Italy

Saturday

David Gilmour

A cult of virility and violence

Mussolini’s brutal sex-addiction makes for dispiriting reading, but provides material for a fine psychological study, says David Gilmour Bunga bunga may be a recent fashion, but adultery for Italian prime ministers has a long history. The first of such statesmen, Count Cavour, had affairs with married women because he was too nervous of being cuckolded to risk having a wife of his own.  One of his successors, Francesco Crispi, suffered such amatory turbulence that the police were often called to break up screeching rows between his wives and his mistresses; in old age he was accused by the press of trigamy because he had fathered children by two women in

Friday

Jonathan Jones

Farage scolds Europe’s wrecking crew

In his cover story for last week’s Spectator, Fraser described how the Frankfurt Group – which he dubbed ‘a new EU hit squad’ – has begun imposing it’s will on Greece and Italy. In the European Parliament on Wednesday night, Ukip leader Nigel Farage made the same case against them – and quite forecefully, too: It’s now going viral, with over 75,000 views so far.

Thursday

Daniel Korski

In defence of technocrats

Is Mario Monti’s administration in Italy democratic? Is Greece’s new government? To some, especially in the blogosphere, it is the exact opposite: a technocratic and undemocratic government foisted upon Italy and Greece by (circle as appropriate) Angela Merkel/Nicolas Sarkozy, the Bilderberg Group/EUSSR, etc. But nobody forced Silvio Berlusconi to resign. Nobody sacked him. Under pressure by the markets, he chose to resign. He could have stayed and nobody denied that he had a constitutional right to do so. It would have cost Italy dear, but he could have stayed. In addition, Monti was appointed to the Senate by the Italian president who himself is elected by Parliament in a joint

Monday

Daniel Korski

Can Italy rebound?

I’m in Italy watching the bonfire of Silvio Berlusconi’s vanities first hand. From the ashes, most Italians hope a stronger nation will emerge. And for this reason, faith in former EU Commissioner Mario Monti, who gave his first statement to the nation last night, seems high. Italy is not a nation on its knees, and despite the travails and troubles of the last decade, there is a sense of hope here. People want Italy to succeed and seem willing, for now, to pull together. They also have a foundation upon which to build: brands, low private debt, and a solid banking system. Crucially, President Giorgo Napolitano has also indicated that

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Berlusconi: latest victim of Europe’s reverse Arab Spring

Berlusconi has finally resigned – and so continues what seems to be the Arab Spring in reverse (a Gnirps Bara). In the Arab world, people rose up against undemocratic juntas and democracy ruled. In Europe, undemocratic juntas are springing up in Frankfurt opera houses and toppling democracy. All Sarkozy had to do was help the rebels who wanted to remove the targeted leader. The cover story of this week’s magazine has a piece by yours truly about the Frankfurt Group of eight people who are calling the shots. Only two members are directly elected: Sarko and Merkel (well, three if you count the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, which we shouldn’t

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Italian domino effect

For all the debate about Theresa May and border security, the big news has not been at Westminster today. Instead, people have been watching what is happening in Italy. For it is far from certain that Europe, or the Western world for that matter, has a bucket bigger enough to bail out a country that owes more than Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain do combined. As the New York Times reports, the European Central Bank is reluctant to step in and start buying Italian bonds because it fears that its previous bond buying efforts have simply enabled the Italians to avoid necessary reforms. It feels that only market pressure will

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

Berlusconi on the brink

Silvio Berlusconi no longer has the support of the majority of Italy’s MPs. That big budget vote was passed an hour ago, but only because 321 of the 630 members of the lower house didn’t vote. Just 308 supported the Prime Minister, leaving him eight votes short of a majority and suggesting he’d lose a confidence vote. This is a result that the global economy could’ve done without, when the need is to move on from Italy’s political problems and start to deal with its economic ones. The yield on Italian bonds, which had settled down earlier after soaring to the euro-era high this morning, have now shot back up

