pre-dates both socialism and fascism. Unlike modern liberalism or modern conservatism, it shares not even a remote family resemblance with them. That is the only sense I can make of his overall argument.

But a final word of advice. If you want to denigrate the Democrats' health care plans or Al Gore's environmental activism, try the word "socialism." That is tried and tested American abuse. "Fascism" will merely baffle Americans -- and rightly so. *

Michael Mann is professor of sociology at UCLA and author of "Fascists."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/31/AR2008013102583.html

Getty Gets Bernini Exhibit as Reward for Return of Looted Italian Antiquities

The Getty recently agreed to return 40 of 52 artworks that Italy has charged were looted and smuggled out of the country before being acquired by the Getty, after more than a year of negotiations.

Besides showing off some of Italy's finest treasures, the Bernini exhibit also sends the message to other museums that they would do well to return antiquities that were acquired under questionable circumstances.

Italy Lending Bernini Art to the Getty

A major exhibit of the sculptor's busts will go on display following settlement of a dispute over looted antiquities.

The Los Angeles Times

By Howard Blume
Staff Writer
February 2, 2008

The J. Paul Getty Museum is preparing for perhaps the most complete exhibit of Bernini busts ever displayed outside Italy, a benefit of settling its dispute over allegedly looted antiquities.

The exhibit at one time was at risk, but a recent settlement between Italy and the Getty ensured that it would go on display.

Among the gems is a bust of Costanza Bonarelli, the beautiful wife of one of Bernini's assistants who became part of a possibly violent love quadrangle. (Bernini's younger brother was also involved.)

The famed sculpture, which dates from about 1637, is housed in the collection of the National Museum of the Bargello in Florence.

The Bernini exhibit symbolizes the change of tone in dealings between the museum and Italy, which put former antiquities curator Marion True on trial on charges of trafficking in looted art.

After more than a year of negotiations, the Getty agreed to return 40 of 52 artworks that Italy has charged were looted and smuggled out of the country before being acquired by the Getty.

Italy dropped charges against True and agreed to develop a cooperative relationship that would allow Americans to view Italian art.

The museum says the exhibit shows the development of the portrait bust as "an innovative and groundbreaking art form which forever changed sculptural portraiture."

Planning for the Bernini exhibit was already underway during the dispute over antiquities.

At the time, Italy had threatened a cultural embargo that would have cut off the Getty from its long association with Italian museums.

Besides showing off some of Italy's finest treasures, the Bernini exhibit also sends the message to other museums that they would do well to return antiquities that were acquired under questionable circumstances.

"The Getty and the institutions in Italy for many years have had solid relationships that were tense during the time the negotiations were going forward," said Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig.

"The relationship that now exists is very solid," Hartwig said.

The Bernini exhibit will open Aug. 5 and run through Oct. 26.

howard.blume@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-getty2feb02,1,7927923.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Celebrating Italy in New Zealand ??

There are 31,000 New Zealanders that claim and cherish their Italian Ancestry. They must still have a lot of passion, because this celebration that occurs during Carnevale in Italy, shocked the director of the Museum with their enthusiasm and found himself infected with their zeal.

Their program is very extensive and impressive!!!!!!!

The Waikato is the first region south of Greater Auckland. It has two spectacular landscapes -one above ground, the other below.Above ground the view is dominated by the serenity of the Waikato River and the rich rolling green of productive farmland. The main centre is Hamilton- New Zealand's fourth largest city, that serves the thriving farming and university community.As of the 2006 Census, the Waikato region held a resident population of 382,716. Port Waikato is just an hour south of Auckland

Hamilton is famous for its themed gardens, and the local zoo which has the largest free flight aviary in the Southern Hemisphere. In the Waitomo area, south of Hamilton, there's a natural labyrinth to discover. Massive subterranean caverns are adorned with stalactites and stalagmites- formations that have been millions of years in the making. Visitors can glide through the darkness on a water-borne barge and admire the beauty and deep silence of the cave where the glow-worms overhead give the effect of an eerie underground sky.

The quirky West Coast beach town of Raglan is known throughout the international surfing community for its amazing left-hand break. As a result, the local township is laid back, crafty and well furnished with good eating places. Even if you don't surf, you'll want to sample the idyllic Raglan lifestyle.

