Since 2015, Europe’s strategy to stop irregular migration has focused on arresting so-called smugglers. But those steering the vessels are usually desperate migrants themselves, forced to take the helm.
country: Italy
Stay 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.
The Mapping Diversity platform examined maps of 30 cities across 17 European countries, finding that women are severely underrepresented in the group of those who name streets and squares. The one (unsurprising) exception: The Virgin Mary.
Argentine journalist Ignacio Pereyra travels to Italy alone to do some paperwork as his family stays behind. While he walks alone around Rome, he experiences mixed feelings: freedom, homesickness and nostalgia, and wonders what leads people to desire larger families.
The Italian Defense minister has blamed an uptick in illegal immigrant arrivals in Italy on the Russian mercenary group, which has a strong presence in Africa, with the risk that it could divide the Western alliance. Wagner chief Prigozhin is having none of it.
Milan will now only allow the registration of biological parents. The city had been one of the few in Italy to recognize same-sex parents, but it was overruled by the country’s conservative government.
Every year thousands of young Italians apply for a Working Holiday visa and escape to Australia. They have many reasons for leaving — but many seek a better work-life balance down under. And then, there are those who cut their adventure short to return home to the bel paese.
After a visit to a holding facility, a group of lawyers and human rights activists have charged the Italian government is mistreating nearly 100 survivors of the tragic shipwreck 10 days ago.
Like photography, new forms of artistic expression arise in every age. Now, new artificial intelligence is making it possible to create incredible images in an instant — but it opens up an ethical and philosophical debate.
The death toll from a shipwrecked migrant boat off the coast of Italy has reached 63. Relatives of the victims and survivors, who have begun to arrive in the southern town, are all mostly immigrants themselves.
Dozens of migrants are confirmed dead, with many more casualties feared. Survivors say the crew threw people overboard, with land finally in sight after a perilous Mediterranean journey from Turkey.
Italy decriminalized abortion in 1978, but the law allows for doctors to conscientiously object. And so many do that it makes it difficult for many women to access health care when they need it most, with some turning to unsafe abortions.
Certain female doctors, extremist midwives, online consultants extol the benefits of painful labor, blame mothers who resort to C-sections and convince them to refuse anesthesia. From Italy, an expose on who they are and why they preach a return to the ancestral nature of motherhood.
Italy’s most-wanted fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro lived in the open in a small town in Sicily, near his birthplace, thanks to widespread silence and complicity from his neighbors. It was essential to evading police for more than 30 years.
“And then they say that there’s no crisis?”
Categories
On The Couch And On The Lam
Our Dottoré looks back on an entertaining session with a witty runaway convict.
Two decades after the U.S. Catholic Church finally began to confront priest abuse of minors, and many other countries followed suit, Italian bishops who live with the Vatican in their midst are reluctant to break the church’s vow of silence and answer to victims.
Many lives have been lost, rights trampled and dreams crushed. But through the haze, the world took the right turn on many fronts this past year, from Ukraine to Iran to China. Trying to take stock amid the suffering.
Trasite!
Categories
No Kindness Under The Christmas Tree
T’is the season for depression …
Acclaimed Italian writer Roberto Saviano is in court this month facing defamation charges from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. With this essay, Saviano stands by his words, and his right to use them.
Vladimiro Zagrebelsky, an Italian jurist and former judge on the European Court of Human Rights, says Italy’s new government’s blocking rescued migrants from coming ashore is a likely violation of international law, and indication of what it thinks of basic human rights.
“It’s just that all the hardships he has faced have made him more appreciative of the simple things — he’s happier than us.”
Authoritarianism and conflict are on the rise around the world. Yet democracy will not be saved on the battlefield but in the classroom. Schools, and more importantly, how teachers teach is crucial in showing the next generations that there is no single defining point of view.
In one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, thousands of Italian minors lost a parent or caregiver to COVID. However, unlike other places, Italy has yet to set out a clear plan to support them, leaving them more vulnerable to mental health issues, and even abuse.
After far-right politician Giorgia Meloni emerged as the top vote-getter in Italy’s election, the question on everyone’s lips is what will her relationship be with the European Union. The risk of her pushing for an Italian exit from the EU is slim.
As the right-wing coalition tops Italian elections, far-right leader of the Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, is set to become Italy’s next prime minister. Both her autobiography and the just concluded campaign help fill in the holes in someone whose roots are in Italy’s post-fascist political parties.
In the face of Russia’s stranglehold over supplies, the European Commission has proposed support packages and price caps. But across Europe, fears about the cost of living are spreading — and with it, doubts about support for Ukraine.
As Italy prepares to vote, migration from Africa is once again a hot topic, even as the number of arrivals is dropping. A view from the tiny Italian island that has been at the center of the debate for more than a decade, where the specter of migrants is rolled out as prime election propaganda.
In the northern Italian region of Veneto, drought has forced half the municipalities to ration water resources. In contrast, the region’s Coca-Cola plant has upped production, using even more water that it gets for a cheap price.
The Maseiantonios, whose roots are in Naples, left their native Italy in search of opportunities and, like so many other Italians, found Buenos Aires. There, they offer the native Neapolitan recipe of pizza to the country that offered Naples its most delectable sports star.
Why are no locals in the northern Italian city of Verona applying for the once prized permanent job posting? The answer is found elsewhere.
News of the acquittal in Italy of a man who confessed to killing his 92-year-old disabled mother comes just as the country is discussing the reversal of a law that bans assisted suicide. For La Stampa, Luigi Mancone argues that legislators cannot leave assisted suicide in a grey zone.
Italy’s low fertility rate and lack of support for young people have become a hot topic. But economic and social conditions are not what’s stopping all Italian women from having children. Some simply want to do other things with their lives. Does that make them selfish, asks Italian writer Simonetta Sciandivasci.
Italy’s head of state is being elected next week, amid a flood of attention of the candidacy of infamously misogynous former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Having a woman in the presidency, argues Italian writer and intellectual Dacia Maraini, may finally help steer the country in a better direction.
The pandemic has exposed longstanding inequalities and brought more people into a cycle of hunger and precariousness,
Italian writer Lia Celi has her would-be mother’s “sixth sense” put to the test.
The European Commission’s efforts to push for more inclusive language are important. But we should be careful and make sure we make room for differences.
This small Italian town is remembered well for being on the front line in the fight against COVID-19. Now it faces vaccine hesitancy.
The disappointment with last month’s COP26 outcome was focused on the failure to deliver on the promise of eradicating fossil fuels, opting instead for a watered-down compromise that merely “reduces” reliance on the polluting energy sources that cause climate change. But the world leaders in Glasgow also missed another crucial opportunity: to squarely address the […]
Surrogacy is still considered quite controversial, especially in Italy where a story has made headlines after would-be parents renounced a baby born in Ukraine. The author says we must face the ethical (and other) questions rather than dismiss the practice as “uterus for rent.”