Jonathan Jones

Crunch time in Italy and Greece

Reports of Silvio Berlusconi’s imminent resignation yesterday may have been exaggerated, but it remains to be seen how greatly. He faces a big test today, in the form of a crucial vote on the Italian budget. Berlusconi has proved adept at surviving such confidence votes throughout his time as Prime Minister, but today’s opposition may be too much even for him. In the words of Italian academic Roberto D’Alimonte to the Telegraph: “Nobody knows what the result will be, I think even Berlusconi doesn’t know.” In the last few minutes, Umberto Bossi – the leader of Berlsuconi’s coalition partners Lega Nord – has said that he called on the Prime Minister

Monday

Clarissa Tan

Berlusconi may quit presto

The word sweeping across Italy is that the PM may be forced to step down in a matter of hours, even “minutes”. Ex-minister Giuliano Ferrara says: “That Silvio Berlusconi is about to resign is clear. It is a question of hours, some say of minutes.” And he couldn’t leave too soon. The Italian bond yield busted the 6.5 per cent threshold to reach 6.58 per cent this morning. It’s now close to what some traders call “bailout territory”. News of Berlusconi’s imminent resignation has sent Italian stocks soaring though – the FTSE MIB is up 2.4 per cent. Berlusconi’s scandal-ridden premiership and bunga-bunga antics have caused political deadlock in Rome

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Crisis a la Milanese

If Italy’s a country on the brink, it doesn’t show it. At least not in Milan. Along the city’s rainswept streets, thousand of designer-clad people hit the shops this weekend, unperturbed at the prospect of the government’s likely collapse and the risk of a financial meltdown. At a small deli called Pack overpriced but delicious pieces of Bresaola and Parmegiano are sold in green-and-gold Harrods-like wrapping. La Rinascente, the city’s upmarket department store, is packed with high-rolling shoppers and the nightclub under the main Armani store is heaving with models and their male accoutrements. Here life remains dolce. Of course Milan is not Italy – it is the country’s commercial

Saturday

James Forsyth

Papandreou wins no confidence vote, but appears set to stand down

The political situation in Greece remains unclear this morning. George Papandreou’s government survived last night’s confidence vote. But the main opposition party has rejected the idea of a national government and Papandreou’s finance minister appears to be maneuvering to replace him. Papandreou’s victory in the no confidence vote means that there probably won’t be elections in Greece this year. But the huge difficulties involved in implementing the austerity plan remain. The measures continue to command little public support and the opposition will continue to criticise them. The debt deal proposals will also have to win parliamentary approval at some point soon and the French and the Germans are, The Independent

Wednesday

Clarissa Tan

Italian comic opera

Politics is serious business, especially when the world’s economy is at stake, but so much of what’s going on in the eurozone now – especially in Italy – resembles opera buffa. Today in Rome, amid rumours that Berlusconi would throw in the towel in January (but not because of bunga bunga, because of bungling over economic reform), a few deputies in parliament came to blows.   The fisticuffs was over that hotly contended if not-very-sexy issue – the retirement age. At least two members of the Northern League, a key party of Berlusconi’s coalition, fought with members from the opposition FLI. ‘Two deputies grabbed each other by the throat as

Sunday

David Blackburn

Leadership at last?

Most of today’s papers carry reports of a deal to relieve the European sovereign debt crisis. The details are varied, but it seems that 50 per cent of Greek debt will written off and the currency will be allowed to remain within the single currency. This means that banks that are exposed to Greek debt will incur potentially ruinous losses. The EFSF mechanism will probably be extended to cover those losses and guard against contagion. Estimates vary, but it seems the fund will have to increase to somewhere around 2 trillion euros if the mounting crises in Italy and Spain are to be contained. Britain’s exposure remains unclear at this

