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.
ROME – Italy is a place of culture, beauty, and a well-oiled style of life — crisis or not. Foreigners always return for more. But in order to make sure that the tourists keep coming back — and telling their friends — some guidelines are needed. According to data from the federation of hotels “Fedalberghi”, […]
The Italian city’s decision to take away a modern sculpture of “wonder” says more about the present than the past.
More and more immigrants think having “Western” features is a secret to success.
He was Benedict XVI’s right-hand man, and now runs daily operations for Francis, but it’s still not clear where German-born Georg Ganswein fits into other power struggles in Rome.
ROME – Refuse from the shacks float by in the river’s brown, putrid water. There is mud everywhere and the acrid smell of burning plastic lingers in the air. Chickens crow and dogs bark, rusty chain-links act as fencing and a gate. It looks like Manila, but this is Rome. Welcome to the “City of […]
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti was called on to lead a caretaker government. His expertise was welcome, but then the economics professor was bitten by the bug of political ambition…
This is the good kind of cheesy…
TURIN – Have you ever wanted to take a stroll in Yosemite National Park? Or discover the South Omo Valley in Ethiopia? How about Cappadocia in Turkey? Now you can explore all of these sites from the comfort of your living room thanks to Trail Me Up, a sort of Google Street View, where you […]
Pope Francis will preach humility and fraternity in the spirit of his namesake St. Francis of Assisi. Can he make it relevant in the 21st century?
Benedict XVI himself said Africa deserves to be considered for the papacy.
Is Italy ready to take back the papacy after being shut out by the Polish John Paul II and Germany’s Benedict XVI? This truck driver’s son is the Italians’ best hope.
TURIN – Marco* was dragged here by his parents. He is 17 and spends 16 hours a day glued to the computer. Two years of school down the drain and no friends. But he still doesn’t get it. “I’m fine,” he says. He wakes up at two in the afternoon and goes to bed at […]
Vac-packed pesto risotto never tasted so good!
VATICAN CITY – Nevermind the “courage, humility, respect and lucidity,” and the other praise we’ve heard associated with Pope Benedict XVI’s historic decision to step down, he leaves behind a papacy stained with failure and a deep feeling of something left incomplete. On some matters, the Pope’s decision is indeed a form of renunciation. “Purification” […]
(Hint: it won’t ever come true)
A Belgium perspective on the urgent risks that Italy’s economic implosion will spread. France could be next.
Beppe Grillo’s protest movement was the winner in Italy’s election that signals a failure of an entire political class.
The most alive of the dead languages is also getting a boost in some surprising corners outside the Vatican walls.
-Essay- We’re all critical of the leaders of our time: Obama let us down, Merkel isn’t Adenauer, and Hollande and Cameron are just pale copies of Monsieur Mitterrand and Lady Thatcher. Meanwhile, in Italy, in front of the disappointing batch of candidates for national elections, nostalgia runs deep for figures of the past from Christian […]
Silvio Berlusconi bad-mouths Angela Merkel, while Mario Monti tries to woo her. But there are deeper reasons the German factor is at play as Italians go to the polls Sunday.
VATICAN CITY – A long queue of men dressed in black is winding silently around St. Peter’s Square: They are Roman priests here to say their last goodbyes to Benedict XVI at a recent Vatican audience. When he decided to resign, did it cross the Pope’s mind that the cross he’d bear would also affect […]
Signs of decline began to appear two years ago, leading the Pope’s doctor to insist on limited air travel. Portrait of an old and weak man, who may have had little choice but resignation.
The resignation of Benedict XVI is historic for the Catholic Church, but it also shows the difficulty of growing old in a society of constant demands and real-time technology.
From Latin America, an early eye toward the coming Conclave, and the future of the Catholic Church after decades of fiercely conservative leadership.
-OpEd- TURIN – Perhaps we deserve Berlusconi and his lies. Not the Italians, maybe, given as a single citizen is largely powerless in the face of a political system. But the media, especially the television, definitely does deserve him. A brief explanation is required: For the last three weeks, every time I turn on the […]
Turns out Benedict XVI had been reflecting on resignation since falling last March. After finally telling the world, the Pope returned to his private quarters where he was overcome by emotion.
TURIN – So it’s like this: after having solved a mystery involving the Pope in Rome and the esoteric world of Leonardo da Vinci in Paris, the new Dan Brown thriller will be set in the streets of Florence, as well as in the pages of Dante’s Inferno. Dan Brown is no master of style, […]
Two decades after the Sicilian Mafia killed magistrate hero Giovanni Falcone, crime networks have shifted drug trafficking from bases to Russia, Colombia, Burma…and beyond.
Barack Obama’s longtime campaign guru David Axelrod has a new client: Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti. Axelrod slipped into Rome to meet privately with Monti, 69, a political centrist and longtime university professor and European Union Commissioner, who served one year as caretaker Prime Minister. Monti is now in his first campaign for higher office, […]
SANTA RITA – “Don’t let nostalgia screw you…” Alfredo tells the young Totò in the 1988 Italian movie Cinema Paradiso, urging him not to look back, to forget his native Sicily: the “evil earth.” Maurizio Spinello, instead, kneads that very nostalgia into his bread every day, having chosen to stay in his village of 11 […]
Behind codes of encryption, the so-called “Deep Web” hosts a vast network of people trading in illegal sales of all sorts, most notably any drug imaginable.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, opera performers could take any role they wanted. Sopranos were kings, countertenors their lovers; although, in an old theater tradition that went back to the Greeks, wet nurses were always played by men, and the character was re-written if no male could be found to play it. Only in […]
CALCATA – Alessandro Falconi had promised he would pick up his guests by car, but he is an hour late. Luckily, the 30-kilometer drive to Calcata, where Falconi runs a small Bed & Breakfast, more than made up for the long wait. The roads in this countryside north of Rome are narrow and winding. Falconi’s […]
OpEd: Prime Minister Mario Monti has announced his resignation, after Silvio Berlusconi sabotages his technical government. Why can’t Italy be a “normal” country?
ROME – For a foreigner who doesn’t understand the Byzantinism of Italian politics, it will seem paradoxical: as of yesterday, the majority that has kept Mario Monti’s government in place is suddenly hanging by a thread, even as the main economic packages were approved by the legislature. And now, elections could be right around the […]
NAPLES – Great news for all connoisseurs of French fries – that is, practically everyone: if it’s done correctly, frying is not bad for your health. Researchers at the Federico II University of Naples and from the nearby “Dolce & Salato” professional cooking school, have conducted a study that shows that frying isn’t bad, if […]
TURIN – It may not be wartime, but the economic crisis is changing basic facts of life. And in some cases, changing them backward in time. One notable change is that Italian women are rediscovering jobs as domestic helpers (housecleaners and care givers), that had been taken over in recent years by a virtual labor […]
BAROLO – One of the wine labels is of Veuve widow Clicquot champagne — when the widow still had a husband. The label bears the name of her now-unknown husband Eugene. Another label comes from one of the oldest vineyards in Burgundy, Labaume l’Ainé. It bears no date but is dated before 1798, the year […]
MILAN – Amazon was born in a car: Jeff Bezos wrote the first draft of his business plan for the company on a long drive between New York and Seattle. It was symbolic for the company, which arrived on the scene in 1995, selling books over the Internet. Today, Amazon is the biggest store in […]
ROME – It was a disquieting statement from the former butler of Pope Benedict XVI, as he took the stand in a Vatican court hearing his case. Paolo Gabriele, who lived for six years in the papal apartment, explained the motives that had led him to photocopy the Pope’s private papers: “Over time, I developed […]