zoomata.com staff Can you say omertà?
German high school students are learning Italian thanks to the son of Sicilian mobster Bernardo Provenzano. Continue reading
Mafia son named ‘Cultural Ambassador’ for Italy
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Former Porn Star Peddles Potato Chips
Porn stallion Rocco Siffredi is now hawking potato chips in an Italian commercial. Not surprisingly, it’s in incredibly bad taste.
Siffredi, 41, strolls around a Hefner-esque villa with pool, clad in a red silk robe surrounded by bikinied beauties. Continue reading
Chinese New Year, Italian Style
by Nicole Martinelli
Chinese New Year in Italy is a celebration unto itself.
For starters, parades never take place on New Years or even on the same date in different cities. The year of the dog was celebrated in Rome February 4th and in Milan the next day.
Milanese celebrations always have a special Italian touch. Last year, the New Year was feted closer to Carnival with a hybrid mix of dancing lions and kids in Harry Potter get-ups.
This year, Italians joined in with a brass band. Not just any brass band, but fanfare of the bersaglieri. Founded in the Piedmont region in 1836, this infantry corps is best known for wearing spectacular hats with a spray of grouse feathers. Continue reading
Giving non-Italian citizens the vote
I finally got an ‘admit one’ ticket to the circus of Italian politics. Well, sort of.
I voted. In a way.
Milan is holding primary elections for center-left mayoral candidates and immigrants can join the fun, too.
No matter that those same non-Italian citizens cannot actually vote in the national May elections.
The scattered left parties, up against Berlusconi’s record-holding government, have brought a new concept to the Italian political system: primary elections.
Since they need numbers, immigrants resident here for at least three years can participate in these primaries.
The reasoning? Immigrants will vote for left, because the left will promote fair immigration laws. Ignoring, of course, that the cornerstone of those laws, the Turco-Napolitano, is a quite conservative product of the left.
Voting is a major part of life in any country, but in Italy there were so many things to vote for — what with the government falling every three weeks and referendums all the time — that it became a constant cultural activity.
As an extracomunitaria, as non-EU citizens are called, I never got to join the fun.
I would follow, puppy-like, Italian friends into grade schools and wait outside classrooms while they cast about for a new leader or expressed an opinion on hunting. But I was still an outsider.
Now it was my turn.
I wait behind two elderly, fur-coated signore outside a white plastic tent put up for the occasion in the square.
My neighborhood borders Chinatown, but I am the first non-Italian to vote here. The first two volunteers are at a loss and I am shown to Paolo, a jaunty middle-aged man in a flat cap and puffer jacket. He checks my ID card, looks at a photocopy of my stay permit and stands over another volunteer to make sure my voter form is filled out properly.
They take my name, place of birth (inevitably pronounced San-Fran-Chees-ko) and tell me I must also fork over a donation, of at least a euro, for the privilege. Sure, I say, swiping a few Pocket Coffees from a tray of chocolates offered to voters for the trouble.
I take my bright orange ballot over to a little desk that, in a vague nod to privacy, has two little 8 x 10 pieces of cardboard around it.
There are four candidates:
Bruno Ferrante, former head of the police department who bills himself as a “servant of the Italian state.”
Milly Moratti, current city councilor, who would run against the only other female candidate, her conservative sister-in-law and former education minister Letizia Moratti.
Dario Fo, Nobel prize winner for literature, who at 80 would perhaps be the oldest mayor in Italy.
Davide Corritore, a congenial-looking 47-year old with background in finance background for the Union party.
On my way out, I ask Paolo when he thinks immigrants will be able to vote for real. “Chissà?” Who knows, he says, shrugging in typical Italian fashion.
Perhaps turning out for the old college try is what political participation is really about in Italy.
3G Hell, Italian Style
MILAN, ITALY — When I moved to Florence in the early 1990s, I thought my student get-up of Doc Martens and overgrown sweaters cut just the right dash between ingenue and intellectual. But when Gino the cappuccino slinger in the ground floor of my 16th-century apartment building offered to drum up change from the regulars for a decent jacket, I knew I had to up the ante.
A decade on, I thought I was doing pretty well, as a Milanese signorina with Hermes scarf and Gucci bag. Cue Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi pimping hair transplants and face-lifts as the necessary accessories for any political hopeful and, God forbid, the advent of the video phone.
Italy, second only to Hong Kong for percentage of mobile-phone users, is now also a leader in 3G users. Though most experts brush away this kind of clunky technology, I fear the bell for high-living, under-waxed singles has already tolled.
An English friend convinced me to go 3G. Rates were low and the phone was thrown in free for journalists. For a few blissful weeks, my video-phoning was limited to beaming footage of Rufus, my very telegenic bearded collie.
