Police in Italy arrested a 60-year-old Naples man for a concoction he made out of marijuana.
They called his invention “marjiuancello,” in honor of the lemon liqueur limoncello commonly found there.
Manlio Chianchiano had a home cannabis garden of 10 plants that he grew with the idea of turning his home distillery into something special.
It’s fairly common to find homemade liqueurs in Italian households — from limoncello to nocino (made from walnuts) and different types of bitters — but this is the first time the very Italic knack for invention has been taken to this extreme.
We’ll never know if his libation was any good — he was still macerating the pot leaves in pure alcohol when police came in to check up on reports that he was growing marijuana at home.
UPDATE: news reports are calling the case a hoax. The lawyers who claimed to represent the young woman now say they have no photos proving the pictures were on Facebook.
A 31-year-old Italian woman, who will take vows to become a nun in the fall, is suing to have topless photos of herself removed from Facebook.
Bare-chested photos of the woman were snapped by her then boyfriend on a Sicilian beach — it was the last vacation they took together before she ended the relationship with the plan to don the habit.
Thwarted, the former lover reportedly tagged them “topless nun” and news of the pics spread.
The woman, unnamed in news reports, asked her ex-beau repeatedly to remove them from his profile, but he refused. Italian news agency ANSA reported the photos have drawn comments including: ”If all nuns were like her, I’d become a priest.“ So far, no names or pics have surfaced.
Although Italians lag behind other EU nations for Internet use, Italy may be the first country to make a full-length feature film about Facebook, called “Feisbum†(as per the Italian pronunciation) a rom-com in episodes about how the US social media company is changing relationships.
Modern Italian great minds are fleeing the country, unable to get valuable research done in the face of shrinking funds, nepotism, red tape, penurious salaries and colossal inefficiency.
Now this drama is being turned a movie called “Il Bene Oscuro†(loose translation: the dark good), riffing on the common expression “dark evil†(il male oscuro) a euphemism for cancer or other lethal illnesses.
While Italian scientists and researchers have often left for other shores, one study found the number of Italian college grads heading abroad, often to Europe or the US, quadrupled in the 1990s. Italy will surely have to face consequences of a country bled dry of potential Leonardo Da Vincis and Enrico Fermis as it exports 30,000 researchers yearly and imports just 3,000, according to one program aimed at getting some of them back.
If you think the subject matter of genius lost is important but doesn’t lend itself to nighttime drama — watch the trailer. The gloomy, tension-filled treatment looks like something out of CSI: secret phone calls, shattering glass, a woman thrown across a lab table, threats and accidents and the word “researcher†repeated hauntingly throughout.
The producers are hoping to get it picked up by a national network and it shows: at least of the actors was from a popular soap opera, an Italian friend who watched it thought it might be a satire until the sponsor logo from Milan city government and Bayer popped up. If it’s a success, it will, however, raise money for an oncology research center in Milan’s San Raffaele hospital.
It’s hard to do any reporting on Italy’s scientific community without coming across the loss of human capital issue — one research lab I wrote about had lured back brain drained researchers from Canada but there are a many stories of researchers who’ve gone abroad and then been lulled back home, too, to mixed results.
Just in time for summer vacation traffic, Trenitalia launched a one-line announcement likely to make it the butt of more jokes: the lost and found offices have been “temporarily suspended.”
With more Italians staying closer to home in belt-tightening measures this year — 73% will not leave the country, according to one poll — trains are likely to be more crowded and chaotic than usual.
No word on when the service will pick back up again — or if it will. Trenitalia suspended the service citing budget reasons, according to daily Corriere della Sera. In 2008, it held 3,800 lost items — ranging from umbrellas to dentures, surfboards to cell phones — and returned about half to their rightful owners.
Now what? It’s up to local governments.
So If you leave your camera on the Florence-Venice train or want to be a good samaritan with that found iPod, you’ll have to go to the lost and found office (ufficio oggetti smarriti) of the city you land in.
And cross your fingers.
