Under 25 Italians Being Influenced by Northern European "Binge Drinking"

While still nowhere near the levels seen in countries like Finland, Denmark and the UK - the under-25s Italians are drinking more than they used to, as the young Italians move away from the more restrained, Mediterranean style of drinking.

Italy Battles Youth Drinking Problem

BBC; By Tamasin Ford; Radio 1 Newsbeat, Rome; August 31, 2009

Pub crawls, two-for-one offers and "all you can drink" nights - they are all things you would usually associate with the UK.

But there are worries this binge drinking culture has made its way to Italy. And it is the young Italians doing the drinking.

Walking through the piazzas in Rome, behind the backdrop of historic sites like the Pantheon or the Trevi fountain, the pubs and cocktail bars could be mistaken for those in any city around Britain.

One pub on the edge of the square in Campo de Fiori has colourful signs outside, enticing people in with their three-for-two offers.

And a few metres down a cobbled alleyway, the next pub boasts cheap cocktails and super strength shots.

"I drink because I work all week and on Saturday and Sunday I like to drink," said 21-year-old Federico, who lives in the city.

"I can drink five, six, seven, eight, nine or 10 in a night."

New generation

It is a similar story at an all-night club by the beach, just 20km (12.5 miles) outside of the capital.

With a cocktail in hand, 20-year-old Nicola said the culture was changing among young people.

"I think young people drink more," she said. "It's just a new generation of people."

Beer, shots and spirits are quickly taking over from wine as the drinks of choice - and young Italians are moving away from the more restrained, Mediterranean style of drinking.

Figures show that while under-25s in Italy are drinking more than they used to, it is still nowhere near the levels seen in countries like Finland, Denmark and the UK - but the change is still something even bar owners are noticing.

More money

Lason Hannick, who runs Mulligans pub in Rome, said: "There's a massive growth in cocktail bars, Irish pubs and venues that strictly sell alcohol, as opposed to the Italian-style bar, often in areas that are not on the tourist trial.

"So, that shows there's definitely a new trend among Italians."

He added that the main place the change was being noticed was in the till.

"This pub's making more and more money every year and I think it's down to the fact the Italians are drinking more," he said.

As the bars tout their offers, cities are beginning to clamp down on under-age drinkers. In Milan, parents whose children are caught drinking can be fined up to 900 euros (£790).

And in parts of Rome this summer, drinking on the streets has been banned after 9pm. It is a measure the city official responsible for the ban, Dino Gasperini, wants extended all year round.

"The arrival of younger drinkers means alcohol is no longer properly appreciated," he said.

"People don't seek out nice beer or nice wine, they drink anything. Our historic town centre has become a meeting place for thousands of young people and they're just getting younger and younger."

Happy hours

Other cities are looking at introducing similar laws and there is a nationwide campaign to raise the legal drinking age from 16 to 18.

Dr Emanuele Scafato, from the Italian Institute of Health, is in charge of alcohol research for the Italian government.

"Happy hours, drinking as much as you can and pub crawls - they are all elements that don't fit in the Italian culture," he said.

"Many people come back from London or Ireland and they also keep a part of that culture. They meet together and to have, why not, a different evening. Many years ago it was absolutely not seen in Italy and now it's a rule."

But this new phenomenon of binge drinking is rapidly growing among the younger generations. And the traditional Italian way of savouring a prosecco or a glass of chianti is slowly slipping away.

"They use alcohol in exactly the same way as people in countries in Northern Europe," said Dr Scafato.

"This is something we've never seen before and it's particularly worrying because drink-driving is the first cause of death among young people in Italy. These are numbers but behind these numbers are people and these people are our children.

"We were not used to people sitting in the road, drinking cans and cans of beer and bottles and bottles of wine."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8230096.stm

What’s In An Italian Name?

Amateur Italian Genealogists are not only interested in their Family Tree, but the Origins of their Family Names.

While searching for Nobility, they often find Ordinariness and Humor.

What’s In An Italian Name?

The Faster Times by Dianne Hales; August 30, 2009

In the United States, my name is Dianne. In Italia mi chiamo Diana. What difference does an Italian name make? As Diana, pronounced Dee-ahn-aah, I wear my heels higher and my skirts shorter, eat leftover tiramisu for breakfast and dance barefoot under the Tuscan moon. All of which seems only fitting since Diana derives from Divia or Diviana, "la dea che illumina" (”the shining goddess"), carrying the moon into the sky in her chariot in this antique Roman relief.

Ancient Romans, like Marcus Tullius Cicero, called themselves by three names: a basic first name, a clan name and a family name that often arose from a personal characteristic of an ancestor. The original Cicero, forefather of the famous orator, for instance, might have been a chickpea farmer or had a nose like a chickpea. Such a descriptive moniker, once established, was handed down through the generations just as our last names are.

By medieval times, the latter two names disappeared, and people were called by only one name, which became confusing as the population grew and Marios and Marias multiplied. And so Italians began adding a second distinguishing label or surname (called a patronymic) to their names, sometimes with the prefix "di" to mean "son of" or "da" for a town of origin, as in Leonardo da Vinci. The names given to babies abandoned on church steps told their poignant stories: Orfanelli (little orphans), Poverelli (little poor ones), Trovatelli (little foundlings), Esposito (exposed, in the sense of being exposed to the elements) and Bastardo.

A short man became Basso; a red-head, Rosso; a big noisy guy, Cavallo (for horse). Amiable ancestors blessed their heirs with names such as Belli (beautiful), Benamato (well-loved) and Bentaccordi (congenial). My "angels" in Rome, my first Italian friends, were the aptly named Serafini (heavenly seraphim). Fortunately, I’ve managed to steer clear of clans such as the Bugiardini (little liars), Selvaggi (savages) and Pappalardi (lard-eaters).

Occupations inspired names such as Zappa or Contadino for farmer, Tagliabue for ox-cutter or butcher, Sarto for tailor, Farina (flour) or Forni (ovens) for baker. The Renaissance painter Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi gained fame as Sandro Botticelli (little barrels), a nickname based on his brother’s trade.

Names and occupations still go together, sometimes in humorous ways. An Italian website records the existence of:

*a dentist named Canino (canine)
*a dietician named Mangione (big eater)
*a veterinarian named Zecca (tick)
*a fisherman named Baccala (cod)
*a perfume shop owner named Puzzolente (stinky).

Sayings and Expressions

conoscere qualcuno di nome - to know someone by name
nome d’arte - stage name
nome di battesimo - Christian name
il secondo nome - middle name
soprannome - nickname
macchiare il buon nome della famiglia - to damage the family’s reputation
farsi un nome - to establish one’s name
chiamare le cose col proprio nome - to call things by their proper name, to tell it like it is

For more on Italian last names:

http://www.italiamia.com/genealogy.html
http://www.daddezio.com/ (Italian genealogy group)
http://italiangenealogy.tardio.com/ (Search for Italian surnames)
http://www.genealogylinks.net/europe/italy/index.html (List of useful sites)
http://italian.about.com/od/italianculture/a/aa111704a.htm
http://genealogy.about.com/cs/surname/a/italian_surname.htm

In italiano:

http://www.pubblinet.com/nomi/cognomi-strani.htm

http://thefastertimes.com/italianlessons/2009/08/30/whats-in-an-italian-name/

"THE VENUS FIXERS" - Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II

These architects and art historians from Harvard, Yale and Oxford. -- were actually protecting the World's Greatest Civilization at a crucial time in it's history.

WORLD WAR II

Guardians of History

The Washington Post; Sunday, by Aaron Leitko; August 23, 2009

THE VENUS FIXERS

The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II

By Ilaria Dagnini Brey ; Farrar Strauss Giroux. 308 pp. $26

They came to the battlefield by way of Harvard, Yale and Oxford. They sported neckerchiefs, cherished a good glass of wine and loved poetry. They were monuments officers -- typically architects and art historians -- with the tough job of protecting Italy's art treasures in World War II.

The Venus Fixers, as they were nicknamed, saw little action at the front. Rather than charging into battle, they collected and catalogued masterpieces among the ruins of Naples and Florence after the war machine had moved on. They propped up church walls, patched leaky ceilings and arranged for guards to protect caches of irreplaceable art.

"While to some comrades the Venus Fixers may have looked like devoted and thorough housemaids, straightening, dusting, rearranging," writes Ilaria Dagnini Brey in her account of these men recruited by the Allied forces, "they were actually watching over a civilization's heritage at a crucial time in its history."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/21/AR2009082101116.html

Italian American Identity: To Be or Not To Be

Michael Parenti has long argued vs Richard Alba's "Twilight of Ethnicity", as have I. This is Worth While reading !!!!

Parenti suggests that we need to distinguish between Culture and Social Systems (that transmit that Culture), and then to differentiate between superficial Acculturation and thorough Social Assimilation. It is further important to examine the link between Americanization and that Culture's social relations with the Host Society. When that Host is Hostile, as they have been in the US vs Italians for a Century plus,

The Italians felt like they were being told: "You must Americanize but not in my social circle."

Thus Italians tend to try to maintain social group relations composed mostly of fellow Italians.

Roundup: Historians' Take

Michael Parenti: Italian American Identity: To Be or Not To Be

From The History News Network; Source: Common Dreams.org ; (August 27, 2009)

[Michael Parenti is the author of twenty-one books including The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories), Contrary Notions (City Lights), and God and His Demons (Prometheus Books, forthcoming).]

In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was the accepted view among many social scientists that, as ethnic assimilation advanced, ethnic group identities would fade away. But in fact, ethnicity continued to impact significantly upon political life. Why was that?

Acculturation and Assimilation
In 1967, I published an article in the American Political Science Review arguing that assimilation would not wipe out ethnic politics and ethnic identities in the foreseeable future because assimilation was not happening.

I suggested that we needed to distinguish between culture and social systems. A culture is a system of beliefs, values, images, lifestyles, and customary practices including language, law, arts, and the like. A social system consists of the structured relations and associations among individuals and groups both formal and informal: family, church, school, workplace, and other networks of roles and status. The culture is mediated through the social system or social structure, as it is sometimes called.

To become well practiced to a prevailing culture is to acculturate. To become absorbed into the dominant social structure is to assimilate. Since the beginning of the American nation the Anglo Protestant nativist population has wanted minority ethnic groups to acculturate but not necessarily assimilate. The "late-migration" Southern and Eastern Europeans were expected to discard their alien customs and appearances offensive to American sensibilities. A new verb was invented: they had to "Americanize".

To make matters worse, these immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries settled mostly in the large urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest (where the jobs were), places that small town Protestant America already loathed as squalid and decadent hellholes.

The public schools became special agencies of acculturation to be imposed on the immigrant children. As a child in a classroom full of Italian-American grade-schoolers in New York City, I was treated to patriotic tales about George Washington, Nathan Hale, Paul Revere, and other of our ?heroic founders.? We recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang the "Star-Spangled Banner" and "America the Beautiful". And I recall at least one of my teachers telling us in an annoyed tone: "Tell your parents to speak English at home".

By the second-generation (children of the immigrants), the ethnics already had undergone a substantial degree of acculturation in language, dress, recreation, entertainment tastes, and other lifestyle practices and customs, while interest in old world culture became minimal if not nonexistent.

However, such acculturation was most often not followed by social assimilation. The group became Americanized in much of its cultural practices, but this says little about its social relations with the host society. In the face of widespread acculturation, ethnic minorities still maintained social group relations composed mostly of fellow ethnics.

The pressure to acculturate was not accompanied by any invitation to assimilate into Anglo Protestant primary group relations within the dominant social structure. It seems the nativist bigots well understood the distinction between acculturation and assimilation, even if they never actually used such terms. In a word, "You must Americanize but not in my social circle."

Dual Identities and Group ?Traumas?
Many of the crucial images that a marginalized ethnic group has of itself do not come from itself but from the dominant culture and dominant social order. For us Italians, the immigrant generation was reduced to a Luigi caricature, a simple soul who spoke in a pasta-ladened accent. Then came the perennial Mafia mobster, recently given new life with The Sopranos. Also still going strong are the television commercials portraying large boisterous Italian families gathered around the dinner table to shovel immense amounts of food into their mouths and at each other in what resembles an athletic contest.

Another enduring stereotype is of the Italian American as a working-class boor, a dimwit proletarian, visceral, violent, and thoroughly unschooled. There is nothing wrong with being working-class but there is plenty wrong with a vulgar class caricature that defames all working people (whatever their ethnic antecedents). Left out of such scripts are the realities and struggles of workers, a subject seldom treated in the mainstream news or entertainment media.

Media stereotypes aside, there exists a duality in the Italian- American self-identity: on the one hand, a strong in-group pride regarding our heritage and an assertion of our worth as Italians to counteract the wretched stereotypes, along with strong family involvements that remain ethnically tinged, to say the least.

On the other hand, there are the strenuous assertions of our ?100 percent Americanism? as a way of overcoming social marginalization. This is what I have called cultural ambidexterity, the promotion of both ethnic pride and Americanism all at the same time, usually accompanied by a political conservatism.

It is an image duality that fits into the acculturation/assimilation model: we acculturate to the American identity, often with a compensatory militancy because of our being somewhat marginalized and unassimilated. This marginalization at the same time adds to our determination to hold to an Italian group awareness and loyalty.

There are ethnic groups that have sustained enormous historic trauma, leaving them with an enduring mega-narrative. For them, ethnic identity is an especially strong imperative. A few prominent examples:

African Americans who have braved centuries of slavery, plus a century of segregation and lynch-mob rule, and today the persistent poisonous sting of White racism.

Jewish Americans who have been victimized by two thousand years of Christianist inspired anti-Semitism and violence capped by the historic trauma of the Holocaust.

Latino-Americans and Asian Americans who would be much further along the assimilation track having been fairly early arrivals, but whose ranks have been lately infused with millions of newcomers, thereby raising fresh issues of acculturation, economic hardship, and even residential legality, all of which heightens a defensive awareness of group identity. In the case of Asian-Americans?and to some extent with Latinos also--there is the additional mark of racism with which to contend.

Arab Americans and Persian Americans in this country in relatively smaller numbers with less visibility but who in recent years have been unjustly harassed and stigmatized as being associated with terrorist groups.

In each of the above examples, group identity retains a special saliency because it is linked to past or present issues of discrimination and mistreatment. What I wrote in my 1967 article still seems to hold: while much ethnic militancy and group boosterism is considered clannish, it ?is really defensive. The greater the animosity, exclusion, and disadvantage, generally the more will ethnic self-awareness permeate the individual?s feelings and evaluations.?

