If it had been in Italy…

A student passed me this joke on the Chilean mine disaster, which also plays on a lot of other recent Italian news (Sarah Scazzi, Giancarlo Tulliani‘s house, the Naples trash crisis, the electoral crisis).  Mainly it’s funny, if you get it all.  Deep Italian current events, knowledge, sure, but enjoy: If it had happened in …

Quick Roundup

ENEL is getting pretty interesting.  Check out their Green Power.  Back when in 2008 I was impressed by their solar generation, tracked by the minute, at their headquarters near Largo Cairoli in Milan. As was predicted in the Italian press years ago — and in these pages a few weeks back when people were naive …

Of Chetniks and Padanians

Beppe Grillo hilariously sums up the commonalities between Southern Europe’s most toxic nationalist-separatist groups. Wow, takes me back to the early nineties when deeply mistaken writers were comparing Serb separatists to those sane, cozy Northern Italian separatists. Sorry kids, it’s in Italian — it’s been a long week.

Berlusca tonight

Second: Berlusconi spoke in Parco Sempione tonight.  I’ve been jogging past the set-up (or rather, altering my route so I can manage to have a run through the set-up) for the past week, and I’ve been noting the contrast of the massive police buildup — not only your standard Guardia di Finanza, Carabinieri, Polizia dello …

Svezia, inferno e paradiso

One expects political upheaval in Italy. After all, the country has had as many governments as Boliva since World War Two, and my primer on Italian politics had a photo of parliamentarians fist-fighting on the cover. But — Sweden? As Stephen Castle wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, Swedish politics are usually “worthy, high-minded and …

Bossi: Today’s News (?)

Well, Rachel Donadio has been a busy woman lately, and she’s hitting all the right places. Observing Bossi’s Lega Nord has been one of my preoccupations since a wealthy Amerophile in Parma told me in late 2004 that Italy should ship all its Communists off to North Korea and Cuba. But that’s neither here nor …