Violence at Cinecitta’ Station

"What if it was your mother? Your wife? Your sister?"

Nasty violence at Cinecitta’ station at the end of Rome’s Line A metro yesterday, in full daylight: after an argument in the line over whose turn it was, a 20-year old Roman struck a 32-year old Romanian nurse in the face. She went down and fractured her skull; he walked off and was later arrested. The security camera video up on the Corriere‘s website shows every detail, from the woman giving the man a push first to him calmly picking up his — ticket? — change? — off the ground, and then the extremely slow reaction time of the crowd. The man already had charges brought against him; for what the paper doesn’t say. I can’t but help thinking that national origin played a much larger role in this than age or gender. Would have he done the same to a 32-year old Italian? American? How much attention would this have gotten if it were Romanian-on-Romanian violence? One wonders.

Several years ago a Forza Nuova poster tried to stoke primitive fears with a provocative poster, intimating that the hordes from the east would be coming in to rape Italian women soon.  As we see, no nation necessarily has a premium on violence against women.

UPDATE: Life “hanging by a thread,” says Corriere.

The Importance of Being Serbian

A Serious Matter for Serious People

Belgrade’s Gay Pride parade has been an opportunity for the its nationalistic and regressive right-wing youth to rebel against European values for as long as Serbia has been trying to rehabilitate itself after the Milosevic regime, i.e., the last decade.   Although the mobs of the right succeeding in actually stopping it last year, this year they didn’t quite get so far, and the parade was successfully run, for the first time.  The hooligans put on such a performance that they made the media nonetheless. This should serve as a reminder, as the riots after Kosovo’s independence over two and a half years ago did, that the same elements that fed the gangsteristic nihilism of the Milosevic years are still hard at work.

The implications of these sentiments reach far beyond Belgrade and deep into the region, particularly in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska.  There’s more — much more — to be said on this, but for now, let me point you to this excellent piece by Marko Hoare.

Sarpi on Sunday

Capitalism in a sack

This is just a first impression.  And first impressions tend to mislead.  But a Sunday stroll on via Sarpi finds an amazing bustle of activity.  Fashionable, well-dressed people shop for shoes and crowd into grocery stores, arms full of fresh meat and vegetables.  Every shop is open.  A gaze into some shows that, beyond the storefront where wares are displayed, that there are many more rooms deep inside, extending all the way back into a courtyard.  Men rush into these courtyards with handtrucks stacked with heavy plastic bags packed with merchandise.  Window shopping aside, this is, of course, more or less how the neighborhood is  every weeknight.  Consumption and production thrive.

The point to take away is that every one of these shops is Chinese.  Every single Italian shop is closed, which is totally normal for a Sunday, but the contrast is sharper given the amazing activity of the Chinese.  And I should point out that although the Italian shops are closed, plenty of Italian shoppers are around, looking at the shoes, cautiously examining vegetables at the market, getting take-out pasta or roast chicken from the deli that also sells barbecue ribs and fried squid.

The first article of the Italian constitution is that it is a “democratic republic, founded on work.”  The presence of a via Sarpi shows what kind of future Italy is being created today.  Those who ignore it will not be able to do so for much longer.

Sunday Style Note

Italy your Italy: good prose is like a windowpane

Let me point something out for aspiring writers on Italy who wish to dress up their language. Italian is a fairly colorful language, so there are several good metonyms for the country. Il bel paese (“the beautiful country”) has the finest pedigree, having been used by both Petrarch and Dante. If you want to point out the defining geographical feature, you can use lo stivale (“the boot”); this is rife with opportunities for word play such as Napoleon’s famous maxim that you must enter a boot from the top. If you want to be official you can say Italian Republic, an exact translation of the name of the county that has existed since the referendum held on June 2, 1946.

