Articles by: Judith Harris

  • Facts & Stories

    As Genoa Drowns, Berlusconi Struggles to Stay Afloat

    ROME.  The river of rushing muddy water, up to three feet deep, which raced through Genoa’s main streets Friday carried with it automobiles, huge garbage bins, motorcycles and—as one amateur photographer’s footage showed—a man who had lost his balance and was dragged by the water. The balance: six dead, including two small children, and many injured. At this writing Sunday evening concerns turned to Piedmont and the risk that the Po River might overflow its banks. As the torrential rains moved down the Italian peninsula, the Campania region with its archaeological treasures was struck, with one dead when a tree fell on an automobile.

    In Genoa the water and mud had not cleared when recriminations began, themselves a tsunami attacking city officials and particularly mayor Marta Vincenzi, 64, blamed for not having ordered businesses, offices and all schools closed beforehand. For two days there had been forewarnings of tremendous storms on the way, but local authorities had decided these warnings sufficed. Today an official judiciary inquiry has been opened against possible negligence, but against “unknown” individuals. The mayor, elected in 2007 on a center-left political slate, has come under sharp criticism for delays in informing parents not to venture outdoors to collect their children from school. That request came only at 2:45 pm.

    But the heart of the problem is more complex. According to a Greenpeace spokesman, Giuseppe Onufrio, “It’s a combination of problems: global warming that’s turning Italy’s climate more tropical, not tending to trees and the environment, and over-building without proper controls. We also need to understand how to manage emergencies better.” Others add that storm sewers and streams have not been kept clear.

    The fragility of the Italian heritage is hard to understate. Eleven days ago one of Italy’s greatest treasures, the Cinque Terre on the Ligurian coastline, was devastated by storms, beginning with a small tornado. The Cinque Terre are in fact five towns perched on a mountainside that drops precipitously down to the sea. The incredibly picturesque central villages cannot be reached by automobile, but solely by walking the steep connecting footpaths or via a train line tunneled through the formidable mountain. The area is a world heritage site for its natural and man-made beauty, which includes dry stone wall terracing. And this is the problem, according to one former resident, a baker. “European Union farm products have undercut the Cinque Terra farmers. Aside from wine, countless fields have been abandoned.”

    Along with abandoned fields comes negligence in maintaining those incredibly steep dry stone walls. Far worse, uncontrolled building construction has stressed the area. The result: a wall of mud that has all but destroyed these precious and splendid villages, further cut off by mud and water blocking the train tunnel.

    Those willing to make a contribution of 2 Euros to help in the emergency in Genoa and the Cinque Terre can send an SMS by dialing, from the US, +39 45500. This is the official collection point, sponsored by Il Corriere della Sera daily and by La Sette TV network. 

    The twin disasters in Liguria have briefly upstaged the government’s defensive strategy, but the problems remain. Indeed they were aggravated when, at the G20 meeting in Cannes, Premier Berlusconi told incredulous reporters that he has no sense of an economic crisis in Italy because “the restaurants are full of people, and the plane flights to vacation spots are also full.” Objectively speaking, this was contradictory (and what is perhaps worse, it was troubling), for the world’s greats, from the U.S. president to China’s, had turned out to discuss the dire economic situation.

    The problems will hit the famous fan on Tuesday, when a vote in Parliament will be held on the budget revisions. Will the government have its bare majority of 316? Rumors are rife that it will not, and supposedly Berlusconi’s top aides, beginning with Gianni Letta, 76, have informed him that there have been so many defections in the Freedom Party (PdL) that the government will lose in a vote of confidence. Their advice to him, supposedly (nothing is certain), was to resign beforehand, in order to save face. Berlusconi has retorted that he has no intentions of resigning, however, and gossip has it that the reason he privately gave for his refusal is that, if he quits, his sharkish enemies would destroy his commercial interests, beginning with the his media empire. La Repubblica reports that some twenty PdL members of Parliament will no longer support the Berlusconi cabinet.

    Pier Ferdinando Casini, the moderate centrist with considerable Catholic backing, has been courted by the PdL in hopes of his joining the rightist coalition that would keep the Berlusconi party (if not Berlusconi himself) in charge. Casini is quoted as refusing this offer, preferring a new pact between moderates and progressives along the lines proposed Saturday at a rally in Rome by Partito Democratico (PD) leader Pier Luigi Bersani.
  • Op-Eds

    Sketchbook of Life on Borrowed Time


     ROME – No one disputes that this is the most serious crisis facing both the U.S. and Europe since the end of World War II. Nor does anyone dispute that it is financial, and that irresponsible bankers all over the West are to be blamed. Looking deeper, we can also see that the Great Recession, as it’s being called, is an almost inevitable result of the de-industrialization of the West, whose beginnings were visible not yesterday, but half a century ago. Here are a few snapshots illustrating how the crisis is affecting Italians.
     
    Item #1. Businessman Enrico Frare from Treviso, 36, is a manufacturer of E-Group winter sportswear. This week he purchased an entire page of the daily Corriere della Sera as a protest against the tough conditions of working in Italy. “Every day people tell me to delocalize but I want to stay in Italy,” he told reporters. Along with his photo, nude, appears the protest that, “Every day in Italy a businessman risks losing his underpants”. In English we’d say “losing his shirt,” but in any language the sense is that banks won’t lend money, no one invests in research or product development, consignments are slow, and in the end the younger businessman is abandoned on his own while the government doesn’t bother to help stop the overseas flight of the companies that made Italy’s fortune.
     
