Italy

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I tell her that her table manners are disgusting?

Q. My mainly male colleagues and I were happy to learn that an attractive young woman would be joining the staff of the boarding prep school where we work. Yet, unfathomably, and despite having gone to the Dragon and grown up in north Oxford, this new colleague’s table manners turned out to be truly revolting. She eats very quickly, with both elbows on the table, head down and lifting the food in via her knife, hardly using her fork at all. This has turned us all off — most notably me at whom she has made a series of unsubtle passes — and as a result we have cancelled the

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite is punished for ignoring the Madonna of the sea

‘Benvenuti alla Small Cluster Band!’ And about time, too. We had been sitting in the Castello in Castellabate for half an hour watching an empty stage, while members of La Small Cluster Band stood around eating slices of pizza from takeaway boxes. ‘They’re on Italian time,’ I told my mother, as she sat in her place wearing an expression communicating polite but profound dissatisfaction. It had been my idea to spend an evening in the historic hilltop town of Castellabate listening to La Small Cluster Band playing ‘Concerto Swing’ after seeing a poster advertising the event on a wall. What could be more sophisticated, I thought, than an evening of

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Will Melissa Kite’s former Italian waiter boyfriend stir up trouble again?

‘Piccolo problemo.’ Luigi, the hotel manager, delivered the fateful news as he served me my first lemon soda of the holiday on his sun-drenched terrace. Francesco, an old flame, had discovered that my mother and I were booked in at the hotel this week and had rung to inquire about the date of our arrival. ‘I say maybe you come this week, maybe next, I don’t know,’ said Luigi, smiling enigmatically. He never approved of my liaison with a local. It was several years ago now. My family had been regular visitors to the small Italian resort for a long time when, one summer, after calling off my wedding and

Wednesday

Nicholas Farrell

In defence of Silvio Berlusconi

Ah Italia! Such a great place to get your head round great art and great women but what a crappy little country. How else can you describe a place that condemns a 76-year-old man to seven years in jail and bans him for life from public office for a crime that both he and his victim deny — a crime to which there were no witnesses and for which there is no evidence? That is what has just happened in Milan in the infamous Bunga Bunga trial at which three women judges (and no jury) found the media tycoon and three times prime minister guilty on Monday of ‘prostituzione minorile’

Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

Investment: Why does so much always go wrong in August?

The weather might not be what it once was, and the football season might start so quickly it feels like it has hardly been away, but there is one thing everyone can surely agree on about August. Nothing of any importance happens. As we head into the dog days of summer, everyone can sling their feet up on the desk and relax. All the people who really matter — the ones running the big corporations, the banks or the government — are off sunning themselves by a pool somewhere. As for the office, it’s about as busy as a job centre in downtown Athens. The only people left are the

David Blackburn

Of technocrats and democrats

A former European leader was a guest at a private dinner in London recently. It was a polite and reverential occasion, but conversation grew lighter as Sauternes gave way to port. What, he was asked, is the most effective form of government? Easy, he replied, look at Europe: technocrats know best and they can ignore short-sighted voters. A battle between technocracy and democracy has broken out in Europe, as democratic Germany and technocratic Italy disagree over the next step in the euro-crisis. Last week’s G20 summit promised progress; Germany agreed to use EU bailout funds to reduce Spanish and Italian borrowing costs. It was hoped that this might inaugerate the

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

When an economist turns into a winemaker

My friend Mitch Feierstein is a jolly, cheerful, life-enhancing fellow. He is emphatically not one of those economists whose purse-lipped response to any new phenomenon is ‘no good will come of this’ and who have predicted six of the past two recessions. But he is a profound pessimist. In a book he published last year, Planet Ponzi, he devotes page after relentless page to the troubles of the world economy. He depicts the West as a ship without engine or rudder, adrift on a sea of bad debt, worse paper and wholly unrealistic expectations. It is even gloomier than the voyage of the Ancient Mariner. He at least found redemption.

