Monthly Archives: March 2004

Italy Crowns Miss Secessionist — Sans Leader Umberto Bossi

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posted Mon March 22 13:24 pm zoomata staff

The show must go on, but the Miss Padania beauty pageant in Milan without Northern League political leader Umberto Bossi was even more of a sorry spectacle than usual.

Bossi, 62 , was hospitalized following a March 11 heart attack and a subsequent media blackout raised further concerns about his chances for a full recovery. The forced smiles of politicians sitting in the first rows of the sixth edition of Miss Padania showed just how lost they feel without the passionate man who declared the north of Italy the Federal Republic of Padania in 1996.

Party leader Bossi was undoubtedly the star of the previous year’s edition, the first to be broadcast on a national network, filling in gaps in the proceedings by making jokes and patting backs like an accomplished TV host playing to a crowd of adoring fans. He was not mentioned during the course of the pageant this year, but cheers of “Bossi! Bossi! Bossi!” broke out from the crowd of over 5,000 people during the final ceremony. Northern League senator Roberto Calderoli announced that there will be no celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the Lega in April without Bossi.

Bossi got the idea for the beauty pageant, which requires at least five years of residence in Northern Italy, as an anti-Miss Italy contest with over 1,000 young women vying for the title in its inaugural 1998 edition. The feisty leader was fond of his creation — one of his last public appearances was on a talk show where he was flanked by two Miss Padania contestants.

When the crown, which looks disturbingly like a spray of spoons, finally went on the winner late Saturday night it seemed an afterthought. 17-year-old Alice Graci — that’s just a two-letter difference from last year’s winner, Alice Grassi — had already won the title of Miss Charme and flailed about trying to put on the second sash. Graci, a tall girl with a mane of teased reddish hair, was neither the most popular nor the most articulate of the 78 contestants; host Emanuela Folliero had to ask the audience to applaud her. Several jury members complained to Italian media that organizers forgot to pick up their voting ballots.

The pageant is typically a mix of whole-hearted pride in everything Northern Italian and pulchritude displayed in dubious taste — this year, however, organizers preferred to emphasize words like ‘solidarity’ ‘friendship’ and ‘fun.’
Contestants wore demure sarongs over bikini bottoms, paraded in vintage wedding dresses instead of evening gowns and the usually comical talent segment was skipped altogether. ?1999-2004 zoomata.com

Zoomata is the brainchild of a bilingualjournalist based in Italy who thinks out of the box. This brain is for hire.

Italians to Boost ‘Heritage Tourism’

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posted Thu March 18 17:37 am zoomata staff
Visit the land of your ancestors, get a discount. The Italian government wants to encourage boomerang tourism — people of Italian origin coming back to discover the old country — with special rates on restaurants, hotels, shops and transportation.

Mirko Tremaglia, the minister for Italians abroad, has proposed a bill for what amounts to a “compaesano card” that would give people of Italian descent special treatment.
If it works, the discount card handed out by Italian consulates would bolster a tourist trade made unstable by terrorism threats: there more people of Italian origins in the world (60 million) than there are Italians living in Italy (58 million), and another four million Italian citizens who also live abroad.

Tremaglia’s initiative is not the first to encourage heritage vacations but it is the first one to arrive at the lowest common denominator of shopping and eating.
Regions throughout Italy — from the Veneto to Tuscany — have tried to strengthen ties over recent years through special language and culture courses offered to those whose forebears left Italy in the tide of early 1900s emigration.

Though it still has to wind its way through the Italian parliament, the bill, which proponents predict could multiply the tourism trade tenfold, already has the backing of hospitality and shop owner’s associations.?1999-2004 zoomata.com

Zoomata is the brainchild of a bilingualjournalist based in Italy who thinks out of the box. This brain is for hire.

Italians Debate ‘Cloning’ Art

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updated Thu March 18 10:25 am by Nicole Martinelli

Two magnificent warrior statues are at the center of a heated debate in Italy on cloning artwork.
The Riace bronzes, 6.5-foot tall Greek statues found in the 1970s off the coast of Calabria, are credited with creating tourism in this impoverished Southern area.
Although remarkably well preserved, they are too fragile to be sent abroad for exhibits, so authorities argue that instead of holding them hostage, high-tech super copies would act as a sort of itinerant travel brochure for the region.

More than just passable copies, clones are created using a laser scanning technique that copies and reproduces the surface on resin, including minute details like chisel marks. Models, first made in foam, are molded into plaster and then cast using resin filled with marble dust. The price tag for cloning the Riace statues is estimated at 500,000 euro. Italian officials wanted them ready to send to Athens for the 2006 Olympics.

