Clean Hands’ 25th anniversary: and they lived corruptly ever after
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…
Who killed Giulio Regeni?
Of Arab Springs turned dictatorships, state tortures and murders, commercial bonds over human life: one year after, we don’t have to live and let Giulio die. Shocked, outraged, bewildered, overwhelmed: that’s how I feel today, on the sixth anniversary of a revolution (the Egyptian Arab Spring) turned fascist dictatorship and on the first anniversary of…
“Theirs is a cultural richness like no other”: Italy’s earthquakes and the loss of great human fabric
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…
My top ten non-fiction books about today’s Italy (in English) – and a modest picture of the country
My top ten books are a virtual guided tour that wants to take you to the heart and the soul of what may seem like the most European of countries. It’s a voyage, sometimes dark and sometimes funny, throughout “Good Italy” and “Bad Italy”, an attempt to let the reader scratch at the reassuring surface…
Education in Italy (part two): the foul play of Berlusconi’s and Renzi’s reforms
In Education in Italy part one I describe the decline of the Italian Education system since the beginning of the new century and the birth of the scuola/azienda, of the student/customer and of the consumers’ school, with its parallel downgrading of the role of teachers and students. In this post I’ll try to present the…
Education in Italy (part one): Nothing worth Teaching can be Taught?
Education in Italy: Nothing worth Teaching can be Taught? In Education in Italy part one I’ll describe the decline of the Italian Education system since the beginning of the new century and the birth of the scuola/azienda, of the student/customer and of the consumers’ school, with its parallel downgrading of the role of teachers and…
Mafia Capitale: dirty hands over the Eternal City
Mafia Capitale: a shocking Christmas gift to Italian people As I write in the introduction of my book on Berlusconi’s Italy, later that year [2014], we discovered that also Rome was not willing to stay behind [Milan and Venice, in which the ‘Expo 2015’ and the ‘Flood Barrier MOSE’ corruption cases had recently been discovered]. The…
Migrants’ Holocaust, the modern Middle Passage: do we really care ?
Migrants’ Holocaust: the second anniversary of the greatest migrants’ tragedy of the XXI century On October 3, 2015 the tiny island of Lampedusa, South of Sicily, celebrated the second anniversary of the greatest migrants’ tragedy since the beginning of the century. 2,000 people marched through the street of Lampedusa sending out an appeal to Europe “to maintain the…
The book "Silvio Berlusconi's Italy" is finalist at the London Book Fair's International Literary Competition 'The write stuff'.Vittorio Vandelli’s prize winner book: “Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy”