In addition, let it not be forgotten that people retain ethnic attachments not only because their group is under assault but because the attachment provides a nurturing social and cultural experience. So along with the negative-defensive identity we have the positive-enjoyment ethnic experience. This is as true of Italian-Americans as of any group in the United States.

The Future Has Arrived
Does assimilation happen to any ethnic group? Yes indeed. Those northern European Protestants who invaded this country in what are called the ?early migrations? of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, riddled as they were with sectarian enmities and national differences, pretty much blended into the nativist melting pot by the mid-19th century. Today persons of long settled and much mixed northern European Protestant lineage are often notably vague about their antecedents. Their ethnic identity is a matter of no great urgency and has a low saliency to their self identity.

Some white Protestant immigrants are relatively recent arrivals yet they have enjoyed a fast-track assimilation, given their linguistic, physical, religious, and tempermental resemblance to the Anglo-American Protestant prototype. British workers who migrated here at about the same time as Italians, Greeks, and Jews were more or less well assimilated within one generation.

The 1967 article I wrote about ethnic assimilation--or rather the absence of assimilation?focused on the Southern and Eastern European groups of the ?late migrations? of 1870-1914. I concluded that ethnic identity would persist and would continue to play a role in political life well into the distant future. My article relied on data from the early 1960s but also from the 1940s and 1950s, in other words, as much as sixty or seventy years ago.

With this passage of time, one might say that the ?distant future? has arrived, at least for the white ethnics: the Irish, Poles, Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, and others. Today the ethnic identities of these late migration groups have much less saliency. This can be seen most dramatically in the political realm where references to a candidate?s ethnicity have become quite rare unless the individual is African-American, Latino, or Asian.

Recall how John F. Kennedy?s Irish Catholic antecedents were such a touchy issue in the 1963 presidential contest. But by 2004 it no longer mattered that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was a Roman Catholic. And in the 2008 election, it went largely unmentioned that vice presidential candidate Joe Biden was Irish Catholic.

In 2006 the media took no notice that Nancy Pelosi was the first Italian-American Speaker of the House; instead attention dwelt almost exclusively on the fact that she was the first woman to occupy that post.

For years Italian-American organizations had called for an Italian-American appointment to the Supreme Court. By 2006 there were two Italian-Americans on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, both conservatives. Progressive Italian Americans like myself were not dancing in the streets bursting with pride. If anything, we opposed both nominations. Obviously the politics of such jurists were of more significance to us than their ethnic antecedents.

In fact, as far as I could observe, no one took note that there were two Italians on the High Court except for the several conservative Italian-American organizations that ran full-page ads in 2006 designed to misrepresent those who opposed Alito on political grounds as being opposed to him out of ethnic bias. Thus the ads argued that Alito was being derisively called ?Scalito? (true) because of some anti-Italian prejudice (untrue). Actually the conflation of names was invited by their similarity and impelled by the fact that Alito was a right-wing reactionary twin of Scalia?s.

Pre-election opinion polls and exit polls published in the mainstream press reveal what groups are still in the public consciousness and what groups have faded into the background. After the 2008 presidential election, the New York Times devoted an entire page to how various groups in America voted. The Times broke down the electorate by income, gender, education level, region, and religion, but no ethnic groups other than Latinos and African-Americans.

Gone were the old time Harris-poll and Gallup-poll reports on how Italians, Irish, Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Portuguese, Greeks, and the like have voted. The white ethnics of the late migrations seem to have assimilated into the electoral mainstream, at least as distinct voting groups.

Good-bye Columbus
Those of us who are Italian-Americans might ask, is assimilation our ultimate fate? And does assimilation mean disappearance as a distinct ethnic entity? Is it our destiny to be melted down by the melting pot, going the way of the earlier Anglo-Protestant groups?

Be aware that social assimilation also leads to a high degree of biological assimilation, in other words, intermarriage and interbreeding with increasing numbers of offspring who are of mixed heritage. This growing tendency toward intermarriage has been a source of concern among some Jewish organizations that posit the question: ?Will intermarriage succeed in doing what 2000 years of oppression could not do?? (namely bring about the disappearance of the Jewish people).

For Italian Americans at the present time ethnic awareness still retains a significant saliency even among those who attain high levels of education and professional training--as demonstrated by the rich offering of scholarly papers presented at the yearly meetings of the American Italian Historical Association.

There is no reason to assume that a person?s identity choices are mutually exclusive rather than multifaceted. Multiculturalism can obtain not only in society but within individuals. And individuals of mixed descent can enjoy multiple identities and loyalties.

In addition, as noted earlier, ethnic identity is not only reactive but proactive, not only a defense against derogatory stereotypes, not only a compensatory assurance of group worth, but a positive enjoyment, a celebration of our history and culture in this country and in Italy. It is a way of connecting with others in what too often is a friendless and ruthless market society, a nurturing identity that is larger than the self yet smaller than the nation.

It would do well if we could bring more of a social content to our ethnic identity. The Italian-American Political Solidarity Club has just published a book whose title urges as much: Avanti Popolo: Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus. The book urges that on Columbus Day instead of celebrating conquest we should acknowledge those who fought for the rights of all immigrants and for social justice.

Indeed Italian Americans need to bring substance to the symbolic politics that have been fed to us. We do not need another statue to Columbus. Some such as Diane Di Prima, Tommi Avicolli-Mecca, and Juliet Ucelli have organized ?Dumping Columbus? readings and other events that challenge the iconic image of the Great Navigator and instead commemorate the Native Americans he enslaved and murdered.

Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (of German Protestant lineage) edited a book, The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism, that reclaims some of the history of radical Italian-American immigrants, labor leaders, union organizers, antiwar activists, and political protesters, a history long neglected or repressed.

To frame the Italian-American experience within a context of struggle for social justice and economic survival is to give it a dimension that goes beyond nostalgia and sentimentality, and flies in the face of the stereotypes that weigh down upon us Italians. Thus do we not only realize more of ourselves but we connect to more of the world, especially to the class realities that compose so much of life yet remain too often unmentioned and unnoticed.

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/116023.html

Berlusconi Declares War on European Media

With the European far greater casualness about sex and relations outside of marriage, than the "puritanical" US, it is rather hypocritical to attack Berlusconi, and particularly with the continuos stream of scandals in Britain. The Libel Laws in Britain are far more favorable to Plaintiffs, and Berlusconi may be successful in his Law Suit if brought there. Perhaps not those in Italy, France, and Spain.

Amazingly The Catholic Church who Berates Homosexuality, but is said to have between 25%-40% Homosexual Priests, and has had a Giant PEDOPHILE Scandal, has criticized Berlusconi for his "behavior".

Berlusconi Declares War on European Media over Sex Scandal Reports

Italian prime minister seeks €1m from La Repubblica and may sue British publications over sex scandal reports

London Guardian; UK,;John Hooper in Rome Friday 28 August 2009;

Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, today launched an all-out attack on Italian and international media which have reported his involvement in sex scandals and questioned its implications.

His lawyer said he had served writs on newspapers and magazines in at least two other European countries and was taking advice on the scope for libel actions in Britain. In Italy Berlusconi is seeking damages of €1m from the Espresso group, whose flagship daily, La Repubblica, has spearheaded the campaign to get answers about his friendship with an aspiring teenage actress and his alleged involvement with self-acknowledged prostitutes.

A writ signed by the prime minister said 10 questions to which the paper has demanded responses for the past two months were "rhetorical and blatantly defamatory". La Repubblica said that "for the first time in the history of Italian journalism the questions [posed by] a newspaper will end up in a civil court".

Details of Berlusconi's media counter-blitz emerged today as his already strained relationship with the Catholic church was buffeted by fresh storms. The Vatican announced at short notice that a dinner for Berlusconi and the Vatican's top official had been scrapped.

The announcement came after the billionaire politician's family newspaper, Il Giornale, launched an unparalleled attack on the Italian bishops' newspaper, Avvenire, accusing it of a "moralising campaign" against Berlusconi, and throwing a spotlight on the private life of the editor.

Il Giornale, the newspaper owned by Berlusconi's brother, Paolo, said that in 2004 the editor of Avvenire had plea-bargained his way out of a trial for menacing behaviour towards the wife of his homosexual lover.

Avvenire's editor, Dino Boffo, called the allegations "improbable, specious and absurd". A statement from the Italian bishops' conference said it had "full confidence" in him.

Following the Vatican's move, the prime minister issued a statement dissociating himself from Il Giornale's report in which he said: "The principle of respect for private life is sacred and should be valid always and in all cases for everyone."

In what was widely billed as the basis for a reconciliation, Berlusconi was to have dined tonight with the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in the earthquake-hit city of L'Aquila. He was due to take part earlier in an annual service for the remission of sins.

But a Vatican spokesman said the dinner had been cancelled and the prime minister had pulled out of the penitential observance to avoid his attendance being used against him. Berlusconi was to have been accompanied by an entourage including his equal opportunities minister, Mara Carfagna, a former topless model who was at the centre of a previous controversy between the prime minister and his now estranged wife.

The writ served on La Repubblica cited, in addition to the paper's insistent questioning of the prime minister, an article published this week that reported coverage given to the affair in non-Italian newspapers and magazines. One of the articles cited was carried by the French weekly Nouvel Observateur.

Berlusconi's lawyer, Nicolo Ghedini, told the Reuters news agency that the article, headlined "Sex, Power and Lies", was the reason for a writ sent to the magazine. He repeated that the Spanish daily El País was also being sued for republishing photographs taken secretly of comings and goings at the prime minister's villa in Sardinia.

Ghedini said La Repubblica had mounted an "intolerable" campaign against Berlusconi "which brings Italy into discredit because all foreign papers repeat these offences as if they were true." But Dario Franceschini, leader of Italy's biggest opposition party, the Democratic party, described the writ as "incredible". He added that Italians were "facing an unworthy strategy of intimidation … unprecedented in a democracy".

The move was also condemned by the Italian journalists' professional organisation, the newspaper publishers' association, and freedom of speech pressure group Articolo 21, which called for re-publication of La Repubblica's 10 questions by as many news outlets as possible.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/28/silvio-berlusconi-sues-sex-scandal

Garibaldi-Meucci Museum tells tales of Italian pride - not myths

John Dabbene, president of Staten Island's Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, speaks up against negative images of Italian-Americans and urges others to do the same.

Dabbene's father taught him young, to politely object to disparaging remarks about his ancestry, which is far more productive than the passive, be a good sport, that my father taught me, and I later abandoned , and met with greater success.

John Dabbene's Garibaldi-Meucci Museum tells tales of Italian pride - not myths

New York Daily news.com; Clem Richardson, Thursday, August 27th 2009,

John Dabbene, president of Staten Island?s Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, speaks up against negative images of Italian-Americans and urges others to do the same.

If you see something, say something." That has long been John Dabbene's motto.

For Dabbene, who heads Staten Island's Garibaldi-Meucci Museum and serves as president emeritus of the National Commission for Social Justice, a branch of The Sons of Italy....

It's a rallying cry against negative images of Italians - wherever found.

Dabbene, 71, has waged the battle - gratis - for much of his life.

"I have never gotten paid for anything I have done in the last 30 years working for the Italian-American community," he said. "I do this because of my love for my heritage."

Dabbene, has seen a lot over the years - and what he's said about what he doesn't like has resonated through our culture.

• In 1982 he persuaded the United States Military Academy at West Point to include Italian in its language program.
• With members of the Commission on Social Justice he launched a litany of protests against television programs that linked Italian-Americans with organized crime, beginning with Geraldo Riveras 1987 report on "Sons of Scarface - The New Mafia," to opposing plans in 2007 to bring back the "Sopranos" show to HBO.
• As one of the founding members of the CSJ in 1980, Dabbene led the group's protest of alleged bias against Italian-American faculty members at Queens College in1989.
• Dabbene began the group's "Positive Image Program," distributing nationally more than 100,000 pamphlets and other items with facts about Italian-Americans.
• He created a film about Italian-American winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor that earned him a 2004 Telly Award from the cable television industry.
• He lead the CSJ fight that put the kibbosh on plans for the U.S. Postal Service to issue a "Godfather" stamp as a tribute to Italian-Americans.
• As president of the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum since 2001, Dabbene organized a total renovation. He also commissioned the creation of several exhibits on Italian heritage that have visited elementary, middle, high schools and colleges.

The museum is housed in the landmark 420 Tompkins Ave. home that famed Italian military and political leader Giuseppe Garibaldi shared with Antonio Meucci from 1850 to 1854. Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell both lay claim to inventing the telephone.

Dabbene has won numerous awards, including a "Heroes of Staten Island" award in 2002. Last month the Order of the Sons of Italy presented Dabbene with the Bene Emeritus Award, their highest award, for service to the Italian-American community.

Dabbene is a walking history book that puts obscure events in context.

One such event is "Una Storia Segreta," the saga of Italian-Americans who were forced into internment camps in Missoula, Mont., during World War II - similar to Japanese-Americans - for fear they would spy against their country.

Dabbene was born in Brooklyn and raised on Court St. in what was then Red Hook, but is now considered Carroll Gardens.

He attended Public School 142, Brooklyn Technical High School, New York Community College and Polytechnic Institute. A certified lighting designer, he created control and alarm systems for Con Edison power stations for 43 years before retiring in 1999.

"My kids and grandchildren could never understand how we grew up," he said. "We had a four-family house, all our family lived in the same house. We had a 40-foot table down in one of the basements and we always ate together. Every holiday was spent together. People don't do that anymore.

"I would never give up growing up the way I did."

His late mother, Josephine, was a housewife and his father, Michael, was a longshoreman fiercely proud of his heritage.

"My father was and is my hero," Dabbene said, tears spilling from his eyes.

It was his father who told him to stay away from "those guys," well-dressed guys hanging on the corner who paid Dabbene 50 cents for his usual 5-cent shoeshine.

Michael Dabbene also taught his son to confront people who disparaged his heritage.

"The first week or so in high school my mother made me this potato and egg sandwich, with the oil dripping out of the bag," Dabbene said. "I was sitting at a table with three other guys, and a guy said, 'This guy must be a 'guinea.' Look at the sandwich he got.'

"I had never heard that," Dabbene said. "Nobody would say that in an Italian neighborhood. I went home and told my father. He looked at me like he didn't know what to say.

"Then he said, 'Don't let anybody call you that again,'" Dabbene said. "'It's not a nice thing.'

"The next time I was sitting at the table and the guy called me that. I said, 'You know what? I don't want you to call me that anymore.'

"To my surprise the three guys sitting there said, 'Okay, we won't call you that anymore.'

"And I said to myself, 'Sometimes you just have to talk up,'" he said. "Sometimes people don't understand what it is that's upsetting."

Dabbene and wife of 43 years, Marcy, have three children and four grandchildren.

