Italy
Outside Party Lines
CARLO ROSSELLI Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile. By Stanislao G. Pugliese. Illustrated. 309 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $35. Carlo Rosselli — one of the most courageous and interesting figures of Italian antifascism — is a rich and overdue subject for a biography. Arrested in Italy in 1926 for underground activities, Rosselli escaped to…
Continue readingPalermo: The Photography of Death
1. One morning in 1993, several Italian policemen arrived unexpectedly at the house of Letizia Battaglia, where she has her office, carrying a warrant to conduct a search of her vast photo archive. Battaglia had worked as the photography director of L’Ora, Palermo’s left-wing daily newspaper, from 1974 until shortly before the paper folded in 1990….
Continue readingItaly: The Convulsions of Normalcy
1. Like a snake trying to shed its skin, Italy has been making convulsive efforts for the last few years to shake off its old political system and become a “normal” democracy, one in which the alternation of government and opposition is an ordinary, unremarkable occurrence. With the victory of a broad center-left coalition in…
Continue readingThe World’s Greatest Salesman
THE POLITICAL CAREER OF THE ITALIAN MEDIA MAGNATE SILVIO BERLUSCONI STARTED, appropriately enough, with a videocassette. On Jan. 26, 1994, Berlusconi addressed the Italian people on all three of his national television networks. Within two months, he turned Italy’s political world upside down, created a new political party from scratch and won national elections that…
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