Italy

Wednesday

Christopher Booker

The mathematical revolution behind ‘the greatest picture in the world’

It seems odd to enter a room dominated by what Aldous Huxley famously called ‘the greatest picture in the world’ to find not another soul there. Looking down from an end wall of the mediaeval civic hall in the quiet little Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro, Piero della Francesca’s ‘Resurrection’ is an image of astonishing power, showing a stern-faced risen Christ stepping out of his tomb in the dawn light of the first Easter morning like an unstoppable force of nature, exuding supernatural authority as he turns the leaves on the trees behind him from wintry death to the new life of spring. This is a painting like no

Wednesday

Len Shackleton

The minimum wage is broken – here’s how to fix it

While welcoming George Osborne’s emphasis this week on raising employment, I have some caveats about his target – to have the highest employment rate in the G7. This isn’t hugely challenging. Those in employment currently amount to 71.2 per cent of the UK population of working age, well ahead of Italy (55.5 per cent), France (64.1 per cent) and even the USA (67.4 per cent). Germany, at 73.5 per cent, is the current table-topper and the one Mr Osborne aims to overtake. Aggregates like this, though, are dodgy to interpret and are affected by differences in age cohort size and other factors. For example, the rising numbers of younger women

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Venetian secessionists deserve to be punished!

How should the western powers react when part of a friendly nation holds an illegal referendum and votes to secede from the country in which hitherto it was located? Sanctions? Military reprisals? We’d better send the gunships to the watery redoubt of Venice, then, which has just voted overwhelmingly to leave Italy. The Venetians, part of Italy for 150 years, are sick of paying taxes to bail out the indolent and mafia-ridden south of the country and wish to go it alone. The rest of Lombardy may soon follow suit. Rome has refused to recognise the plebiscite, fearing that the entire country may cease to exist. No sense of history,

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

Clarissa Tan’s Notebook: Why I stopped drinking petrol

Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though through steam. The Arno river was a dense strip of dew. At the Piazzale Michelangelo, the statue of David was etched by the surrounding murkiness to a stark silhouette, the renaissance defined by gothic cloud. I peered through a telescope that overlooked the city and saw nothing for miles. My friend Alessandro told me this was unusual for sunny Tuscany, which made me feel quite pleased. Perhaps with each day that passed I would see less of Florence — the ultimate tourist experience. At a nearby cemetery, the milky arms

Thursday

The Spectator

Christmas past in Spectator letters

This is a selection of seasonal letters from The Spectator’s 185-year archive, now online at archive.spectator.co.uk. The emblem to the right is by our cartoon editor, Michael Heath. It was his first drawing for the magazine, and appeared in 1959.   Spare the turkey Sir: Of the thousands who within the next few days will be ordering their Christmas turkeys, are any aware of the fact that the useless custom that makes it the proper and correct thing to have its most useless head upon the dish condemns the poor thing to a cruel and lingering death, while but for this custom, its head would be cut off comfortably and

Friday

Ed West

The EU is corrupt because southern Europe is corrupt

What with Britain’s dreadful performance in the PISA educational rankings, there has been comparatively little attention given to another international league table– Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. The good news is that Bulgaria and Romania, with whom we will become much more intimate next month, are already in the EU’s top 5 for corruption, placed 2nd and 4th, with Greece, Italy and Slovakia filling out the leader board. I don’t object to Romanian and Bulgarian EU citizens being able to come to Britain as such, I object to the very idea of these countries joining the polity of which I am a member. But then I’m not too happy about

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: I don’t like traffic jams or lager louts but that doesn’t mean I hate Britain

The Italians are often thought of as being unpatriotic, and one can see why. They relentlessly denigrate their national institutions, abuse their politicians, and compare their democratic arrangements most unfavourably with those of the ‘more mature’ north European countries. You might conclude, therefore, that most Italians ‘hate’ Italy. But, of course, you would be wrong, just as the Daily Mail was wrong when it decided on the basis of Ralph Miliband’s political opinions that he ‘hated Britain’. The Mail’s justification for its now notorious headline (‘The Man Who Hated Britain’) was that Miliband Senior ‘had nothing but hatred for the values, traditions and institutions — including our great schools, the

Mary Dejevsky

The Lampedusa hypocrisy: Italy prefers its migrants dead on arrival

Italy has held a day of national mourning in memory of those who died in the 3 October disaster off Lampedusa. The victims – mostly from Eritrea, Somalia and Syria – were given Italian citizenship posthumously and are now – it was announced yesterday – to be honoured at a state funeral. The desire of the Italian government to salve its conscience following the fire and shipwreck that cost an estimated 250 lives is understandable. But such measures are grotesque and will only reinforce the idea, among would-be refugees and their advocates, that a dead migrant is preferable – at least in the eyes of the receiving country – to a live one. Will the Italian authorities, I wonder,

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Italians for Maggie

Now that the forces of evil have transformed Silvio Berlusconi into a condemned man, there remains just one person on the planet who can save Italy: Roger Scruton. If the famous philosopher were just to come to Italy to deliver a single speech, his very words would be enough to set in motion la rivoluzione. That at least is the view of the Circolo Culturale Margaret Thatcher, a group whose mission it is to establish at long last, after all those centuries lived without one, a proper Anglo-Saxon Tory party in Italy. So far it has failed, but its members, like all true believers, have not lost their faith. A

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

How can you be racist and Italian? Quite easily, it seems

The Italian shop assistant accused by Oprah Winfrey of showing racial prejudice towards her in a shop in Zurich has hotly denied the charge, but with a curious twist. ‘I am Italian,’ she said in an interview with a Swiss magazine. ‘Why should I discriminate against anybody because of their origin?’ She seemed to be suggesting that no Italian could ever possibly harbour any racial prejudice against anyone. It is a claim that seems especially implausible at the moment when Italy’s first-ever black cabinet minister, the Congolese-born doctor Cecile Kyenge, has been reeling from a number of crude racist attacks. Kyenge, Italy’s recently appointed Integration Minister, has been pelted with

The Spectator

Letters: James Whitaker’s widow answers Toby Young

Absent friends Sir: Alec Marsh (‘Welcome to Big Venice’, 10 August) accurately observes that Londoners are priced out of central London by largely foreign buyers of second homes. Wealthy foreigners not only buy, they also rent, often living in London for a few years, during which they frequently return to their first home for weeks or months at a time. In Marylebone, where I have lived for 43 years, an average earner can neither buy nor rent. Moreover, rentals are only short hold. This contributes to the death of communities: it is not their foreignness which makes the new residents bad neighbours, nor their love of the convenient transport and

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Attack of the nudist lawyers

Carla, my Italian wife, has a small house in a little town on the Adriatic near Ravenna called Lido di Dante, right next to one of the last unspoilt beaches in Italy. But we cannot go to this spectacular beach because even though it is una spiaggia libera (open to all and free) and therefore di tutti (everyone’s) it is infested with nudists and their related sub-species: guardoni (voyeurs), scambisti (wife-swappers), group-sex freaks, transsexuals, bisexuals — plus several other creatures yet to be classified by scientists. Needless to say Dante’s Beach, which is named after the poet who died in Ravenna in 1321, has got a bit of a reputation

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

Thursday

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

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

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