After the winning match against Germany of our national team at the Tuesday’s semi-final of the Worldcup Soccer 2006 tournament, it seems that it is time for the Brits to update some of their clichés on Italy and Italians:
England may still love long balls and the commentators mention the war, but the Italians no longer play catenaccio. What kind of crazy tournament is this?
Not only more civilised, but more conducive to perfection. Take Italian footballers: they’ve proved themselves rather a superior breed to the English lot, this World Cup. Totti, Toni, et al have showed that the Italian way produces muscles, nerve and hair as well-conditioned as Ginola’s.
[…] Italians are healthier. An Italian man can expect to stay healthy 10 years longer than his British counterpart, according to a Leicester University study just published. The difference between an Italian woman and a British one is 14 years of health.
So how can the British become more like the Italians?
Growing up, Italian teenagers learn the tale of Giotto and the fly. As a young apprentice in 13th century Florence, the aspiring painter sketched a fly on the nose of a portrait his master-teacher Cimabue was finishing. So lifelike was the insect that when the elder painter returned to the studio, he repeatedly tried to swat it off the canvas. Realizing he’d been fooled by the bravura talent of his pupil, Cimabue told him: "You have surpassed your teacher." Thus encouraged by his master, Giotto went on to revolutionize Western painting, and posterity regards him as the man who launched the Italian Renaissance.
Fast-forward to Italy 2006, and the image of the precocious apprentice has been replaced by a humbler figure: the underemployed 30-something despondent about the present, let alone the future.
[…]
Developing the potential of a Giotto requires masters with the wisdom and magnanimity of Cimabue. Even if Italy’s under-40s were to push harder for responsible roles, Italy’s old guard — in virtually every field, from academia to entertainment — shows few signs of ceding space to them.
[…]
Frida Giannini, 33, has taken over as creative chief [at Gucci, the luxury-goods maker]. The Rome native says Italy must find new ways to do what it has always done best: brilliant design allied to fine workmanship. "You grow up in a place like Rome, every other meter there is a work of art, some kind of treasure. It’s not the same to see it in a postcard," she says. "It’s in our dna." But that native aesthetic sense needs an extra dose of ingenuity to add value in today’s competitive environment. "Quality must be wedded to creativity," Giannini says. "If you want to give luster to whatever you produce, you must focus your resources on the young. You have to always be in search of what’s new, what’s next."
[…]
Italy is now on course to become quite literally the oldest of countries. Beset by economic and social stagnation that makes it among the most ossified slices of Old Europe, it is stuck with a stubbornly low birth-rate that means Italians are not even replacing themselves. In a more fundamental way, the nation has not figured out how to make use of the energy and ingenuity of its young. Faced with bleak job prospects and a lack of young leaders to look to, Italians in their 20s and 30s risk falling into a nationwide generational rut. Many are afflicted with a pervading sense of hopelessness and malaise that contrasts with the youth-driven vigor boosting states like Sweden or Slovenia.
[…]
Though absent from the candidates’ slogans, Italy’s need to rejuvenate itself ought to be the nation’s No. 1 priority. Better educated and more connected with the outside world, young Italians are ready to step into full-fledged adulthood and reshape their country’s future. But far too few have had the chance.
Jonathan Lethem in The New York Times (registration required):
Calvino [...] had managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic. Calvino, with his frequent references to comics and folktales and film, and his droll probing of contemporary scientific and philosophical theories, had encompassed motifs associated with brows both high and low in an internationally lucid style, one wholly his own. As comfortable mingling with the Oulipo group in Paris (Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau and others, who spliced the DNA of literature with overt surrealist games) as he was explicating his love for and debt to Hemingway, Stevenson and the Brothers Grimm, Calvino seemed never to have compromised in his elegant explorations of whatever made him curious in nature, art or his own sensory or intellectual life. His prose was ambassadorial, his work a living bridge between Pliny the Elder, Franz Kafka and Italian neorealist cinema. And – I intuited then, I’ve heard since – he was a kind and generous person to meet, as colleague or student or friend.[…]
I worry a little about the state of Calvino’s shelf, 20 years later. Not that any of his books are out of print; precisely the opposite. Calvino’s two primary publishers have been reverential in presenting nearly all of his many titles in elegant trade paperback editions, the bulk in an appealing uniform sequence from Harcourt Brace.
[…]
I speak as both a lifelong completist and a former bookstore clerk, one who watched and sometimes guided readers as they attempted to choose a book. Ennoble an author’s shelf with too many uniformly enticing editions, and the problem becomes one of luck in the reader’s selection.
