Italy

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Richard Ingrams defends Joan Littlewood, and the truth about Napoleon’s poisonous wallpaper

The state of Italy… Sir: Ambassador Terracciano’s letter (Letters, 1 November) about Nicholas Farrell’s article (‘The dying man of Europe’, 25 October) seems to me to be ill-researched and not thought through. Nicholas Farrell is spot on. The Ambassador is not. In another forum the Ambassador, on being asked what Italian nationals contribute to Britain, claimed that: ‘There is no area in which they don’t excel. Not only finance and management but also culture and the scientific and medical world, from professorship at Oxford to the chorus director of the Royal Opera, from the Science Festival at Cambridge to the director of the Tate Gallery in Liverpool.’ Has he ever stopped

Monday

Daisy Dunn

Should we revive the Colosseum?

It occurs to me that Italy isn’t the best place to live if you’re an architect. Take a walk at random through Rome or Florence or Venice, and it is quite possible that you won’t pass a single building made in the last century, let alone the last decade. Certainly, no one needs a Cheesegrater grating bolts all over the place when there are so many historic monuments to preserve. But while Italy’s old buildings are nectar to tourists, they can prove a headache for those trying to adapt their cities to modern life. No surprise, then, that some Italians have come out in support last week of a proposal to restore

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

The shameful truth: Britain lets in far too few refugees

Pictures from Calais have returned to our television screens, showing desperate men and women trying to break into lorries bound for Britain. A Sudanese man died jumping from a bridge onto a lorry heading for Dover. Another perished after falling from the axles of a bus. The mayor of Calais has blamed Britain for being an ‘El Dorado’ offering aspirational benefits to migrants — but as she’d know, the Africans arriving in her morgues would never have qualified for welfare. They risked death due to a sense of desperation, and hope, that we can scarcely imagine. The same is true in the Mediterranean, where 2,500 have died after embarking on

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: In defence of Italy, and the rise and fall of the military moustache

Italy’s to-do list Sir: You would expect a long letter of rebuttal by a piqued senior diplomat in response to the many barbs that Nicholas Farrell packed into his piece about Italy (‘The dying man of Europe’, 25 October). Among the most painful ones were that Italy is ‘almost doomed’ and parts of it are ‘hopeless’, which are far too simplistic statements. Mr Farrell is remarkably complacent in his negative bias. But beyond the sea of clichés, the piece offers a useful to-do list. So I will limit myself to a brief comment on its title, highlighting some details not mentioned in the article: if decline is the issue, there

Martin Vander Weyer

How Italy failed the stress test (and Emilio Botín didn’t)

Continuing last week’s theme, it was the Italian banks — with nine fails, four still requiring capital injections — that bagged the booby prize in the great EU stress-testing exercise, followed predictably by Greece and Cyprus, while Germany and Austria (with one fail each) fared better than some of us had feared. The most delinquent European bank turned out to be the most ancient, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which was judged to have a capital shortfall of €2.1 billion as a result of a very modern set of problems. Founded in 1472 as a kind of charitable pawnbroker, the bank which eventually became Italy’s third largest had a

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Italy’s in terminal decline, and no one has the guts to stop it

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth, Mats Persson and Matthew Elliott discuss Europe” startat=60] Listen [/audioplayer] Rome   The Rome Opera House sacked its entire orchestra and chorus the other day. Financed and managed by the state, and therefore crippled by debt, the opera house — like so much else in Italy — had been a jobs-for-life trade union fiefdom. Its honorary director, Riccardo Muti, became so fed up after dealing with six years of work-to-rule surrealism that he resigned. It’s hard to blame him. The musicians at the opera house — the ‘professori’ — work a 28-hour week (nearly half taken up with ‘study’) and get paid 16 months’ salary a year, plus absurd perks