    Item # 2. The head of the Partito Democratico (PD), Pier Luigi Bersani, age 60, was not exactly pleased when he learned from the newspapers that the mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, age 36, had called for the “dinosaurs” of the leftist parties in Italy to pack up and go home. The dinosaur insult came during a public debate in Florence Oct. 30, where the topic of primary elections for PD leaders was raised. For attacking the balding, cigar-chomping Bersani, along with Antonio Di Pietro and Nichi Vendola—three of the top leftist leaders—by name, Renzi was in turn assailed as all too new-media-savvy and, worst of all, too “Berlusconian.” The younger set, however, applauded Renzi, a front-running candidate for future national office, for such affirmations as, “This country has got to go back to being the nation of beauty, not of vulgarity.” He also complained that, whereas the best and the brightest of Italy go abroad to live and work, “no one, but no one, comes to Italy.”
     
    Item #3. In a puzzling outburst, Labor Minister Maurizio Sacconi warned of the risk that terrorism may raise its ugly head, in the wake of jobs being lost. “Today I see a sequence from verbal violence to organized violence, which I hope will not lead into the homicidal events of only a decade ago, when poor Marco Biagi was killed in the context of a discussion very similar to what is going on today.” His words infuriated Susanna Camusso, leader of the leftist General Confederation of Italian Labor (CGIL), who retorted, “Either the Minister has proof of this or he should keep quiet.” At any rate Camusso also warned that a general strike may be called to protest government measures aimed at creating a more dynamic work force (translation: easier firing of workers). The kerfuffle was serious enough that La Repubblica had a bitter editorial cartoon by Ellekappa, in which one figure mentions that the Italian left is waking up. His buddy replies: “It’s a delicate moment. The risk is that if we have elections, we win.”
     
    Item #3. The very least that can be said about the letter—and there is only one letter being discussed in Italy these days, the one signed simply “un abbraccio [a hug], Silvio”—is that it gained time for Italy to attempt to deal with its economic woes. It was addressed to the European Union leaders when they met in Brussels Oct. 27, and contained promises of the reforms that will get Italy back on track and a timetable. The stock market initially surged on the news that the EU top dogs had accepted the 15 pages of proposals—and then it emerged that the letter had been drafted in Brussels, then faxed to Berlusconi’s eminence grise Gianni Letta for editing and approval. So the substance of the letter was sent by the recipient to itself. (For a synthesis of the letter and its commitments, see: il Sole 24ore)
     
    Item #4. Several days before this, in a press conference (for the few who missed it), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy had snickered publicly when Berlusconi’s name was mentioned in the context of prospects for Italy to deliver on economic reforms. Berlusconi himself brushed off the slight, saying that Merkel is friendly enough when they meet in person, but was showing off for her own difficult electorate at Italy’s expense. As for Sarkozy, he was trying to make points with his own electors, said the Italian premier. Nevertheless, the sneering tone of these two Euro powerhouses offended many here. But not all: Emma Marcegaglia, head of the Italian industrialists’ association Confindustria, said that, “We did not deserve to be treated like that, but at least it galvanized people [the government] into taking action.” By the way, Berlusconi said that when he’d later met with Merkel, she apologized—but then her press secretary issued a statement that this was untrue. She did not apologize for the snicker. But then Berlusconi has not apologized for saying she did.
     
    Item #5 is yet to be written—how the spread moves, up or down (at this writing, +5.69). That is, the difference between the cost of purchasing 10-year treasury bonds in Italy and in Germany. In coming days all eyes will remain focussed on this.
     
  • Op-Eds

    Berlusconi wins confidence vote by a hair (but is he losing Italy?)



    ROME – The beleaguered Premier Silvio Berlusconi squeaked through his 51th vote of confidence in Parliament on Friday, with a razor-thin majority of 316.. It was just enough to keep him in office even though his government appears far too feeble to address the sort of fundamental reforms which experts at home and abroad say are necessary to get the country moving again.
     
    And although the vote halts speculation that national general elections will take place in November, elections appear inevitable early next spring, a year ahead of the mandated five-year legislature. If we can believe the insiders, they will take place, perhaps in April, and the scuttlebutt is that Mr. Berlusconi’s political aides themselves have already reserved billboard space to advertise his forthcoming brand new political party, to be called (perhaps) by the treacle name Italia Forever.
     
    The atmosphere prior to the confidence vote was particularly tense. Calls for his resignation have been pouring in from a broad spectrum of the influential foreign press and from powerful industry leaders at home. Their hopes were raised in mid-week when Parliament, in a stunning blow to his Freedom Party, overturned Berlusconi’s government in a vote over the budget. The following day Berlusconi, addressing the nation on TV, apologized for what he put down to a technical mishap. And then he launched into a smooth sales pitch in defense of his government, during which he boasted that he was irreplaceable.
     
    And for the moment this appears to be the case. Even though his approval rating has sunk to an all-time low of 24% and he looks more worried than at any time, he still has stout defenders, who sincerely believe that he is the victim of a worldwide rabid foreign media corps and of politicized Italian magistrates in cahoots with Communists. He still argues, correctly, that he was democratically elected and therefore has the right to govern until the voters turn him out of office. His supporters add that, given the current state of crisis—a crisis whose existence Berlusconi pretended did not exist until only a few months ago—no one should consider changing horses in mid-stream. Never mind that the Spanish, facing a crisis of smaller dimensions than Italy’s because theirs has fewer international repercussions, have called new elections for November. 
     