The University of Waikato, is re-confirmed as New Zealand's No 1 research-based business school, has an advanced Computer Dept, and is a national radiocarbon facility undertaking both Standard Radiometric Dating and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry.

I was initially misled by the name, but this is NOT hicksville, but a beautifully situated university location.

Celebrating Italy

Waikato Times

Waikato,New Zealand

By Kate Monohan

Wednesday, 30 January 2008

All things Italian are honoured with an exhibition and events at Waikato Museum. Kate Monahan gets a taste.

What's not to love about Italian culture?

There is the food the creamy risottos infused with truffle or porcini mushrooms, the divine pastas made with the freshest tomatoes, herbs and seafood, not to mention the artisan cheeses and the heaven-sent desserts (if I were to be shot by firing squad, my last request would be for tiramisu).

There is the wine. A journey through Italy is not complete without sampling the diversity of wine, from deep red chiantis to light bubbly proseccos, and everything in between.

Meals are a slow, languid affair, to be enjoyed, just like life, along with good company and stories.

Then there is Italian design clever, innovative where function and art meet in jaw-droppingly beautiful furniture, car design and even kitchenware.

Architecture and art, from the Colosseum to Michaelangelo's statue of David, are among the best in the world.

Italian fashion, from Prada and Gucci to Armani and Valentino, pushes boundaries and celebrates beauty.

In New Zealand, Italian culture and community has a small but vibrant presence.

There are several thousand Italians living in New Zealand 3114 people identified themselves as Italian in the 2006 census. It is estimated there are several hundred Italians in Hamilton.

Hamilton city councillor Joe di Maio, who comes from Sorrento, near Naples, was so passionate about celebrating Italy, he pushed for Te Papa's Italian exhibition to be brought to the Waikato Museum.

Currently on display, "Qui Tutto Bene" explores the stories and history of the Italians in New Zealand. It explores the reasons Italians immigrated to New Zealand, how they settled, and Italian style.

It is the first community exhibition from Te Papa to travel, with many of the objects on loan from Wellington-based Italians, including some stunning handmade Venetian masks.

Waikato Museum has localised the exhibition with documentaries featuring local Italians, and items from their homes.

Di Maio's fantastic golden coffee machine, from his old Garden Place gelataria, is a centrepiece in the exhibition, looking like something out of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

At the top of the steps, fronting the exhibition, is a mint green 1968 Vespa, on loan from Hamilton couple Campbell and Joss Robertson, who have lovingly restored the scooter, bought on TradeMe in 2006. "We are deeply into all things Italian," says Campbell Robertson, who is also president of the local Fiat club. "There is something about the design of Italian products that sets them apart."

And over the next nine weeks, until March 27, there will be a range of free Italian cultural events on Thursday evenings at the museum, including language lessons, cooking, mask making and classic films. There will be free classic Italian movies shown every Thursday night (except February 7) from 7.30pm. The museum will stay open until 8pm.

"It's probably the most intensive programme we've ever done because of the enthusiasm of the Italian community," says Steve Shappell, public programme leader/educator for social history at the museum. "We tried to match their enthusiasm."

A group, Circolo Italiano, or the Italian Circle, has formed to promote and support Italian culture in the Waikato.

The highlight of the schedule is the Carnevale next Tuesday night at the museum. It's a night of outdoor picnicking and entertainment, with everyone encouraged to dress up and wear masks, just like they do in Italy during Carnevale.

"Carnevale happens at the same time, everywhere around the world," says Shappell. "This night is the last Tuesday before Lent begins, and Carnevale literally means a farewell to meat. In Venice, they used to wear masks year round, but it was restricted due to all the debauchery that went on when people hid their identity, so now they can wear them during the two weeks of Carnevale, which ends on the Tuesday."

The museum has had exhibitions celebrating other ethnic or cultural groups in New Zealand in the past, including Mexican, Irish and Somali exhibitions.

As you walk up the stairs of the museum, and admire the Vespa and the three-dimensional floating pieces of Italian-New Zealand artist Chiara Corbelletto, and absorb the fascinating historical journeys of Italian immigrants, it all comes together. The introductory words, written in Italian, Maori and English, explain: "Ask Italians how things are going, and they will often say, `qui tutto bene' `everything's fine'..."

