Francesco Schettino, the 52-year-old captain of the cruise liner Costa Concordia, began his pretrial hearing last week in the small Tuscan city of Grosseto. The Costa Concordia capsized on the evening of Friday January 13th after hitting barely submerged rocks close to the tiny island of Giglio 10 ...
They played "The Internationale" at Wednesday's funeral of Eric Hobsbawm, Britain's "greatest historian." No one took offense. Indeed, all felt uplifted. The mourners at the crematorium in Golders Green, London's Jewish heartland, included Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, who ...
In Italy"which is the next eurozone domino to fall after Spain, Greece, and Portugal"things are bad and getting worse. The mood here is one of black pessimism and utter contempt for politicians. Italians simmer with anger, but no one has a viable solution to the problem. How could they? ...
One of the reasons the West is in such deep trouble is that it has allowed "rights" to kill off what's "right," as in "that which is right." Rights are used to justify a whole series of wrongs, from the declaration of unwise or unjust wars to the condemnation of smokers ...
In continental Europe, S&M seems to be a northern Teutonic phenomenon rather than a southern Latin one. The Germans, for example, are dead keen on it. Given that Italy invented fascism, you might have thought that the Italians were also keen. For as Sylvia Plath wrote in the poem ...
Fascism is presumed to be intrinsically and violently anti-Semitic, and the fascists wanted to exterminate the Jews, right? Wrong. That was the National Socialists. The German historian and journalist Emil Ludwig, who wrote a fascinating book about Mussolini in 1932 based on a series of lengthy ...
The BBC has just rejected a proposal to erect a statue in honor of George Orwell outside its new London headquarters. The reason? As the nation's public broadcaster, the BBC is supposed to be unbiased and objective, so to erect such a statue would be regarded as "far too left-wing." That ...
In Britain, there are ghosts everywhere. Here in Italy, there are none. Our house is nevertheless infestata (haunted), according to my wife"not by ghosts but by demons. Apparently, the Devil and his cohorts are busy 24/7 casting malefici (evil spells) on Carla and our five small children. Who ...
Everywhere I drive in the Italian countryside I come across fields that are now desecrated by ugly solar-power plants. These silver constructions would be aesthetically acceptable only on a lifeless distant planet or in a postmodern desert city such as Abu Dhabi. This is odd because in Italy, ...
I am an alcoholic, or what is called an alcoholic, and I still am an alcoholic, so they say, even though I gave up booze nearly one year ago. Sure, I drank dangerous amounts of the stuff day in and day out for decades. But I am convinced that I did not and do not suffer from what the health ...