    Had the Berlusconi government fallen, it was expected that a technical cabinet to be headed by the prestigious economist Mario Monti, 69, was to take over until a controversial election law could be rewritten and early elections be held. Monti’s front-running position makes it all the more important that on the day after the confidence vote his hard-hitting editorial—it had to have been prepared well ahead of time—ran in the daily Corriere della Sera. Monti has served on the board of directors of Fiat Generali, and Comit, and was a professor of economics at the Bocconi University in Milan, becoming its president in 1994. Here are a few of the crucial points.
     
    --It’s a common conviction in Europe and the U.S.A. that the Euro zone won’t be wrecked by Greece, but, given their larger dimensions, by Spain or especially by Italy, which just now is lagging behind Spain in addressing the problems. A case in point: interest rates on public debt are higher for Italy than even for Spain.
     
    --After denying that any crisis existed, after indulging at length in “illusionist optimism,” Berlusconi goes on maintaining that the opposition is obstructionist, and that the magistrates “obliged” the head of government to tend to his law suits rather than the needs of the country. Cooperation with the opposition is essential for addressing the current economic crisis, but the Berlusconi government continues to play the victim instead. Backing him is a circle of the faithful who have “sunk to unheard of levels of servility,” to judge by their TV appearances. As a result, Berlusconi is protected and lives behind the veil of a soft-focus reality.
     
    --The risk is that, lacking economic growth and true reforms in the public sector and in the markets, Italy could become the (not innocent) victim of major attacks on the financial markets. Italy is being seen as the “possible triggering factor in a crisis in the Eurozone of dimensions that have not yet been tested, and which perhaps cannot be dealt with.”
     
    Monti’s conclusion is equally severe. Those who voted for him in the Parliamentary confidence vote saved the President of the Council of Ministers. “In exchange, now may they have him save Italy, if not from derision, at least from the blame of being the cause of a disaster.”
     
    Saturday’s demonstrations in Rome which caused a million dollars worth of damage to public proerty and sent more than a hundred police officers and protesters to the hospital made a disquieting sequel. Speculation here is that they were infiltrated by agents provocateurs. 
  • Life & People

    Learning Italian in a Los Angeles kindergarten

    They’re first graders, all of six years old, and their enthusiasm more than makes up for a certain tunelessness as they sing “Fratelli d’Italia….” This was a rehearsal for their big performance—a rendering of the Italian national anthem as part of the Columbus Day celebration in Los Angeles organized by the Los Angeles Casa Italiana.

    Curiously, not all of these youngsters singing their hearts out in Italian are Italian. They are are students in the Italian immersion project at the Benjamin Franklin Elementary School in the Glendale district. This is a public, not a private school, and, unique in California, it offers its students, beginning in kindergarten, what is known as an immersion program of studies in a second language, which can be German, Spanish or Italian. In kindergarten and first grade 90% of the teaching, including in arithmetic, is in Italian (or German or Spanish) and 10% in English. With each passing school year (and the year includes an optional summer program for those desiring it) the percentage in English rises until fifth and sixth grade, when it is half and half.

    Each language has a separate teacher, and instruction is always by native speakers. At a time of worsening student-teacher ratios, these students have the luxury of having two teaching assistants—also native speakers—to help the teacher in the classroom. One comes thanks to a grant from the Fondazione Italia. The other is an intern brought to Glendale from Italy by the school’s parent Foundation through the Amity Institute Exchange Teacher Program (www.amity.org). These interns are offered hospitality by a pupil’s family.

    What’s the point? According to an expert in childhood bilingualism, Simona Montanari, “Research shows repeatedly that children in long-term bilingual programs not only develop higher competence in English than children learning solely in English, but they also reach higher academic achievements than children educated in only one language. Bilingual programs have cognitive, emotional and practical benefits.”

    Help in maintaining this unusual public school program comes first of all from the Glendale District, but, as a magnet school, it also is the beneficiary of a grant from the Federal Government, which funds the work of a full-time teacher specialist to work on the curricula for programs in all four languages, for seven years of schooling for circa 500 students. Now in its fourth year, the immersion program so far has pupils who’ve just entered the third grade. Some of those in the Italian program have Italian parents, but the majority are from homes where the parents have elected to have their children study in Italian. A few have grandparents who were Italian immigrants, but whose parents never learned Italian at all and are only now, through their children, discovering their linguistic and deeper cultural roots.

    The project involved turning limoni into limonata. Gentrification of Glendale meant that, as housing prices rose, the neighborhood school was losing students. “But this has now been reversed, reviving the school,” according to principal Vickie Atikian Aviles. “Placement demand is on the rise.” Another benefit: some of the local Spanish-speaking families are taking advantage of the immersion program to give their children a third language. Success means, however, that in the Italian program there was space for only half the applicants this school year.

    Ana Jones is the inspired and inspiring guiding spirit who coordinates this trio of language programs. In practice, she says, “most of the children don’t even know that their Italian teacher speaks English. And in state examinations in English, 72% of the 32 immersion students had either proficiency or advanced status. In math, they did even better, at 78%.”