Martin Vander Weyer

The one economic indicator that never stops rising: meet the Negroni Index

This dispatch comes to you from Venice — where I arrived at sunset on the Orient Express. More of that journey on another occasion, I hope. Suffice to say that if you happen to have been wrestling with the moral choice of bequeathing what’s left of your tax-bitten wealth to ungrateful offspring or spending it on yourself, don’t hesitate to invest in a last fling on this time capsule of elegant extravagance. Made up of rolling stock built in the late 1920s, the train itself symbolises everything that 20th-century Europe was good at — engineering, craftsmanship, style, cross-border connections — when not distracted by political folly and war. Views from

Thursday

Prue Leith

Prue Leith’s diary: I want to be green, but I’ve got some flights to take first…

‘Please God, make me good, but not yet.’ I know the feeling. As I get older and more deeply retired, I globe-trot more and my carbon footprint is horrendous. And guilt does not result in abstinence. The brain is persuaded but the flesh is weak. Years ago I chaired Jonathon Porritt’s sustainability organisation, Forum for the Future, and I remember holding a fund-raising dinner for rich Cotswolders and hoping no one would notice my gas-guzzling old car, toasty warm house, and melon with more air-miles than flavour. I’ve tried harder since then, but it’s not easy. A couple of years ago I converted my ancient barn into an eco-friendly house

Jack Castle

Ezra Pound – the fascist years

‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb, /Jumbled boulder and weed’, was Basil Bunting’s 1949 opinion of Pound’s Cantos; but as the sometime friend of Pound continued: ‘There they are, you will have to go a long way round / If you want to avoid them.’ This judgment has proved wise. Here we are in 2014, not avoiding one of the most contentious figures in 20th-century literature: poet, midwife of Eliot’s The Waste Land, economist, translator, committed Fascist, anti-Semite, avid supporter of James Joyce and Mussolini, later alleged traitor to the United States of America and —

Thursday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The consequences of neutrality

From The Spectator, 10 October 1914: IT would be a base act to try to bribe or to threaten a neutral Power like Italy into joining the Allies. The notion of taking up the attitude that she may find herself in the wrong box when the peace is made is one which must be utterly hateful to every Englishman. Not only is it certain that if Italy remains neutral, and does not come to the assistance of the Allies, no vengeance will be taken upon her for her aloofness, but, more than that, no one here will even pretend that her failure to show an active friendship with us may

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Pizza, choc-ice and Leonardos – the treasures of Turin

To most non-Italians Turin spells Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Fiat). But this subalpine city has a longer history than the internal combustion engine. It may be twinned with Detroit, but its cavalcade of equestrian monuments testifies to an older sort of horsepower — the sort harnessed by the condottieri of the House of Savoy to turn their little Duchy into a major player on the European stage and, for four brief years from 1861 to 1865, into the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. So while Detroit has the Detroit Institute of Arts, Turin has 55,000 sqm of royal museums, currently undergoing unification into a single complex called the ‘Polo

Nicholas Farrell

Italy is killing refugees with kindness

The next time you eat a fish from the Mediterranean, just remember that it may well have eaten a corpse. As the Italian author Aldo Busi told the press just the other day: ‘I don’t buy fish from the Mediterranean any more for fear of eating Libyans, Somalis, Syrians and Iraqis. I’m not a cannibal and so now I stick with farmed fish, or else Atlantic cod.’ Personally, I prefer my fish natural, fattened on drowned human flesh, but there you go. I take the point. Foolishly, last October Italy’s left-wing government became the first European Union country to decriminalise illegal immigration and deploy its navy at huge expense to

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

The Italians are disgusted with our holidaymakers

As the holidays draw to a close, Italian newspapers have been reporting with perplexity and distaste on the outlandish behaviour of foreign tourists in Italy, by which they mean young people from northern European countries. One report told of a couple making love in broad daylight on a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice, the Ponte degli Scalzi (which, as a commentator pointed out, means ‘Bridge of the Barefooted’, not ‘Bridge of the Bare-bottomed’). Other reports talked of people sunbathing naked in public places or picnicking in large groups under the colonnades in St Mark’s Square. Venice suffered most from these excesses, but nowhere was immune. Florence and Rome