This exhibition is fine indeed, and well worth checking out. And you can get your hands dirty, making pasta dough and masks, or sit back and soak it all in with a classic Italian movie or language class.

SCHEDULE:

Tomorrow night, there is mask making from 5pm, and pizza making from 6pm.

From 6.30pm, there will be a talk on cheese making in central Italy, with a focus on sheep milk cheese.

The movie at 7.30pm is "Three Men and a Leg" (1997).

Tuesday February 5 is the big one Carnevale. It's a Tuesday, not Thursday like all the other nights, and is the highlight of the Italian season at the museum. Carnevale is a traditional celebration held around the world, making the beginning of Lent (and the end to indulgences!). Traditionally, people wear costumes and there will be prizes for the best handmade masks. Take a picnic dinner and blanket, for dinner in front of the museum, and watch the entertainment. Renowned piano accordion player Silvio De Pra will play traditional and contemporary Italian tunes, and there will be stilt walkers. There is a huge painting of an Italian scene up for auction, currently on display in the museum foyer, donated by Joe Di Maio. Proceeds will go to the new Circolo Italiano group.

Thursday February 14 has a Valentine's Day focus. The 7.30pm film is a romance, "Casomai" (2002). Before the movie, there is an introductory Italian lesson at 6pm (taught by Paul Spadoni, who is taking all the language classes) and an Italian travel presentation from 7pm.

On Thursday February 21, acclaimed food writer and chef, Rafaella Del Monte, is speaking from 5.30pm. At 6pm, local Italian chefs show how to make great pasta dishes, and there is an introductory Italian lesson at 6.30pm. The 7.30pm film is "Novecento" 1900 (part one).

This is one for the boys and one to get bike and car lovers drooling. On Thursday February 28 it is Italian Car and Bike Night, with a variety of Italian bikes, scooters and cars on display from 5.30pm. From 6pm, it's pizza making (with your own pizza dough to take home). At 6.30pm, it's an introductory Italian lesson, and at 7.30 the film "Novecento" continues (part two).

Thursday March 6 involves lessons in making fabulous pasta dishes from local Italian chefs from 6pm, followed by an introductory Italian lesson from 6.30pm and the film "La Meglio Gioventu: The Best of Youth" (part one) from 7.30pm.

On Thursday March 13 local masquerade mask making guru Colleen Hannah will give a talk at 6pm, with an introductory Italian lesson from 6.30pm, and "La Meglio Gioventu" continues from 7.30pm (part two).

Music and experimental film making is on the agenda on Thursday March 20, with a performance of classic Italian aria by local soprano Brooke Baker at 6pm, followed by an introductory Italian lesson from 6.30pm. At 7.30pm, it is one of the highlights of the schedule, Hamilton Underground Film Fest Italian Flavour. These short films were made by local film makers with no/low budgets, and given only one keyword: Italy. Come and see their weird and wonderful creations as they vie for the honour of being the inaugural winner of the Best Film title. Bookings are essential. Phone 07 838 6606 to reserve a seat.

The final evening is Thursday March 27, with a presentation by acclaimed food writer and chef Rafaella Del Monte at 5.30pm. At 6pm, get all rowdy and patriotic, joining with the Circolo Italiano singing Va Pensiero Verdi's famous chorus, considered Italian's "other" anthem. At 6.30pm is an introductory Italian lesson, followed by the comedy/drama, "The Last Kiss" (2001).

See www.waikatomuseum.co.nz for more information on the Qui tutto bene exhibition and schedule of activities.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/waikatotimes/4381106a15575.html

The Italian Lizzardi Family that Sheltered 5 Jewish Children vs Nazis Saluted on Holocaust Day

I applaud the ceremony, but the "Never Again" rings rather hollow, when Genocide is CURRENTLY Happening in 73 Countries, with 17 those in Category 7, the most gruesome degree of Genocide.

Those 17are Dufar, Sudan; Uganda; Congo; Ethiopia; Columbia; Nepal; North Korea ; Afghanistan; Burma (Myanmar); Sri Lanka, Indonesia; Kashmir; China; Philippines; Uzbekistan; Chechnya; Iraq.