    The school library, where I passed a pleasant afternoon with a number of the younger Italian pupils, has a section with children’s books in Italian, and volunteer parents were on hand to help with reading and homework. Enthusiastic parents were also involved as volunteers creating a garden for the pupils to tend. Volunteer parents made cedar frame planters for vegetables, and planted shade and fruit trees. A sink and benches were added to the grounds. “We hope the students will better understand the value of conserving materials, of recycling and of leading sustainable life styles,” says parent Charlotte Culina, one of the project’s prime movers and fund raisers.

    Grants to the program have already come from Fondazione Italia and the Yahoo Foundation, and more grants are being sought. Besides financial contributions, donations of books in Italian would be welcome. “We are also searching for trained bilingual teachers,” says Ms. Jones. Teachers must have multiple subject credentials since in elementary school they teach everything from social studies to arithmetic and, of course, a language. “Luckily, our teachers are enthusiastic beyond belief—they love the language, the program, the workshops and the students.”

    The feeling is reciprocal. Kindergarten in Italian is hard, admits little Maya Mahler, age five, after the first three weeks, but adds that she loves her teacher: “Maestra Gargiulo e’ molto brava.”

  • Life & People

    Honoring Italian emigrations after 150 years

    Our Portuguese-speaking friend, who is half Italian and half English, was at the barber’s in Rome when he heard the young man in the next chair speaking only Portuguese. Our friend offered to translate, and, as the two chatted, the man having his hair cut mentioned that he was of Italian descent, but spoke no Italian. "In 1940 my grandfather got scared and left Italy for Brazil,” he explained. “I grew up there. I never learned Italian, and my father is dead. So now I’ve come to Rome to learn to speak Italian and to trace my grandparents and their ancestors.”

     All told, an estimated 29 million Italians emigrated, whose descendants include some 25 million present day Brazilians, meaning that between 13% and 14% of that population claim an Italian heritage. Italian emigration to the U.S. was fairly limited until 1870 and unification of Italy, but by 1900 the figure had risen to over 400,000, and in the decade after 1900 over 2,100,000 arrived. Today nearly 18 million Americans can claim Italian descent, or about 6% of the U.S. population. By 1910 New York City alone was already home to 472,000 Italians.

    He is not alone in wanting to trace those roots. Genealogical research has become a passion among Italians as well as the scattered descendants of Italians. Helping in the research for family histories is an array of on-line genealogical tools and organizations like the Italian Genealogical Group, which is active in New York City, see: http://www.italiangen.org/

    Among the most helpful is the Genoa-based Centro Internazionale di Studi Emigrazione Italiana (CISEI, see:www.ciseionline.it/), which announced Sept. 9 that by year end its archives regarding the two million Italians who emigrated from that port city will be available on line for free public use, thanks to the sponsorship of the Compagnia di San Paolo. The announcement was made at Turin’s Museo Diffuso della Resistenza. The State Archives of Genoa has 12,038 nautical journals of ships which traveled out of the port between 1883 and 1956--part of a precious collection of documents that include passenger lists, now being catalogued.

    Genoa was a particularly important port of departure. From the second half of the 19th century onwards Genoa was the port of departure for 61% of those leaving their country. In an interview with the daily Corriere della Sera, the CISEI president Fabio Capocaccia between 1876 and 1901 almost two million Italians fled from their country. Thereafter the pace quickened, to the point that 1.7 million left Italy between 1902 and 1925. Under Fascism emigration continued, but at a slower pace, with only 400,000 leaving between 1926 and 1939. CISEI also plans to open a museum in Genoa within the year.

    Turin has a fairly new emigration museum, open since 2006 at Forssasco. And Rome’s fascinating National Museum of Emigration, located on the ground floor of the Vittorio Emanuele monument at Piazza Venezia, was inaugurated in 2009, in time to honor the 150 years of Italian unification. At that launch President Giorgio Napolitano said, “It is a heritage of sympathy, esteem and friendship which benefits Italy in the whole world. It is fruit also and above all of what those emigrants created when they went to the countries which offered them hospitality.”

    Besides what is on view at present, the Rome museum has an attic stuffed with donations from patrons, and so its displays of photographs, documents (letters, permits, passports) and such artifacts as cardboard suitcases are expected to change every six months. An hour-long documentary film showing scenes of emigration by ten Italian directors is also on view in the museum. At the end of this year the present exhibition will go on tour outside Italy, and, afterward, throughout Italy, which already has 54 regional exhibitions on emigration. In the words of Lorenzo Prencipe, president of the Emigration Study Center in Rome, “ Without a history of the phenomenon of emigration Italian history is inaccurate and incomplete.”

    The museum has three sections: the birth and development of Italian emigration; the regional geography of emigration; and its cultural reflections in cinema, literature, music, objects and rare documents. For a short video of its inauguration, see: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xaxy0l_museo-nazionale-dell-emigrazione-l_creation

    To read more, log onto www.clevelandmemory.org/italians/partii.html, which points out the irony that the first Italians to come to the New World were the captains of the ships of discovery. And to see an interesting film with music about emigration between 1892 and 1924, see the short films on YouTube by Marcello Bonitatibus, president of the cultural association Pietro de Stephanis, at Pettorano sul Gizio. The video was made for the conference Emigartion and Immigration, Songs and Music., held in August of 2007.
  • Facts & Stories

    Sick of Sleaze? Let’s Talk “Just Folks”

    Are you bored with bunga-bunga? Longing for the left to get real? Ready to throw a shoe at the Third Way? Tired of Tremonti?