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

The lesson of France and Italy – the worse the country, the better the wine

Although I promise to move on to drink, forgive me for beginning with a less interesting but even more complex subject: government. It is easy to patronise the Italians. The Risorgimento was a failure (See David Gilmour’s superb The Pursuit of Italy). Since the days of Cavour’s Machiavellianism and Garibaldi’s Cav and Pag bravura, the Italian political system has suffered a steady haemorrhage of authority and prestige, with the partial exception of the Mussolini era. By the 1950s, the serious people in Italy had come to one of three conclusions. The first lot decided that the Italians were not fit to govern themselves. This explains the Euro-enthusiasm of the Montis,

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Papal Conclave: would a result today mean Angelo Scola is Pope?

White smoke from the Vatican this afternoon may signal that the new Pope is Cardinal Angelo Scola. But the longer the papal conclave goes on, the more likely it becomes that St Peter’s next successor will be a global figure – which probably means either a North or Latin American, rather than an African or Asian. That, at least, is the prevailing consensus of the Vaticanisti this morning. And it makes sense. Scola, probably the least talked about of the heavy favourites, is the obvious choice to follow Pope Benedict: a theologian of similarly high standing (though his writings are less accessible to lay readers), he has grown in stature

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 February 2013

On the BBC television news on Monday night, the first three items concerned alleged misbehaviour by the famous — Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Lord Rennard and Vicky Pryce, the ex-wife of the ex-Cabinet minister, Chris Huhne. I begin to wonder if an accidental revolution is in progress. There is no revolutionary political doctrine, just a wish to believe that anyone in any position of power or fame is corrupt and should be exposed. Sexual misbehaviour is probably the most fun way of doing this, but stuff about money or lying works too. In theory, we should welcome this. The accusations often turn out to be true. Power corrupts. But actually there

The Spectator

Barometer | 28 February 2013

Political joke The Five Star Movement, led by comedian Beppe Grillo, won 26% of the vote in the Italian general election. Comedian John O’Farrell competed as Labour’s candidate in the Eastleigh by-election. Some other comedians who have won office: — Jon Gnarr won Reykjavik’s mayoral election in 2010 with 35% of the vote, on a platform of free towels in swimming pools and putting polar bears in the city’s museum (instead of shooting them). He had previously played a Swedish Marxist in a TV comedy show. — Al Franken was elected to the US Senate for Minnesota in 2009, after a recount. He had previously been a writer for Saturday

Douglas Carswell

Why I love Beppe Grillo

‘Crazy Italians!’ you might think.  Offered the choice between Bunga Bunga Berlusconi, an ex-Communist and a Brussels stooge, one in four of them went and voted for a stand up comedian. Ever since Beppe Grillo’s shock success in the Italian elections, serious pundits in the mainstream media have been inviting us to disapprove. We are supposed to roll our eyes at the idea that Italians seem unwilling to accept austerity.  We are meant to tut tut at the failure of their democracy to produce a stable administration willing to take instruction from the Eurosystem. This only goes to show, imply the poobahs and the pundits, that Italian democracy is in crisis.

Nicholas Farrell

Beppe Grillo: Italy’s new Mussolini

The stand-up comedian Beppe Grillo, like the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini before him, has a craving to take over the piazza and mesmerise the crowd. Where once young Italians chanted the mantra ‘Du-ce! Du-ce!’ now they chant  ‘Bep-pe! Bep-pe!’. But it is not just a shared need to rant and rave at large numbers of complete strangers that hirsute Beppe and bald Benito have in common. Worryingly, for Italy and also for Europe (where democracy seems incapable of solving the existential crisis), there is a lot more to it than that. Beppe Grillo founded the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Milan on 4 October 2009. The capital ‘V’ stands for

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

Italian elections: ‘The worst possible outcome’

