Italy

Tuesday

Annabel Denham

Will Italy’s Euro win lead to a baby boom?

Could Italy’s triumph on Sunday result not just in a trophy for the azzuri, but a baby boom for a nation with one of Europe’s lowest fertility rates? The anecdotal evidence would support this theory. Nine months after Iceland beat England in a Euro 2016 match, it experienced an unprecedented increase in births. This was the first time the nation had ever qualified for a major European tournament, and close to 10 per cent of its 300,000 population watched the game in person. Spain’s birth rate also shot up 16 per cent nine months after Barcelona won the 2009 Champions League. Yet a new paper from Luca Fumarco and Francesco Principe pours cold water on the idea that sports success euphoria boosts human conception.

Monday

Wolfgang Münchau

Italian politics is fracturing

Just in time for the football final, Italy’s Five Star party reached a deal. Giuseppe Conte, a former prime minister, has agreed to take on the leadership of the party, but only on condition that he will be fully in charge of the politics of the movement and of the parliamentary party. Beppe Grillo, the party’s founder, agreed to those conditions, which reduces his hold. This compromise may not last. Many details have yet to be agreed. But Conte is in a strong position because the majority of parliamentarians and voters are behind him — a powerful combination.

Sunday

Rod Liddle

England had it and they threw it away

England: 1 (Shaw)  Italy: 1 (Swarthy cheat) England had it and threw it away. Much the better side in the first half, finding acres of space along the right flank. But the Italian manager, Roberto Mancini, recognised the problem and changed the game. As Italy swarmed forward in the second half, Gareth Southgate had no answer: it was almost a re-run of the 2018 semi final in Russia against Croatia – he cannot grasp when a game is going against him and has no comprehension of what to do to change it. His substitutions were appalling: Henderson horribly off the pace, Saka horribly out of his depth. Two very bad changes indeed. The godforsakenly late introduction of Grealish gave England a new cutting edge: too little, too late, Gareth.

Nicholas Farrell

England, Italy and the power of national pride

As an Englishman in enemy territory I am lucky that love is a more powerful emotion than patriotism otherwise after a month of Euro 2020, climaxing in tonight’s final between Italy and England, my marriage to my Italian wife, Carla, would be well and truly on the rocks – even though she is a devout Catholic. Carla is so fiercely pro gli azzurri that it is a case of ‘o con noi, o contro di noi’ (either with us or against us) – the clarion call of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Every time the Italians have scored a goal this past month my very fiery wife has exploded from the mega sofa in front of the wide-screen TV we got from a bar roaring ‘Si!’ and ‘Grande!’ and ‘Che uomo!’ (what a man!

Rod Liddle

Euro 2020: This game is tailor-made for Southgate’s England

Right now, it’s a bit like you’re five years old and it’s the night before Christmas but you can’t be sure who is going to come down the chimney, Santa Claus or Benito Mussolini. I mean for football fans – not for the public school bedwetters on here who refer to the world’s favourite sport as ‘girlball’. Italy are unbeaten in their last 33 games: good. Runs come to an end sooner or later. This is a game tailor-made for Southgate’s favourite tactics of stifling containment. This may well turn out to be one of the most boring matches in the history of football. I would start with Sancho and Grealish, just to worry their backline a little. But he won’t. And who, now, is to say that he is wrong, given what he has achieved?

Wednesday

Wolfgang Münchau

Can the EU save Italy?

There’s been a lot of hype around the green light given by the European Commission yesterday to Italy’s recovery plan. But let’s break it down: the final headline numbers are €68.9 billion in EU grants by the year 2026 and €123 billion in loans. If you take the grant component, and divide it over the six-year duration, you arrive at an average of 0.6-0.7 per cent of Italy’s 2019 GDP each year. It is front-loaded, and it’s by no means a modest sum. What’s harder to accept however, is folding in the loan component to arrive at some giant fake headline number. The whole point of this exercise is not to produce a classic fiscal boost, but fiscally-assisted structural reforms.

Wednesday

Joanna Rossiter

The sumptuous Suffolk estate that transports you to Tuscany

Ah Italia! Land of gelato, Vespas and frescoes – I’ve pined for the place so many times over the last year that it’s difficult to know which I love more: Italy itself or the idea of Italy.  The joy of travel is always sparked in part by imagination: the anticipation of a place before you arrive; the memory of it once you leave. And it's not without reason that we love to recreate the places we admire back home. The Chinese have even gone so far as to enshrine their nostalgia for England through Shanghai’s mock English suburb Thames Town. It’s a riot of British stereotypes – from phone boxes to village greens.