To learn more about the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, which is holding its annual fund-raiser tomorrow in Roslyn, L.I., see the Web site, http://pub1.andyswebtools.com/cgi-bin/p/awtp-home.cgi?d=garibaldi-meucci-museum.

crichardson@nydailynews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/08/28/2009-08-28_john_dabbenes_museum_tells_tales_of_italian_pride__not_myths.html

Veronica Lario Berlusconi - Playing the Aggreived Wife - Who is Ridiculous?

In reading the New York Times article, remember that Veronica Lario Berlusconi, prior to marrying previously twice married Silvio, who brought with him the public reputation of being a "womanizer" ( a man who puts smiles on many women's faces), and therefore his actions should NOT have come as a surprise, but instead an expected part of the "package".

Also,Veronica was previously merely an actress in low budget films, and did not give up any great career to marry this Billionaire. with ALL the "perks".

But more stunning is that Veronica had a well publicized Affair with the Mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, and has NO Moral High ground.

In fact it generated one of the greatest Put Down's EVER, to his wife and her lover by stating in October 2002, during a press conference with Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Berlusconi said he ought to introduce his wife to Rasmussen, "the best-looking prime minister in Europe and certainly more handsome than Cacciari".

Berlusconi Wife: He Is Ridiculous Before The World

The New York Times; By Reuters; August 26, 2009

ROME (Reuters) - The wife of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is entangled in a spate of scandals involving other women, says she wants a divorce because she can no longer stop him from "looking ridiculous before the world."

In a revised edition of a biography, Veronica Lario said she had no choice but to leave Berlusconi after newspapers said he had attended an aspiring model's 18th birthday party. He told her he was at a conference.

"It was the umpteenth lie. Better to finally respect myself, better to divorce," Lario said in the book titled "Veronica's Way," which hit the bookstores Wednesday.

"I cannot condemn myself to be his wetnurse and I cannot stop him from making himself ridiculous before the world."

Lario publicly demanded a divorce in early May from her husband of 19 years, accusing him of "frequenting minors."

Berlusconi has denied any indecent relationship with Letizia Noemi, whose 18th birthday party he attended in April and to whom he gave a 6,000 euro (8,500) necklace as a gift. He has denied that anything "spicy" happened between them.

"I think that I have no choice but to separate...He would tell me another lie and this time I could not stand it," Lario says in the book by journalist Maria Latella.

Lario, Berlusconi's second wife, met him in 1980 and bore him three children before they married a decade later. She said that for many years she had silently endured Berlusconi's behavior with other women.

"I've reached the end of the road. Ten years ago I was not ready but now I can say: I am leaving this man."

Lario spoke to Latella in the spring, before another scandal broke over allegations that Berlusconi spent the night with call-girl Patrizia D'Addario in his Rome residence in November.

Berlusconi, notorious in diplomatic circles for a string of gaffes, asked his wife's forgiveness after Lario said in a public letter to a newspaper that he had wounded her dignity.

While the "sexgate" scandal has excited the foreign press, opinion polls show many Italians consider it a private matter and it has done little to dent Berlusconi's high popularity, despite the worst economic downturn since World War II.

Lario said, however, his transgressions threatened to overshadow his political legacy. The self-made billionaire is Italy's longest-serving post-war prime minister.

"What most displeases me is that a man like Silvio could have betrayed himself," Lario said. "He has done so much, conquered so much, and today they talk about him for things which make you forget what he really was."

"The Italian Chapel on Orkney" - One of Scotland’s best known Icons - Basis of Love Story Book

A story of forbidden love, lifelong friendships torn apart, despair and hope, The Italian Chapel is set against the backdrop of the creation of a symbol that is known around the world. Amidst strikes, conflicts and untold hardships, the Italian prisoners of war sent to a tiny Orkney island during WW2 create a monument to the human spirit’s ability to lift itself above great adversity. 90,000 people a year visit the building.

Highland Author Uncovers Secret Love Behind Orkney's Italian Chapel

All Media Scotland; Black and White Publishing; August 28, 2009

THE ITALIAN CHAPEL
by Philip Paris
Publication date: 23 September 2009


A Highland writer’s quest to tell the untold story of the creation of one of Scotland’s best known icons "the Italian Chapel on Orkney" has uncovered the secret love between an Italian prisoner of war and a local Orkney woman.

Philip Paris, whose debut historical fiction The Italian Chapel will be published in September by Black and White Publishing, has spent more than three years tracking down ex POWs and descendents of the key players in Camp 60. He has delved into the Chapel’s fascinating history and used a number of sources such as the Italian Chapel Preservation Committee and relatives of the POWs to uncover his story.
The Italian Chapel is Orkney’s most popular tourist attraction. Around 90,000 people a year visit the building, which consists of two Nissen huts placed end to end and converted with enormous skill and dedication.

A story of forbidden love, lifelong friendships torn apart, despair and hope, The Italian Chapel is set against the backdrop of the creation of a symbol that is known around the world. Amidst strikes, conflicts and untold hardships, the Italian prisoners of war sent to a tiny Orkney island during WW2 create a monument to the human spirit’s ability to lift itself above great adversity.

Philip discovered many fascinating hidden stories about the Chapel. One came from correspondence he had with a relative of one of the POWs. He explained, "The Italian blacksmith who built the rood screen died in 1980. I had been corresponding for months with his grandson, Giuseppe Palumbi. One day I received an email from Giuseppe to say that he had just heard the story about his grandfather meeting and falling in love with a local woman while he had been a POW. I think Giuseppe was even more surprised than I was to learn of this news! He then revealed that his cousin, who was born 25 years after his grandfather returned to Italy, is named after the woman on Orkney."

Philip continued, "It quickly became apparent that the story of the Chapel had never been told in any depth. Finding out what actually happened all those years ago became rather a passion, but I never imagined for a moment just what extraordinary secrets would be revealed."

The Italian Chapel will be published in September, the 65th anniversary of the Italians leaving Camp 60.
REVIEW COPIES ARE AVAILABLE ON REQUEST

For further information, photographs or an interview request, please contact:
Katy Gilzean at Black & White Publishing
Phone:0131 625 4507
Phone: 0131 625 4500
Fax: 0131 625 4501
Email: katy@blackandwhitepublishing.com
Website: http://www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

http://www.allmediascotland.com/media_releases/5416/highland_author_uncovers_secret_love_behind_orkneys_italian_chapel

Unification of Italy in 1870 More Conquest than Liberation

The 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy appears that it will be met with a yawn, or recriminations. In fact it reminds me a lot of the Yankees and Confederates in the US and the Civil War.

Unification had been an act of conquest rather than liberation, had been followed by fascism and then post-war cronyism and corruption,

The South laments the demise of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, sacrificed to the interests of northern industrialists under "a form of colonialism known as the unity of Italy".

Unbelievably The Northern League after stripping the South of it's Industry, and Treasury in Naples, The North now complains they are "saddled" with an impoverished region.

Italians still at odds over unification of country 150 years on ITALY: Plans for official anniversary of union see old wounds reopened Scotland Sunday Herald; From Philip Willan in Rome; August 27, 2009 IT WAS the Austrian statesman Prince Klemens von Metternich who famously observed: "Italy is a geographical expression". That was in a letter written in 1849, 12 years before Italy emerged as a unified state.

That dismissive view of the country of has been echoed a century and a half later by Umberto Bossi, the founder of the federalist and xenophobic Northern League, who is today one of the most influential ministers in the government of media magnate Silvio Berlusconi.

Bossi's lack of enthusiasm for a united Italy is proving an embarrassment as the government prepares to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the unification of the country, to be officially marked on March 17, 2011.

The government's lackadaisical approach to the occasion has sparked a tussle over the tortured cultural soul of a people accustomed to division by a history of feuding city states and warring political factions that continues from the Guelfs and the Ghibelines to the Bossis and Berlusconis of today.

President Giorgio Napolitano has written to the government to inquire politely what its plans are for the anniversary and former President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi has threatened to resign as chairman of the anni-versary oversight committee if the government shows no sign of believing in the event.

"Certain members of the present government are imposing a tendency not to decide anything," Ciampi complained in an interview published by the Turin daily La Stampa on Friday.

The government has identified some 11 construction projects, ranging from a new cinema complex in Venice to the refurbishment of theatres and museums in Naples and Reggio Calabria, and to the enlargement of Perugia's international airport, as part of an anniversary facelift for the nation.

But money is tight and the Northern League distinctly unkeen.

Bossi declared recently that the appropriate expenditure for the celebrations was "zero".

The League's newspaper, La Padania, explained why in an article titled: "Unity of Italy, what is there to celebrate?"

The birth of the Italian state was "an act against nature and against history", the paper said, and the only solution was federalism, a political order corresponding to "the true, deep soul of the country".

The unification of the country, achieved by national heroes such as Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, was actually the fruit of "violence, abuse of power and theft", according to Northern League MP Marco Rondini.

Italians felt greater identification with their city council than with the nation, so it was no surprise they wouldn't be waving the tricolour flag for the anniversary, Rondini said. With other politicians off on their summer holidays, League representatives have kept up a barrage of provocative proposals, from changing the national anthem to promoting regional dialects and traditions in schools.

One League MP has proposed a law allowing the celebration of marriages in local dialect, while the mayor of Capriate, in the northern state of Lombardy, has issued a ban on "alien" kebab stalls in his town centre.

From the pages of the Corriere della Sera newspaper political commentator Ernesto Galli della Loggia warned that the construction projects marking the anniversary were an illustration of how the country's leaders had lost touch with the real cultural background of the country. "How can someone celebrate the birth of Italy who has no idea at all of what the country really is?" Galli della Loggia asked polemically.

The article elicited a response from a Northern League-supporting student, who explained in a letter to the paper why some young people like him felt so little identification with the history of their own country.

Unification had been an act of conquest rather than liberation, had been followed by fascism and then post-war cronyism and corruption, wrote Matteo Lazzaro in his open letter to the Corriere.

"If I draw up a balance sheet from national unity to today, there seem to be more things to be ashamed of than of which to be proud," he wrote.

And disaffection for the unified state is not confined to the industrial north. A blog by the writer Mimmo Marseglia laments the demise of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, sacrificed to the interests of northern industrialists under "a form of colonialism known as the unity of Italy".

As Bossi calls for the replacement of the national anthem with Va Pensiero, a popular aria from Verdi's opera Nabucco, it is not surprising to learn that the tomb of Goffredo Mameli, the composer of the official anthem, lies in a state of unkempt neglect in Rome's Verano cemetery.

No other major European country seems so ill-at-ease and divided over its own recent history. No surprise then that it should be riven over where it wants to go in the future and how to honour its first 150 years of life.

http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var.2526963.0.0.php

"BITTER SPRING" A Life of Ignazio Silone, By Stanislao G. Pugliese

Ignazio Silone would become a celebrated realist novelist: Italy’s greatest living writer, in Faulkner’s opinion, as famous in his time as George Orwell or Arthur Koest­ler. Like them, he was a moral critic of the horrors of the age who told the truth about both Fascism and Communism.

"Fontamara" (Silone's first book) was turned into a play in New York in 1936, and "Bread and Wine" (Silone's second) was chosen over "The Grapes of Wrath" as a Book-of-the-Month selection. It’s hard now to recapture the impact of those books in their day.

Bread, Wine, Politics

New York Times By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT; August 23, 2009

BITTER SPRING

A Life of Ignazio Silone, By Stanislao G. Pugliese, Illustrated. 426 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35

When an earthquake struck L’Aquila in April ...it was hardly the first such tragedy Italy had known. On Jan. 13, 1915, quite near L’Aquila in the mountainous Abruzzo region east of Rome, a much more terrible earthquake hit Pescina dei Marsi and killed 3,500 people in a village of 5,000 - among them, the mother of a 14-year-old boy named Secondino Tranquilli.

He had already lost his father and five of his six siblings, and so young Secondino carried heavy emotional burdens before he reinvented himself as Ignazio Silone in a Spanish prison in 1923. At first an under­ground party operative like Trotsky or Tito, Silone would become a celebrated realist novelist: Italy’s greatest living writer, in Faulkner’s opinion, as famous in his time as George Orwell or Arthur Koest­ler. Like them, he was a moral critic of the horrors of the age who told the truth about both Fascism and Communism. Later he was embroiled in some of the darker controversies of the cold war, and was still a lightning rod in Italy even after his death in 1978. But his fame has faded outside his country, and Stanislao G. Pugliese’s absorbing new biography, "Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone," is the first to appear in English.

Having become secretary of a radical peasants’ group at only 16, Silone was already a prominent left-wing socialist by 1921. Early that year, at an age when others are still studying or in their modest first jobs, he helped found the Italian Communist Party. This was only the beginning of a life that would seem implausible in fiction. Indeed, Pugliese says of one later episode that it was the kind of outrageous coincidence found in Victorian romantic novels, although if anything Silone’s life was closer to the kind of pop "faction" in which the hero finds himself wherever history is being made, rubbing shoulders with its makers.

He met Lenin in Moscow, where (as he later recalled in a radio interview) "everyone was contributing to remaking society." Then came the Spanish interlude, when he was imprisoned while helping the local Communists. In 1927 he was in Moscow again for the epic meeting of the Communist International that saw the showdown between Stalin and Trotsky. Silone refused to condemn Trotsky on the basis of a document that he, like all others present, had not been allowed to study. Afterward he read that Trotsky had been condemned "unanimously" It was not long after that eye-opening experience that Silone broke with the Communists.

Now he was on his own, an anti­-Fascist physically exiled from Mussolini’s Italy and an anti-Stalinist intellectually and morally exiled from much of the left. Living in Switzerland in the 1930s and 1940s he found fame not as an activist but as a writer, for three novels set in his birthplace, Pescina. "Fontamara" literally "Bitter Spring," giving Pugliese his title - was followed by "Bread and Wine" and "The Seed Beneath the Snow." The first two especially were pioneering classics of proletarian fiction, telling of the tragic struggle of the Abruzzese peasants against rapacious landlords and brutal officials.

It’s hard now to recapture the impact of those books in their day. "Fontamara" was turned into a play in New York in 1936, and "Bread and Wine" was chosen over "The Grapes of Wrath" as a Book-of-the-Month selection. Silone himself made few literary claims for the trilogy, and no doubt they aren’t "great novels" in the sense that "Anna Karenina" and "Ulysses" are. But then neither are "Darkness at Noon”" or "Nineteen Eighty-Four," let alone "Uncle Tom’s Cabin": political or didactic fiction is not to be judged by the standards of Flaubert. The fact is that "Fontamara" and its successors inspired a generation, and Silone’s admirers included Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Thomas Mann and Arturo Toscanini.

