Italy

Monday

Ross Clark

Why is the coronavirus mortality rate so much lower in Germany?

From our UK edition

Is there something about being Germany which protects the body against coronavirus Covid-19? Probably not, I would guess. In which case why do the latest figures from the Robert Koch Institute show that the country has a case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.3 per cent, while the World Health Organisation (WHO) figures from Italy seem to show a CFR of 9 per cent? To say there is a vast gulf between those figures is an understatement. If nine per cent of people who catch Covid-19 are going to die from it we are facing a calamity beyond parallel in the modern world. If only 0.

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

Life under lockdown: Italy is being consumed by panic

From our UK edition

Ravenna The whole of Italy is now in quarantine and infected by the kind of panic I imagine an invaded people feels as it waits for the enemy to knock on the door. I work from home and suppose I must be thankful at least for that. I have just heard the youngest of our six children, Giuseppe, who is four, ask Carla, his mother: ‘Mamma, do you know why it’s called coronavirus?’ ‘No, bello, I don’t, tell me’ she replied. ‘Because it’s the king of tutti i virus!’ he crowed which caused Carla to smother him with kisses. ‘Bravissimo! Amore mio! Bravissimo!’ The word ‘corona’, in case you didn’t know, is Italian for crown. Did he invent that himself I wonder?

Tuesday

Ian Acheson

The nightmare scenario of a coronavirus prison outbreak

From our UK edition

Scared about coronavirus as you go about your everyday life? Spare a thought for those living and working inside our battered prison system. In Italy yesterday the anxiety that underpins all incarceration suddenly exploded into violence. Rioting left six prisoners dead, staff were taken hostage, dozens escaped and one prison in Poggioreale near Naples was ‘completely destroyed’. The ferocious backlash was in response to tough new measures introduced across the country to try to slow the relentless progress of Covid-19. These included a ban on the all-important prisoner family visits, which are seen by experts as dramatically increasing the risk of contagion in places almost wholly unsuited to withstand its effects.

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

Italians believe the coronavirus outbreak shows their superiority

From our UK edition

During times of contagion, you begin to understand why fascist salutes were once so popular. The foot-tap is replacing the handshake in parts of China. Here in Italy, which has far more cases of coronavirus than any countries except China, Iran and South Korea, a left-wing government is telling Italians not to shake hands. It reminds me of 1922, when Mussolini came to power after the first world war had killed 20 million and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 at least as many again. The Duce replaced the handshake with the Roman salute. The handshake, according to fascist ideology, had to go because it was unhygienic and bourgeois. The connection Mussolini made between the power of the hand to infect the human body and the power of the bourgeoisie to infect the body politic is fascinating.

Tuesday

Kapil Komireddi

Palermo without borders

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. On a wet November evening, Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, sat in the front pew of a church on the city’s main thoroughfare. He, like the citizens proliferating behind him, was waiting for the concert to begin. The setting and the seating order had a provincial air, like something out of an Upamanyu Chatterjee novel. But Orlando, the man who squeezed the Sicilian mafia, has a cosmopolitan vision. Orlando has converted Palermo, a major gateway for the masses pouring out of Africa and the Middle East, into perhaps Europe’s least administratively hostile city to prospective settlers.

palermo

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Why I’ll never become an MP

From our UK edition

Every now and then someone asks me if I have ever thought of becoming an MP. My response tends to be a laugh so deranged that the question answers itself. When I manage to verbalise the answer it usually goes something like this: ‘No, because I enjoy saying what I think is true.’ Occasionally my conversationalist will persist: ‘But MPs have a huge variety of opinions. Parliament is not filled with silent types.’ Throughout such interactions various names and images flash through my head. I think of Sarah Champion, for instance — the Labour MP for Rotherham. Ms Champion got her seat in 2012 and among the problems she inherited was the fact that her constituency had recently been one of the largest crime scenes in modern British history.