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Wine by the jug in Venetian Venice

We were discussing travel, that forbidden delight now tantalisingly close. Where would be our first destination? Forswearing originality, I chose Venice. Among the world’s greatest paintings, one in particular does not merely come to mind. It fills the mind. I have never been in the Serenissima for the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, probably just as well. In mid-August, there are bound to be pedestrian traffic jams all the way from the Piazza to the Rialto. But it is possible to imagine the event. Go to Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Use your inner eye to fill the church with the entire nobility of Venice, festooned with gold and jewels. The choir and the censers are both in full cry.

Friday

Olivia Potts

Spaghetti puttanesca: turn your leftovers into something special

If you’ve heard a story about puttanesca it is likely that it translates as whore’s spaghetti – that it was born in the brothels of Naples’ Spanish quarters, a favourite of the prostitutes who worked there, for its quick, cheap and easy nature. But – ah, isn’t it always the way? – the truth is perhaps a little more prosaic. The word puttanesca is indeed derived from the Italian for prostitute (‘puttana’), but the same word is also used as a catch-all profanity, an Italian ‘crap’. In this vein, the dish would come to mean ‘any old crap’ pasta. This makes sense, because puttanesca is a true store-cupboard dish, made almost entirely from tins and jars and dried pasta (entirely if you forgo the parsley).

Thursday

Wolfgang Münchau

Europe’s reckless caution over AstraZeneca

The first smear campaign against AstraZeneca, when Emmanuel Macron falsely claimed at the start of the year that the jab was ‘quasi--ineffective’ in over-65s, did serious damage to public confidence in the Oxford vaccine across Europe. The latest concerted action by the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands may have destroyed it altogether. The decision temporarily to ban Astra-Zeneca originated in the German health ministry, which was spooked by reports of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, and was blindly followed by other European leaders. This is a scandal whose roots are political, not medical, and it will have terrible consequences.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tributes to Sarah Everard, rows over AstraZeneca and Nokia cuts jobs

Home A Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, 48, was charged with the kidnap and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard, who was last seen on 3 March as she walked home from Clapham to Brixton. A mass vigil on Clapham Common was called off after the High Court declined to interfere with a police ban on the event in accord with coronavirus regulations. The Duchess of Cambridge came alone and left some daffodils at the bandstand. Women who stayed in their hundreds saw police struggle with women who refused to leave the bandstand. There were four arrests and pictures of policemen subduing one of them, Patsy Stevenson, on the floor fed a widespread anger against the police.

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

The EU’s ugly vaccine nationalism

We have to rid the world of vaccine nationalism. No one is protected until we are all protected. And we need, above all, solidarity to fight a virus which by its nature does not respect borders or boundaries. Over much of the last year, European Union officials, led by the President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen, have led the world in grandiose rhetoric about how we have to lead a global effort to fight Covid-19, contrasting its own noble internationalism with the grubby self-interest of the likes of Donald Trump or indeed Boris Johnson. But hold on. After much speculation, the EU has itself started firing the first shots in the vaccine wars, permitting Italy to block the export of 250,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab to Australia.

Sunday

Nicholas Farrell

Can Italy’s arch Eurocrat save his country?

The world these days is so blasè about the destruction of democracy that no one even thinks it worthy of comment that an important free country such as Italy has not had an elected prime minister since the last one, Silvio Berlusconi, was forced to resign in 2011 during the Eurozone crisis after a palace coup orchestrated by Brussels, Berlin and Paris. That is ten years without a prime minister chosen by the Italian people at the ballot box in a general election. The electoral system, currently a hybrid of first past the post and proportional representation, is partly to blame. But the real reason is the Italians. They seem anthropologically incapable of giving enough votes to form a government, even to a coalition of parties — let alone one single party.

Tuesday

Gregorio Sorgi

Can ‘super’ Mario Draghi save Italy from itself?