Then Luca, a co-worker, video-phoned from the beach in Sardinia. Tan, with a tummy enviably toned in little rolls, he wanted to gloat over my city-induced pallor. His wife, Maddalena, who had given birth to their son just a month before, desperately tried to conceal the ravages of her C-section slump as he swung around for a panoramic shot. The video call ended abruptly with a phrase I would hear a lot: “Any chance you’ll flash me?” Oh, gee, the connection broke.
The revolution will be televised and, yes, that means there is no such thing as in-between waxings (as my roommate Sara found out when her lover wouldn’t take video “no” for an answer, only to be treated to a close-up of her snarling, bleach-heavy upper lip).
Just as the cell phone was the adulterer’s best friend, the video phone is the mistress’ nightmare. As every sex-line worker knows, it’s easy to feign orgasmic rapture while eradicating toe jam. In Italy, that particularly forgiving brand of the feminine mystique is now as passé as last year’s Fendi jeans.
I had always prided myself on a dirty, late-night purr, on tap if needed at 11 a.m.; I could do sexy while hanging out the laundry. Italian men now want to look as well as listen. And if Jane Jetson’s robo-beautician style was once a prerequisite for Milanese streets, lovers are now obliged to air-brushed porn perfection in the former sanctum of their apartments.
With the Nokia 6680 resolution at 176-by-208 pixels, makeup is essential but it is not the kind of HDTV definition that makes you wonder about the expertise of Cameron Diaz’s dermatologist.
It does, however, make smoothing over the fault lines of a late-night necessary before heading to the newsstand. Italians don’t do natural; I have enough trouble curbing comments on my personal appearance from Franca, the troll who collects the mail — let alone trying to be bella with co-workers, my accountant and a possibly significant other when they video-phone at all hours.
Watching more television could have curbed my fall. Current Italian ads for 3G phones feature a pneumatic Marilyn Monroe type begging a departing lover, “Videochiamami!” Honey, if you look like that in person, you don’t need to video-phone.
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
Tuscany trumped in Italian ‘happiness’ index
www.zoomata.com staff There is no more joy under the Tuscan sun for Italians.
Olive trees, rolling hills and Chianti aren’t enough to combat high prices, traffic problems and a tight work market. For the 1,500 Italians polled by an association of psychologists (ISPA), happiness and quality of life are lowest in the Tuscan region of Siena and other picturesque places like Urbino, Pesaro and Piacenza.
Visitors seeking bliss in the Bel Paese would do well to get to know places like Rieti, a town of about 40,000 people in Lazio whose claim to fame is Piazza San Rufo, thought to be the exact center of Italy.
Rieti tops the happiness-quotient at 145 out of a possible 200, followed by Imperia (Liguria) and Baroque jewel Lecce, in the heel of the country’s boot.
The rest of the top scorers are central-northern towns, mostly off the beaten track: Sondrio (Lombardy), Treviso (Veneto) and Perugia (Umbria).
Psychologists asked Italians polled to evaluate the environment, food, services, work, traffic, noise pollution, roads and, lastly, the quality of neighborly and interpersonal relations.
Frowns abound in Italian cities, where the average resident ranked quality of life at just 79 on the scale. ?text 1999-2005 zoomata.com This is an original news story. Play nice. Please use contact form for reprint/reuse info.
Related resources:
”Pizza Pact” for cash-strapped Italians
www.zoomata.com staff What could possibly ruin the love affair between Italians and pizza?
Money.
The faltering Italian economy — more or less stagnant since 2002 — and relentless price hikes with the arrival of the euro have made many in the Bel Paese forgo eating out.
And because even the most gifted mamma is unlikely to have the wood-burning oven necessary to make a proper pizza, it is the one dish Italians gladly eat outside the home.
Restaurant owners have struck up a “pizza pact” (patto della pizza) hoping to get cash-strapped Italians out and eating the national dish again, offering pizza and a beer or soft drink for 7 euro ($8.39).
The pizza crisis and the idea of a pact was first discussed on popular talk show Porta a Porta, a late-night program generally dedicated more to burning political issues than hot pies. Retailers’ body Confcommercio took up the idea and over 200 restaurants throughout Italy have signed the pact, valid to the end of 2005, so far.
It may be a case of too little, too late.
“Pizzeria owners are crazy if they think this will fill the restaurants after they’ve jacked up prices over the last few years, ” Rik Sentenza wrote in a letter to daily Metro. “Why don’t they give us coupons, like war-time rations for bread, since none of us can afford to eat out anymore? This isn’t going to solve the problem.”
Sentenza, like many readers who wrote into the paper, remembers a few years back when a pizza cost ?4.000 to? 6.000 lire or about 2-3 euro.
The profit on the average pizza is already 490%, reminds Vincenzo Donvito, president of consumer group ADUC, who called the initiative “obscene.”