By Christmas 1942, Silone was back in prison. The Swiss wanted to expel him "no joke when the country was surrounded by Axis territory " but relented because of his eminence, whereupon he found a new ally and a new career. Allen Dulles was then the Bern station chief of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the C.I.A., and enlisted Silone. He gave Dulles advice both military " the Brenner pass should be interdicted " and political, correctly predicting that "unconditional surrender" was a foolish policy that would prolong the defeat of Italy.

After the war, Silone was active for a time in Italian politics as a leader of the democratic left, campaigning for a united Europe and opposing the plan to merge Italy’s Socialist and Communist parties. The Socialist Party was saved, though not from the fissive tendency that saw its rival factions split away.

In 1950, Silone’s "Emergency Exit" was one of the autobiographical essays by former Communists that appeared in the anthology "The God That Failed," and now Silone was an official cold warrior. He went on to edit Tempo Presente, the sister journal to Encounter in London and Preuves in Paris, espousing liberal anti-Communism with financial support from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. As some guessed early and the world would learn, the C.C.F. was itself clandestinely financed by the C.I.A.

This part of the tale has often been told, among others by Peter Coleman in "The Liberal Conspiracy." Coleman compared the "gentle socialist moralist" Silone favorably with Koestler, whom Silone disliked both for the fanatical quality of his anti-Communism and for his philandering, in its way almost as fanatical. Not that Silone himself was consistently faithful to either of the remarkable women with whom he shared his life, Gabriella Seidenfeld and then Darina Laracy, one from a Jewish immigrant family and the other Irish. Pugliese sees these infidelities floating in the "murky waters of his state of mind and personal"; Silone was plainly neurotic and in some ways unlovable (as if that distinguishes him from other great writers).

On more than one occasion during his life Italians spoke of a caso Silone - a "Silone case" or affair, referring to his breach with the Communists or to the C.I.A. connection. But the most dramatic caso Silone of all was posthumous. In 1996, the historian Dario Biocca produced startling letters from the archive, written mostly in the 1920s to a senior Fascist policeman from an informer called "Silvestri", who appeared to be Silone.

If not quite on the scale of l’affaire in France a hundred years earlier, this case convulsed politically conscious Italy, dividing innocentisti from colpevolisti as Dreyfusards had been divided from anti-Dreyfusards, and likewise inevitably on partisan lines. "Bitter Spring" is readable, well informed and accurate (although when Pugliese refers to "Vladimir Nabokov" he must mean the novelist’s cousin Nicolas, a musician who ran the C.C.F.); and its treatment of this episode is one of the best and most judicious things in the book.

At the time, I decided not to trust anything said confidently about the case by anyone who didn’t command Italian and hadn’t studied all the enormous resulting literature, which I don’t claim to have done myself. It does seem that Silone had at least some contact with the police, who had arrested his one surviving brother, Romolo (who would die in prison at the hands of his captors), but it’s hard to see evidence of any great betrayal.

If Silone’s books are less read now than they once were, they ought not to be forgotten, and they will not be. Pugliese quotes a touching story from a professor at a Florida college who was teaching "Fontamara" to his class some years ago. The middle-class white kids couldn’t see the point of this tale of distant peasants fighting brutality and oppression - but his black students were overwhelmed. Whatever the postmodernists may say, justice and freedom are universal values.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include "The Controversy of Zion" and "Yo, Blair!" He is writing a study of Winston Churchill’s reputation and influence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Wheatcroft-t.html?_r=1

Paulie “The Magic Man” Malignaggi Gets Hometowned in Houston Texas vs Juan Diaz

With the Ring Announcers STUNNED, and angry, and TV Unofficial Scorer Harold Lederman scoring Malignaggi the Victor, Juan Diaz, the Belt Holder was declared the unanimous winner, of the vacated NABO Jr Welterweight World Championship, and as further evidence of a "FIXED" Fight, one judge, Gale Van Hoy, scored it 18-10 in favor of Diaz which meant that he felt Diaz won 10 of the 12 rounds. Incredible !!!!!

Proud Italian American, Paulie Malignaggi predicted that he would not be beaten in the ring, but by the Referees, who in Texas are notorious for giving "hometown" decisions (awarding undeserved victories to the hometown boxer). He tried to minimize that possibility by exacting a promise from the State Boxing Commission to have at least two of the three Referees from out of State. Promise ignored. All three judges were from Texas. Both Malignaggi and Diaz were former Jr Welter Champs. The Internet Boards are ablaze with indignation.

Paulie Malignaggi Caught With His Pants Down

Sporting News.com; By Dave "Large" Larzelere ; Monday, August 24, 2009

Brooklyn boxer Paulie "The Magic Man" Malignaggi has built a career around being a fast-talking, flashy, Italian-American kid from Brooklyn. This past Saturday, Malignaggi fought a bout against Juan Diaz in Diaz’s hometown of Houston and ended up getting robbed by the judges, something that he predicted would happen going into the fight.

The scoring was inarguably horrendous. In a bout that many, including HBO’s Harold Lederman, scored in favor of Malignaggi, Diaz was awarded a unanimous decision with one crooked judge scoring it 118-110, meaning that he had Diaz winning 10 of the 12 rounds. Myself, I had the fight scored a draw, and I think I would have been fine with a very narrow decision either way. But a 118-110 scorecard is a robbery, plain and simple. There’s absolutely no other way to look at it. ...

[Experiencing his second fashion career ignominy] ...Starting around the seventh round, his trunks started to go south under the weight of their various flouncy accoutrements. By the eighth, they had slipped below ass-level, and the announcers were openly laughing at the situation. "Boxing After Dark," Bob Papa said. "Where the moons come out."..

And here’s the crazy thing - this is the second such ignominy fashion-first Malignaggi has recorded in the past two years. In May of 2008, facing Lovemore N’Dou in Manchester, England on a Ricky Hatton undercard, Malignaggi wore very long dreadlocks (which were later revealed to be hair-extensions) pulled back in a ponytail. Early in the fight, these dreads started breaking free of the ponytail and flying into Paulie’s face. By the third round, he was completely blinded by his own hair. His corner tried everything, including wads of tape, to hold them back, but nothing could keep them from coming loose and obscuring his vision. Finally, his corner was forced to hack his hair off with tape-shears. It was the first, and only, impromptu haircut to have ever witnessed in the corner of a fight.

Many, including Malignaggi himself, are bemoaning the condition of boxing in the aftermath of the bad Diaz decision. I hear that complaint and feel it is valid

http://www.sportingnews.com/blog/the_sporting_blog/entry/view/31202/paulie_malignaggi_caught_with_his_pants_down

ITALY: "The Righteous Enemy" - National Center for Jewish Film.

This series of My Reports focusing on Italian Humanitarianism during WWII is a result of a burst of Misinformation and Disinformation on certain Italian American and Jewish Digital Bulletin Boards.

Let me again state, that while my sympathies and efforts are with the underdog, and I believe in The Golden Rule, I would NEVER have Jeoprodized My Life and the Life of My Family to save either fellow Jews OR Non Jews who faced arrest and worse.

To the Extensive Degree that Italians Performed these Heroic Acts is STAGGERING! STUNNING !

For those who diminish those Monumental Efforts, are Either Ignorant of the Facts, or exhibit Enormous Ingratitude!

Thanks to John Matteo

The Righteous Enemy

Italy/UK, 1987, 84 or 60 minutes
Color/B&W, Italian and German with English subtitles
Directed by Joseph Rochlitz Recommended by the National Center for Jewish Film.

A documentary account of the non-Jewish Italian resistance to Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Director Rochlitz begins with the story of his father, who was interned by the Italians during WWII, and then enlarges the film’s scope to show how Italian officials saved some 40,000 Jews from deportation to concentration camps.

Unique interviews explore why these officials subverted Mussolini’s orders to comply with German plans for Jewish annihilation and how they created ingenious bureaucratic evasions and, when necessary, literal roadblocks. Previously unseen Italian and German newsreel footage, archival photos, and excerpts from Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem are also included.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

“There have been so many books and films depicting the horrors of the Nazi atrocities, that it is a welcome change to find one which can call attention to decent, humanitarian people who, on a large scale, were willing to challenge the Nazis... this is the first time that the Italian resistance has been presented on film." - Carl Alpert, Jewish Advocate

"... thoughtful, carefully researched and in a way, warming...a compelling piece of work." - John Corry, The New York Times

http://www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm/Catalogue/films/righteousenemy.htm

An Army of Shindlers From Italy

My Previous Report re "The Benevolence of Italians toward Jews" stirred up a tumult, in of all places, the H-ITAM ( History - Italian American), which is an Academic Forum (History Bulletin Board of Michigan State University) , where there seems to be cadre of Self Loathing Italians who do not miss an opportunity to ridicule Italy. Also, surprisingly the H-ITAM Hierarchy are resistant to print corrections to Myths that are spewed. While ALL other Ethnic Studies Programs Nationwide, both University and Private, engage in instilling Pride in their Ethnicity. H-ITAM under the cover of fear of "Filiopietism" (Cheerleading) seem to concentrate on Self Flagellation, justified or not.

The following was sent to me by Comm. Dominic Di Frisco, a Director of Society of the Italian Legions of Merit, President Emeritus of JCCIA

(Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans- Chicago), Director of public affairs at Burson Marsteller, a Chicago-based public relations firm.

An Army of Shindlers From Italy- By Dorothy Rabinowitz - Wall Street Journal

Dorothy Rabinowitz, is a Pulitzer Prize winning (nominated three previous times) American conservative journalist and commentator. She was educated at Queens College and New York University. She has worked as editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal since June 1990 and has been a member of their editorial board since May 1996.

AN ARMY OF SCHINDLERS FROM ITALY

By Dorothy Rabinowitz

Oskar Schindler, flawed hero of Steven Spielberg's monumental 11m, "Schindler's list," came to Poland a profiteer and ended up a rescuer of many hundreds of Jewish lives. His story's entry into the world, via Mr. Spielberg's justly celebrated film, calls to mind a number of other unlikely rescuers of whose exploits little has yet been heard, however much they are known to historians.

I haw in mind, namely, Hitler’s allies, the Italians, whose government ministries and army and highest political circles moved heaven and earth to see to it that not a single Jew was deported tram Italy. They schemed, they plotted, they resorted to the wiliest of strategies and delaying efforts-including the invention of the most wonderfully complicated "census-taking" known to man - to ensure that no Jews under their govemance fell into German hands. Not for nothing does the history of these plots sometimes read like farce.

None of this can mitigate the facts of the unspeakable fate that ultimately befell some 8,000 Italian Jews when the Germans finally marched in-nor the harsh anti-Jewish legislation Mussolini introduced in 1938. Still, there is no doubt that, were it not for what the Germans so bitterly described, in their cables, as the peculiar "Italian attitude" of protection toward the Jews, far more than the 20% of the Italian Jewish population that was annihilated would haw been shipped to their deaths.

Unlike countries like Bulgaria and, for a time at least, France-which resisted deporting their Jewish nationals but were prepared to deliver their foreign-bom Jews-the Italians refused to deport Jews, period.
Their refusal (like that of Hitler’s other temporary ally. the Finns) was based on a full awareness of what awaited any Jew deported for "resettlement." Berlin was naturally was naturally bitter over this intransigence. The telegrams from Bureau IV of the Reich Security Head Office-command post for the final Solution - flew thick and fast with inquiries as to when Italy could be expected to begin handling its Jews OWL The answer from the Italians was an unbending - if silent "Never." And indeed, so long as Fascist Italy remained independent, and until its occupation by the Germans in 1943, the answer was the same.

Not only would the Italian government - reflecting the popular attitude of the citizenry at large - resist deportation, its army and consuls undertook extraordinary efforts to rescue Jews in their zones of occupation. As an Axis partner, Italy's forces occupied a large sector of Greece, part of Yugoslavia and eight sectors of southeastern France, including Nice.

The attitude of the occupying Italians with regard to Germany’s extermination plans for the Jews was made immaculately clear, to the great distress and confusion of the Germans and their French allies.
For, as soon as the Vichy police in these areas busied themselves rounding up Jews for 8nest and deportation, the Italian military and foreign ministry demanded - and obtained - a stop to the arrests and deportations .
In Annecy, the French police, who had rounded up a trainload of Jews for deportation, found them Selves looking at the barrels of guns trained on them by soldiers of the Italian Fourth Army. Yielding to this forceful persuasion, the French released the Jews.

In Salonika as elsewhere, as historians Leon Poliakov and Jacques Sabile document, the Italians offered more than tolerant protection. In Greece, the Italian consuls and military - witness to the brutal deportations taking place before their eyes - busied them selves handing out phony certificates of "Italian nationality" to the hunted Jews. Italian officers spirited Jews away to safety on military trains and, as survivors haves attested, they undertook, in every possible way, to cheer them on and assure them of their protection. In Poland, Italian troops gave aid and comfort to the hunted Jews.

In Nice, the Italian commandant stationed carabinieri outside the Jewish communal center and synagogue to make certain that Vichy police could not enter to make arrests. Elsewhere in southeastern France where the Vichyite police (on orders from the Germans) decreed that the Jews be made to wear the yellow star, the Italian generals countermanded the order. It was. they answered, "inconsistent with the dignity of the Italian army" that in areas of its control Jews should be made to wear "this stigmatizing badge."

The dignity of the army. Such a quaintly improbable ring the words have in the context of the unrivaled honors being inflicted daily by the armies of the Reich and their accomplices. They' were flawed heroes of a kind different from Schindler, these servants of Mussolini's Fascist state. It has been argued that there were elements of political concern in Rome's refusal to cooperate in the murder of the Jews - but no one can attribute anything but humanitarian revulsion at the Germans' policies in the activates of the Italians who strove so assiduously to save lives in the territories they occupied.

What there was in the character of the Italians that made their resistance to mass murder so implacable, so different from that of the Vichyite French, is a question we may ponder - and one- for whose existence we can be grateful.

Ms. Rabinowitz Wall Street Journal, 22, December, 1993

Italian Benevolence Toward Jews During WWII - Questioned?

Below is my response to an acquaintance of mine, who forwarded me to me an article that appeared in I-Italy. OP-ED : "Brava Gente' The Resurgence of the Shopworn Myth of Italian Benevolence During Fascism" by Alessandro Cassin
http://www.i-italy.org/10288/brava-gente-resurgence-shopworn-myth-italian-benevolence-during-fascism which was a response to "It Happened in Italy, Untold Stories of How People of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust" by Elizabeth Bettina. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/It-Happened-in-Italy/Elizabeth-Bettina/e/9781595551023/?itm=1


Dear BV. ,

As Especially Educated man as you, I am astounded that you would give ANY Credence to the above referenced article in I-Italy.

