Marijuana Liqueur Plan Goes up in Smoke for Italian

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Home brew? Pot steeping in alcohol. Photo: ANSA.

Home brew? Pot steeping in alcohol. Photo: ANSA.

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: “Topless Nun” Sues Ex-Boyfriend for Facebook Pics

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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.

Photo used with a CC-license, thanks fiorellaq

Italy’s “Brain Drain” Becomes Big-Screen Drama

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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.

Lost and Found? Not on Italian Trains

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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.

Related stories:
Free Trains to Italian hotels

Italy Tracks Tardy Trains

Police Advice for Safe Roman Holiday Dampens Spirits

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Roman police have issued a safety sheet that, while strong on common sense, makes a vacation in the Eternal City sound devoid of the merrymaking that makes Italy such a draw for tourists.

The how-to on keeping safe and enjoying Rome (surprisingly in decent English) downloadable from their website starts off by reminding tourists (and by tourists, we mean women) why they came: “Rome is a safe city and its people are welcoming,” but some of the advice they hope tourists will keep in mind is a bit of a downer.

First the useful info:
— in an emergency, call either 112 (local police) or 113 (carabinieri). (They left out the medical emergency number, 118.)
— women get a 10% taxi discount at night as yet another “pink” initiative.
— numbers for 24-hour women’s anti violence centers: (06) 5810926 or (06) 23269049.

Alas, though most of the advice is common sense, it rules out what draws many women visitors to Italy: don’t wear any flashy jewelry, drink in moderation, do not accept drinks from strangers, do not accept invitations from strangers and stick with the people you came with.

Ok, so Rossano Brazzi was never going to roofie Katherine Hepburn’s bellini (though he is shown in the “Summertime” poster staring intently at her with a large drink in hand) but has Italy become so dangerous that visitors are well advised to glare at the locals suspiciously while clutching half glasses of wine singing “O sole mio” wistfully to their American counterparts? And given the hundreds of stories, romantic and bittersweet, about foreign women in Italy, are they really expected to?

Image courtesy @ polizia di stato

Financial Crisis Puts Italian Men to Work at Home

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By many accounts, Italian men are some of the laziest in Europe when it comes to lending a hand at home.

According to the national association of house husbands, 70% of Italian men never cook, 90% have never, ever, ironed a shirt, 95% have never done a load of wash.

With the financial crisis hitting Italian households, that may change. Some 34% of Italian women have cut back on household help, a recent survey by Coesis announced. They’re also looking to husbands and family to start lending a hand, researchers noted.

It’s about time for men to step up and help out, says the house husband association.

“Women are really sick of it, they’re used to having to pay to get the help they might expect from a husband or partner,” said president Fiorenzo Bresciani. “If they can’t afford that, now’s the time to re-discuss who does what around the house. Men are definitely the ‘lazy sex,’ we want to show them that real men do help out.”

Born in 2002, the Tuscan-based association, which offers master classes in home management (“the science of ironing,” anyone?) now counts over 4,000 members.

I suspect the biggest challenge may be men over 50, who have never helped out and probably don’t see much reason to change that. A lot of younger Italian guys I know are great cooks and decent about taking care of la casa.

Does your Italian man help out around the house?

Photo courtesy Italian Household Association

Rediscovering Italy’s Pilgrim Route: La Via Francigena del Sud

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Fellow reporter and friend Eric Sylvers is on the road again, this time he and three friends are walking the lower half of Italy’s pilgrim route to where the boats once left for Jeruselem, the Via Francigena del Sud, 500 kilometers (310 miles) from Rome to Otranto, Puglia.

While the northern part of the trek — from the Gran San Bernardo Pass in Switzerland to Rome he did in 2007 was fairly well marked, this leg sounds like the epitome of the road less traveled.