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Italy in the firing line

Markets sank into negative territory this morning, following Standand&Poor’s downgrade of Italy’s credit rating. (Although they have since recovered.) The agency cut Italy’s rating from A+/A-1+ to A/A-1; it also kept its outlook as negative. The agency’s reasoning is hardly surprising: growth is negligible, debt is unsustainable and Silvio Berlusconi’s inert government appears incapable of arresting the crisis. Frail economics and supine politics, those twinned threats to prosperity, have struck again. The implications to the Eurozone, and the world economy, are obvious. An economist in Nomura’s Sydney office told Reuters, “It only adds to the contagion risk over Greece and has encouraged the flight to safety in markets here.” Over

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Eurosis

Most of Europe takes all of August off for summer. Paris is empty, Brussels eerie and nobody works in Madrid. But as politicians and officials come back from their holidays, they are finding that the problems of the euro have not gone away. Quite the contrary. No less a supporter than former EU Commission president Jacques Delors believes that the European currency is still “on the edge of the precipice”. It is easy to see why the European grandee feels as he does. The euro eased against the dollar today, taking a cue from lower stocks; the euro was down 0.6 per cent. The losses came on top of data

Monday

David Blackburn

Merkel’s hard game

As James noted earlier, Angela Merkel’s response to the Eurozone crisis is hampered by the awkward arithmetic in the Bundestag. Merkel has been faced with these difficulties throughout the crisis. Her answer has been to oppose initial proposals to solve the Eurozone crisis, only to relent later in the day. This has been the pattern from the first Greek bailout to the expansion of the EFSF, which is currently before the Bundestag. Might her apparently determined opposition to Eurobonds (which, of course, would require a huge transfer of power and cash from Berlin to the Med and Brussels) go the same way? Wolfgang Münchau has a comprehensive piece on the

Saturday

Alexander Chancellor

The scandal that inspired La Dolce Vita

At about 5.15 p.m. on 9 April 1953, Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old woman of no account, leaves the three-room apartment in a northern suburb of Rome that she shares with her father, a carpenter, and five other members of the family and never returns. Thirty-six hours later her body is found by the edge of the sea at Torvaianica, a fishing village close to the capital. She is lying face down in the sand, wearing all her clothes apart from her shoes, her skirt, her stockings and her suspender belt, all of which are missing. She appears to have drowned. But why? Was it an accident? Was it suicide? Or

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Euro crisis enters a new phase

It was a problem that would be fixed with a snap of the Commissioners’ manicured fingers, but now fresh euro-storms are louring in the near distance. As predicted over the weekend, the markets reacted to the European Banking Authority’s deeply flawed stress tests with fevered concern and a clear note of contempt. The FTSE shed 90 points yesterday, with banks among the day’s biggest losers. The performance in Frankfurt and Paris was equally baleful, as investors fled for safe commodity stocks. As Fraser has noted, Allister Heath argues that the Eurozone crisis is responsible for the booming price of gold. The markets have recovered slightly this morning; but that does

Saturday

Lee Langley

Wool of bat and lizard leg

When Julia Blackburn and her Dutch husband Herman move into an old village house perched on a cliff high above the Italian Ligurian Riviera they become part of a dwindling community in a landscape of forests and deserted villages with roofless ruins almost swallowed up by the riotous undergrowth. Seven hundred peasants once occupied this mountainous terrain, scraping a pitiful living; shepherds, chestnut farmers, cheese-makers — mezzadri, ‘half-people’, handing over half of everything, down to their last kilo of olives, to the padrone who was virtually their feudal lord; also sharing, when required, their women. They got by on a diet mainly of chestnuts — eaten raw, boiled, roasted, ground

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

The euro’s death rattle

The end might be nigh for the euro. The currency has hit an all-time low against the Swiss franc, as individual eurozone government bond yields vaulted higher due to mounting concerns about the region’s debt crisis. To spell out what this means: in Spain, 12 billion euros of interest payments will accrue for every 100 point bond rise in Germany. That is more than Spain’s annual public investment in infrastructure (8.6 billion) and its entire defence budget (7.6 billion). At the same time, Greece is heading towards disorderly default or some form of devaluation. Or both. And now Italy looks vulnerable. Well, I say that the end is nigh but,