WorldcrunchStay updated with comprehensive news on Italy from Worldcrunch. Discover insights on Italian politics, economic developments, societal issues, and cultural landmarks with translations from top international sources. Highlights include Rome, Milan, Venice, the Italian film industry, modern cuisine, and events like the Venice Biennale.
MILAN — Taking home leftover food from a restaurant is not common practice in Italy, where your fresh plate of lasagna should be finished the first time around. Basta. But as the world struggles to reduce food waste, even Italians may be coming around to the idea of leaving a meal with leftovers in hand […]
In the small Sicilian town Of Mineo is a sprawling facility where asylum seekers, many of whom have survived perilous journeys, live in limbo and face exploitation.
Competing Muslim groups are vying for official recognition from the Italian state — and a share of the country’s “8 per 1,000” taxpayer pie.
An upstart from Savoy has challenged the royal authority of Marcello I, prince of the unofficially unrecognized so-called Principality of Seborga.
Among the many potential applications are the defense of digital copyright for photographers, and the end of the hassle of online passwords.
In a never-before-published interview shortly before his suicide, the Jewish-Italian author opens up about his adolescent angst and traumas beyond Auschwitz.
NEW YORK — Umberto Eco died last month in his Milan apartment, among his 30,000 books. He wrote many of them himself, and these books were translated into more than 30 different languages. He had them all. Even when translated into foreign languages, Eco owned them, because he worked hard with every single translator. He […]
When the owners of the tiny, unspoiled island of Budelli went bankrupt and a would-be New Zealand buyer’s bid failed, middle school students stepped in, starting an ambitious global fundraising campaign that has gone viral.
When the legendary 87-year-old film composer finally won his first Oscar, he chose to speak in his native language. It was a subtly powerful message back home in Italy.
The village of Sutera was facing demographic doom as young people have been leaving for generations. Then locals started to wonder about those migrants coming to Italy.
A visit on the eve of the 500th anniversary of the neighborhood where Jews were forced to live, giving the world the culture, confinement and indignity of the ghetto.
The Seguso family’s passion for glasswork burns brightly, even after 23 generations dedicated to the same painstaking but breathtaking craft.
Italian museum officials covered up prized ancient statues for the visit of Iranian President Rouhani. But what do we lose with such overly eager attention to Muslim sensibilities? And what about our own?
In Italy, between 5,000 and 7,000 priests have given up their robes. Some ex-priests re-enter lay society with a female companion, others struggle to build a new life from scratch.
-OpEd- ROME — The year begins with the absurd destiny of two children, both tiny victims of a war that we’d rather not see. On the left is a screen-grab image of a shockingly young boy who is featured in the first propoganda video of 2016 by the butchers of ISIS. Like adults members of […]
TURIN — In Brussels, it doesn’t matter if your 8-year-olds have a smartphone in their pockets with more computing power than the Rosetta space probe. The European Union passed a regulation this month that raised the legal age for the use of social media to 16, requiring parental consent before teenagers can open Facebook, Instagram, […]
TURIN — Like in a comedy that suddenly turns into tragedy, a caricature of Silvio Berlusconi may become the next president of the United States. It’s not really shocking that Donald Trump would propose closing the Internet and the borders to Muslims, as Americans have grown sick and tired of President Obama’s babblings and potential […]
Average age: 65. The one immigrant family in town had a baby girl, the first birth in a decade — and they’re already making plans to leave.
The pontiff’s visit to Tuscany brings him to the historic textile town of Prato, where Chinese workers have flocked to toil in what are often very inhuman circumstances. These are the faithful Francis wishes to see.
On the island of Sardinia, asylum seekers rebuild their lives on the football pitch.
Arcangelo Ricciardi’s rise in the world of chess seemed too sudden. And it was. Caught using hidden mini webcams to defeat international chess masters, his board is tipped.
What did Pompeii look like before Mount Vesuvius erupted? And what was on the famous Herculaneum scrolls? Modern technology can provide answers.
The six Nigerian women had each risked their lives like so many crossing the Mediterranean. When they found each other in church in northern Italy, they discovered they had something else in common.
The bacterium Xylella has arrived in Italy, infecting thousands of olive trees in a stretch of the southeastern peninsula. Europe is powerless, with the region’s entire economy at risk.
After a devastating leak and allegations of working with oppressive regimes, the Milan technology firm’s founder responds to the critics.
As Venice’s biennial art extravaganza reveals, sexual provocation is old hat, and anti-capitalism is the new means of selling expensive art to millionaires.
TURIN — From the forbidden apple to Esau’s lentils, the Bible offers a divine feast of food-related storytelling. How should Cronus, the Titan who ate his children, be classified? With the cannibals, or among those with gastroesophageal reflux disease? If you want to know how important it is to eat healthy food, consult the Bible. […]
Italian PM Matteo Renzi has obtained Washington’s blessing to pursue its own dialogue with the Kremlin. Could Rome be the bridge to resolving the Ukraine crisis?
La Stampa takes on big questions in Muslim world with Sunni Islam’s highest authority, who was at a conference in Italy, his first trip to Europe since taking his post in Cairo.
Saying that a starred rating in the Bible of fine dining actually turns off locals, Donatella restaurant in Oviglio has decided to give back the precious star.
TURIN — Italian politicians from very different backgrounds have been trying to capitalize on last week’s victory of Spain’s anti-austerity party Podemos in regional elections: from centrist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and the populist Northern League leader Matteo Salvini, to the banker-turned-cabinet minister Corrado Passera and leftist LGBT activist and governor of the Puglia region […]
Transportable and cheap, a made-in-Italy DNA kit prototype promises to allow molecular analysis directly in the field, sending collected data instantly across the world.
As boatloads of desperate immigrants land in Italy, the debate is highly charged. One writer reminds his countrymen of their own emigrant past.
Young men who left Eritrea, by way of Libya, may have all ended up in Lampedusa, but they took many different paths getting there.
-Analysis- TURIN — Thousands of people — calling them people, i.e. men, women and children, is the first step — have died in the Strait of Sicily since 2010. Sunday saw the worst tragedy yet, but it was not the first, and unfortunately it won’t be the last. Many of these people are fleeing the […]
You’ve heard of storm chasers and tornado hunters who travel far and wide to capture extreme weather. Carlo Dellarole will go anywhere anytime that the moon and sun cross paths.
Details emerge of poisonous links between local politicians and organized crime networks in Sicily working together to siphon public funds and exploit migrants arriving via Lampedusa.
Dutch soccer fans smashed and urinated their way through Rome last week. Could Italian authorities have done anything to stop them?
-OpEd- TURIN — Geography is inexorable: Italy can never be isolated from Libya, which is just 300 miles from the coast of Sicily. Still, the Italian public tends to be isolated from the rest of the world. The government knows both these truths. Unlike any other European or Western country, Italy kept its Libyan embassy […]
An old cinema in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood was abandoned until a group of students refurbished it to give new life to masterpieces of the past. But they never anticipated what would happen next.