First, I've got to tell you, that while I have fought for the underdog all my life, I would NOT put my family's life at risk, for another family, particularly if they were Not a fellow Jew. !!!!!!!!! That Catholic Italians Risked their Families Life for Italian AND Non Italian Jews, and did so in such Enormous Quantities is STAGGERING to me !!!!!!!!!!!

Next, the article is written by Alessandro Cassin who is a cultural critic and weekly feature writer for L’Espresso, and a regular contributor to Il Diario, and Not an HISTORIAN, and most of his material is taken from discredited and well known Anti- Italians as Alexander Stille, and Susan Zuccotti. Cassin comes to the subject with NO background, yet has the audacity to malign the efforts of Elizabeth Bettina, who spent several years of study, and was granted unprecedented access to Vatican Files.

Cassin further attempts to undermine Bettina's efforts, since she is Not an Academic (and neither is he), as if only an academic is permitted to write a book , or be taken seriously.(Cassin does say that "Bettina proceeds in her investigation with the dogged determination of an oral historian, the resourcefulness of Indiana Jones and the enthusiasm of a neophyte.")

It is particularly amusing, since Classing is unaware that "The pioneer of Italian American Studies was Giovanni Schiavo. Though he was not part of the academic world his dedicated labor produced over thirty volumes of documentation on the subject." from a Report " The American Italian Historical Association at the Millennium" by Frank J. Cavaioli. http://www.aihaweb.org/AIHAhistory.htm

Giovanni Schiavo fell short of obtaining his PhD, only because he could not afford to publish his dissertation during the Depression,,but even more amusing is that Schiavo earned his living as a Reporter, the same despicable profession that Cassin dabbles in. :)

Coincidentally, Schiavo suffered a great deal of derision from Academics, for the longest time, since he wasn't of their "Elite" class,

"Giovanni Schiavo and Professor Rudolph Vecoli: Their Legacies: Pride vs Anti-Filiopietism". The ANNOTICO Report: May 14, 2005 http://www.italystl.com/ra/2137.htm

Cassin says " the consensus among serious scholars has repeatedly refuted the consolatory myth of Italian benevolence."

However , Cassin fails to mention these "Serious Scholars" by name, and the Degree of Consensus. There are a few"Opportunistic" and Biased writers that do "smear" Italy, but when other Authors recounted the outpouring of Jewish Appreciation immediately after the War, and other authors more recently have retold the stories, supplementing them with new Archival information, the "Haters" are fully discredited.

Additionally, as an example of Cassin's galactic ignorance, that completely undermines his credibility, he states: " Historical research suggests clearly that the comparatively smaller numbers of deported Jews from Italy has more to do with the size of the Italian Jewish community (roughly 1 per 1000 inhabitants),"

Contrary to Cassin insinuations,there were almost the exact same Jewish Population in Italy prior to the War, as there was after, about 50,000. NOT A SINGLE ITALIAN JEW was Jailed, Imprisoned, or Deported in Italy.!!!!!!!! Italian Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Partisans, Communists, Anti- Fascists, etc were !! Yes!! BUT it had NOTHING to do with their Religion, it had to do with their Politics !!!!!!!!

Maybe it was also partially due to the fact that Jews held high positions in the Fascist movement, from the very beginning, including hundreds of Jews who were with Mussolini in the "March on Rome", which we both know was more like the "Railroad Train to Rome".

Cassin, goes on to state: "its high level of (Jewish) assimilation". WRONG! While Jews were fully accepted in Italy, they continued to maintain their special Identity, and plethora of Jewish organizations. !!!

Cassin also states INCREDIBLY INCORRECTLY : " and the fact that deportation began relatively late in the war, when the Nazis controlled only a portion of the country), than to any particular 'goodness' of the Italian population. "

On June 10,1940, Italy declared war on Britain and France. On December 11, 1941, the US declares war on Italy. In July 1943 The Allies invaded Sicily , and Italy surrendered in September 1943, the US entered Rome in July of 1944, the Germans left Florence in August 1944, to retire to Gothic Line. On May 2, 1945. Germans in northern Italy surrender.

Therefore the Germans were ENTIRELY in CONTROL of ALL of Italy, from Italy's surrender. Cassin's journalism is sloppy at best, and disinformation at it's worst.

Also, allow me to refer you to an article from the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz". Italian Jews and Holocaust survivors are rushing to aid "Aquila" communities that sheltered them during World War II, and were hit by last week's devastating earthquake.

Riccardo Pacifici, the head of Rome's Jewish community, said he was working to get recognition from Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial for Italians and bestows a special honor on those who saved Jews during World War II.

Unbelievably, according to Haaretz, Yad Vashhem, with it's warehouses full of WWII documents plead ignorance to Italian Benevolence. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1078259.html

Of course, few are not familiar with the "conversion" of The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel (Zolli) Zoller, (1881-1956), to Catholicism. Zoller did so because he was SO grateful for the "refuge" the Vatican extended to him, and the enormous "protection" the Catholic Church afforded Jews throughout Italy, during the Nazi occupation, but especially in Rome

As documented in Renzo Felice's "Jews in Fascist Italy" , pg 751, Felice lists 155 Catholic buildings in Rome alone, that "sheltered" Jews.

ADDITIONALLY, NOT a SINGLE REFUGEE (German, Austrian, Polish, etc...) JEW was Shipped back to Germany. EVEN after the Germany had significant Military troops in Italy, while the Italians were in Charge..

The Italians put as many Refugee Jews in "Displaced Persons" Camps (familiar in all countries after the war) such as in Campagna (Salerno), Ferramonti di Tarsia (Cosenza) etc. that Cassin properly describes as "safe havens" where the Italian guards kept the German SS at bay. In Ferramonti the Jews freely went to town, and the Italian towns people freely entered the Camp, in many cases to receive Medical Treatment from Jewish Doctors.

ONLY until AFTER Italy Surrendered, and Germans were in CONTROL of Italy, were about 8,000 REFUGEES (Citizens of Germany, Austria, Poland, etc) were Shipped by Rail back to Germany, where only about 2,000 survived.

Cassin uses the usual critic tactic, when the content can not be easily contoverted. he critcizes that the the view isn't more comprehensive, he wonders why Betting is able to get Jews to be so cooperative, that she really has a different agenda, demeans her perspective, and berates her for not including enough Negative Stories, and berates her for not explaining why the Italians did not "overthrow" their German masters, and be massacred in a futile attempt to prevent the deportation of Refugges,

Cassin implores us to apply 'common sense" rather than the Facts he deems not to his liking.

Cassin says nothing about the incredibly high losses of Italian Partisans in Fighting the Germans, nor does he mention the 20,000 Italian civilians Massacred by the Germans in the almost 1,000 "incidents". Cassin neither mentions the hundreds of thousands of Refugee Jews that were assisted in their flight out of Europe through Genoa and Trieste, although he is quick to excoriate Bettina for not mentioning Delasem (Delegazione di Assistenza agli Emigranti Ebrei) who could NOT have operated without the "Blind" AND "Complicit" Cooperation of Italian authorities, that engaged in "wholesale" forgery of documents, and "overlooking "missing" or obvious forged documents. .

To question the Benevolence of Italians toward Jews, and as Cassin states the Italian efforts to fail to save the 8,000 of Refugees was " morally offensive" is to be Uninformed or Disingenuous at the Best , and Evil at Worst. It actually shows an enormous amount of INGRATITUDE.

Published on i-ITALY (http://www.i-italy.org)

Brava Gente? The Resurgence of the Shopworn Myth of Italian Benevolence During Fascism by Alessandro Cassin (July 29, 2009) Propaganda in Italy

==================================================================

Note: while Ms. Bettina was assembling her material, she and her collaborators video taped interviews with many of the survivors, which she plans to release as a full length documentary film.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?ModuleId=10005455

What Puzo Godfathered 40 Years Ago

Italian-Americans have always been ambivalent about "The Godfather." While the book and the films made it hip to have a name that ended in a vowel, there were many who wanted to consign Puzo to the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno for forever labeling organized crime as Italian. Historians of the early mob point out such names as Arnold Rothstein, Owney Madden, Meyer Lansky, Dion O'Bannon, Dutch Schultz (aka Arthur Flegenheimer) and Jack "Legs" Diamond, but in Puzo's novel, crime is treated as "La Cosa Nostra" -our thing.

While some consider "The Godfather" a masterpiece, Puzo, by his own admission, says it wasn't well written. "If I'd known so many people were going to read it," he famously said, "I'd have written it better."

What Puzo Godfathered 40 Years Ago

Wall Street Journal; By Allen Barra; AUGUST 12, 2009

In 1969, an obscure middle-aged novelist and pulp magazine journalist named ­Mario Gianluigi Puzo hit the literary jackpot. He wrote "The Godfather," he later told Larry King, "to make money." By his own admission, it wasn't well written. "If I'd known so many people were going to read it," he famously said, "I'd have written it better."

How many people have read it? It can be said with some certainty that having sold between 20 million and 30 million copies, "The Godfather" is one of the best-selling books of all time. By most yardsticks, it is one of the top 10 best-selling works of American fiction. Four decades later, it's still selling, in a paperback edition from the New American Library.

The reasons for its enduring popularity aren't easy to pin down. Of course, Francis Ford Coppola's masterpieces, "The Godfather" and "The Godfather, Part II," brought a swarm of new readers, but the book had already sold millions of copies before the first film was ­released in 1972.

Those who read the novel today in search of a greater ­appreciation of the movies are bound to be disappointed; it quickly becomes apparent the book's success isn't based on literary merit. The late 1960s were the peak period of "novelizations"?easy-reading books aimed at fans of popular movies. Puzo, along with Michael Crichton, Peter Benchley and John Grisham, helped usher in an era when the novelization would precede, not follow, the film. Puzo had previously written critically praised but virtually unread novels about the Italian-American experience, most notably "The Fortunate Pilgrim"; with "The Godfather," he went from being a novelist to a novelizationist.

Wilfrid Sheed correctly ­described the prose of "The Godfather" as "speed writing clichés." One searches the novel in vain for the verbal poetry in the films, lines such as "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes" and "Leave the gun, take the cannolis." And yet, as the New Yorker's Pauline Kael noted in her review of the film, "There was a Promethean spark in Puzo's trash." What exactly was that spark?

Gay Talese, whose "Honor Thy Father" is perhaps the classic nonfiction book about the Italian mob, thinks it can be summed up in four syllables: "La famiglia." A friend of Puzo until his death in 1999, Mr. Talese says: "Mario didn't know much about organized crime, but he certainly knew how to depict an Italian family. Take away the gambling and the murder, and it's pretty much a straightforward story about how Italian-American families were assimilated into American culture." George De Stefano's "An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America" examines, among other things, the impact of "The Godfather" and how it reflects Italian-Americans. He says that "we saw our families in that book, and, for the first time, a great many Americans saw us. It wasn't a pretty image, or a tranquil one, but it was never dull, and it was new to most people."

Italian-American gangsters were a part of our popular culture long before Puzo's novel. "But it was Puzo's genius to turn them into family men," says Maria Laurino, author of "Old World Daughter, New World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom." "All those elaborate passages in ?The Godfather' which describe the family patriarch presiding over weddings and baptisms and then ordering murders gave a new dimension to the image of the Italian father," Ms. Laurino notes. "Movies had always shown the murders but never told us that these men had daughters and godchildren."

The popularity of Puzo's novel caught America by surprise because it seemed to go against the grain of everything that was dominating the news of the time: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, Woodstock, ­Altamont, the moon landing, the Vietnam War. "In times of such social upheaval, who cared about the fortunes of a family of Italian-American immigrants?" asks Mr. Talese. As it turned out, just about everybody did. "I think there was a lot of unrest about the dissolution of the American family, and many Americans of other backgrounds were fascinated by the idea that they would kill to ­uphold their family values and traditions?appalled, but fascinated. Mario touched a nerve that most Americans didn't ­realize was even there."

Italian-Americans have always been ambivalent about "The Godfather." While the book and the films made it hip to have a name that ended in a vowel, there were many who wanted to consign Puzo to the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno for forever labeling organized crime as Italian. Historians of the early mob point out such names as Arnold Rothstein, Owney Madden, Meyer Lansky, Dion O'Bannon, Dutch Schultz (aka Arthur Flegenheimer) and Jack "Legs" Diamond, but in Puzo's novel, crime is treated as "La Cosa Nostra"?our thing.

If he isn't burning for that, Puzo is surely doing time in the Purgatorio for suggesting that Frank Sinatra owed his success to the Mafia. One horse's head in a movie producer's bed, and Puzo's Sinatra stand-in, Johnny Fontane, "went on to become the greatest singing sensation in the country." As if the greatest singer of popular standards in American music needed a ­godfather to put a gun to the collective heads of record ­buyers.

Perhaps, though, Puzo ­deserves a suspended sentence for his contribution to film rather than literature. The enormous success of the book poses an interesting question: Why didn't the descendants of Dante produce more first-rate writers in this country? The likely ­answer is that the grandparents of the great Italian-American film directors?Mr. Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Michael Cimino, Quentin Tarantino and others?came here unable to speak a new language and illiterate even in their native tongue. The younger generation found a new medium to turn the pulp of Mafia legend into art.

If Puzo wasn't a genius, he at least found a way to inspire genius. One might call him the Godfather of Italian-American film.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204886304574308603266273652.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Italians Use Pungent Gold as Collateral

Interestingly, Parmesan cheese has been used for financial operations since the Middle Ages. This is both due to its value, since each compact wheel holds the equivalent of 550 liters of milk, and the fact that aging takes years, making financing necessary until the product can be sold.

It is all the more important today, since Italy is facing its fourth recession in seven years, with the economy likely to shrink 5.3 percent this year, the worst contraction on record. Fortunately Italy has not had the Upheaval as in the US , since the Mortgage Market is more sensible, as is the use of Credit Cards.

Cheesy Collateral Keeps Italian Credit Flowing Amid Recession

Bloomberg News; By Alessandra Migliaccio and Flavia Rotondi; August 12, 2009

The vaults of Credito Emiliano SpA hold the pungent gold prized by gourmands around the world -- 17,000 tons of parmesan cheese.

The regional bank accepts parmesan as collateral for loans, helping it to keep financing cheesemakers in northern Italy amid the worst recession since World War II. Emilia Romagna-based Credito Emiliano's two climate-controlled warehouses hold about 440,000 wheels worth 132 million euros ($187 million).

