Italy

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 8 December 2016

While American conservatives, including Donald Trump and the Cuban exiles in Florida, whooped with joy at the news of the death of Fidel Castro, and while millions of America-haters throughout the world extravagantly mourned his passing, Barack Obama was circumspect. ‘History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him,’ he said. This was a restrained comment by an American president about a foreign leader whose 47 years of dictatorship had been sustained almost entirely by stirring up hatred of the United States; and we won’t have to wait for history’s verdict on his impact on that particular country, for we

The Spectator

Power and the people

When The Spectator was founded 188 years ago, it became part of what would now be described as a populist insurgency. An out-of-touch Westminster elite, we said, was speaking a different language to the rest of London, let alone the rest of the country. Too many ‘of the bons mots vented in the House of Commons appear stale and flat by the time they have travelled as far as Wellington Street’. This would be remedied, we argued, by extending the franchise and granting the vote to the emerging middle class. Our Tory critics said any step towards democracy — a word which then caused a shudder — would start a

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Is time up for the EU?

Something is happening across Europe, says the Sun – but EU leaders are still intent on burying their heads in the sand. Following Matteo Renzi’s defeat in the Italian referendum on Sunday and far-right Eurosceptic candidate Norbert Hofer’s good showing in the Austrian election, it’s clear that ‘voters across Europe are increasingly rejecting the EU’s self-interested ruling consensus,’ the paper says. But while the outcome for the continent does not look good, the signs of instability in Europe can arguably be only a good omen for Theresa May as she looks to negotiate Britain’s Brexit deal. The Sun argues that this instability ‘strengthens Theresa May’s hand’ and suggests that the increasing

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

A Eurosceptic union is forming across Europe

Of all the barbs fired at us Brexiteers, the one that’s irritated me most is ‘Little Englander’. The suggestion is that pro-EU people are broad-minded Europhiles while Brexiteers are petty nationalists who want to dismantle the Chunnel and while away our days drinking tea and slagging off Germans. It couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, the most wonderful thing about Brexit — glorious, rebellious Brexit — is the new European unity it is forging. Far from giving an English two-fingered salute to the continent, the Brexit bug is helping bring the continent together, uniting peoples who’ve had a gutful of the technocrats. The overthrow of Matteo Renzi is 2016’s latest

Monday

Barnaby Martin

Italy will soon be haunted by its inability to reform

Matteo Renzi has resigned from being Prime Minister of Italy but he has not resigned from the Democratic Party.  He has not done a David Cameron or David Miliband and left public life. This means that he will be back next year, and it also means that he will act as kingmaker in the coming days.  Right now, he will be working away behind the scenes to help organise the next coalition government that will soon be ushered in to pass the Budget law and to ensure the smooth passage of the banking bail out.   There is zero appetite among Democratic Party members or their junior coalition partners to call a general

Nicholas Farrell

Italy is in desperate need of a saviour

Matteo Renzi lost his constitutional reform referendum – and his job – for a simple reason: too many Italians from across the political spectrum opposed the Florentine and what he represented. What he stood for is easy to see from the names of those who gave him their wholehearted support: Jean-Claude Juncker, Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi, François Hollande, the Financial Times, and, of course, outgoing American President Barack Obama, who made him guest of honour at his last White House state dinner in October and described him as ‘bold’, ‘progressive’ and ‘promising’. God – perhaps – knows who will be the new Prime Minister of Italy. There have been more than

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Beppe Grillo says he’s ready to govern after Renzi resigns

It started with a blog, and it could end up with a new Prime Minister. Beppe Grillo’s 5-Star movement, which wants Italy out of the Euro, has called for an election within a week – to pick up on the momentum which saw Matteo Renzi lose the referendum by a margin of almost 20 points, far bigger than that indicated by the polls. On his blog, he had this to say:- Hooray! Democracy won! The regime’s liars and its propaganda are the first losers in this referendum. Times have changed. Sovereignty belongs to the people, now we start to really apply our Constitution. The first winners are the citizens who raised their

Sunday

James Forsyth

Renzi concedes defeat in Italian referendum and resigns as PM; the Eurozone is heading for a fresh crisis

Matteo Renzi has conceded defeat in the referendum he called on his constitutional reforms and announced that he is resigning as Prime Minister. NO are on course for an overwhelming victory, they are ahead by a close to 60-40 lead in the count at the moment. Needless to say, this referendum result has profound implications for the Eurozone. The market was supposed to have priced in a defeat for Renzi, but the euro has fallen to  $1.05 earlier this evening – down 1pc from Friday’s close. Defeat will lead to calls for early elections, next year and there is a chance that these elections could lead to the Eurozone’s first anti-single currency government.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Austria and Italian voters could plunge the EU into crisis

Voters in Austria and Italy head to the polls tomorrow and could plunge the EU into a political and economic crisis, as I say in The Sun today. In Austria, the candidate of a genuinely far-right party—its first leader was a former SS officer—could become president. If the Freedom Party’s Norbert Hofer does win, and the race is too close to predict with any confidence, it’d show that the very extremist forces that the European project was meant to crush are now on the rise—and in part, because of the EU’s own failings. But it is the Italian referendum that could have the more immediate consequences. Italy bans polls just

Thursday

Barnaby Martin

Italy’s own populist revolution may be about to begin

Golden boy, Luigi Di Maio, is the 30-year-old, slickly dressed leader of the Parliamentary Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), Italy’s insurgent political party that is polling ahead of the incumbent Democrats with a smorgasbord of National Socialist-style policies, plucked from the manifestos of the left and right. And just like everyone else in M5S, Di Maio doesn’t like journalists.   This dislike of journalists is not merely the perfectly reasonable loathing that one develops towards the mainstream media (MSM) if one is a vegan, who doesn’t believe in vaccinations, but who does believe that airplane contrails are evidence of government-funded chemical spraying of the population (M5S member beliefs at one

