Italian TV: Dancing Grannies, not Sexy Girls

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A program featuring high-kicking grannies accidentally flashing their panties was served up as an alternative to the usual sexy ‘garnish girls’ gracing Italian TV programs.

“Velone” is low-budget summer TV fare at best: a 20-minute pseudo-talent contest for women over 65 that kicks off with a recycled theme song from last years’ version — a contest for young go-go dancers for popular satirical show “Strip the News.”

These senior citizens won’t be replacing skimpily-clad dancing girls anytime soon — they’re competing for a 250,000 euro prize that show creator Antonio Ricci calls ‘a violent boost to the average pension.’ It’s certainly compensation for having to twirl around the stage in a public piazza to last year’s disco hits while a graphic displays name, age, height and weight to the nation.

Wisecracking host Teo Mammucari, who regularly got the better of sexy young babes, fared worse with the four over-aged 65 contestants. They stole his lines, interrupted his jokes, ignored his cues — and the winner of the first episode, 72-year-old Gugliemina Bianchi who improvised a samba in a lacy white getup, grabbed his bum.

The debut on leading commercial channel Canale 5, owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset company, came shortly after state TV director Lucia Annuziata announced a ‘anti-bimbo’ decree for the RAI. So what’s the “dignified” alternative to senior shenanigans? Flagship state network RAI uno offers a no-budget random telephone call quiz show that would probably better suit radio, hosted by Sunday variety-show matron Mara Venier. Not surprisingly, Velone topped “cold phone call” in ratings — with 21.19% share compared to 17.54% for RAI uno

At the tail end of “Velone” a bit of pulchritude had to be thrown in for good measure, though, with two 20-something women competing to become “Good Evening Girls” or nearly-extinct announcers. A blonde with a plunging neckline and a brunette with an exposed midriff tripped through announcements about upcoming programs with relative success — a jury of mostly tabloid journalists gave Miss Bellybutton the thumbs up.

The Italian viewing public is in for a long, hot summer — both programs are on six nights a week right before prime time until September.

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

Related resources:
The Dark Heart of Italy
British author Tobias Jones calls Italy “the country feminism forgot” in his take on today’s Bel Paese — calculating that the average Italian watches about four hours of soft-porn a day.

Garnish Girls Get Expensive Good-by

Italians Launch Nepotism: the Game Show

Miss Over 40, beauty without age–but with plastic surgery?

Italy by Numbers: Cleanest Beaches

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1,850 kilometers of Italian coast off limits for cleanliness
70% Italians plan to vacation in Italy 2003
10 beaches get top ratings

As vacations approach, so do competing beach rankings — we’re banking on environmental group Legambiente’s list, which uses 128 parameters to comb 243 coastal spots for its yearly quality test. Not all of Italy’s extensive coastline passes the grade, but figures are improving.

The list can be used to decide where to go, but also where to expect crowds as Italians favor vacations close to home this year — there’s been some jostling over the previous years’ top ten, but again Southern Italian beaches dominate better-known locales in Liguria and Tuscany.

Beaches are rated in "sails," these 10 spots received a "five-sail" rating: Otranto (Lecce), Buoso (Nuoro), Cinque Terre (Liguria), Orosei (Nuoro) , Pollica Acciaroli e Pioppi (Salerno), Tropea (Calabria), Castiglione della Pescaia (Grosseto), Arbus (Sardinia) and Tremiti Islands (Foggia) .

Ratings also take into account natural beauty, contamination but also tourist structures, noise levels and environment-friendly waste systems. Sandy spots with a "four-sail" rating (thirty total) include: Sirolo (Marches), Isola del Giglio (Grosseto), Positano and Anacapri.

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

Related resources:
www.legambiente.com
Here’s the online free searchable guide to Italian beaches, in Italian only. Can be searched by ‘rating’ (‘punteggio’), province or region. Among the other symbols rating beaches are stars for environmental soundness and petals for tourist amenities.

The Rough Guide to Italy

www.multimania.com/natur/ita/#en
Map of Italy’s nudist camps & beaches (with terse descriptions in in English, Italian & French) in collaboration with FENAIT, Italy’s largest ‘naturist’ association. Keep in mind these are places where nudity is tolerated — associations are still awaiting a law to make nude bathing legal.

 

Italians create ‘non-profit’ funeral home

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by Nicole Martinelli
posted Mon 9 June 16:07 pm

A co-op in Turin has started the first nonprofit funeral home in a move to get trust back into Italy’s troubled hallowed ground.
Italy’s problems in dealing with the dear departed aren’t about just overpriced caskets, it’s a nationwide nightmare — from archaic laws that prohibit married women and their children being buried in the family plot, loved ones gone ‘missing’ because relatives owe back rent for niches and kickbacks for finding precious space or getting the dead properly dressed.

