Italy is the cradle of the best and the worst. A nation of natural and artistic beauty and creative people cloaked by endemic corruption, organised crime, pathetic politics and lack of civic sense. An immaculate-homes-and-dirty-streets country to love and hate.
Silvio Berlusconi and the dark aspects of Italy: why writing a book about them? Silvio Berlusconi is “not just any old charlatan”, as the Nov. 21, 2011 Newsweek cover reads. As I have said time and again, Silvio Berlusconi’s ventennio (his twenty years in office) is a privileged observatory as far as the future of democracy is…
Ho letto sul Fatto Quotidiano del 17 agosto 2021 il bell’articolo di Selvaggia Lucarelli intitolato Noto, bellezza&monnezza. Ma se lo denunci t’insultano che descrive la sua vacanza da incubo in quella parte della Sicilia. Andando in ferie da alcuni anni in quei luoghi, non mi sono meravigliato per nulla. La bellezza barocca di quei posti…
Twenty-eight years later: Falcone and Borsellino are victims of Totò Riina’s ‘negotiating by bomb’ strategy. Victims and martyrs indeed, and of course heroes. Nevertheless, I always have a bitter taste in my mouth every year at the celebrations, and the feeling is not because of the inevitable rhetoric. Hypocrisy lurks in the air: slowly, too…
Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, May 4,2020 Outside in my street… .. there is no one around, of course. A blistening sun is shining on the terrace from where I am writing the weather is very warm, inviting you for a stroll downtown or a walk in the parks already green. But, still, there is no one…
All the World is a football Stage Italian football is the mirror of our society: it means organized crime connections, both at top management level or at mafia and camorra rank; it means corruption, in match-fixing, slush funds creation and drug use; it means another weapon of mass consent in the hand of the demagogic political candidate.…
‘In 2013 I wrote a whole chapter dedicated to the trattativa stato–mafia in my book about Berlusconi when just a few believed it had happened. Proud of it. A post will follow with the chapter. Thank you Di Matteo‘ is my first tweet after the sentence (trattativa stato-mafia means state-mafia negotiations). So here is the chapter in…
The tame seals and the dark (ex) knight (article in Italian). La news più fake: Berlusconi Presidente. Passando occasionalmente davanti ad un televisore acceso ieri sera, ultimo giorno di campagna elettorale, ho avuto una visione surreale: l’ex Cavaliere, in uno avanzato stato di sfacelo che chirurgia plastica e trucco pesante non riescono a celare del…
1992 is modern Italy’s D-year. It is the time of the death of the decadent First Republic and the birth of the more degenerate Second one, which is probably about to end these days. It is the year of Mani Pulite (Clean Hands, or Tangentopoli), an investigation that revealed the corruption of politics and business…
On October 30, 2016 another tremendous earthquake hit central Italy again, the greatest one in the last decades of a series that started in August, killed almost 300 people and destroyed the cultural treasures of the medieval small towns and villages scattered along the Apennines. The news came to me as I was spending my…
When the folk revival and then the rock revolution of the 60s arrived in Italy, it landed in Modena. Amid Ferrari and Maserati cars, balsamic vinegar producers, tortellini restaurants and small industrial enterprises scattered around the province, ‘beat’ music started to bloom almost unexpectedly in that ‘little town, bastard place’, as Francesco Guccini, one of…
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