    Me too, so let’s pretend that this is a Fox News feature and throw in some down-home news from here and there all over Italy. We’ll talk about the things that count, beginning with these days when kids go back to school, and proceed on to child care and—why not?—a bit of culture.

    SCHOOL DAZE: The song went, School days, school days,/ dear old golden rule days. This autumn in Rome it’s being rewritten so that the second line goes,Bring your own stool days. In one junior high school here, the Istituto Manzi, the principal says that they need some forty more chairs, and that in the science lab has only three chairs in all. Students sit on the desks. In another school the desks themselves are lacking. And elsewhere children are being advised to bring their own toilet paper. Students are planning a demo in Rome for early October.
     

    In the Veneto Region a law has been passed in commission, if not yet by the regional parliament, that says that absolute precedence for school entry is to go to families resident in the region for at least fifteen years. Not everyone in the Northern League, sponsor of the bill, is enthusiastic. Opponents, who call the pending bill “racist,” include the former Socialist mayor of Venice Nereo Laroni, now a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s Partito della Liberta’ (PdL).

    CHILD CARE: They are a May-December couple. He is a retired minor public official, she a library employee, and they live in a hamlet of 1,000 near Turin. When they married in 1990, twenty-one years ago, they found out they could not have a baby and they applied through legal channels to adopt one. Thirteen years later their application was rejected. Four years after that they managed to have a baby through complex scientific advances. The mother is now 57 and Daddy, 70. Problem is that busybody neighbors were horrified.

    Noticing that the baby was left unattended in the couple’s car, they called police. Never mind that the baby was asleep in a crib, and that the parents explained that the baby had been left for exactly seven minutes because they did not want to wake him. A judge seized the child and has put it out for permanent adoption. The four juvenile court judges (three women, one man) added that the baby had been born thanks to the couple’s misgotten exploitation of modern scientific techniques. That is, the couple did not have the moral right to have a baby at all. “The parents never asked themselves serious questions regarding the fact that the baby will be orphaned at an early age and before that will be obliged to care for elderly parents, who could have more or less handicapping pathologies just when as a young adult the child would need the support of its parents.” The last word was that the parents paid more attention to “the repayment of a narcissistic right to have a baby.”

    CULTIVATING CULTURE: Three years ago a huge Roman villa was discovered at San Cesareo in Puglia during excavations for construction of an apartment building complex and a shopping mall. The new Culture Minister Giancarlo Galan, who replaced Sandro Bondi this summer, explains that, “Although very important from the historic point of view, including for the presence of poorly conserved but handsome mosaics, the villa structure is relatively poorly preserved.” The villa will therefore the reburied so as to protect it. Fortunately, an adjacent nymphaeum (fountain garden) will be left intact.

    At the Ministry in Rome meanwhile the Superintendence has confirmed that its inspectors will not be reimbursed for gasoline for their cars while they make their rounds of the archaeological sites they are to inspect. Instead of driving the employees will be given bus tickets to places in Rome the Appia Antica, Ostia Antica and the Veii park. These sites are accessible by public transport, but many others are isolated, such as Vulci. Public archaeologists—that is, those who work for sites and are employed by the Ministry—who go on paying their own transport expenses will therefore have their salaries cut from E 1,700 monthly to E 1,300 (circa $2,350 to $1,800). The ruling is retroactive to April. The employees’ reaction: “We will call a strike.”
  • Facts & Stories

    The Vandals are Back in Rome, but Who are They?

    The Vandals sacked Rome back in 455. Today their equivalent have returned, striking this weekend to add a few cracks to the city’s art heritage, and to its legendary promise to remain the beloved Eternal City. Visited annually by some 23 million visitors, Piazza Navona is perhaps Rome’s most beloved square after St. Peter’s. At 8:30 Saturday morning, while its cafes were serving cappuccini and corneti, a man of perhaps 45 years of age jumped into the Baroque-era Fountain of the Moor, one of the two side fountains in Piazza Navona. Cameras show that he first tried to strike at the central figure, but slipped and instead smashed at one of the marble masks that decorate the fountain border.

     
    The Fountain of the Moor, the work of Giacomo della Porta, dates from 1575 and hence predates Bernini’s central Fountain of the Four Rivers. Its central statue is a Neptune-like figure with an African look (hence the word “Moor” or Moroccan in the name) standing in a conch shell and wrestling with a dolphin, surrounded by four statues of Tritons, or demi-gods of the sea. “The vandalism was the work of the usual idiots,” said Rome’s Cultural Heritage councilman Umberto Broccoli, “but fortunately police intervened quickly, and all the broken fragments were recovered.” Fortunately, too, this is a 19th century copy; the real thing is kept elsewhere.

     Fine—but later in the day another of the usual idiots (or perhaps the same) threw a few heavy paving stones of basalt (sanpietrini) at the Trevi Fountain sculptures, which had been restored fairly recently at considerable expense. Much of the Trevi Fountain is made of the fairly fragile Roman marble, travertine, which splinters easily. There too telecameras—and there are 1,200 scattered around downtown historical Rome—were in action, and witnesses saw the man act so hopes are high that he will be identified and arrested.
     
    Late Saturday night, in addition, a 20-year-old American tourist was hauled into the police station near the Colosseum after he was caught scaling the wall of the Colosseum and trying to pry off pieces of travertine to take home as a souvenir. At least in this case he has been identified, but otherwise throwing stones at precious monuments is all too easy, and casual vandalism is a problem that is creeping up on all of us who live here and love the beauty of the city.
     