Enter Farewell, the first nonprofit funeral home with a code of ethics. "We want to recover the respect for death and the grieving that is a social responsibility," said spokesperson Alessandro Di Mauro. "That’s hard to do when the company is out to make money." This new kind of nonprofit has common characteristics with other similar organizations — including a job training scheme for the socially disadvantaged and a percentage of profits given to charity.

It’s a timely initiative. Citizens of Palermo recently spent an afternoon crossing themselves and touching iron (the Italian version of knocking on wood) when dozens of funeral cars jammed traffic to protest what they call the city governments’ ‘corpse monopoly.’ Space is another problem and many towns throughout the country are building new cemeteries or, in the case of Milan, installing computer kiosks to help family members find loved ones in the maze of graves often dating back centuries.

The co-op idea is also a way of catering to those getting ready to shuffle off this mortal coil — currently the only growing segment of Italy’s population. The average Italian funeral costs about 2,300 euro, according to statistics released recently in a funeral sector conference, which estimated the funerals a 4 billion-euro industry in the Bel Paese.

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

Hot, Fresh Pizza — From A Vending Machine

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Chalk up another one for Italian ingenuity: the pizza vending machine. Entrepreneur Giovanni Demaggio, 35, has created a machine that serves a four-slice pizza in 90 seconds, for about $3.
Whether the so-called ‘Wonder Pizza’ will provoke wonder or just disgust remains to be seen since
two out of three pizzas offered probably aren’t very popular with non-Italian palates: Neapolitan (oregano, anchovies and capers), Quattro Stagioni (olives, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, ham) and the Margherita (cheese and a sprig of basil). By the end of 2003, Wonder Pizza will be sold in 1,000 European outlets including airports, train stations and offices — perhaps the true test of automatic pizza as an ‘international’ food.

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

Related resources:
The Art of Pizza Making: Trade Secrets and Recipes
Take some time out for a real treat….

Italian Judge OKs ‘Regular’ Adultery

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by Nicole Martinelli
posted Thu 8 May 10:07 am

In a country where one of the harshest insults remains ‘cuckold,’ an Italian judge recently ruled that run-of-the-mill affairs don’t warrant any special remuneration for the spouse who was cheated on.

Electrician Mario N. took his wife’s lover — and employer — to court in Milan seeking 300,000 euro in emotional damages caused by the tryst. While the judge found that his wife’s extramarital activities fault her for divorce, the ‘ordinary’ way the affair was conducted meant her husband wasn’t eligible for damages.

The ruling’s a long way away from Italian film classic "Divorce, Italian Style" where eternal playboy Marcello Mastroianni plots his wife’s adultery then gets away with killing her for a ‘crime of honor’ — it seems Italian spouses are now expected to tolerate a certain amount of discreet philandering.
Judge Bianca La Monica’s sentence made a distinction between ‘regular clandestine affairs,’ which qualify for fault in divorce but that don’t cause "serious damage" to the cheated on partner. And, more importantly, that the lover couldn’t be held responsible for the infidelity of a wife who apparently did more than just dust the bookshelves at her employer’s home.

Perhaps the judge is just trying to make furious husbands to accept what’s commonplace — a recent poll of Italian women found that 69% said cheating is an equal-opportunity sport for both partners and 23% of those who have cheated did so because their man "wasn’t good in bed." Interesting to see whether the ruling will have other consequences — a wife was fined 500 euro in 2001 for calling her husband ‘cuckold’ (cornuto), the judge in the case ruling that the term constituted slander. Zoomata is the brainchild of a bilingual journalist, based in Italy, who thinks out of the box. This brain is for hire.

Related resources:
Italy by Numbers: Quicker Divorce

Italy by Numbers: Bad Cooking=Road to Divorce

Deirdr? Straughan (Milan)

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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.
Looking to move to Italy?Try the reader-recommended Survivor Package
If you live in Italy, we would love to hear your story–Contact form

Deirdr? Straughan, 39, US passport.
Writer, with lots of experience in Web marketing, online customer service/support, etc.
Hobbies: Reading, writing my own Web site and newsletter (<http://web.tiscali.it/deirdres/>), family, cooking, fine dining.
Deirdre_straughan@hotmail.com

Currently living in: Milan for the last 10 years.