The tug-of-war over cloning the statues is passionate, even by Italian standards.
After 3,000 grass-roots protesters turned out in a candlelight vigil to protest the operation, cloning was blocked by a regional court. Federal government overturned the local sentence, then Culture Minister Giuliano Urbani stepped into the fray by ordering an investigation into the ramifications of cloning the statues. Press reports claimed, with typical Italian drama, that it was too late — that partial clones have already been made in secret.

“It’s insane, they’re throwing what we have away,” said Calabrian architect Michele Servidio, who spent his university years studying Renaissance masterpieces first-hand in Florence. “Art shouldn’t always come to you. In this case they are also taking the art and leaving us with very little.”

According to Italy’s national tourist board, Calabria owes “eternal gratitude” to the bronzes for creating a flow of “hundreds of thousands” of visitors to the country’s poorest region, better known for an unforgiving rocky landscape and organized crime. Locals fear visitors would not travel all the way down to the toe of Italy to see the statues if clones made a world tour.

Debates over these exact copies will likely become more common as technological advances meet a country that UNESCO estimates holds 60% of the world’s art treasures. In May 2002, two statue clones of Priapos and Flora by Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini were installed in the Garden of Delights at Rome’s Borghese Gallery, filling a gap left when indebted heirs sold the originals over 50 years ago.

Cloning has also been proposed for the Dancing Satyr, another statue coughed up by the sea between Sicily and Tunisia after 2,400 years in 1998. After five years of restoration, the Greek bronze left Sicily for a temporary exhibit in Rome in 2003, sparking a still unsettled debate over ownership and ‘parking rights’ to the masterpiece.?1999-2004 zoomata.com

Zoomata is the brainchild of a bilingualjournalist based in Italy who thinks out of the box. This brain is for hire.

Related resources:
Stolen Figs: And Other Adventures in Calabria

http://www.museionline.it/museicalabria/eng/cerca/museo.asp?id=1718
The National Museum of Archaeology in Reggio, current home to the Riace bronzes

Jonathan Blosser (Catania province, Sicily)

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First Person: Real Life In Italy

Each month we introduce you to someone who has made the dream of picking up and moving to the Bel Paese a reality.
In their own words they share the good parts, the bad parts and the just plain absurd moments of day-to-day life in Italy.

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If you live in Italy, we would love to hear your story–Contact form

ID Card: Jonathan Blosser. In Italy for 11 years, I work as a maintenance schedule manager for an Italian multiservice firm (government contractor).
I was born abroad to American parents in the United Arab Emirates. For the first five years of my life I was exposed to several cultures and languages which, I’m sure, formed much of my personality and predisposed me to learning languages. I went to kindergarten in a British school and then we moved back to the US in July of 1976.

Currently living in: Sicily (Province of Catania)

By way of: South Central Pennsylvania

How (or why) did you get here from there?
I completed a 5-year obligation to the US Navy at Naval Air Station Sigonella. I fell in love immediately (with Sicily), but it took another year for me to meet and fall in love with a Sicilian. After our wedding we moved to PA, but my wife didn’t seem to like snowy winters and the fact that an ocean lay between us and her mom, dad, 5 brothers and 2 sisters, so we packed up and came back after only 9 months.

What role did language skills play in your experience?
It was absolutely indispensable. My first day in Sicily I remember thinking to myself “There is no way I’m going to live here for 3 years without speaking the language!” From there, I dove head first into the language and culture. I knew that I would never understand the culture fully without knowing the language , but I also discovered that the opposite is true. Unless you understand the culture, your ability to speak the language will always be limited to a scholastic level and never “ring true” to the locals. You’ll be able to communicate, but you’ll always feel like the odd one out when you don’t understand the humor in a joke or when you miss the subtle nuance of a double entendre.

Your biggest challenge: Employment, but I never let it stop me. My “cumpari” (the best man at my wedding) still tells people about how I came back from the States and was already working the next day. I was only making about $600.00 a month, but somehow I was making it work. I worked under the table for at least 5 different employers making more or less the same wage for about 5 years until I finally landed my current job through a recommendation by a friend, but in the meantime I took advantage of my language and people skills and spent all of my free time trying to turn a buck. I would broker automobile sales between Italians and US Service members and at one point I even had a pretty decent business going procuring car parts for US spec vehicles (until my stateside supplier liquidated his store!).

What do you still have to get used to/learn? My identity crisis. The cross I bear is that I adapted impeccably. Because I blend in too well, sometimes I feel obliged to bring up the fact that I’m not from here and that invariably leads to a complicated explanation about who I am and where I came from. As a result, I find myself constantly arguing with Italians who won’t believe that I’m American.

Latest pursuits: In the bureaucratic phase of opening a business. “We need document X, Y and Z, but they can’t be obtained unless you do Q, R and S first which have to be processed simultaneously with U, V and W. Of course, I’m so overworked and still can’t make ends meet at home, so if you could contribute to my kids’ college fund I think I can guarantee you that X, Y and Z will be approved when you submit them.”