    Vincenzo Maruccio, the Lazio regional secretary for Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori political party, blames the men and women at the top. “A leadership class that privatizes the Colosseum and organizes private events in place the whole world envies us for does not set a good example. Rome is ever less safe, It’s being turned over to hoodlums and delinquents, while the big crime organizations work undisturbed.” The reference to privatization is the awarding of the rights to the Colosseum image for publicity to shoe tycoon Diego Della Valle.
     
    “There is a total lack of respect for the art heritage of the city of Rome,” Maruccio went on to say.
     
    Neighborhood residents complain that petty crime, excess noise and vandalism is all too common in and around Piazza Navona, which—importantly—has elements from the square’s original ancient Roman substructure and is next door to an important museum. “This is no man’s land,” one Piazza Navona storekeeper protested. “Lots of people still jump into the fountains for fun.” Fun? Well, in 1997 a youth jumped into the Bernini fountain, using the tail of one of its marble sea monsters for his diving board. The tail broke off. There can be little justification in the evident lack of police supervision or failure to identify the graffiti writers who leave hideous smears on freshly painted walls in Rome. One friend of mine, who lives near Campo de’ Fiori, repaints her front door weekly.
     
    Other monuments in Italy are at risk. The obelisk at Piazza del Popolo, which came to Rome in 10 AD, has been covered with graffiti. The statues of national Italian heroes on the Janiculum Hill have been losing their heads for years. Even the stairs of the Spanish Steps show damage. A British School marble balustrade was damaged, repaired, and damaged again, three times in all. A year ago in Parma the wall of the cathedral, the Duomo, was damaged by graffiti writers. In Genoa the monumental cemetery, which is considered the equivalent of an open-air museum for its fine statuary, has been systematically damaged. At Pompeii the House of the Chaste Lovers was sacked by thieves in 2003. And at Trani in Southern Italy two medieval stone lions at the entrance to the cathedral were damaged.
     
    On this same weekend in the little town of Trevignano Romano where I live, an hour north of Rome, population 6,000 or so, vandals struck, knocking down and obliterating the occasional historical markers that appear every few hundred yards along a lovely lakeside walkway. The week before unruly youths literally knocked down the front door of the home of a woman living alone. Is there a connection with the vandalism in Rome? Possibly.
     
    Maruccio’s explanation is that resentment of social injustice is combined with the knowledge that the vandals will not be punished. In fact, the image of the man who took a hammer to the Fontana del Moro was caught on more than one camera, but is fuzzy enough that his capture seems unlikely. To this I would add that the abuse of alcohol and drugs is demonstrably on the rise among young Italians, including the 15-year-olds. Among young Europeans between 15 and 29 years of age one death out of four is a result of abuse of alcohol. This is a new problem for Italy. In addition, the relatively low cost of cocaine today has made it by far the most popular drug in Italy, estimated at representing 80% of all illegal drug sales.
     
     
  • Art & Culture

    Stylish Grand Opera for Summertime Umbria

    In summertime in Umbria, there may be no cotton, but the livin’ is easy. The setting: on a balmy evening a full moon illuminates a medieval stone church in a tiny hillside town dedicated – as churches tend to be here in Umbria, the green heart of Italy – to the gentle Saint Francis. In a garden to one side of the church, 350 chairs face a stage that has been built and rebuilt twenty-nine times for an annual outdoor music festival, culminating this August with four stylish, sold-out performances of Puccini’s Tosca.

    The rapturous musical heart of Italy, Umbria boasts over twenty annual festivals in which music is the centerpiece, from the renowned Spoleto Festival created by the late composer Gian Carlo Menotti to Umbria Jazz and the Classical Music Foundation concert series in Perugia. All these attract famous performers from the world over, and have considerable means behind them. But what kites the serendipitous scene at Preggio – what brings the hamlet’s 29th festival a step beyond the merely charming - is the quality of the production, which fuses high-tech sound with the extraordinarily capable local Umbrian talent and international performers, directors and patrons. And it attracts an international audience – largely vacationers in Umbria and Tuscany.

    Starring in the performance, directed by Father Francesco Bastianoni, were two Perugia natives, the beautiful and talented Chiara Giudice as Tosca and the appropriately evil-looking baritone Giulio Boschetti as the wicked, womanizing police chief Scarpia. Sebastian Ferrada Garramon – a tenor with powerful voice and equally powerful stage presence – was the artist Tosca loves, Cavaradossi. Born in Uruguay in 1978, Ferrada Garramon studied and performed in Argentina and Chile. Since 2008, when he moved to Milan, he has studied voice at the Academy of the Teatro alla Scala and at the Accademia Internazionale della Musica. 

    Director Antonello Madau Diaz, another native of Perugia, is a veteran with countless La Scala productions under his belt, and has directed productions for the Arena of Verona and, in the U.S., for the Philadelphia and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. Also busy with films (including with Fellini), Madau Diaz was art director for the famous RAI TV filming of Tosca in the actual places where Puccini had envisioned the action – the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle for Act I, the piano nobile of Michelangelo’s Palazzo Farnese for Act II and the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo for Act III.