The World Times News Report: http://news.wtnrradio.com/story.php?story=13

Now why do so many people Commemorate a past Genocide, vowing "Never Again", when under their very noses there are SEVENTEEN GENOCIDES of the HIGHEST Degree now taking place, Not to mention the dozens more at the 5th & 6th stages???????

Why would they not instead of "Photo op" Commemorations and building more and more Museums that teach Tolerance, Actually do SOMETHING?????????

I find their efforts "blind" at least, and bizarre at most????? I'm I the only one that sees the Hypocrisy of this stance????

Italians and Jews mark sombre anniversary
By Remo Zaccagna, The Suburban

Jeannette Katz has had a lifelong affection for the Italian people, and for good reason — she credits them with saving her life 65 years ago.

In a Paris suburb in 1943, the Lizzardi family, Italian communists who fled Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy, sheltered a then 12-year-old Katz and four other Jewish children from France’s Nazi occupiers.

For more than four months, the children hid in the basement during the night while their hosts worked construction and factory jobs in order to earn enough money to support everyone.

“They worked during the night to be able to take care of five Jewish children. It wasn’t easy and they never made us feel any different from their own son,” Katz, 77, said.

Katz told her story at downtown’s Italian Cultural Institute on Sunday evening before an overflowing audience that came to mark International Holocaust Day, as well as the 70th anniversary of Italy’s passing of anti-Semitic racial laws.

“I wanted to come here to tell my story because people should know what Italians did for us and to say that they hold a very special place in my heart.”

The evening’s proceedings began when a four-member panel, which included professors Lucienne Kroha (McGill University), Francois Crépeau (Université de Montréal) and Eric Volant (UQAM), presided over an hour-long question and answer period that stemmed from their observations of the book L’Italie Fasciste et la Persécution des Juifs.

A special screening of Paul Lee’s 45-minute documentary Bookmark: Primo Levi followed the discussion.

The audience included young and old, Italian and Jewish, and spilled out of the room.

“I think that genocide has been such an important event in recent history, that it is important for everybody to be aware of that,” said Francesco Paolo Venier, the Consul General of Italy, who helped organize the event with the Cultural Institute.

“I’m glad that youth came to this occasion because they have to remember even more,” he added. “The important thing is not to be in a situation where you have your eyes closed again. These things happen because our eyes are closed and this is what we have to avoid happening again.”

Peter Subissati, public affairs officer for the Israeli Consulate, agreed with Venier.

“It’s a good show of solidarity between communities, very important communities, the Italian community and the Jewish community, and it’s nice to have a show of support,” he said. “Sadly, it’s for a tragic period in history, but nonetheless it’s nice to see that several generations after the Holocaust that we have a nice assembly of two peoples coming together to, first of all to commemorate the tragic part of the history of Italy and of Europe, but to say ‘enough’ and that we will not repeat these things in the future.”

Subissati said he wasn’t surprised with the evening’s turnout, given that, for the most part, Italians have been accepting of the Jewish community in Italy, now hovering around 38,000 people.

“Like the panel said earlier, Jews were at the vanguard of the Italian nationalist movement; they were emancipated at the same time as this nationalism was growing. And after the war, very few Italian Jews moved to Israel, very few moved elsewhere, they were very intertwined with the Italian community.”

Rome Opera Singer Savior of Cleveland's Italian Rennaissance Gardens

Aside from Severance Concert Hall, the one nice thing I remember about Cleveland was the Parkway that was bisected the city in a semi circular path, with no intersections.

It was crowned by a group of Ethnic Gardens, at the North East end, called Rockefeller Park, the Italian Gardens being the crown jewel. It was a marvelous experience to stroll through the some 20 different Ethnicities represented.

With the decline of the Cleveland, Detroit, and some other rust belt cities the Gardens lost their luster, But an Italian Opera singer from Rome refused to allow the only Italian Renaissance garden in the United States, to slip into oblivion, and has raised $250,000 to bring them back to their former glory.

Restoration Could be Garden's Renaissance

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Roxanne Washington

Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Italian Cultural Garden in Rockefeller Park is looking a lot snazzier these days. One of the fountains has been stripped down to a sparkling clean finish, the deep cracks repaired, and 16 new lampposts cast a warm glow over the Italian Renaissance setting at night.