Now: in Italian you may come across la Penisola, the peninsula, from time to time.  And that’s ok.  Italians know only one peninsula and so there’s a context.  But it doesn’t work as hip shorthand in American English.  “What a great cup of coffee I had on the Peninsula!” is simply confusing; “I went up to Turin on a recent trip to the Peninsula” is just pretentious.  There are several peninsulas in Europe; notably the nearby Iberian and Balkan ones, and Italy shares substantial history with both.  If you really want to be a pedant, you could consider all of Europe a peninsula of the Eurasian subcontinent.  To add to the confusion is the fact that “peninsular” in English often refers to Spain, not Italy; i.e.,  Peninsular Spanish or Peninsular War.  There are other, better terms. Most importantly:

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

And if you don’t know who said that I’ll leave it to you to google, but if you’re interested in good, clear prose style and you don’t know, then you’re in trouble.

The Bird is the Most Popular Finger

Giving or receiving?

Riding my bike home from work I decided to go through Piazza Affari to check out the Borsa. I was left gape-mouthed by a gigantic middle finger. I wasn’t sure if it was an accident or not. It’s not. By Cattelan, and mild by his standards — recall the infamous Hitler piece of a few years ago, and his hanging children. I’m all for eye-turning pulbic art, but one must wonder — who’s getting the gesture here, and who is giving it? Or is that the tantalizing ambiguity? I’ll ponder…

Immigration is Not Zero-Sum

Elisabetta Burba had a story in this week’s Panorama on Italy’s Chinese population.  It’s really not bad writing in that it lists many success stories and is generally favorable.  It includes details I didn’t know, such as a quote from one expat Chinese saying that “the Filipinos will work under a boss, but we all want to have our own business, be our own boss” — something any red-blooded Italian should take heart with.  But before I get too giddy handing out the accolades, I should say that the print version includes maps of five different city streets and store-by-store diagrams indicating which businesses are foreign-owned.  This is an issue, especially when coupled with making note that the particular Chinese who come to Italy are called “China’s Jews.” Perhaps not intentional, but tasteless at best, as were the cover (see graphic) and at least part of the title (“We Were Evicted — We’ll Win” — why must someone lose, Chinese or Italian?).   Hard to find online, but here’s a terribly-formatted version. In Italian.

Be sure to click on the above link to read about Burba’s role in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Berlusca tonight

Why he's really mad at Naples

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 Stato, but also the Corpo Forestale (as if the foliage is that dense) — to the lack of people other than joggers in the park nightly, so it’s not like I didn’t know about it.  But a deadline clashed and I wasn’t able to make it at 4 pm tonight, regrettably.  Corriere has a video up; I can say that I’m glad I wasn’t on hand to hear yet more complaining about the judiciary, but watching his histrionics as he excitedly pinned the blame for every problem the South has on the left and the Naples garbage crisis on that city’s leftist mayor might’ve been worth the trip out. “I said it and I’ll repeat it, loud and clear — the Naples trash crisis has a name and it’s name is Rosa Russo Iervolino!”

His comments on his absolution of Bossi on worth it, too.  (-1.33).  I’ll leave you with the video and a pledge to make my deadlines better.

Rand Paul

Tempest.

A quick weekend roundup: in my home state, Rand Paul debated Jack Conway, and some coverage — inasmuch as Kentucky has become a major political battleground, is worth reading.  I wonder how the legions of Tea Party supporters riding around on scooters will like being told that they have to work longer before drawing some of those socialist benefits they like to carp about.  But Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone tells you why that doesn’t really matter, in a long, thoughtful, righteous analysis of how Rand Paul ended up doing Mitch and Rove’s bidding and why the tea party is more of a tempest in a tea pot, or destined to end up as one.

UPDATE: read the New York Times‘ coverage here.

Swiss Intolerance

If you thought Lega Nord images stereotyping Southern Italians and immigrants were bad, check out this new poster against the opening of Swiss borders to Italian (and other European – presumably Romanian) workers. Given that hordes of Milanese commute to Ticino and vice versa and that, uh, Italian is one of Switzerland’s official languages, this point to paint the Italian as ‘other’ seems particularly desperate. Corriere has good coverage in English, although the article suffers a bit from some self-pity. One wonders if anti-immigration proponents reading this — particularly the bit at the end about American perceptions of Italians a century ago — will note the parallels.

But is the ship really sinking?