A preconceived notion about Italians/Italy that is not true: All Italian men cheat on their women. Of course, most of them talk about it and a strong majority say they do, but for the most part they aren’t willing to risk the one woman in the world who actually puts up with them in exchange for a few fleeting moments of carnal pleasure and almost none of them can afford to actually keep a mistress!

A preconceived notion about Italians/Italy that is true: It’s not what you know – it’s who you know.

Your response to the following question: “I really want to live here, but I don’t speak Italian or have a job. What do you think?”
Stay at home and be content to fantasize about how romantic your life would be in Italy. I’ve seen too many people come over here with stars in their eyes only to get back on an airplane, burst balloon in tow, before the first year is up. If you don’t speak the language, at least come armed with a job or a reason to be here, i.e., school or spouse.


How would you sum up your Italian experience in a word (and why)? Home. I love the town where I grew up and it’s a thrill for me every time I have the opportunity to go back, but my life is most definitely here and I can’t see myself living anywhere else.

Italian Porn Director Highlights ‘Local Treasures’

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zoomata staff updated: Mon March 15 13:56 pm

Nearly every small town in Italy boasts some sort of art treasure, but a porn director is trying to capitalize on other local ‘attractions’ with a series of sex flicks starring residents of small towns.

Porn veteran Lucky Damiano’s new series entitled ‘The Depraved Penisola’ is a natural for word-of-mouth buzz in the towns where the films are set. In Italy, where regional differences are strongly felt, the film series has also hit upon a new sort of ‘campanilismo,’ that is the tendency to think that the local campanile, or church bell tower, has no rivals.

From Tuscany to Sicily, Lazio, Umbria and Lombardy Damiano takes a sex tour of minor towns through titles like “Poggibonsi in Heat” and “Hard Legnano.” Advance press in local papers is guaranteed and sales of the videos, which cost around 25 euro (30 USD) in newsstands, are undoubtedly boosted by curiosity to see what the neighbors, disguised only by black Zorro masks, are really up to.

“The strong point is that they’re all really local people, amateurs,” Damiano told an Italian magazine. “My average actor in these films is 35-40 years old, middle or upper middle class and includes shop owners, doctors, gym instructors etc.”

Damiano recruits the improvised porn actors in local classifieds or through the internet before scouting a ‘meaningful’ locale in town for the shoot. In the Umbrian town of Gubbio, better known for its medieval historic center than for steamy sex, the local mayor protested that Damiano’s film would damage the town’s image.

Sex therapist Gabriele Traverso says the films attract attention and interest mainly because of their local character.

“The pull isn’t seeing amateurs having sex,” said Traverso. “These are amateurs who may be people you know, or at least they have a familiar accent, and in the province where roles are more defined it’s like peering behind the mask.”

Paestum, home to some of the best-preserved Doric temples in existence, is next on the ‘Depraved’ tour of Italy. It will be the seventh film in the series, ‘shot in a villa’ and of a ‘higher quality in keeping with the setting’ than the other films, says Damiano.

Damiano isn’t the first one to get the idea of using Bel Paese locales for hardcore films. A church in Abruzzo was reconsecrated in September 2003 after it was discovered it had been used as the set for a porn film called “The Confessional.”?1999-2004 zoomata.com

Zoomata is the brainchild of a bilingualjournalist based in Italy who thinks out of the box. This brain is for hire.

Italian ‘Priests’ in Calendar Are Models

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posted Tue Mar. 2 18:59 pm by Nicole Martinelli

Surprise, surprise: an Italian calendar purporting to feature handsome young priests as pin-ups that made the rounds of the international press is a hoax.

The gorgeous men brooding in old-fashioned clerical outfits in “Calendario Romano 2004″ are, well, just actors and models. It took a disgruntled January, that’s actor Yuri Antonosante, to expose the truth behind a story that sparked debate over the role of priests in modern times.

“I was dressed in priest’s clothes without being told what the shoot was for,” 23-year-old Antonosante told Italian media. “It certainly hasn’t done me any good. Every time I go on a casting call they ask, ‘Father, what are you doing here?’

It was a timely gimmick in the competitive Italian calendar market, where just featuring surgically-enhanced starlets in provocative poses is no longer enough.
Photographer Piero Pazzi upped the ante with his sexy men of the cloth after another rival photographer got the bright idea of featuring nearly-naked women with stigmas in a mother of a calendar called “Madonnas.”

The closest these priestly poseurs get to the holy cloth is with one former altar boy turned model, the rest of the hunks in the Calendario were models or students dressed up in rented holy gear.

Perhaps not content with sales of the calendar, which retails for eight euro in newsstands, Pazzi has decided to come clean and produce next year’s calendar with the real deal. The official website makes an “appeal to clergymen, priests and members of religious orders” who would like to model in the 2005 version. Amen.