[…]
Italo Calvino never wrote a bad book. Yet an author of such diffusion, without a single, encompassing magnum opus to embrace (some readers will argue for "Invisible Cities," but that ineffably lovely book shows too narrow a range of Calvino’s effects, too little of his omnivorous exuberance) needs a beginner’s entry point, as well, perhaps, as a compendium to point toward posterity.
The challenge for the Left—as it has been often said—is to wake up and shake off some of its most “conservative” attitudes of mind, such as, for instance, its die-hard anti-Americanism, which sometimes prevents it from perceiving reality. Well, perhaps that is what is happening to the Italian Left, or at least that is what an optimist could dare to think in the light of some recent attitudes. The case of the mayor of Bologna is the last, in chronological order.
Once dubbed "The Messiah of the Left"—in the days when he was leading Italy’s largest trade union—, in his new role as mayor of the prosperous and traditionally left-oriented city of Bologna, Sergio Cofferati is fighting to uphold the rule of law. Once the orchestrator of huge protests against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on behalf of workers’ rights (in 2002 he brought more than one million people onto the streets of Rome), now Cofferati is being accused by some Communist Party allies of playing populist politics, acting more like a hard-knuckled sheriff from one of the comic books he loves than a leftist mayor.
"What we are doing doesn’t seem so very radical to me,” said Cofferati in an interview.
“We have to get away from the mindset—he added—that the left takes care of social solidarity and the right deals with law and order. The two issues are totally entwined and when the left governs it has to tackle both."
According to one opinion poll, in his campaign Cofferati is backed by 85 percent of his fellow citizens. Which is not meaningless in the most Leftist city in Italy. Another sign of the times?
Thirty-five years ago, Renzo Piano and his British colleague Richard Rogers teamed up to build the Pompidou Center. Though they were both unknown, they beat out 681 architects for the job
and their brash factory for culture, with its pop-colored industrial tubes, ducts and pipes, landed in a sedate Paris neighborhood like an alien spaceship. "We were young, quite impolite bad boys," Piano recalled with a smile not long ago. Now the Pompidou is a landmark, […]
The son of a builder in Genoa, Piano, 68, sees architecture as more than the romance of the sketch. "Of course it is an art," he says, "but it is also a science—very much the process of research, discovery, exploring materials." Even the name of his firm—Renzo Piano Building Workshop—suggests his devotion to craft and invention, the marriage of the mind and the hand. It’s an architecture that reveals the touch of a maker, but also the heart of a humanist.
Once an “outrageous architect,” Renzo Piano is now showing a quiet elegance. “Did he lose his edge—or find his soul?” Cathleen McGuigan tries to investigate. In November 7 issue of Newsweek magazine. An interesting portrait of a very interesting Italian architect.
‘He was an extraordinary man of faith and culture who dedicated his existence to the education of new generations, working above all in the Communion and Liberation Movement that he founded more than 50 years ago. He contributed via his generous action to the promotion of the social and human maturation of many young people who saw him as their spiritual guide. ‘Be ever more passionate about the mystery of man’: this was his exhortation, his communication of the idea. A lesson of life that needs to continue to inspire the common commitment of the institutions and citizens in facing the challenges of the future.’
President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, thus recalled the figure of Father Giussani. (Italy On Line)
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Update (February 27, 2:20 pm)
At Sandro Magister’s website (in English) a memorable interview with Fr. Luigi Giussani, published in the weekly newspaper "Il Sabato" on August 9, 1988. The founder of Communion and Liberation recounted how, according to him, popes Montini and John Paul II saved the Church from disaster.
There is a debate now going on in Italy: was Tiziano Terzani a secular saint, a Guru, or even “the lay Pope?” Terzani (see Wikipedia and The Guardian), before wearing a long white beard and robe and living in an Indian ashram, was a former war correspondent and an expert on China and Japan—he wrote for Der Spiegel, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica—who covered wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan.
Two Italian peacekeepers were killed and four wounded by a roadside bomb near the Afghan capital Kabul on Friday. [...] The blast hit a two-vehicle Italian convoy about 20 km (12 miles) south of Kabul, on the main road to Logar province. The wounded were evacuated by helicopter. [...] Italy handed over command of the force to Britain on Thursday. A Taliban spokesman, Mohammad Hanif, said by telephone from an undisclosed location that Taliban suicide bombers would increase attacks on British troops in the southern Helmand province, and would "turn the ground red" with their blood. [
The life and martyrdom of Fr. Andrea Santoro, a Roman priest on mission in Turkey, by Sandro Magister, and 
AGI