His daily blog, with tons of photos and video, about the peregrinations tells of having “celebrity status” in Campania and getting lost:

“Just before Amorosi we had been through a town called Ruviano were we made the acquaintance of Giuseppe, who left nearby Avellino for the United States when he was 19 and lived there for 50 years before coming back to retire to his native Campania four years ago. Colorful Giuseppe kept us occupied for quite awhile and so it was with the slowest of paces that we made our way towards Solopaca, our intended stop for the evening before our push to Benevento tomorrow.

After getting lost in the hills near Solopaca for a good 90 minutes we came to the very disheartening realization that as there was nowhere to sleep in the town and we were going to have to walk further and away from Benevento. Disheartening as that was, we eventually ended up in a small hotel on the edge of a picturesque small lake. The walk, which was under a scorching sun, had us weaving around some hills until we had some proper climbing on the approach to Solopaca.”

Fascinating — though I’m more likely to sign up for the trek when it’s a little less adventurous…

Image courtesy / copyright @ Eric Sylvers

Pasta la Vista, Baby: The Changing Italian Diet

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25 years ago, Italian families ate more meat, drank more wine but put less fish and pasta on the table. La famiglia also usually shopped in small local stores — there were five times fewer supermarkets — and 85% of the time ate at home.

These are some of the changes tracked in a study (.pdf Italian only) by national food industry lobby Federalimentare to mark its 1983 founding, back when Socialist Bettino Craxi first stepped into office and pop hit “Vamos a la Playa” had Italians singing into their watches.

Rapid changes after World War II first revolutionized Italian eating habits, breaking some long-standing stereotypes. In the early 1950s, the Italian mamma spent a good chunk of her day preparing a hearty lunch, while her new millennium counterpart, less likely to be a stay at home mother, spends just a third of that time in the kitchen.

In the post-war period, Italians also spent half the family income on food. From 1983-2008, money spent on groceries dropped eight percent to 17.7% of the budget. They now eat 10% less meat, 10% more pasta and bread but about the same amount (18%) of fruit and veg. Beverages have flip-flopped: Italians now spend 5% of the budget on juice, bottled water and soda, five times more than in the 1980s when that same percentage was allotted for wine and spirits.

Some staples of the Italian postwar diet that have now disappeared include smoked herring (often eaten with polenta), tinned milk and carob beans, sucked like candy.

Image used with a CC license, thanks orsorama

Italian Writes Guide Book to Mass

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A new guide book for Catholics is designed to lead them back into church by reviewing the services.

Journalist Camillo Langone, also a long-time restaurant reviewer, sat in pews all over Italy to write over 300 pages on weekly mass ceremonies. What makes a good mass (communion given in the mouth, incense) bad mass (electric guitars and too many tambourines), is, much like a restaurant, up to the reviewer, who in this case describes himself as a “fervent Catholic.”

It’s not the first guide book to church going, but it’s the first in Italy, seat of the Vatican and country where the flock is fleeing rapidly. The battle may be an uphill one: 90 percent of Italians are baptized Catholics but only about a third are churchgoers.

Langone’s “Guide to Mass” also reviews the priests of over 200 services, whether their sermons are creative or soporific and whether the church architecture (poor acoustics, hot summer and cold in winter) is conducive to prayer.

Design of the Times in Milan

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Milan buses are plastered with bright red posters reassuring recession-anxious consumers that if there’s a financial crisis, the Salone del Mobile is the answer.

That confident attitude sums up the buoyant mood at the 48th annual International Milan Furniture Fair, which started here on Wednesday and runs until Monday. In a city where fashion is king, design makes the most of its yearly five-day spotlight by showcasing the weird and the wonderful.

Exhibitors at the Massimiliano Fuksas-designed fairgrounds were up 15% to 1,496 from 2008 according to the organizer, Cosmit. Organizers expect to surpass last year’s record of nearly 350,000 visitors. Indeed, antsy lines for the metro, elbowing around the big-name stands and the crush to procure a restorative cappuccino are as fierce as ever.

Full story here.