Tag Archives: lega

Saviano

Roberto Saviano’s remarkable talk on Vieni Via con Me (which is really making the news this week) got over 5 million viewers last night. There’s a reason: it’s provocative and damned good, featuring the reenactment of an ‘ndragheta initiation rite and accusations of Lega Nord involvement with organized crime that’s sent Interior Minister and Lega Nord old hand Roberto Maroni into a tizzy. He also takes on the massive building enterprises in Milan, especially around my old ‘hood of P.ta Garibaldi. Of course, all-Italian, but I’ll look for or provide a translation in coming days.

Like certain other Italians, Saviano is both fearless and a survivor. He lived with a police escort after he named names at Casal di Principe in 2006, and there’s strong evidence that the Casalesi clan planned to kill him in 2008, after which he left the country. So here’s to hoping that one of the few brave voices in Italian public life is in an undisclosed location.

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.

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.