By way of: Born in New Orleans. Subsequently lived in Beaumont, TX; Honolulu; Bangkok, Thailand; Pittsburgh, PA; Norwalk, CT; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Mussoorie, India (boarding school); Santa Cruz, CA; Austin, TX; Varanasi, India; Washington, DC area; New Haven, CT. For more details, see http://web.tiscali.it/deirdres/tcks.html
My career is even harder to explain, so, again, a URL: <http://web.tiscali.it/deirdres/whatido/resume.html>

How (or why) did you get here from there?
Married an Italian (whom I met while he was in graduate school in the US). Before I met him, I had never been to Italy (barely been to Europe), and had no interest in Italy at all. If I?d gone out looking for a husband, it would not have occurred to me to look for an Italian mathematician!

What role did language skills play in your experience?
You definitely need to speak Italian to live a fulfilling social life among Italians. Many Italians speak English, but if there are two or more Italians in a group, no matter who in the group speaks English or doesn?t, the Italians will always speak Italian. So learn to speak Italian, or you?ll find yourself being lonely in a crowd.
I started taking Italian classes in the US, soon after meeting Enrico, but didn?t really speak it until I spent a month in Rome without him, with my in-laws, when our daughter was an infant. My mother-in-law speaks no English, so I had to speak Italian!
My spoken Italian made another great leap when I got my first job in Milan. The boss did not tell me he spoke any English (I found out afterwards that he did, perfectly well), so I was forced to speak Italian at the office all day.

Your biggest challenge:
Living in the same city ? even the same apartment! ? for 10 years is far and away a record for me. It?s been very hard to learn to stay in one place. I have to travel a lot to keep myself from going insane.

What did you do to feel at home or adapt here?
As a third-culture kid (see <http://web.tiscali.it/deirdres/tcks.html>), one of my survival skills is feeling more or less at home almost anywhere ? except my ?native? country, the US. Italian culture turns out to be a happy medium between the Asian cultures I grew up in and the American culture of my family, so Italy has mostly been easy for me to adapt to.
However, much as I love Italian food, I also like variety. I have yet to find a decent Indian restaurant in Italy, so I had to learn to cook Indian food myself. My next culinary ambition is to learn Thai cooking.

What do you still have to get used to/learn?
The post office. I absolutely hate going to the Italian post office. Services and processes have improved over the years, but still leave a lot to be desired. As a result, to date, I have never actually mailed a package from Italy. (The time I arrived at the post office and found a robbery in progress also rather put me off.)

Compare an aspect of your home town (or other place you’ve lived) to current town.
I spent a lot of time in California over the last six years (for work), and one thing I love about it are the rigorous anti-smoking laws. Way too many people smoke in Italy, and most are not considerate about it.

Latest pursuits:
Building a steady client base for freelance work (said she hopefully). Accompanying my daughter to riding school. MBA course.

A preconceived notion about Italians/Italy that is not true:
That they?re all interested in ?la dolce vita? above all, and therefore are not hardworking. Many of them are actually very good at both working hard and playing hard. They?re just smart enough not to take their work with them on vacations.

A preconceived notion about Italians/Italy that is true:
Family above all!

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?”
Living in a country is not at all like spending a vacation there, and the reality can be a rude shock. Especially if you haven?t lived outside your native country before, leave yourself an escape clause: try it as an experiment for 6-12 months and see how you really like it before you commit for the rest of your life.


How would you sum up your Italian experience in a word (and why)?
Home. My life and my family are here, and it?s unlikely I?ll ever live anywhere else again.

Sicilian Town Changes Name for Fame

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Murder, Mafia, kidnapping — dirty business of all sorts — is the stuff most Sicilian towns would rather not be associated with, but one is renaming itself to do just that by taking on the moniker of a fictional town made popular by an Italian author.

Andrea Camilleri, 77, publishing sensation in Italy and abroad, had a long career as a theater director before turning his attention to gritty mysteries set in fictionalized Vig?ta. His urbane yet earthy police inspector Salvo Montalbano has starred in six books and numerous short stories that have sold over four million copies in Europe and have monopolized Italy’s best seller list since debuting in 1994.

The resulting popularity of all this ‘something rotten in Sicily’ is that Italians can’t do enough to honor Camilleri. After both the author and Luca Zingaretti, the actor who plays Montalbano in the hit TV movies, were knighted by President Ciampi in February 2003, the mayor of Camilleri’s birthplace got an idea: to add the name ‘Vigàta’ to the town of Porto Empedocle in the province of Agrigento.