"This mechanism is our life blood," said Giuseppe Montanari, 65, a cheese producer and dealer who uses the loans to buy milk. "It's a great way to finance our expenses at convenient rates, and the bank doesn't risk much because they can always sell the cheese."

So precious is the cheese that each 80-pound wheel, worth about 300 euros, is branded with a serial number so it can be traced if it is stolen. Thieves tunneled into one warehouse in February and made off with 570 pieces before they were apprehended by police.

"Thank heavens we caught the robbers before they grated it," said William Bizzarri, 58, who manages the cheese vaults.

Nestled in the valleys of Italy's Emilia Romagna region, southeast of Milan, Credito Emiliano has been using parmesan as collateral since 1953, entrusting management of the cheese to a unit called Magazzini Generali delle Tagliate.

The bank offers loans for as long as 24 months, equal to the time it takes the parmesan to age, at the euro interbank offered rate, plus 0.75 percent to 2 percent, Bizzarri said. The bank gives producers as much as 80 percent of the value of the product, based on current market prices.

550 Liters of Milk

"Parmesan cheese has been used for financial operations since the Middle Ages," said Leo Bertozzi, head of Italy's Parmigiano-Reggiano Producers' Association. "This is both due to its value, since each compact wheel holds the equivalent of 550 liters of milk, and the fact that aging takes years, making financing necessary until the product can be sold."

The bank considered taking prosciutto ham, another of the region?s specialties, and olive oil as collateral but such products are harder to store and brand, Bizzarri said.

"It's easier to steal or replace them," he said.

Emilia Romagna is the only area in the world legally allowed to use the "parmigiano-reggiano" name for the hard, dry skim milk cheese that was first made in the region around 1200. Sales of parmesan equaled 1.54 billion euros in 2008, 25 percent from exports, according to the producer's association.

Once the bank accepts cheese as collateral it oversees the aging process, which includes turning the wheels several times a week and checking periodically for cheeses that have gone soft. As a master tester taps each cheese with a small metal hammer, Bizzarri listens for hollow sounds that would indicate the wheel is a "dud" and result in its disposal.

Like a Check

Most wheels pass the test, said Bizzarri, who sold financial products and managed bank branches before taking over the cheese unit. After a year they are branded with the parmigiano-reggiano logo and serial numbers and tags.

"It's just like a bank check," Bizzarri explained. "If we catch any thieves in time we can easily trace the cheese"

When loans aren't repaid, Credito Emiliano sells the cheese collateral to recover its investment, returning any difference to the producer. This makes the operation low risk for the bank, Bizzarri said, adding that very few producers default.

Producer prices for parmesan averaged 7.27 euros a kilogram in July, down from 7.49 euros in January, according to data from the Parmesan Producers Association in Reggio Emilia. Prices peaked at 9.36 euros a kilo in January 2004.

"Fortunately, prices have now stabilized and while the global economic crisis remains a concern, consumption, including sales abroad, is holding up," Bertozzi said.

Economic Boost

Credito Emiliano has almost 6,000 employees and 590 branches, mostly in central and northern Italy. First-quarter net income fell 75 percent to 11.8 million euros on lower commissions and trading losses of 33 million euros.

While cheese accounts for less than 1 percent of the bank's revenue, the unit is important because it helps keep parmesan makers in business, bolstering the local economy, Bizzarri said.

Italy is facing its fourth recession in seven years, with the economy likely to shrink 5.3 percent this year, the worst contraction on record, according to research institute Isae.

"The government has been asking banks to help the economy and keep lending, but credit quality is a problem these days," said Edoardo Liuni, an analyst at IlNuovoMercato.it in Rome. "With this system, defaults are less likely."

While other local banks have at times had similar programs, and larger institutions sometimes accept high-value goods such as art as collateral, Credito Emiliano is the main bank offering loans to Italy's 429 parmesan producers, Bizzarri said.

"It's not our main source of funds, but it helps producers and shows there are more ways than one to keep doing business," he said. "Let's say it's a way to put our heritage to good use."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_en&sid=aT_bQ9tRAhrw

Italy's Flavia Pennetta Wins L.A. Women's Tennis Championships

The 27-year-old Italian 10th-seeded Flavia Pennetta moved smartly through the bracket and avoided the sort of inconsistent play that doomed the others. Pennetta was born 25 February 1982 in Brindisi, Puglia.

Penetta has won eight career WTA singles titles, including back-to-back titles in Bogotį and Acapulco in 2005. She and her Italian teammates Mara Santangelo, Francesca Schiavone, and Roberta Vinci beat the Belgium team 3?2 in the 2006 Fed Cup final. Justine Henin had to retire in the fifth and final match due to an injury in her right knee, which let Italy win their first Fed Cup trophy.

Penetta has defeated former World No. 1s and multiple Grand Slam singles champions such as Justine Henin at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix in 2005, Martina Hingis in Gold Coast, Australia at the beginning of the 2006 tour, Amélie Mauresmo at the 2008 US Open en-route to her first Grand Slam singles quarterfinal, Venus Williams, and former World No. 1 Jelena Jankovic at the 2008 Zürich Open Pennetta is also one of only seven women to beat Williams three consecutive times. In doubles, she reached the 2005 US Open final with her partner Elena Dementieva http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavia_Pennetta

Pennetta last one standing, wins L.A. Women's Tennis Championship final

Los Angeles Daily News; By Elliott Teaford Staff Writer; August 9, 2009

CARSON - One by one, the top-seeded players tumbled all around Flavia Pennetta at the L.A. Women's Tennis Championships at Home Depot Center.

Top-seeded and No. 1-ranked Dinara Safina went out in the third round. Second-seeded Vera Zvonareva fell in the quarterfinals.

Bigger names and brighter stars were sent packing. Ana Ivanovic lost in the third round and Maria Sharapova was ousted in the semifinals.

The 10th-seeded Pennetta moved smartly through the bracket and avoided the sort of inconsistent play that doomed the others. She completed her steady run with an efficient 6-4, 6-3 victory over No. 13 Samantha Stosur in Sunday afternoon's final.

"Now I'm feeling tired," the 27-year-old Italian said while breaking into a chuckle. "No, I'm very happy about this tournament, about today, about yesterday, about this whole week. Today was a very good match.

"We fight a lot, both of us."

Pennetta's serve lacked the pace of Stosur's and hovered around the 100-mph mark as opposed to the 115-mph speed of her Australian rival.

Pennetta had four aces to three for Stosur. Pennetta also had only two double faults; Stosur had eight.

What's more, Pennetta was steadier in her groundstrokes and volleys. She had only 16 unforced errors compared to 32 for Stosur. She hit 18 winners to Stosur's 19.

All of which added up to perhaps the most significant victory in Pennetta's career, one shaped on Italian clay courts rather than American hardcourts. There was a time not so long ago when she tried to avoid hardcourts all together.

"I started to play better in hardcourts two years ago," she said. "I just played on clay all the time. My serve is much better now. Also, my forehand has improved. I have more power in the legs now, so everything changed."

That much was evident as Pennetta appeared fresher and more at ease than Stosur, who fell to 0-5 in finals in her career. Pennetta got the break of serve she needed in the first set, went ahead 4-3 and held on to take the first set.

In the second set, Pennetta broke serve to go ahead 2-1. Stosur broke back to make it 3-all, but Pennetta broke again and held serve for a 5-3 lead. She broke Stosur again and thrust her arms skyward after hitting a forehand winner on match point.

On her way to the title, Pennetta defeated Varvara Lepchenko in the first round, CoCo Vandeweghe in the second, Nadia Petrova in the third, Zvonareva in the quarterfinals and Sharapova in the semifinals.

Pennetta reached the final in Carson for the second consecutive year. Last time, she lost to Safina, 6-4, 6-2. This time, she took the extra step and won her second title in as many months. She also won at Palermo in July.

Pennetta also will vault from No. 14 in the world to No. 12 when the new rankings are released today. That's one spot away from the highest ranking of her career.

No Italian woman ever has been ranked in the top 10, something Pennetta hopes to change sooner rather than later.

"Women's tennis in Italy has improved the last few years, not like soccer, because in Europe they talk about soccer all the time, but it is important now," she said. "To be in the top 10 is going to be very important in Italy." .....

http://www.dailynews.com/sports/ci_13028592

All Broads Lead to Berlusconi's Rome

I am no supporter of Belusconi's Right Wing Politics, but as you read the Vanity Fair article keep in mind that (1) Americans are Puritans regarding Sex, almost perpetual obsessed adolescents, while Europeans (excluding the Brits) are more "natural', (2) Is Belusconi humiliating his wife , Veronica, for her affair with the Venice Mayor? (3) Veronica as a former nude dancer is not positioned to be a preacher on morality (4) Does Belusconi have good taste in Ladies or Not? (5) calling Berlusconi a "cheap" Lothario, the way he "pampers" his ladies is idiotic.

The article is informative about "Velines", (the Italian version of the US model/starlet) and Berlusconi's battle with Rudolph Murdoch for supremacy of Italian Satellite TV.

A Seventeen Slide Show of the Women in Berlusconi's life can be seen at :

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/09/berlusconi-slideshow200909

THAT'S AMORE

All Broads Lead to Rome

Mired in sex scandals, headed for an ugly divorce, dogged by investigators, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is a national joke. He's also the richest, most successful politician in Europe - and has no intention of changing his ways. Will Italy change without him?

Vanity Fair; By Michael Wolff; September 2009

"Veronica believes," said Maria Latella, the biographer of Italy's First Lady, "her husband is a man who lives still in the 1950s."

This may or may not be a bad thing in Italy, where I've spent as much time over the last 30 years as I possibly can because Italians seem so ambivalent about the modern world's arrival. But, for better or worse, it's a surge of modern irony, psychological nuance, and obsessive media attention that is confronting Italy's prime minister, threatening the career of one of the richest men and most successful politicians in Europe.

In the 1950s, Silvio Berlusconi was a cruise-ship crooner. After that he became a real-estate magnate, a media mogul, and then prime minister. Although that's not quite giving him his due: he isn't just one more immensely powerful billionaire; rather more impressively, he controls his country's dominant political party, its primary television networks, and its government. But, after all this, what characterizes him most is his crooner personality: he's an indefatigable "and cheap" Lothario. A dime-store Sinatra. A type. An Italian stereotype.

His desires are hardly a secret. He's a braggart, which is part of his charm - furtive isn't his style. His wife first caught his eye doing nude stage shows. Her first public letter, written two years ago, was prompted by his voluble declaration that if he weren't married he would run away to a desert island with one of the women in his Cabinet. This was followed by the publication of telephoto pictures of a seeming bacchanal at Berlusconi's Sardinian mansion. To him this was less cognitive dissonance than positive demonstration: this 72-year-old man is living the dream and, he says with a stagy wink, the redhead and the blonde, with whom he was walking arm in arm, were just admiring his statues and fountains.

In a sense, no one was as stunned as Silvio himself by the current nonstop discussion in Italy of his sex life that began with renewed vigor in April when he was spotted at the 18th-birthday party of a young woman in Naples. Indeed, he doesn't get it. A man who's been at one with popular culture as exploiter and its consummate expression is now its joke.

Popular culture in Italy is TV.

There are three private networks, which Berlusconi owns and controls, and three state networks, which, as prime minister, he also controls. People in Italy watch television the way people elsewhere used to before satellite and cable and the Internet: the country sits in front of the TV at the appointed hour.

The attractiveness of that market is a reason why Berlusconi blames his current problems not just on his wife, and the few outlets of the Italian press he doesn?t own, but also on Rupert Murdoch.

As it happens, Berlusconi is the only person I've ever heard Murdoch talk about without reservation. This makes sense. Berlusconi has accomplished the thing Murdoch has most tried to accomplish: he's monopolized his nation's media and politics. And yet, Berlusconi may have a point about Murdoch's having it in for him.

The Murdoch satellite-and-pay-television system, Sky Italia, has grown widely in popularity in Italy since Murdoch launched it, in 2003. Murdoch would like much more of this market. "Murdoch's competition would be a disaster for Berlusconi," says Marco Travaglio, a journalist who became famous, during the 2001 election, for his reports on the public television network RAI about the Berlusconi money trail - from which he was promptly banned when Berlusconi was re-elected. "It would destroy the very system upon which Berlusconi has built his fortune and power base."

Hence, the Berlusconi government slapped a special 20 percent tax on Sky Italia. Which is why the prime minister is now saying the Murdoch media is out to get him. And perhaps why, at a particularly dicey moment for the P.M. early in the summer "just as, along with his other girl problems, several more girls were saying he'd paid for their attentions" Murdoch had a big and well-publicized dinner in Milan where he announced an expansion of Sky.

"In this context," says Alexander Stille, the author of a book about Berlusconi, "Murdoch is like Paul Revere." [RAA: Stille never misses a moment to deride Italy. But calling the egomanicical, curmungingly Murdoch, who has never gotten along with his second in commands or even his children, as a Paul Revere is falling down laughable]

But back to sex. The cheap Lothario grows up to be the lascivious producer with one of history's most active casting couches. It?s his Lothario values, as much as his political wiles, that make him. Here's his secret: he puts big-bosomed girls on TV. So many girls that they have come, in Italy, to represent, like courtesans of another era, almost a social class: the veline.

In the 1980s and 90s, the veline " a term that came to mean young girls with no talent except the desire to be on television"redefined popular culture. Before Berlusconi and the veline, Italian television, dominated by the twin orthodoxies of Catholicism and Communism, looked monochromatically clerical and dogmatic: heavyset men, smoking cigarettes, with lots of hair coming out of their ears and noses. In a country that proscribed private national television networks, Berlusconi tricked the system by assembling in the early 80s a patchwork of local stations that all, at slightly staggered times, broadcast the same thing. There were few situations on Berlusconi television in which a hostess was not cheerfully hovering nearby. His wife, Veronica Lario, whom he met in 1980, when she was 23 and he was a 43-year-old married man with two children, was a velina.

The veline set the fashions, the veline married soccer stars, the veline made Berlusconi rich and famous. If this was a dirty old man's dream, it was also a housewife's fantasy. When Ezio Mauro, the editor in chief of the Roman newspaper La Repubblica, Berlusconi's most ardent foe, first met him, in the early 90s, Berlusconi told him of his incipient political dreams: "With the housewives I freed I could become prime minister," a prospect that Mauro then rated to be as likely as Berlusconi's playing for the American N.F.L.

When, in 1993, Berlusconi started a new political party and became prime minister, the veline followed him. It has become a commonplace to rise in the ranks of veline and then get elected to high office.