    So how do you bring an orchestra to a stage on a medieval hillside? Enter high tech Japan, whose Musical Academy of the Showa University generously donated to the Festival two Electone Model El-90 digital synthesizers. A 21st century Hammond organ, they reproduce, with stunning accuracy, a full orchestra sound, when played – as they were – by two competent young Japanese women, Kana Sasaki and Yuka Chiba, each following the complete musical score, no mean feat. The conductor, Bastianoni, is president of the Preggio Festival, and a trained musician who subsequently entered the priesthood and today serves as the parish priest for Preggio. And behind the scenes were dozens local English, Italian and American stage hands, organizers and patrons, among the latter American patron Bruce Wolfe and Italian patrons Marco and Maria Teresa Stoppoloni.

    I asked the tenor, Sebastian, what set this opera production apart from others he has seen. His answer was simple: “It isn’t a cheap production—it’s the real thing.” And so it was.

    Those who do not want to wait for next summer’s Preggio Music Festival can take advantage, this September, of the offering in Spoleto of another Puccini opera, Madama Butterfly, to be conducted by Caro Palleschi and directed by Andrea Stanisci, for six performances, Sept. 20-25, in the Teatro Nuovo. Coinciding with the wine harvest in Umbria, a night at the opera is a fine excuse for an early autumn vacation.
  • Art & Culture

    Getting the Dirt on Ancient Rome

    ROME – For over fifteen years Piero Giusberti, an architect specialized in archaeological restorations, has been digging in Roman dirt—ancient Roman dirt, that is. And in what amounts to a sneak preview for i-italy, last week he showed this reporter through the so-called Cryptoporticus, an amazing, high-ceilinged underground gallery on the Oppian Hill to see the latest discovery: a First Century AD colorful wall mosaic, 53 feet long and 6.6 feet high, whose centerpiece is a nude Apollo, god of poetry and music, flanked by the Muses. Border details show a sophisticated use of perspective.

     
    The gallery stands atop a corner of the ruins of Nero’s Domus Aurea, the Golden House overlooking the artificial lake where the Colosseum was subsequently built. Its famous portico was the showcase for the emperor’s collection of 100 or so statues, but after Nero’s forced suicide in 68 AD, the whole Domus Aurea complex was destroyed in the Romans’ campaign of dannatio memoriae, intended to erase all memory of him.
     
    Today, with countless tons of earth removed, the gallery has been cleared enough to show that it culminates in an elegantly decorated room which may have served as a lobby for a municipal office building dating from the time of the Emperor Titus (AD 79-81), who finished the Colosseum and built modest baths atop the hilly site.
     
    In turn, two decades later the Baths of Titus were knocked down and replaced by the emperor Trajan’s far more ambitious and sprawling complex of thermal baths, probably on designs by the visionary Greek architect Apollodorus of Damascus, author of Trajan’s Market and, it is believed, of the Pantheon. The gallery with the mosaic remained as part of the foundations for Trajan’s Baths.
     
    Dedicated in 109 AD, they were in use for perhaps four centuries, but fell into neglect after the Goths besieged Rome in 537. From that point on the tunnel-like gallery below remained untouched for centuries, although during the Renaissance, scavengers hunting buried treasure dug pits that were later used as dumps. In addition, prior to the Napoleonic conquest of Italy in the early 19th Century, the Vatican army protecting the pope used the gallery as a powder magazine. Indeed, Giusberti and his team have uncovered a series of vats which once held potassium nitrate, the chemical compound used in gunpowder. Fortunately, unlike the Acropolis in Athens, which was similarly used as a munitions depot, this did not explode.

    Work to unearth the gallery began in the early 1990s under the Rome city archaeological division, then headed by Eugenio La Rocca. “When we began,” Giusberti relates, “the lower half was entirely filled with earth, and the Colle Oppio gardeners used it to store their equipment. No one imagined what lay below.”
     
    Because Rome has never been abandoned, non-monumental ruins revealing the details of daily life, such as an office waiting room, are found rarely, and Giusberti’s work has brought us a postcard from ancient Rome at the height of empire. The decorated gallery is an exceptional find, as is the painted wall in the big room which shows what La Rocca called a “bird’s eye view” of a particularly prosperous Roman city.
     
    “We don’t yet know which city. Perhaps it is imaginary, but it must resemble Rome itself,” said Giusberti, pointing to walls painted to look like stone surrounding the town. “Inside the walls we have a temple, a theater, and people’s homes jammed close together.”
     
    Thirteen years ago a first portion of this painted wall was discovered, showing boats in a river port giving onto the sea and a bridge with constructions atop, like the gallery over Florence’s Ponte Vecchio. Countless conjectures were made about which town was depicted, but to date without success. Peering through a miniature video camera, one could also see into an adjacent room, where a mosaic wall shows a lively scene of a grape harvest, with men picking bunches of grapes while others, barefoot, trampled grapes in a big vat. I saw it at that time, at eye level; earth clearance today puts it high above the present (and still temporary) ground level, so that I have to tilt my head back to see it. This adjacent room is as yet unexcavated, but will be in the near future, Giusberti promises.
     
    Restoration of the gallery has been complex and expensive since, besides the extensive earth removal, consolidation of its perimeter was required, and waterproofing of the Trajan-level vault. But the rewards continue as earth removal deepens the floor level. A hint of what is to come: what seemed a pit proved to be a perpendicular tunnel leading down into an early Nymphaeum, or wall fountain area dedicated to the Nymphs.
     