This is just the beginning. It won't be long before the monument is fully restored to its original 1930s majesty.

"It's going to be very elegant when we're done," says Joyce Mariani.

Mariani is executive director of the Italian Cultural Garden Foundation, and the driving force behind the $250,000 ongoing garden overhaul. Mariani is an opera singer who has performed at Severance Hall and throughout Europe, and still maintains a home in Rome.

While Italians and other Europeans appreciate public gardens, Mariani says, it saddened her to see how Americans zoom right by, too busy to stop and notice. She thought it a shame that the Italian Cultural Garden in Cleveland -- the only Italian Renaissance garden in the United States, she says -- lost its luster.

"In Italy, gardens are part of people's daily lives," Mariani says as she surveys the garden off of East Boulevard, weeds poking up between broken pavement, but not for long. "The gardens are used by families, lovers, people who go to read their newspapers or just relax."

Mariani took it upon herself to organize an effort to give the garden a much-needed face-lift. In the beginning, her tactics were rather bold.

"I read about people in the newspaper, and if they were Italian, I called them and told them what I was trying to do," she says. "A lot of people didn't even know there's an Italian Cultural Garden in Rockefeller Park. A couple people asked, Where is it?' "

Her enthusiasm was contagious, and since then others have joined the efforts of the Foundation. Grants and private donations raised about $180,000. Last year, the Cleveland Italian Film Festival raised $64,000.

Mariani has an information booth at this year's National City Home & Garden Show at the International Exposition Center. Also at the show, open play on two boccie ball courts will raise money for refurbishing the Italian Cultural Garden.

The garden is designed on two levels. The upper level begins with a walkway leading to the large Renaissance fountain that stands in front of a balustrade, from which two winding stone staircases lead down to the lower level.

On the lower level, a tall wall fountain graces a courtyard with circular seating. On either side of the fountain are the faces of famous Italians Giotti, Michelangelo, Petrarca, Verdi and Da Vinci.

Hardscaping repairs include sprucing up sandstone pavement and replacing the bust of Virgil, the Italian poet, which was donated by the Italian government at the opening of the garden.

A new "outdoor museum" of small granite columns with plaques naming famous Italian Nobel Prize winners, famous cultural figures in the arts such as Luciano Pavarotti and Federico Fellini, and other names in literature, science and education.

The garden was formally opened on Oct. 12, 1930, with the joint celebration of Columbus Day and the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Virgil. Cleveland businessman Philip Garbo, president of the first Italian Cultural Garden Association, was instrumental in raising money for the garden, Mariani says.

In 1930, the Italian government sent the bust of Virgil and in 1932 sent a large block of stone from Monte Grappa in northern Italy, which was placed in the garden to commemorate Italian war veterans of Cleveland who fought on Italian soil in World War I. In 1936, the San Carlos Opera Company presented Italian operas at the garden.It wasn't just a garden, says Mariani, but was "Cleveland's monument to Italy, and dedicated as a symbol of the contribution of Italian culture to American democracy."

The latest completed restoration project was a $60,000 installation of the lampposts in November. Next comes the landscaping. Bulbs were donated from as far away as Livermore, Calif., from Anthony Gazzuolo, the owner of a garden center there who read about the restoration.

Mariani is working hard to raise the money, but she left the planting of the bulbs to volunteers.

"I'm not a gardener," she jokes. "No kidding. I don't like getting dirt under my nails."

Hunter Morrison, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at Youngstown State University and a former Cleveland planning director, serves on the Italian Cultural Garden Foundation board. He lives in a home that was designed by Garbo, and has always had an interest in Garbo's work.

Having worked with the Landmarks Commission, Morrison knows the gardens well. In fact, he helped bring the Chinese and Indian Cultural Gardens to Rockefeller Park, and he can see how Mariani's work with the Italian garden might catch on with others.

"This could be a precursor for other groups making an investment in the cultural gardens," he says. "It could prompt a lot of enthusiasm."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: rwashington@plaind.com, 216-999-4427

http://www.cleveland.com/living/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1201685858303840.xml&coll=2