Berlusconi did not seem, at this point, old-fashioned. His election was made possible because the old order collapsed in the early 90s in a great corruption scandal. Berlusconi, although closely aligned with the socialist leader Bettino Craxi "who fled the country shortly before conviction on corruption charges" was not a politician. Benefiting from Craxi's influence and financial ties, he had become one of the most successful businessmen in the nation - which was the platform he ran on. He was the businessman who could make the trains run on time. He was, people said, with horror and awe, like an American politician. The future had come to Italy.

But as Italy began to transform, Berlusconi did not. He went into politics not least of all to protect the extra-legal television business he'd managed to build in spite of the regulated market. And then he expanded the uses of politics so that, first and foremost, politics became about protecting him and his interests.

Last year, in one of the more precarious legal difficulties the prime minister has faced (and he has faced many), the Italian courts convicted a British lawyer and businessman, David Mills, of taking bribes from Berlusconi in exchange for giving false testimony in yet another investigation of alleged Berlusconi corruption. The Mills conviction seemed to presage Berlusconi's own inevitable conviction. Berlusconi's solution: a law providing that the top four figures in the Italian government, including the prime minister, the president, and the leaders of Parliament, could not face prosecution until they'd left office. It is Berlusconi's well-known intention to have himself appointed president for a seven-year term after he completes his term as prime minister.

Then there's the wiretap law. Because the prime minister is a study in indiscretion, much of the evidence in the various investigations that threaten him comes from conversations picked up in wiretaps authorized by judges overseeing the many inquiries. But in an inversion of standard Big Brother behavior, Italy has just passed a tough anti-wiretap law?to protect the prime minister from being overheard.

An effect of this creation of a system in which he is beyond challenge or competition is that, as the world changes, Berlusconi hasn't had to change very much. He can do what he wants and become ever more what he is. Which, as it happens, can make you seem rather strange.

His wife changes, though. Veronica is the poor girl from Bologna who became a performer, and then married the boss and settled into a fully indulged life where she raised her three children and, quite unexpectedly, read books. "She raised her children and read philosophy and literature," says Maria Lattella. "Her husband was a man the way Italian men used to be. He has his life in Rome and then he comes home on Saturday nights and expects to have his life at home."

Veronica lived in Milan and Silvio in Rome, where he engaged in a dizzying life of political and sexual ambition, including a hair transplant and, reportedly, a face-lift and liposuction. Jacques Chirac, the former French president, recently recounted his memories of trips to Berlusconi villas: "This bidet," Chirac recalled Berlusconi saying as he offered a tour of his bathroom, "you have no idea how many pairs of buttocks it has received!"

Shortly after the news of Berlusconi's visit to the 18-year-old's birthday party in Naples broke "while the girl, Noemi Letizia, and her family apparently re-arranged their stories and went silent" her former boyfriend explained the details. Seeking, like many teenage Italian girls, a television career, Noemi assembled her portfolio and sent it to a contact at a modeling agency in Rome, where it came into the hands of a favorite Berlusconi news anchor, Emilio Fede, who put it into the hands of the prime minister, who promptly picked up the phone and personally called Noemi - a name now as famous in Italy as Monica.

Berlusconi arrived for Noemi's birthday party at an un-prime-minister-like venue, a discotheque outside of Naples, just as another bit of bad press was kicking up: the prime minister's list of likely nominees for Italy's seats in the European Parliament included a full slate of veline. The controversy over his list of dubiously qualified women was enhanced by the suspicious nature of his visit to the birthday party in Naples, made much more suspicious by his inability to explain why he would be at an 18-year-old's birthday party at all. It did not get any better when Noemi said she called the prime minister "Daddy," and explained that she often visited him in Rome or Milan and sang karaoke duets with him, or when she joked that she did not know if she would get a job on television or in Parliament.

For Veronica it posed issues beyond the personal: "I have come to wonder what kind of country we live in." The point was not only that her husband had embarrassed her but that, as a further moral issue, he was, in her view, according to Latella, "not an example of a man who respected women."

Shortly after her husband?s trip to Naples, Veronica told La Repubblica and the Turin newspaper La Stampa that her husband was a man who went with "minors" and that she wanted a divorce.

There doesn't seem to be an Italian who's not asking how Berlusconi came to be and how he continues. This has become the great issue of national character: Why do Italians like Silvio?

The most obvious explanation for why he survives and thrives is that he owns the media. While the international press hammered him, and his nemesis, La Repubblica, repeatedly published the same 10 questions he continued to refuse to answer about his relationship with Noemi, and even after other women had come forward to say they had been paid to entertain the P.M., Italian television barely broached the subject.

Then there is the issue of the Italian character. The Italians reach for, instead of resist, their own stereotypes. Berlusconi is their metaphor. You understand Berlusconi, you understand yourself. A Berlusconi-employed journalist "a fate whose ironies make for great comedy and bitterness"explains, "Italians need someone like him because he is just like them. Everybody has a mistress. Everybody cheats on taxes. Everybody does something illegal because it's impossible to live legally. Also, we love authoritarians. We need a strong man. If not Mussolini, well, then someone like Mussolini."

Then, perhaps most confoundingly, it may be that he is a very good politician. That is, he does what people want: lower taxes (he says he lowered them; the opposition says he's raised them) and talk tough on immigration; deal with a garbage pileup in Naples; make ritualistic bows to the Catholic Church while ignoring it altogether (his two marriages and gazillions of girls); rush to the scene of the recent earthquake in central Italy and demonstratively kiss old ladies and joke with the men ("What are you doing up there [on the scaffolding]," he shouted to some workers on one of his earthquake-inspection tours. "And how come there are no women? Are you all gay? Next time I'll bring you a few girls, the veline ... but not minors, all over 18 "); and, always, divide the elite from the greater populace, with whom he takes pains to identify (in fact, with whom he may naturally identify).

On a sunny morning in Rome in June, Berlusconi sent his lawyer to explain the situation to me. Niccolò Ghedini, a tall, thin man with a long, scary face "who is not just Berlusconi's personal lawyer but among the most powerful members of the Italian Parliament " is famous for his daily television defense of the prime minister. It is a defense that seems to mesmerize the Italians: denying what can't be denied in arguments so shamelessly self-serving that they win by sheer bravura alone.

"You must understand the character of Mr. Berlusconi is very complicated," Ghedini says slowly through a translator. "It provokes enthusiasm and antipathy. But great enthusiasm and small antipathy. So the allegations against him are flawed because they are against him. This is anti-Berlusconi-ism."

"Veronica," says Ghedini with a big sigh. "What does she want?" Attention. He would like to reconciliate. He still loves his wife. He was hit very hard by her request for a separation. Perhaps if he was able to involve his wife more in his life. But this is not so easy, because he is very busy and also a man with a strong character.?

Big sigh: "Noemi-gate." Silvio Berlusconi is a man who likes to be among people: if he enters a hall with a thousand people, he asks, "Where are the others?" His strength and charisma come from being among the common people. He is so popular because he remains a simple person. There is nothing at all strange here. It is very straightforward and innocent. He has a long relationship with her family. And if there are other reports, well, in the same matters of the same family when there is a long relationship, it is common for people to remember things differently.?

Another big sigh: "The Mills case and the protection from prosecution of our top officials." They say that Mills was given money to not say certain things at the trial. But you see he is now the main witness, so that must be proof that he was not given the money. As for our top officials. In Italy, there is a constitutional right to participate in a trial, but if you are the prime minister, with the responsibility for running the country, you could not have the time to participate. So this is a way to protect the rights of the prime minister.?

His biggest sigh yet: "The press." It is the responsibility of the press to criticize the government. But of course this criticism has to be based on the truth. And the press has written things totally different from the situation, from the context, which cannot be tolerated, you understand."

The very basis of Berlusconi's survival may be that he is someone who does not have to be taken seriously. The people who take him seriously seem to suffer in the contrast.

Marco Travaglio, who was banned from RAI because of his criticism of Berlusconi, has built a significant Internet following with his detailed reports about the prime minister. But when I spoke with him I couldn't help but feel that he was investing a disproportionate amount of time and significance not just in such a clownish, even childish man but also in an attempt to prove the obvious. Where the funding for Berlusconi's empire came from is one of Travaglio's obsessions. And while that might be a meaningful, even epochal question, it also seems somehow overly literal. Of course Mr. B. is suspect. Everybody knows that!

In June, Berlusconi, in a fit of pique toward the press "specifically La Repubblica and Murdoch" said that it was engaged in a conspiracy, indeed trying to stage a coup d'état, against him.

La Repubblica's Ezio Mauro "a man who suggests that while he was born to better things than dealing with Silvio Berlusconi he is now fated to have him as his whale" wondered, one afternoon as I sat with him, whether the prime minister would use sedition laws to muzzle the press. The suggestion is that Berlusconi, the borderline personality, is, too, a borderline dictator, the heir to Mussolini, whom he periodically makes excuses for. And yet, putting aside that he has actually already muzzled the press, how could he be a dictator? The point of being a dictator is to be taken seriously.

It's a precarious act, being the unabashed show-off, the novelty performer. All audiences grow weary and jaded. Berlusconi is nearly 73. At some point, in the natural order of things, younger people no longer find old people trying to act young amusing. It's gross.

And yet, at the end of June, in a runoff election held just a few days after another woman who claimed to have been paid by a Berlusconi associate produced a recording of the prime minister saying, "Go wait for me in the big bed," Berlusconi's party won handily.

At the July meeting of the G-8, which Berlusconi hosted, his official hostess, in his wife's absence, was Mara Carfagna, Italy's equal-opportunity minister, the former topless showgirl and velina who first roused his wife's ire when he suggested he'd like to run off to a desert island with her.

The people "want me," he explained, "because they feel that I am a good person, generous, truthful, and loyal, and I keep my promises. And, anyway, at my age I am not going to change."

Michael Wolff is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/09/wolff200909

Italians Win Aga Khan Nations' Equestrian Show Jumping Cup in Shock Victoty at 100-1

The Italian side, at 100-1 odds with the bookies, put in a fairytale performance to claim the Aga Khan trophy of international show jumping following an extremely poor season.

The new stewardship of former Swiss rider Markus Fuchs was being credited with the dramatic turnaround in the final leg of the Meydan FEI Nations' Cup series after taking the four member team over only three weeks ago.

Italians Ride off with Cup in Shock Victory

The London Independent; By Louise Hogan; Saturday August 08 2009

IRELAND put in a dismal performance in front of a packed home crowd in yesterday's Aga Khan Nations' Cup, despite being hotly tipped as contenders for the coveted trophy.

Team manager Robert Splaine touted the Irish-foursome as being in the running over the challenging course but a shock victory from a rank outsider delivered on the day.

The Italian side, at 100-1 odds with the bookies, put in a fairytale performance to claim the Aga Khan trophy as they have been relegated from the top ranks of international show jumping following an extremely poor season.

The new stewardship of former Swiss rider Markus Fuchs was being credited with the dramatic turnaround in the final leg of the Meydan FEI Nations' Cup series after taking the team over only three weeks ago

After the Irish side clocked up the highest number of faults among the eight teams, Chef d'Equipe Splaine said: "Today was disappointing for me but it was the end of the series and we did stay in the Meydan series for next year, and we did win one leg outright."

The Italian anthem rang out across the jam-packed main arena at the RDS as President Mary McAleese, accompanied by her husband Martin, presented the Aga Khan trophy to the Italian team manager Mr Fuchs.

Mr Fuchs said he had gathered together the best possible combination of horses and riders for the final competition.

"I got the best team to Dublin and I think it turned out good," he said.

Italy will be relegated from the top ranks of international team show jumping next year, while Belgium and the UK may join them.

More than 40,000 horse-lovers are expected to flock to the show over the final two days, as the Land Rover Puissance gets under way today and international competitors vie for a stake of the lucrative prize pot in the Longines International Grand Prix tomorrow.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/italians-ride-off-with-cup-in-shock-victory-1854865.html

Italians Treated Refugee Polish Jews after WWII "From Tajikistan to the Moon" a Memoir of Robert Frimtzis

"From Tajikistan to the Moon" is a Memoir of Robert Frimtzis' story of tragedy, survival and triumph of the human spirit will inspire the reader to navigate the mazes in life and overcome its obstacles. He speaks particularly kindly about his treatment by Italians during his arduous journey that took Frimtzis born in Moldavia,(between Rumania and the Ukraine), whose family fled the Nazi's Blitzkrieg 3000 miles eastward to Tajikistan, and after the war trekked back across half Europe and eventually ended up in Cremona, Italy, and then Geneva Switzerland, and thence to the USA.

I haven't figured out why Frimtzi's is referred to as Polish/ *Polacchi *

"From Tajikistan to the Moon"

Tajikistan officially the Republic of Tajikistan is a mountainous landlocked country in Central Asia. Afghanistan borders it to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and People's Republic of China to the east. Tajikistan also lies adjacent to Pakistan but is separated by the narrow Wakhan Corridor. Most of Tajikistan's population belongs to the Tajik ethnic group, who share culture and history with the Iranian peoples and speak the Persian language.Tajikistan became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union in the 20th century, known as the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic (Tajik SSR)

Frimtzis in his own words, provides a unique account of life in displaced person's (DP) camps in Italy during the 1947-1950 era of the mass exodus of European Jews who survived the Holocaust and searched for freedom and new beginnings. Frimtzis gives great credit to ORT.

[ ORT- In 1880 a small group of prominent Russian Jews petition Czar Alexander II for permission to start a fund to assist Jewish trade schools and establish new colonies, agricultural schools and model farms in order to help Russia's five million Jews, that leads to create the "Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor" for Jews of Russia." It is from this original name, Obschestvo Remeslenovo i. Zemledelcheskovo Trouda that the ORT acronym is derived. Now "Organization for Rehabilitation through Training" (ORT). there are ORTs in 60 Countries and have trained Millions of Jews, during the last 130 years. ]

Frimtzis states, I am not an Italian but have great admiration and love for the Italian people. These feelings have stayed with me from when I was a teenager (age 16-19) living there post World War II to this day. That includes my love of Italian opera, bell canto, art, style, the zeal of life, and the sharing of their company. I travelled on trains to Rome and Naples to inquire about the status of our visas at the American consulate. I learned to speak Italian fluently while living as a poor refugee in (DP) camps in many parts of the country.

