Italy
THE POPE EXCOMMUNICATES THE MAFIA, FINALLY, New Yorker, June 24, 2014
In some ways, it is surprising that Pope Francis made news by travelling to Calabria and excommunicating members of the Mafia. He went to a town where members of a local Mafia group, known as the ’Ndrangheta, had murdered a three-year-old boy, together with his grandfather, and burned their bodies, in a case tied up…
Continue readingThe Return of Berlusconi — end of reform? La Repubblica, July 23, 2014
MERCOLEDÌ, 23 LUGLIO 2014 Pagina 29 – COMMENTI LA VOGLIA DI ESSERE DIVERSI ALEXANDER STILLE APPENA arrivata la sentenza di assoluzione, Silvio Berlusconi comincia di nuovo con le vecchie abitudini: domande di grazia, nuove leggi ad personam, eccezioni alle norme per permettergli di ricandidarsi. Avete notato che l’Italia è diventato un paese un po’…
Continue readingThe Rise and Fall of Right-Wing Populism in France and Italy, New Yorker, May 28, 2014
The extraordinary success of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, in France, and of other right-wing, populist parties has, with good reason, been the main story of last weekend’s European Parliamentary elections. Running on an anti-euro, anti-immigration platform, Le Pen won a historic twenty-five per cent of the vote, handily outpolling France’s main conservative party, the…
Continue readingDancing to Nowhere, review of “La Grande Bellezza,” New York Review of Books blog, Jan. 9, 2014
If the character Marcello in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—played unforgettably by Marcello Mastroianni—had spent another four decades flitting about the high life of Rome he might have turned into someone like Jep Gambardella, the protagonist of Italian film director Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty). A self-conscious twenty-first century version of the Fellini classic, La Grande…
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