In the aftermath of the financial crash, two 'Super Marios' came to Italy's rescue. Mario Draghi, then president of the European Central Bank, and Mario Monti, an economics don turned politician, both helped steady the ship. Now, more than a decade on, one of those Marios is back. But is he the man Italy needs in its hour of need? Draghi, who is set to become Italy's new prime minister, has followed a well-trodden path to this moment. Like Monti, he has worked in academia and is a Goldman Sachs alumnus with a stellar EU career on his back. It all sounds very familiar. But can Draghi avoid the fate of the other Mario and ensure that Italians don't quickly turn against him?

Thursday

Lisse Garnett

How Argentina conquered Malbec

When Napoleon III proclaimed himself Emperor of France in 1852, he unwittingly kickstarted quality wine production in Chile and Argentina. A mass exodus of republicans ensued, one of whom happened to be a skilled agronomist from Tours named Michel Aimé Pouget. Pouget carried with him a cache of French grape cuttings that were to change the course of wine history and formed the basis for Argentina’s wine industry today. Because of the phylloxera plague, French wine production fell by 75 per cent between 1875 and 1889. Today the vines of Europe are still grafted on to phylloxera-resistant American root stock. In Argentina and Chile, which have no phylloxera, old ungrafted European vines are flourishing.

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Every page of this astonishingly beautiful ode to the citrus is a treat

There’s an episode of Yes Minister called ‘Equal Opportunities’. Minister Jim Hacker is under pressure to recruit more women to the civil service. The hunt is on for female mandarins. ‘Ah,’ says principal private secretary Bernard. ‘Sort of… satsumas?’ At this time of year, I can’t help thinking of Bernard as I hover in the Co-op over nets of tangerines, mandarins, clementines, satsumas and ‘easy peelers’, whatever they are. ’Tis the season for citrus. For oranges at the bottom of stockings, for Buck’s Fizz on Christmas morning, for smoked salmon blinis with slices of lemon, for Milanese panettone with candied parings of peel, and for J.C.

Friday

Matthew Lynn

Italy is about to hijack the eurozone

There is still some debate about who came up with the adage that ‘if you owe the bank $100 that is your problem. If you owe the bank $1 million dollars that is their problem’. It is usually attributed to the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, which may help explain how he became the richest man of his era. Occasionally, and in a slightly modified form, it is attributed to John Maynard Keynes in his advice to the British cabinet after world war two. And yet in truth, it should probably have been coined by an Italian. Why? Because the country now owes so much money to the rest of the eurozone it looks about to hijack the whole system.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Every scene Sophia Loren isn’t in feels like a wasted one: The Life Ahead reviewed

The Life Ahead stars Sophia Loren, and if there is one reason to see The Life Ahead it is this: Sophia Loren. And if you need a second reason, it is this: Sophia Loren. Also, it is the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh reason. And probably the eighth. She is magnificent, truly. Directed by Edoardo Ponti, Loren’s son, the film is based on the 1975 novel The Life Before Us by Romain Gary. It was filmed in 1977 as Madame Rosa, starring Simone Signoret, and won the Oscar for best foreign film. Here, the action has been transposed from France to Italy and the port city of Bari which is, from what we see of it, rough and poverty-stricken rather than picturesque. And our Madame Rosa is Loren, in her first proper film role for 11 years.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Why did the ‘Florence Three’ keep testing positive for Covid?

Worse tales have emerged during the pandemic than that of the ‘Florence Three’ – Rhys James, Quinn Paczesny and Will Castle, who have all now returned home to Britain after 61 days incarcerated in a hotel in the Italian city. Some might say a couple of months stuck in Florence could have been a blessing – and so it might have been, had they not each been stuck in solitary confinement and fed microwaved mush, with no more chance to go out to a trattoria than to visit the Uffizi. But what stands out about the story of the Florence Three is not so much their plight, but what it tells us about Covid-19 tests. The three men, who are aged between 20 and 23, met in Northern Italy while teaching English over the summer.

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

Britain’s bizarre Italian travel guidance

Here’s a tip. When the Foreign Office advises against going somewhere, hop on the next plane. The mandarins have advised against visiting Italy because of Covid-19. It’s as bizarre as everything else that our rulers have said about the virus. Confirmed cases in the UK are currently more than twice as high per 100,000 as in Italy. Anyone with our welfare at heart should be telling us to go to Italy at once. I left the next day. The Italians could be forgiven for serving us our own medicine and quarantining all arrivals from the UK. As it is, they test you at the airport, and quarantine is only required if you test positive. It is rational and very efficient. It takes only ten minutes and costs nothing. Generally, however, the Italian government has much to answer for.