Never was I discriminated in Italy for being a Jew, having survived the Nazi onslaught of our city. I will never forget the kindness of the Italian

people toward the unfortunate poor refugees even though they had lived under the influence of Fascist Mussolini and under the watchful eye of the Vatican. They referred to us as *Polacchi *instead of *Ebrei *since the earlier* profughi* were from Poland.* *That is to be contrasted with the neutral, democratic Swiss behavior, who lived in prosperity and lack of war for some seven centuries, where young boys called me "sal Juif" dirty Jew, when I lived there as an international student of the Central ORT Institute in Aniere pres Geneve. I roomed at the Institute with a young man named Vittorio Pavoncello who was born in Rome. We and another refugee from the Cremona DP camp formed the Italian contingent. Since he spoke only Italian he could only converse with us. I am also making reference in the book to Primo Levi, as compared to my uncle who survived the concentration camps in Bershad, Ukraine (Transnistria) and the murder of his younger brother, who

was buried in a mass grave with 300 other victims. He was depressed and lamented for the rest of his living days wishing he would have taken the place of his brother, a physician who was more deserving to live and help humanity.

In a short excerpt from page 154 of Frimtzis book:

?A few days after our arrival in Milan, my parents sent me to expedite a registered letter to New York. I walked out of the DP camp at *Via Unioni*, still wearing torn pants from my crossing the Alps. I reached the trolley stop in front of the *Panettone Motta. *Because of my attire and lack of Italian language skill, I felt too embarrassed to ask for assistance from strangers on the street. I finally set aside my pride and approached an impeccably dressed gentleman in his fifties.

"Posta, America," I said as I showed him the letter.

"Ho capito" He nodded and took me by my hand. We boarded the trolley, and he paid my fare. After a couple of stops, we got off. He escorted me to the post office and helped me send the letter, then returned with me aboard the trolley to the stop in front of the *Panettone Motta.* He refused to accept the payment I offered.

"Grazie, grazie" I thanked him profusely as I bowed.

I have not encountered other Italians quite like him. However, he is a good example of the reason I love the Italian people.?

*From Tajikistan to the Moon *is a compelling true story of the spellbinding events of World War II and my escape. Written from a unique Soviet perspective, it brings to life my flight to freedom and my ultimate success in America. Against all odds, a ten-year-old boy from Beltz (Moldova) evaded Nazi capture, bombs, imminent starvation and deprivation in a mud hut in Tajikistan, escaped from the Soviet Union, and trekked across half Europe.

In America he earned a Bachelor's from CCNY and a Master's degree from Columbia University both in electrical engineering without finishing high school. To top it off, he contributed to America's accomplishments in space (worked with Neil Armstrong), developed scientific and defense satellites to keep America strong.

This inspirational story is worth reading as I bear testimony to my life as a young boy caught up in the subhuman existence of a war refugee, a displaced person, separated by unseen borders of discrimination and war, who managed to live a full and rewarding life, achieving the American dream, making a difference in the world for generations to come.

I have written the book as a result of a solemn promise I made to my mother at he age of ten during bombardments and strafing by the Nazi Luftwaffe to write a book and tell the world what happened to innocent people so it should not be repeated. In keeping with that promise distributing it to the wide public is my obligation.

http://www.atlasbooks.com/marktplc/02547.htm

Italians in Mexico - A History

As Americans we tend to view the Italian Diaspora as almost solely to the US. Rather, it wasn't that easy to immigrate to the US, and there are huge number of Citizens in Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and so many other countries of Italian Ancestry.

There an estimate of 850,000 of Italian ancestry in Mexico!!!!

ITALIAN MEXICAN

An 'Italian-Mexican' or 'Italo-Mexican' (Italian: ''italo-messicano'', Spanish: ''ítalo-mexicano'') is a Mexican citizen of Italian descent or origin. Most people of Italian ancestry living in Mexico arrived in the late nineteenth century, and have become generally assimilated into mainstream society.

History

Italo-Mexican identity rests on the common experience of migration from Italy in the late 1800s, a period characterized by a more general Italian diaspora to the Americas (under the pressures of economic transformation and the process of unification into a nation-state in 1871), and the establishment of communities, primarily in central and eastern Mexico. Only about 3,000 Italians emigrated to Mexico during this period, and at least half of them subsequently returned to Italy or went on to the United States^[1]. Most Italians coming to Mexico were farmers or farm workers from the northern districts. Most of these immigrants were from northern Italy, especially from the north-east regions of Veneto and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. Others arriving in the early 19th C included many from South Italy. Significant numbers of Italian settlers arriving in the late 1800s and early 1900s received land grants from the Mexican government.
Today, many Italo-Mexicans continue to reside in towns founded by their ancestors. Among these is Chipilo, in the state of Puebla, where a derivitive of the Venetian dialect is still spoken by its residents. Other towns founded by Italian immigrants lie in the states of Veracruz (Huatusco), San Luis Potosí, and the Mexican Federal District. Smaller, but also notable numbers of Italo-Mexicans can be found in Guanajuato, Estado de Mexico, and in the towns of Nueva Italia and Lombardia in the state of Michoacán, which were founded by wealthy Italians who immigrated to Mexico after the 1880 diaspora and established large agricultural estates known as haciendas.

Society

Although many Italo-Mexicans now live in urban centres such as Mexico City and Monterrey, many others live in, and strongly identify with, one of the original or spin-off communities that are almost entirely of Italian origin. These individuals still stridently claim an Italian ethnic identity (at least to a non-Mexican outsider), but generally note that they are Mexican as well. In the late 1900s, there were an estimated 30,000 Italian Mexicans in the original eight Italian communities.^[1] The total population, however, is uncertain due to the national census not gathering information on any specific ethnicity, as it is done in other countries. Despite this, Italian surnames are not uncommon in parts of Mexico.
The majority of Italian Mexicans speak Spanish, but in Italian communities derived Italian languages (usually mixed with Spanish) are used to communicate among themselves.

Derived Italian Languages

Since most Italian immigration occurred by way of the establishment of colonies, derivitives of Italian languages exist in Mexico. Besides the best known Chipilo, derivitives of the Venetian language may also exist in Huatusco and Colonia Gonzalez, Veracruz. To this we can also add other Italian immigrant languages like Trentino (like in Colonia Manuel Gonzalez, Veracruz and Tijuana, Baja California), Piedmontese (in Gutierrez Zamora, Veracruz which remains the oldest Italian colony in Mexico as such which was called the Model Colony, and in La Estanzuela, Jalisco another Italian colony), Lombard (in Sinaloa and Colonia Manuel Gonzalez too, but mainly in Nueva Italia and Colonia Lombardia in the state of Michoacan), Sicilian (mainly in Mexico City), and Lower Bellunese (in Colonia Diez Gutierrez in San Luis Potosi.

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

Five Italians Killed in "Tragedy on the Hudson" as Piper Plane Hits Tour Helicopter on Hudson River in NY

Following the "Miracle on the Hudson" (Sully Sullenberger) , we now have the "Tragedy on the Hudson"

A Helicopter carrying Five Italian tourists, Tiziana Pedrone, Fabio Gallazzi, Giacomo Gallazzi, Michele Norelli and Filippo Norelli was slammed into the back by a single-engine Piper plane, with 3 Americans, and is blamed for the Tragedy. In total nine lost their lives, none survived.

The Five Italian Tourists were part of a larger group of 12 Italian Tourists that hailed from two different parts of Italy: some from Bologna, while others were originally from Benevento. a town not far from Naples.
After New York City, the Italian tourists had planned to spend time in Florida before heading to Cancun. The survivors have now changed those plans and intend to return to Italy.

Deadly End for Groups on 2 Trips of Leisure

New York Times; By Serge F. Kovaleski and and Michael M. Grynbaum; August 9, 2009

At 11:50 a.m. Saturday, Steven M. Altman set off from Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey at the controls of a single-engine Piper airplane for what should have been a routine, short flight to the Jersey Shore. Nearby sat Daniel Altman, his brother and partner in the family’s real estate business, and a teenage boy.

The three had been in the air for only about six minutes when, according to the authorities, Mr. Altman’s Piper slammed into the back of a helicopter that had just taken off from a heliport on the Hudson River, carrying a pilot and five Italian tourists eager to see New York City from the sky.

No one survived the crash.

The helicopter passengers were part of a larger group of about a dozen Italians " a collection of family and friends who lived in the Bologna area " visiting New York City as part of a vacation that was to wrap up on the beaches of Mexico, according to an Italian official and a person familiar with their plans.

On Saturday, all the Italian tourists showed up at the West 30th Street heliport, but only five would take to the air over the Hudson River while the rest waited on the ground. According to a spokesman for the Italian Embassy in Washington, the five who lost their lives in the crash were Tiziana Pedrone, Fabio Gallazzi, Giacomo Gallazzi, Michele Norelli and Filippo Norelli. Two of them were youths and the rest adults, the spokesman, Fabrizio Bucci, said.

The helicopter pilot was Jeremy Clark of Lanoka Harbor, N.J., according to Liberty Helicopters, the tour operator.

All told, nine people died after the two aircraft collided.

Steven Altman lived with his wife, Pamala, in Ambler, Pa., a suburb about 20 miles north of Philadelphia....and was a Cornell graduate ..was the principal of Altman Management Company, a real estate investment firm, that owns and manages residential properties. Daniel, his brother, was a vice president....

As for the Italian victims, Mr. Bucci said that, according to their passports, they hailed from two different parts of Italy: Some were born in the northeastern part of the country around Bologna, while others were originally from a town not far from Naples called Benevento.

After New York City, the Italian tourists had planned to spend time in Florida before heading to Cancun. The survivors have now changed those plans and intend to return to Italy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/nyregion/09victims.html?_r=1

"Distant but Loyal" by Anne Romano inspired to counter Anti Italian TV Images

"Distant but Loyal" had much to do with the author, Anne Romano, desire to contradict societal myths about Italians. "I was in tune with presenting positive images of Italians" hardworking people who came here to make a better life for themselves and their families,- Romano said. "Yet, all you see on television is the "Sopranos" and the "Real Housewives of New Jersey." The book was 10 years in the making.

"Distant but Loyal" by Anne Romano

Queens Chronicle, Queens NY , Review by Lisa Fogerty, Assistant Editor, August 6, 2009

...Anne Romano's new book, "Distant but Loyal," which the South Ozone Park resident self published after 10 years in the making, examines her family’s migration from Itri, Italy to Cranston, R.I. In it, she analyzes the Itrani character -studies their culture, heritage and religion; explores the ways in which their traditions were transcribed once their feet hit U.S. soil.

Romano traveled back and forth to Itri " hit all the libraries,interviewed countless residents and snapped photos of everything that could have meant anything to her parents, Maria and Giacinto. She also clocked in more than a few miles trekking between Queens and Cranston. Her first trip on I-95 north to visit her family’s many relatives took place the summer of 1996, when her father was 91. Arriving during the feast of the Madonna della Civita, Itri’s patron saint, Romano’s father was treated as if he’d never left home.

“On the day of the feast, men carrying this 500-pound statue of the saint stopped in front of my dad, kneeled down and let him kiss it. I was so moved and touched by that,- Romano recalled. "I began to wonder what it would have been like if I’d been brought up in Rhode Island. That started the whole inquiry into what pushed them out of Italy in the first place."

The desire to inspect and throw a spotlight upon her family’s heritage puts Romano in the same camp as other cultural detectives - luminaries such as... Ignazio Silone, an Abruzzese native who captured the struggles of Italian farmers and the poor in "Bread and Wine" ; and with less fanfare, Caroline Seller Manzo, an Englishwoman who fell in love with the peculiar and precious oddities she unearthed in her husband’s Sicilian paese in "Casa Nostra: A Home in Sicily"

Romano’s setting, however, is virtually uncharted literary territory. Itri is a city of 10,000 people in the central region of Lazio - that same wonderland most famous for containing a little city called Rome. It boasts a castle, a 12th century bell tower and a fortress used by freedom fighter Fra Diavolo to ward off France in the 18th century. It’s close to the mountains and minutes away from the Tyrrhenian Sea, yet, many of its residents, including Romano’s mother and father, flocked to Cranston after the war to find work as vegetable farmers, masons and clothesmakers.

Romano’s family eventually moved to New York City, settling in Manhattan. The author planted her roots in South Ozone Park after meeting her Queens-born husband. The couple raised three sons in the neighborhood while Romano, who earned her bachelor’s degree from Queens College and master’s degree from Columbia University, acquired her doctorate in sociology from Fordham University. She has published numerous psychology, criminology and sociology books and is a professor of sociology at Nassau Community College.

...The process of researching and writing "Distant but Loyal," which she said had as much to do with her desire to contradict societal myths about Italians as it did her personal curiosity.

“I was in tune with presenting positive images of Italians" hardworking people who came here to make a better life for themselves and their families,- Romano said. "Yet, all you see on television is the "Sopranos" and the "Real Housewives of New Jersey."

Romano recounts one trip to Cranston when she located her father’s nephew’s address and knocked on the door, eager to chat with her unfamiliar relative. The man was out for the afternoon but his wife insisted her new neice return that evening for dinner.

“We were invited back for dinner without even knowing them," she said."She took us all in and fed us. It’s that hospitality and warmth you don’tfind on the streets of Manhattan"...

To learn more about "Distant but Loyal" or purchase it, visit amazon.com,barnesandnoble.com or borders.com.

<http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?brd=2731> 08/06/2009 Ozone Park

Author digs up Italian roots *by Lisa Fogarty* ,

Queens Chronicle , Assistant Editor

Italians Love their Mobiles, The Use of Internet Debateable

No doubt, Italians LOVE gatherings with family and friends personally, will keep that contact with their mobile.

There however seems to be a serious difference of Surveys about the Italian use of the Internet and Computers.

The European Commission says that Italians ranked 23rd of 27 nation of the EU, and is was at odds with a parliamentary survey released in May which showed that more than one in two Italians surf the net.

ITALIANS SEEM TO SHUN INTERNET

Italy News , Ansa, August 4, 2009

(ANSA) - Brussels, August 4 - Italians love mobile phones but don`t seem to fancy Internet, according to a
report released on Tuesday by the European Commission.

The EC report said Italians ranked 23rd in the 27-nation European Union for ``routine logging`` to Internet
and ``half of the population`` has never opened a Web page.

Italians were also in last place in the EU for the downloading of music and videos.

Only 31% of Italian homes have access to broadband technology, well below the EU average.
However, Italians are still first in the world for the use of cell phones.

Italian communications experts say that one of the reasons for Italy`s wariness of cyberspace is that the
country`s population is one of the oldest in Europe.

Older Italians seem to favour mobiles but shun the Net. The EC report was at odds with a parliamentary survey
released in May which showed that more than one in two Italians surf the net.

Some 58.5% of Italians surf the Web daily for information, said the study, commissioned by a communications
committee on a sample of 2,400 people.

Just under three quarters of Italians (73.7%) have a home computer but most of the remaining 26.3% - housewives
over 50 or couples without children - said they`d ``never``buy one even if there were government incentives.

Some 74.2% of this latter group said they wouldn`t use the Internet even if they had a computer.