Wednesday

Cardinal Vincent Nichols

Words to live by from Saint John Henry Newman

From our UK edition

On 13 October, John Henry Newman, a distinguished and distinctive Englishman, was officially declared a Saint. A well-known saying of his is: ‘To live is to change; to be perfect is to change often.’ How did that work in his life and, to a lesser extent, how has it worked in mine? In 1833, Newman was desperate to get back to England from a trip to Italy, including to Rome, for which he acquired a deep dislike. He had his plans ready, among them a determination to lead the Church of England in a profound renewal. But he fell ill and then, heading for Marseilles, his ship was becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio, between Corsica and Sardinia. His frustration deepened. But then a change.

Thursday

Mark Palmer

Why Tuscany always beats Provence for me

From our UK edition

A family of peacocks is sunning itself in our villa garden. They all look extraordinarily happy and composed, especially the baby one, for whom (like us, come to think of it) this is a whole new experience. But then, the 150 hens wandering in and out of their coops painted like beach huts don’t look exactly overburdened themselves; nor do the sheep, pigs and cows in their 220 acres of lush Tuscan terrain near the Merse river about 45 minutes southwest of Siena.

Thursday

Manfred Manera

Venice needs Venexit

From our UK edition

Some of Venice’s problems are well known: the challenge of conserving her famous buildings, the dangers of poorly managed mass tourism — not to mention the fact that the city might well simply drown, a threat made all the more obvious by last week’s floods, the worst in 50 years. Since 1987 billions have been spent on the Mose project, a still unfinished and controversial system of underwater dams intended to protect the city from flooding. The authorities have repeatedly shifted the completion date: 1995, 2012, 2016 and now 2021. Venetians suspect these delays were just attempts to hide serious faults. They view the most recent floods as a clear sign of a major dysfunction in the way the city is politically managed.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Should I return to the land of my Italian ancestors?

From our UK edition

When I was growing up, my Italian grandfather was my favourite person. He taught me to play a mean game of draughts. He told me stories about his childhood in a remote mountain village in Abruzzo. I couldn’t hear often enough about how he got the deep scar across the bridge of his nose. He was standing as a little boy behind his father who had a pair of shears slung over his back and they fell and sliced his face. He told me they had to stick the adhesive strip of an envelope over the cut. My mother told him to be quiet every time he gave me the lurid details but I loved it. The builder boyfriend and I have been thinking a lot about our heritage. Like many Brexit voters, we find the charge of ‘little Englander’ ironic.

Friday

Daniel DePetris

Will Italy’s new coalition last?

From our UK edition

Italian politics is like a game of musical chairs. One government resigns or collapses, another takes its place, until that government is either rendered irrelevant a year later or voted out during the next election. Italy has had 68 governments in the last 74 years and 10 prime ministers in the last 20. Italians will get another prime minister sworn in relatively soon, and the new one is the same as the old. Guissspe Conte, a quiet law professor only 15 months ago, will stay on as Italy’s premier after surviving an attempt by his hardline interior minister Matteo Salvini to force an early election.

Tuesday

Nicholas Farrell

Will Italy’s warring politicians succeed in shutting Salvini out of power?

From our UK edition

What now looks like a distinct possibility in Italy after today's resignation of Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte is a reminder of a golden rule of modern politics: the liberal left will sleep with any enemy however repulsive to stop right-wing populism. Matteo Salvini, who is by far Italy's most popular politician, perhaps forgot this rule when he pulled the plug on the coalition government of his radical-right League party and the alt-left Five Star Movement by tabling a no-confidence vote in Giuseppe Conte, which prompted his resignation. Either that or he just could not face another day in a coalition government which was unable to agree anything and which was damaging and not helping Italy. Whatever.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

The secret of Il Capitano’s success

From our UK edition

Last summer, when Italy became the first major European country to get a populist government, Steve Bannon was cock-a-hoop. The former White House chief strategist had spent much of his time in Europe last year aiding and abetting populists. He called Italy ‘the centre of the political universe right now’. He was full of praise for what he described as the altruism of the alt-left Five Star movement led by Luigi Di Maio and the radical right Lega led by Matteo Salvini. The two populist parties had buried their differences for the sake of the nation, Bannon believed, as they formed a coalition government. But for all his excitement, this anti-establishment honeymoon couldn’t last.