Thursday

Roderick Conway-Morris

How Richard Wilson made Wales beautiful

‘I recollect nothing so much as a solemn — bright — warm — fresh landscape by Wilson, which swims in my brain like a delicious dream,’ wrote Constable of his encounter with the Welsh artist’s ‘Tabley House, Cheshire’ after he visited the gallery of that house owned by Sir John Leicester. Recalling this epiphany, Constable went on to say of Richard Wilson: ‘He was one of the great appointments to shew to the world what exists in nature but which was not known till his time.’ Turner, too, was an ardent Wilson admirer and as a young man set out on a reverential pilgrimage to Wales, seeking out his birthplace

Sam Leith

Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s Englishing of Proust — widely and immediately agreed to be one of the greatest literary translations of all time — very nearly didn’t happen. Scott Moncrieff only suggested the project to his publisher after they rejected a collection of satirical squibs in verse (sample: ‘Sir Philip Sassoon is the Member for Hythe;/ He is opulent, generous, swarthy and lithe.’). Like any good hack, he had another suggestion up his sleeve: there was this character Proust just starting to be published — making a bit of noise in France. Constable didn’t immediately see the value: ‘They replied that they did not see much use in publishing a

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

If you want real stress, move to the country

It’s much more stressful to live in the country than in a town. There are always threats of one kind or another — wind farms, housing developments, road ‘improvements’, and so on. And then there are often arguments with neighbours about this and that. If it’s not leylandii, which are not one of our problems in south Northamptonshire, there’s always something. We used to have peacocks that migrated to our neighbours’ gardens and proceeded to ruin them. (The peacocks were duly eliminated.) Then the man who mowed our lawn upset people by doing it too early in the morning and waking everybody up. Some of our neighbours have also been

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

Think Britain’s tabloid journalists are bad? Try Italy’s tabloid judges

There is a small light at the end of the tunnel but it comes too late, I fear, to save Italy from the abyss:  Silvio Berlusconi was yesterday acquitted on appeal of committing Bunga Bunga with Ruby the Heart-Stealer when she was sweet 17 for which he had been sentenced to seven years in prison. Che bello! Yet if ever a reason were needed for Britain to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with European courts of any kind, and the European Arrest Warrant in particular, we need look no further than the Berlusconi Bunga Bunga trial. If it could happen to him, a media tycoon and four times Italian

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Brave, noble, forgotten – the other side of Italy’s second world war

At the time of the armistice of September 1943, when the kingdom of Italy formally transferred its allegiance from the Germans to the invading Allies, there were some 40,000 British prisoners-of-war languishing in camps around the country. Camp gates were thrown open by fleeing Italian guards, but on orders from Whitehall thousands of PoWs stayed put until the Germans arrived and packed them off to other camps in Germany. Some 4,000 of them, however, set off to seek freedom either by heading north towards Switzerland or south towards the advancing Anglo–American forces, which had just arrived on the Italian mainland after their conquest of Sicily. Most of these escapees were

Sunday

Rod Liddle

World Cup diary: Italy were poor but England were worse

Another fairly unpleasant evening spent watching England playing football. Ah well. It used to be that England were renowned for two things: we could score from set pieces, and we knew how to defend set pieces. In fact we rarely scored from open play – but give us a corner, or a free kick, and suddenly we became dangerous. Similarly, we rarely conceded from set pieces. This was a consequence of the English game, I suppose. Against Italy we conceded from a set piece in fairly lamentable fashion. Worse, though, was the endless parade of wasted corners and free kicks. I don’t know how many corners we had in the

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Harry’s Bar, where a slice of cake costs €32 – and is worth it

Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held up aching over the world’s most charismatic puddle; Harry’s is a transgressive anti-palazzo. It is a world-famous restaurant, the jewel of the Cipriani brand, and it is very conscious of this honour; it sells branded tagliarelli and books about the meals it served 30 years ago to the rich and famous; it is into auto-iconography, like the city it lives in. For this, and so much else, I blame Ernest Hemingway. He ate here after shooting birds in the lagoon and doesn’t the world know it? Some men fought against