Most people wouldn’t pick Milan as a tourist destination, but should you attempt it, aim for Design Week.
This is a working city, best when humming with some sort of event. And while the Fashion Weeks seem like they’d be a good choice but unless you’re Suzy Menkes or a 20-pound Ukrainian model, trust me, you won’t have any fun.
Design Week, usually held the first week in April, is more democratic.
Even if you don’t go to the fair (officially called Salone Internazionale del Mobile ) or snag any cocktail invites, there are a ton of events — 350 this year– outside the fair (fuori salone) that anyone can visit, often getting free drinks and food in the process.

It’s also democratic because even regular joes can have an opinion. Most times you can touch, try out, sit down. Hmmm. This chair is uncomfortable. Wouldn’t this look great in my kitchen? Pretty, but you could never read by that lamp.
And, if you have the good sense to be single or at least unaccompanied (somehow this always eludes me), it’s also a great way to meet talented young things. (The Belgian/Dutch showcase always seems to have the most talent, in both senses of the word).

Rodent power

This was my first year doing just the fuori salone, even a neighborhood reccy was well worth it.
Diana Eugeni, an architect friend of mine, launched a gizmo called “Jack Bag” to keep your Gucci from touching the ground. A curvy key chain made of plexiglas, it latches on to the table and provides a hook for your handbag, ever more important now that restaurants seem to have all decided that normal square chairs are hopelessly démodé. It’s part of a project called cutnpaste where designers sell their stuff directly to consumers.
At the Dutch/Belgian fuori salone, there were fuzzy weeble-wobble stools, a goth lamp with a stuffed mouse in the base, a bracelet with a razor blade (“kill yourself whenever you want,” the tagline says) and some fabulous ceramic vases with a tulip print.

The Established & Sons installation in an ex-pelota court was the place to be: A-list British designers (Zaha Hadid, Jasper Morrison, Sebastian Wrong) plus free beer.
While the Miele kitchen store plied guests with free crepes, the most creative use of food in a furniture fair goes to BMW, sponsors of a molecular cooking extravaganza/DJ set with chef Carlo Cracco whipping up dishes made with liquid nitrogen. (I organized a segment for Discovery Channel once on molecular cookery. It looks neat, but the only thing that really tastes better made with liquid nitrogen is ice cream. The super-quick freeze locks in the flavor and it doesn’t melt quickly or give you ice-cream burn).

Take your place

Bigger is better seemed to be an ongoing theme. Of the outsize installations, Jacopo Foggini’s enormous chandelier (the same one lording over Luciano Pavarotti during the Turin Olympic opening ceremony) was probably my favorite.
The giant Ikea furniture — a couch, a sofa, a bookcase — placed around town seemed slightly ominous rather than playful. A reminder of how many of these bright-eyed, creative nordic types may end up with careers in indentured designer-dom.

by Nicole Martinelli If you’ve ever tried to stand in line in Italy, you’ll understand why self-service scanning at supermarkets has taken off.

Something in the Italian character simply refuses to stand in an orderly fashion and wait. Women in fur coats park baskets near the checkout, disappear, come back and add items, and when they are done, cut in with the banshee wail: “I am in line!”

Hence the appeal of quick, orderly DIY checkouts. Self-scanners have long been called the next big thing in supermarkets, but perhaps because of the hellish line situation, Inferno-familiar Italians were quick to adopt them…
Read more at wired or download the podcast.

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 →

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.