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Matteo Salvini prepares for his big gamble

From our UK edition

Italians have had ten prime ministers in the last 20 years. They may soon have another. Matteo Salvini, the interior minister, deputy prime minister, and leader of the League, is ready to pull the plug on a coalition government increasingly pitted against itself. The League and its coalition ally, the Five Star Movement or 5SM, are less ideological brothers-in-arms than sibling rivals forced to live under the same roof. Salvini and Five Star Leader Luigi Di Maio are two strong personalities who were never completely aligned to begin with – Salvini having represented Italy’s industrial north, Di Maio coming onto the national scene as the leader of a grassroots party with significant support in the agricultural south.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 18 July 2019

From our UK edition

The train standing at platform 1A had no air-conditioning and the heat was stupefying. Latecomers pressing into the carriage reacted to it as to a slap in the face. Those with nothing better to hand fanned themselves with their tickets. The lady seated opposite me mistook my theatrical languor for conviviality. ‘I’ve been in Florence for a week and I’ve never been so hot in my life,’ she said. ‘But I’ve had such a wonderful time in school here learning Italian. Such a beautiful language. You sort of roll it around in your mouth as if you are tasting something delicious, like olive oil or something. And I made such good progress! I’m sure that if I’d done another week I would be fluent almost.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 11 July 2019

From our UK edition

The hotel manager had arranged for me to borrow an Alfa Romeo Spider Duetto two-seater convertible (1982) for the afternoon. And now, after lunch, here it was, as promised, parked on the forecourt. ‘You’re familiar with left-hand drive cars I take it, Mr Clarke?’ she said, a touch apprehensively I thought. ‘I’ve had a Spider,’ I said. ‘Similar to this, but a later, fuel-injected model.’ A true statement — although I was as confounded by it as she was. She handed me the key and a map with a suggested scenic route marked in Biro. I climbed in, fired the thing up, and with a cheery wave, 10,000 exploratory revs and a pip on the horn I set off through the village.

Monday

Eric Newby

A chance encounter with a butterfly-catching Nazi

In the winter of 1943, Eric Newby, captured in 1942 on a commando raid on Sicily, escaped from an Italian prisoner of war camp. Love and War in the Apennines, his memoir of life on the run among the peasant farmers of the Apennine Mountains, is that rarest of combinations, a military classic and a love story. Patrick French’s tribute to Newby’s memoir can be read here. In this excerpt, Newby describes an unlikely encounter in a mountain pasture. As I climbed, the trees began to thin out and at last I came to a place where there was nothing but juniper growing.

butterfly naxi apennines

Monday

Patrick French

Love and War in the Apennines

An escaped British prisoner-of-war is sleeping in a grassy hollow by the edge of a cliff. He wakes to find a German soldier standing over him, wearing summer battledress, a pistol at his hip. Realizing he has been caught, he says his name and adds, ‘I’m a lieutenant in the infantry, or rather I was until I was put in the bag.’In the bag – captured. It is one of the many phrases of the time that add to the resonance of Love and War in the Apennines (1971), a vivid memoir of Eric Newby’s capture, escape and recapture in Italy’s mountainous terrain during the later years of World War Two. The man standing over him will not, though, take him away.

apennines

Tuesday

Nicholas Farrell

The triumph of Matteo Salvini

Since becoming leader six years ago Matteo Salvini — Il Capitano as they call him — has transformed the radical-right Lega from small regional separatist party into the largest party in Italy. After last week’s European elections, the Lega is now also the second largest national party in the European Parliament. Its 28 seats place it level with Angela Merkel’s CDU, and just behind the 29 seats of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. The European Parliament election results confirm Salvini as the undisputed leader of Europe’s populists. Their insurrection is determined to unseat the EU ancien régime. Its latest champion, French president Emmanuel Macron, is ever less convincing and popular in France and elsewhere in Europe.

matteo salvini

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Salvini’s common touch

From our UK edition

While Britain continues to try to struggle its way out of the EU, perhaps it is wise to consider what is happening inside the bloc itself, not just in Paris where the fumes from burning cars fill the apartments and approval ratings for Emmanuel Macron continue to slide as he engages in a national listening exercise (which actually consists of him delivering Chávez-length lectures to the French public). But over the border in Italy, where the tone of the era is being set. Being both interior minister and deputy prime minister is a tremendous position for Matteo Salvini to be in.