Forget Moody’s. If you want to see market panic, just look at Italy. As Isabel reported this morning, the unexpectedly strong performance of Beppe Grillo’s anti-establishment party, the Five Star Movement, has produced an extremely close election result, and no clear winner. While the electoral system guarantees a majority in the Chamber of Deputies for the group with the largest vote share (Pier Luigi Bersani’s centre-left group), it does not do so for the Senate. With no group securing a majority in the upper house, Italy now faces coalition negotiations and likely another election. Citi calls this ‘probably the worst possible outcome for Italy’ — thanks to the political uncertainty,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Weary Italian voters can teach UK politicians lessons

Italian voters are clearly cheesed off: with the Establishment, and with the country’s austerity programme. The explosion onto the scene of Beppe Grillo – which Freddy examined in his post from Rome on Sunday – shows quite how cheesed off they are, and it also has wider lessons for the eurozone and for UK politics, too. The first is that voters clearly do not share eurozone leaders’ unswerving commitment to the euro project: Grillo made much of his party’s eurosceptic credentials and won 54 seats in the upper house, with Berlusconi’s centre-right on 116, while Mario Monti, the conduit for the EU’s austerity measures, won only 18. No alliance gained

Sunday

Freddy Gray

Italian elections: anti-politics on amphetamines

Rome Italians go to the polls today, and Beppe Grillo still seems to be the name on everybody’s lips. Grillo is expected to get up to 22 per cent of the vote — staggering for a comedian-turned-politician with no discernable policies whose campaign slogan is ‘vaffanculo’ (‘F— off!’). Il Fenomeno Grillo is anti-politics on amphetamines. Is Italian democracy self-immolating? Maybe. Faced with nothing but corruption, recession, imposed EU austerity, and the same old politicians, the downtrodden public are fed up and turning on the system. You can’t really blame them. Some of the Italians I spoken to here today think it is scandalous that Grillo has so much support —

Friday

James Forsyth

Mario Monti resigns

Following the passing of his budget, Mario Monti has quit as Italian Prime Minister. At the moment, it remains unclear whether he’ll continue to lead the government until elections next year. Many in the Italian establishment—and, I understand, several European leaders—would dearly love Monti to emerge as the leader of a centrist coalition ahead of the election, though as a Senator for Life he can’t run in the election himself. They view the popular endorsement of Monti’s reforms as the best possible result for the stability of the Eurozone. What seems certain, though, is that the Italian elections will be highly unpredictable. The presence of both a comic and Silvio

Saturday

Rod Liddle

I need your help

I am in southern Italy and there has been thunder and lightning pretty much continuously since Tuesday. I am quite scared of lightning. I need to buy some comestibles; especially wine and cigarettes. But the tiny apartment I have rented is connected to the outside world only by 72 metal steps affixed to the side of the mountain by metal scaffolding. The lightning is all about. Should I risk it? Would it help if I wore rubber-soled shoes for my dash to the shop? Or will I be forever fused to the rockface, like a sort of crap gargoyle? I turn to you for help, and succour.

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Raphael’s paintbrush

One of the puns that circulated the cultured elite of Italy during the Renaissance compared the potency of an artist’s paintbrush, his pennello, with his penis, il pene. Raphael, who by all accounts liked his women, perhaps embodied that duality best of all. The artist’s fascination with female kind, Antonio Forcellino suggests in his brilliant and lyrical biography of the artist, helped shape his genius. Not long before Raphael died, aged just 37, of a malady popularly believed to have stemmed from excessive sexual activity, he painted La Fornarina — a young, brown-eyed beauty (perhaps his last lover), semi-nude but for a diaphanous veil draped beneath her décolletage. Around this

Friday

Fredrik Erixon

Europe’s illusory deal

After Merkel’s decision to allow Eurozone funds to be used to bail out Spanish and Italian banks, the press tomorrow may declare – yet again – that some kind of breakthrough has been reached and that the Teutonic queen of austerity has been forced down from her throne. But, as ever with the Euro summits, there is less – far less – than meets the eye. Here’s my take:  1. Growth pact. Any pact representing no more than 0.0096 per cent of Eurozone GDP is hardly going to have a discernible effect, so let’s not pretend otherwise. 2. About those no-strings bailouts. It seems countries can access bailout funds without