Four out of the just seven pizzerias supporting the pizza pact in Milan called by zoomata did not know whether the offer was valid just one day a week or every day or on which day it was offered.
Roberto, owner of pizzeria Summer in Milan, who has not signed the pizza pact told us: “They didn’t publicize it very well, I first read about it from the newspaper.”
When asked whether he would be signing up any time soon he said, “We’re talking a 1.50 discount on our normal prices, I’ll throw in an espresso or grappa if people ask for the pizza pact. How’s that?”
Related resources:
Pizza Napoletana!
A love letter to the true Italian pizza from chef Pamela Sheldon Johns
ilpattodellapizza.it
Official site for the pizza pact
Venice Biennale: art after the brouhaha
www.zoomata.com staff
The critics are gone, the parties are over: now is the best time to soak up a lagoon full of contemporary art at the Venice Biennale. Held in the cave-like 12th-century Arsenale and the Giardini until November 6, visiting the Biennale may be the only way to take two steps in Venice without being immortalized in someone’s vacation photos. Every other year La Serenissima provides a stunning backdrop to one of the oldest and largest art exhibitions; there are 1,000 works by over 200 artists from 73 countries making this year is one of the biggest Biennales ever.
There is no mistaking that the Biennale 2005 is all about women.
Continue reading
Italian hopes to stomp Chinese imports with gladiator shoes
by Nicole Martinelli Italians are following in Roman footsteps with hand-made sandals and boots worthy of Julius Cesar, thanks to one shoemaker.
“Romans were practical people who walked a lot, so I was curious to see what they wore,” Anna Piergiacomi, owner of a company that makes shoe uppers, told zoomata via email. “I’ve been making shoes for ages but it seems to me that they are less and adapted to our feet.”
Piergiacomi, who is also vice-president of the leather-shoe division of the national fashion association Federmoda, hopes to start a trend that will ease the squeeze Chinese imports have put on Italian shoes.
It may be a noble but losing battle: footwear imported from China to the European Union surged 700 percent from January to April 2005, the EU’s executive commission said earlier this month. Italian trade associations estimate 8,000 jobs were lost as a result.
Fortunately for Piergiacomi, Italy has plenty of ancient Roman culture under foot. Urbisaglia, where she lives in the Marches, grew out of the ruins of Roman city Urbis Salvia and is choc-a-block with clues to life from that period.
With the help of friends, mainly an archeologist at the nearby university and several history buffs, Piergiacomi found out all she needed to know about Roman-era foot wear.
Armed with info, Piergiacomi went to the drawing board. Among her designs are a modern rendition of caliga, worn in Roman times by soldiers and laborers with iron hobnails designed to withstand miles of marching, the delicate sola originally meant to be worn only at home and a slinky calceo, the choice for toga-clad big wigs, in patrician red.
After trekking her models to both an orthopedic specialist and a foot expert to see if they were street worthy, she set about trying to make them without too much modern interference. The gladiator shoes have no glue, no synthetic materials, no chemical dyes and are sewn mostly by hand.
Walking like a Roman in sandals will set you back circa 50 euro ($60), boots cost up to 180 euro ($216). ?photos + text 1999-2005 zoomata.comThis is an original news story. Play nice. Please use contact form for reprint/reuse info.
Related resources:
www.lucinacalzature.it
www.urbisaglia.com
The Roman amphitheater of Urbisalia, home to summer theater and Roman-style gala dinner in July.
Italian romances nun with text messages
zoomata.com staff A text message an Italian sent by mistake started a romance that convinced a nun to leave the Catholic church.
It began when a factory worker from the island of Sardinia, Maurizio Degortes, thumbed a message to a female friend intended to help her get over a broken heart. His message by accident reached a nun and changed her life.
Seven months of courtship via mobile phone convinced Geraldine, 35, from the Philippines but living in a Palermo convent, that her future was with Maurizio.
The final push, however, may have been given by the mother superior who found the woman of the cloth furiously texting messages in private.
These star-crossed lovers met only once in the airport when she was being sent home. They reportedly only shared a caste kiss on the cheek.
Shy, with a grey and white striped polo shirt monastically buttoned up, Degortes, 32, told national news program TG5, “I don’t think I’m prince charming or necessarily her soul mate but I do think she deserves another kind of life.”
The mother superior shipped Geraldine back to the Philippines but Degortes says that didn’t stop the two paramours from talking, or texting, every single day.
Degortes hopes to sponsor Geraldine for a tourist visa but he says that if the authorities do not grant it he will gladly go to the Philippines to spend time with his new-found friend.
Latin lovers may have an advantage with new technologies: it is estimated that 10,000 text messages are sent every day in Italy making it one of the most prolific countries for thumb jockeys. ? text 1999-2005 zoomata.com
Play nice. Please use contact form for reprint/reuse info.