Italy

As the build-up to the World Cup continues, my latest item at Goal Post defends Italy and the Italian way of playing football. Some of this, I confess, is based on sentiment. If Scotland cannot prevail - and it seems that some techinicality has made that more than usually impossible this year - then Italy are the european team I tend to support. Perhaps it's because I spent the first year of my life in Rome that this is the case. No memories of that time, of course, but some bond of sentiment nonetheless. Anyway, there's a magnificent austerity to Italian football sometimes and, while one might not want to feat upon it every day, it's good to have it there nonetheless: There is, as I say, a minimalist purity to the essence of Italian football.

  As you know, it's Ivan Basso in the picture here and on Saturday, for the first time and on the penultimate stage, in this year's Giro d'Italia he will wear the race leader's Maglia Rosa. He deserves it too. On the Zoncolan and then yesterday on the Mortirolo pass Basso has been the pride of the field in this year's superb Giro. Increasingly I rather suspect that the Giro is a better and, in some ways, tougher race than the Tour de France. The frequently terrible weather conditions play a part in this but so too do the unforgiving Italian mountains. In any case this has been a Giro to cherish and one that reminds one that, no matter how chequered the stories of the protagonists, cyling is the sport of a certain kind of truth.

Cadel Evans wins Stage 7 of the 2010 Giro d'Italia in Montalcino. Photo: Luk Beines/AFP/Getty Images. What with being deprived of, for various reasons*, Contador, Menchov, Valverde, Pellizotti, di Luca, the Schleck brothers, Armstrong and Cancellara you could have been forgiven for thinking that this year's Giro d'Italia might be a disappointment. Not a bit of it. In fact, I wonder if these days the Giro doesn't often provide better racing than the Tour de France. It certainly did today. On paper the stage from Carrara to Montalcino was interesting but not obviously threatening even though it included some 20km over the Tuscan strade bianche - that is, gravel and shale roads that offer a small reminder of the conditions the giants of yesteryear battled every day.

In these bleak times, we should be grateful for Silvio Berlusconi's willingness to provide much-needed levity and entertainment. The story of his encounters with Patrizia D'Addario (above) constitutes a public service: The escort at the centre of a sex scandal involving Silvio Berlusconi has said the Italian prime minister offered her a seat in the European Parliament. Patrizia D'Addario told the BBC the plan was abandoned by his party, People of Freedom, after his wife complained. He also did not pay her to sleep with him, but instead promised to resolve an issue over a building permit, she said. The allegations follow the release of audio recordings purportedly of their liaison in his official Rome residence.

Among the plethora of things I hold against Lance Armstrong is the way that his story - no matter how inspiring and heroic and extraordinary it has been - has accentuated the English-language press's belief that there's only one bike race of any importance each year. Apparently it's the Tour de France first, the rest nowhere. This is irritating. True, matters have improved in recent years and this year's Giro d'Italia is receiving more coverage (thanks Eurosport!) than it has sometimes done in the past. Granted, this has something to do with Armstrong's return from retirement (which is less astonishishing and, perhaps, less difficult than some might have you believe: after all, plenty of cyclists find themselves taking a two year break in their career...

I'm indebted to Justin at Chicken Yoghurt for alerting me to this article from La Repubblica: "PORTO VIRO (Rovigo) - 'It's a pity - È un peccato - I love working with the Italians, I love Italy. I just hope this Ssuff about the Grimsby refinery is just a one-off'. Brian has just got back from the oil rig in the Adriatic where one hundred Brits, along with two hundred Italian and foreign colleagues, are working cheek by jowl on a regasifier that will provide 10% of our country with methane. He doesn't want to talk, as he walks out from the Porto Viro base, guarded like  a barracks, where another one hundred employees work, mostly from Exxon Mobil: British, American, Norwegian, Italian... But the news of those walkouts against the "Italians" arrive like a bad omen.

Milan beat Inter 2-1* and, well, just watch the rest of it yourself. Great stuff. Thank you to Tiziano Crudeli... Milan 2-1 Inter commentaire Italienby t_m Hat-tip: Andrew and Rizzo Sports. *An important result, in fairness, since it puts the Rossoneri in line for a Champions' League place next season. Tough week for Fiorentina...

Matt Yglesias writes: For such a nice country, Italy's politics seem weirdly screwed up. There's the famous instability of the governments, of course. And then there's the fact that their main right-of-center party is led by the legendarily corrupt Silvio Berlusconi. And then there's the fact that despite the broadly discreditable nature of Berlusconi, the left-of-center bloc can never seem to stop him from coming back to power. Well, yes and, as is so often the case, no. I don't know what correlation there is between a country's niceness and the screwyness of its politics, but itt's true that foreigners of all stripes enjoy their occasional surveys of Italian politics. Certainly no commentary can avoid having fun with the "famous instability" of their governments.

Megan on the horrors of travelling in the United States these days: You know, I never really understood why making the trains run on time was so important for Mussolini, but after last week, I can understand how that became one of fascism's main selling points. She kids, of course. I've always thought, however, that improvements to the reliability of the Italian train service improved after Mussolini came to power were as much due to changes in timetabling as actual efficiency gains. In other words, by officially giving the trains more time to reach their destination they had a better chance of actually getting there on time even if the journey took as long as it did in the bad old days of a useless, inefficient service*.