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Italy’s Brexit moment

Though he is a big fan of the European Union, Barack Obama brings bad karma to it. So perhaps he should not have chosen Greece and Germany, the two countries which illustrate so poignantly why the euro is doomed, for his last foreign tour. His farewell visit is, if not a kiss of death, surely a bad omen for the EU and most immediately for one of those present in Berlin to bid him goodbye: Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, who has called an all–important referendum on constitutional reform for 4 December. If he loses, as looks ever more likely, it could cause a run on Italy’s sclerotic banks that could

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Root and branch

Eventually,’ said Michelangelo Pistoletto, ‘it became a movement. In fact, I believe that arte povera was the last true movement. Since then all artists have been individuals.’ We were sitting one baking hot day last month in his cool study in Biella, a small town in the foothills of the Alps where he has established a huge museum and foundation in a series of disused 19th-century textile mills. He was discussing the group of Italian artists of the 1960s of which Pistoletto himself was a founding member. Arte povera is an umbrella phrase that covers a number of diverse artists, several of them marvellous, who emerged in Italy about half

Taki

High Life | 22 September 2016

Sicily   Under the watchful eye of Mount Etna the storied past of the island lies parched and yellowish, but as one gets nearer to the fiery growling giant the air turns cool, the sun glistening against black volcanic rock. Sicily is of two minds. Orange groves and beaches galore, then dank forests and the possibility of lava flows. Sicily’s history resembles its landscape: peaceful and religious; violent and vengeful. I first sailed to Taormina back in the Sixties, visited the ancient Greek amphitheatre and listened to Dvorak’s New World Symphony while breathing in the smells of history. It was an extraordinary spectacle: beautifully dressed people, a great Italian symphony

Thursday

Caroline Moorehead

Twists and turns of the Italian campaign

When Rome fell to the Allies on 5 June 1944 General Harold Alexander, commander of the 15th Army, calculated that he would need just 12 weeks to reach the river Po and liberate Italy from the Germans. It took him nearly a year. Christian Jennings’s new book chronicles the months of heavy fighting, the advances and retreats and the enormous losses on both sides as the Allied forces stalled, and the enemy attacked. It was never going to be easy. Once the Italians signed the armistice with the Allies on 8 September 1943, turning their backs on their former Axis partners, the Germans moved quickly to occupy the whole of

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Italian Notebook

 Lido di Dante, Ravenna When the earthquake struck in the dead of night at 3.36 a.m. — the Devil’s Hour — I was in front of my computer in what used to be the cow shed. This is the only time of day when my six boisterous children and their high-voltage Italian mother are not around. The insects, attracted by the light, are worse at night but they can be killed if necessary. As for the toads (we have biblical numbers that emerge from the underworld at night via the open glass doors), I quite like them. Even though there are three on the coat of arms of the Devil

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Mussolini at Lake Como

If your destiny is to be shot dead with your mistress, where better than Lake Como, which, in the words of Shelley, ‘exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the Arbutus Islands in Killarney’? It was in Giulino di Mezzegra, a tiny village in the mountains above the lake, that a handful of communist partisans executed the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci on 28 April 1945. The Duce was 61 and his amante 33 — two years older than his daughter Edda. The partisans loaded their corpses and those of other Fascist leaders — executed separately down by the lake — on

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Italy’s migrant purgatory

 Ravenna At a car park a short walk from Dante’s tomb, one of the gang of illegal immigrants who tell motorists where to park and hound them for cash agreed to talk to me for €20. His name was Billy, he said, and he was 22. He was from Senegal and a Muslim. He had come to Italy by fishing boat 14 months ago from Libya, where he had arrived via Mali and Algeria. He paid €200 for the trip (the going rate is said to be at least €1,000) and his boat landed at Lampedusa, 160 nautical miles from Tripoli. ‘Why did you come?’ I asked. ‘In Senegal, no

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Heavenly bodies | 28 July 2016

Initially it must have been a nasty surprise. On 16 August 1972 an amateur scuba diver named Stefano Mariottini was fishing in shallow waters just off the coast of Calabria. At about noon he was poking around some rocks when he saw part of an arm protruding from the sand. His first thought, a natural one, was that he had found a cadaver. On closer examination, it became clear that there was not just one body but two — and that they were made not of flesh but of metal. Mariottini’s discoveries are world-famous now, taking their name — the Riace bronzes — from the little resort near which he

Thursday

Felicity Lloyd

The gardens of Ninfa

I’ve just been given a personal tour of Ninfa by Monty Don. True, I had to share the thinking woman’s TV gardener with a number of others, but I’m convinced his attention was focused solely on me. The occasion was a visit to three outstanding gardens outside Rome — Ninfa, Villa d’Este and Landriana — to celebrate a quarter-century of Gardeners’ World magazine in the company of its editor, Lucy Hall. Monty was an added inducement for the tour of Ninfa, after which he was to give a talk on the evolution of Italian gardens. Rather like a gentleman’s club, Ninfa satisfies one’s inner snob. The eight–hectare garden, within 105

Thursday

Ian Thomson

The art of getting by

Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, is reckoned to be a hive of pickpocketing and black-market manoeuvrings. (A Neapolitan gambling manual advises: ‘Rule Number 1 — always try to see your opponent’s cards.’) Crime is not the whole picture, of course. To look out across the Bay of Naples remains a visual education in the grand style as the twin, dromedary-like mounds of Vesuvius shadow the dead cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Erri De Luca, one of Italy’s bestselling authors, was born in Naples in 1950, and understands perfectly the city’s obscure exuberance of life. The Day Before Happiness, a novella, unfolds amid the card-sharps, prostitutes and barefoot scugnizzi