Whether it will focalize literary tourism on the town remains to be seen. The writer admits he changed the town’s name to preserve the memory he had of it as a child — the current cement sprawl makes it incompatible with the images stark beauty portrayed in the books and, in fact, the TV series were filmed in more pristine Sicilian spots. ?1999-2003 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:
The Terra-Cotta Dog: An Inspector Montalbano Mystery
Of the three Montalbano books translated into English so far, this is the staff pick.

www.vigata.org
The official Camilleri fan club — tour Sicily with the author, explore the dialect, take a look at the movies, explore Sicilian recipes…

 

Italy by site April 8-16

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Italy’s Love Affair with Fiat ? Find Italian Travel Companions ?Italian Ecards for Mother’s Day?Hear Avion Travel’s ‘Little Torment’

Hear Avion Travel’s ‘Little Torment’
The first release from latest album ‘poco mossi gli altri bacini’, the new track ‘piccolo tormento’ has got one of Italy’s most interesting pop bands on the charts…°
www.avion-travel.net/avion_archiviovideo.htm
The clip…

Perdo Tempo
An earlier, brilliant effort…

Italian Ecards for Mother’s Day
Let your mamma know you’re thinking of her May 11 — with these Italian ecards, though modern moms may get an unintentional laugh out of some of the sugar-sticky traditional ones.
www.cartoline.it/festamamma1.htm
www.excite.it/cartoline/categorie/festamamma
http://cartoline.libero.it/

Find Italian Travel Companions
Women traveling to Italy this summer might want to use this message board to find some company for the road…Use the ‘clicca qui’ button in the first paragraph to read previously published messages.
www.glamouronline.it/partire_compagni.asp?IDCategoria=163

Me & My Fiat
Italians& their Fiats — take a stroll through this mostly vintage photo gallery sent in by readers for a look at the way Italians & their wheels once were…
http://club.virgilio.it/community/motori/fiat/index.html?pmk=HPCom

Italy by Numbers: Keeping the Peace (Flag)

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2.5 million peace flags sold (est.)
82% Flag-owning Italians don’t want to take it down, yet
1% will get rid of peace flag for good

Italians aren’t reading to give up rainbow-colored peace flags yet, according to an SWG poll. Though many are many tattered and faded from the months spent hanging from balconies and the war is all but wrapped up less than 20% have folded in the flag and some 15% of the 18-64 year-olds put it away plan to unfurl it again for future antiwar protests.

Flags with the word ‘pace’ have had an enormous grassroots appeal — there are likely considerably more than the 2.5 million official ones from nonprofit groups like Emergency — street corners in cities were manned by ad hoc flag vendors who sold them for about five euro. Given out with magazines, turned into stickers, book bags, flown high during protests, from some city halls and schools — popularity was so broad that conservative politician Marco Follini felt the need to say that the left didn’t have a ‘monopoly’ on the flag, despite the fact that it belied Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s statements that his fellow citizens were with him supporting the American war effort. And, given the previous indifference and flap of late over the ‘new’ colors of the national flag the Peace Flag seems to be the only one everyone agrees on.

Italy’s Baby Name Revolution

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by Nicole Martinelli
posted Tue 29 Apr 11:07 am

Traditional Italian names like Marco, Giuseppe and Francesca are making a slow comeback after what was considered an “alarming” trend of babies in the Bel Paese being named after American movie and soap opera stars.

Italians are now back to doling out grandparent’s names or those of patron saints to the few precious bambini they’re having after a wave of Sue Ellens, Naomis, Kevins and Michaels, according to a recent poll by Anna magazine. Back on Italy’s baby-name hit list are classics like Alessandro, Matteo, Paola and Elena.

"It was a strong trend, but fortunately it’s going out of fashion ", communications expert Sandra Monti told zoomata."Parents are looking back to tradition and continuity instead of originality — saving a lot of headaches for their children."

Foreign names were a seductive fad and a constant hassle — even though the Italian alphabet recently reintroduced the letters K, J, H, W and X pronunciation was difficult and many parents used improbable spellings like Gessica, Illary — pronounced Elarry — and Gionatan (that’s Jonathan, to you) to make sure fellow citizens could get the sound right. Children were saddled with these trendy monikers for good because Italian courts only allow name changes in very limited circumstances — and having to go through life as Uma or Britney isn’t one of them.

Asked to cite influences for baby names, expecting parents (who could chose more than one inspiration) cited grandparents (40%), followed by close friends or other relatives (36%) and saints (28%) while entertainers now inspire Italian parents only 9% of the time. Little ones with names traceable to saints also have another reason to be content with tradition — in Southern Italy the saint’s day is still often celebrated as a kind of second birthday. ?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:
Italian baby name finder: www.mamma.it/servizi/nomi/ricercanome.asp
Lots of sites in English list ‘Italian’ baby names but many have either names that aren’t really Italian or just plain weird. Try this one in Italian that allows you to choose first letter (‘iniziale’), length (‘lunghezza’) popularity (put yes or no in the ‘diffuso’ field).

Bilingual Baby: Italian
No matter what you settled on for a name, get your bambino chattering in Italiano…

Italian Town Welcomes First Newborn in a Generation