Journalists call August the "silly season" because according to legend there is no news and so their job requires them to use even more fantasy than usual. But the global financial markets have a nasty habit of going berserk in August as they did last year when the Dow lost more than 2,000 ...
My wife has a little house in Lido di Dante, a beautiful beach just south of Ravenna where Dante himself died in 1321. The beach is three miles of unspoiled sand dunes and pine trees. But we don"t go to the beach because it has become Italy's most famous nudist beach. Even if we did not have ...
Yet again, a Catholic country has won a major international soccer tournament. Why are Catholics so good at kicking around soccer balls but so bad at running their countries? Is it because they are Catholics? Last Sunday evening in Kiev, Spain won the European Championships" final to make it ...
Italian communists always wanted a revolution in Italy, but I do not think that this is quite what they had in mind: A Chinese man has just bought the bar at their party headquarters in the city of Forlì in the "red" Romagna region where I live. Attached to the party's headquarters, the ...
This evening in the European soccer championships" quarterfinals, the country where I was born in 1958 (England) plays the country where I have lived since 1998 (Italy). Whom do I support? England, for one simple reason: I am English. But even when Italy is playing some other nation, I want ...
I was wading through the daily mire of newspaper headlines the other day about the deepening euro crisis and the latest rich or famous Italian to be arrested when I saw this: "Mucca inferocita in fuga semina paura" (Ferocious cow on the run spreads panic). A cow, nicknamed "Libera" ...
That slogan on pop star Madonna's T-shirt "Italians do it better!" may date back to the 1980s but it is still popular with Italian men. They often deploy it to impress foreign women they have just met. Do what better? Cheat you, betray you, rip you off, and stab you in the back? The ...
The uomo nuovo in Italian politics is a professional comic called Beppe Grillo, whose slogan is "Vaffanculo!" (Fuck off!) He's opposed to everything, it seems, except wind farms. Such are the consequences of the euro crisis, whose cause is simple"too much sovereign debt in countries ...
"You"re so lucky living in Italy," people tell me. "The food's so divine." Oh no, it isn"t. Italian food is tedious"so tedious that I gave up going to Italian restaurants of my own free will long ago. I was never a Michelin Star-obsessed gourmet, but I had passion. Not ...
Europe's crisis is existential and economic. Here in Italy the talk is of suicide. Hardly a day passes without an Italian in financial trouble killing himself. (They are all men.) But the Italians are a nation of drama queens who are right up there with the best of them when it comes to playing ...