     
     
     
     
     
  • Op-Eds

    Italy on Trial: The Cat Eating Its Tail



    ROME – Questions about Italy pour in from all sides, but let’s face it: no one has the answers. So let’s pretend this is a press conference and, with the humility owed to such a difficult moment, attempt at least tentative replies to some of the pressing questions.
     
    Q. Italians may have public debt, but they have relatively little private debt because, unlike in the US, the Italian banks are notoriously cautious about making loans. Is it really so dangerous that Italy’s public debt is 120% of GDP? (GDP—PIL in Italian—is the European version of Gross National Product.)
     
    A. It’s true that the banks have been cautious, but the Italian government owes outsiders 20% more than the total which the whole country earns in a year from its production of goods and services. The worse things are, the more servicing that debt costs citizens because interest rates rise according to the damage. To pay such a high rate of interest simply makes Italians poorer, and the debt bigger. The cat is eating its tail.
     
    Q. Who cares?
     
    A. Everybody. The global economy is a series of communicating vessels, and, as the current crisis shows, what harms one country harms another. If the Euro has a cold—and it does—the US stock market sneezes. If Germany agrees to help Italy with a bail-out, the German politicians, who answer to their tax payers, know they will pay at the polls. In ordinary households in Italy, resentment of the government for the current mess translates into alienation from the political class and from the government—and this in a country whose tradition is that people are subjects rather than citizens, an attitude which legitimizes the national sport of tax dodging. According to the 2011 edition of the independent social research institute EURISPES, the political parties command the esteem of barely 8% of Italians, the combined polling result for “maximum confidence” and “enough confidence.” This means no confidence on the part of 92%.
     
    Q. But Greece was helped.
     
    A. With a population of under 11 million, Greece is a small country by comparison with Italy, population around 60 million. If Greece was too small not to save, Italy may just appear too big to save.
     
    Q. Who's to blame?
     
    A. Sloppiness on the part of the political class which has been governing for the past two decades. From 1975 until 1983 Italian public debt hovered below 65% of GDP. At that point the debt began to creep up slowly but inexorably under a series of governments headed in turn by Christian Democrats, Socialists and temporary caretaker cabinets run by non-political experts. By 1992 it had bounced up to 105% of GDP. Under the Silvio Berlusconi government, in power from May 1994 through January 1995, public debt continued to advance, reaching almost 122%. Since then, despite efforts of both rightist and leftist governments, it has never gone below 104% of GDP.
     
    Q. Anybody who’s ever gone into a public office or post office knows that the Italian bureaucracy is bloated. Why not just fire them?
     
    A. In all fairness, at the end of World War II, Italy inherited a tough situation. Fascism left the state involved in half of all Italian corporations, and half the industrial capacity had been destroyed. Unemployment was therefore tragic, and the state hired tens of thousands more employees than it needed in order to keep people off the dole. This was aggravated when farm laborers abandoning the countryside for the city needed work. A tradition of working for the state sank in, generation after generation.
     
    Q. But today the bureaucy is bloated, and civil servants are in unions that have been slow to catch up. Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?
     
    A. Many have tried, but vested interests prevailed. Today one of the discussions turns on cutting out the provincial governments, there being local, state and national as well. But no one dares, and in the latest version of the emergency budget this rather obviously desirable reduction of a needless bureaucratic layer is not mentioned. Twenty years ago a cabinet minister charged with reducing the bureaucracy tried to install a merit system for promotions, starting with teachers. He was simply blocked by the unions. I also recall a demonstration down Rome’s Via del Corso where signs read, BANK EMPLOYEE POWER.
     
    Q. That was a long time ago. So today what is the way out?
     
    A. Three possible ways out are under debate. The first is to keep the present government in charge on grounds that it is unwise to rock the boat in the midst of such a serious economic crisis. The second is to kick the government out and hold new elections as soon as possible under the current election law, which hands a huge premium of members of parliament to the front-runner and beefs up the powers of the political party bosses because they, and only they, choose all the candidates. The third is to install a caretaker government of non-politicians to tend the store (and revise the particularly nasty election law). Candidates mentioned as desirable to head such a caretaker cabinet of experts are the reputable Mario Monti or even Mario Draghi, both distinguished economists.
     
    Q. What about the vote for overseas Italians?
     
    A. Until and unless the right to vote is challenged under an hypothetical new Italian election law, the right to vote remains extended to overseas Italians. This Spring’s referendum votes were warning bells, however. The votes of overseas Italians were at risk of not being counted because, between the time the referenda were voted overseas, and the time when the vote took place in Italy, the wording was changed. This time it did not matter because the referenda were passed by a huge turnout, and there was no chicanery. But such a situation should be on watch for the future, as should the possible (if not yet probable) revision of the current law.
     
    Q. Does the Vatican have a say in any of this?
     
    A. Yes, and talks are underway about reviving an openly pro-Church party. Reliable sources report that Pierferdinando Casini, who heads the Unione di Centro (UDC) has just had talks with high Italian Church officials, who are now opposed to early elections. Casini had been calling for Premier Berlusconi’s resignation, but has now reversed his position, saying in effect, “They’re the government—let them go ahead and govern.” The Church, it would seem, is now in the don’t-rock-the-boat camp.
     
    Q. Well, Ms. Smarty-pants, where do you stand?
     
    A. I would like to see a technical government put in charge to handle the crisis, and rewrite the election law – while protecting the right of overseas Italians to vote—followed by elections next Spring. And may the best man or woman win.
     
     

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