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 — “We deserve a smile …” With these words, Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte urged the country to celebrate the reopening of the country’s regional borders on June 3. Unfortunately, there’s very little to smile about, and nothing to celebrate. As it reopens, Italy is a country that has been worn out by the […]
-Essay- Among the many things that COVID-19 taught us, one is to not measure the world by latitude. Take the case of Milan, a shining example, we’re told, of northern Italian industriousness and efficiency that’s supposedly absent in the south. And yet this capital of the Lombardy region saw one of the world’s worst COVID-19 […]
Charles de Gaulle was the first world leader to truly understand the power of television, using regular presidential broadcasts as a way to circumvent French legislators, labor unions and other levers of democratic influence.
-Analysis- ROME — “Curiouser and curiouser!” the famously ungrammatical exclamation from Alice in Wonderland in the 1865 Lewis Carroll classic. The current situation created by the pandemic is certainly not wonderful, but it is quite curious, and grows stranger and stranger with every passing day. We are caught between the willingness to continue the social […]
FERRERA ERBOGNONE — Though Italy’s total number of COVID-19 cases has topped 100,000, one town near the epicenter in the Lombardy region has registered zero infections. Now researchers hope to see if this town, with a population of 1,200, holds clues to understanding how the virus spreads? Ferrera Erbognone, the town that has been completely […]
As the toll passes 10,000, Italians try to look past the unthinkable numbers to remember each life lost, including a 34-year-old father from a town near Milan.
In the country hit hardest by coronavirus, a shortage of seasonal workers who couldn’t cross the border has set of a spiral of trouble for farmers across Italy.
-Essay- ROME — I’ve got a daughter who works abroad and, like many Italians, she is experiencing for the first time a different reaction when she says: “Yes, I’m Italian.” It is the gaze of mistrust and fear that makes her and her friends uncomfortable and cautious: Almost all of them have given up on […]
It’s a bittersweet scene captured at Milan’s Central Railway Station, at the global epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis. With more than 800 deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus and 12,000 infected in Italy, the northern region of Lombardy, which includes Milan, is by far the hardest hit, with 617 deaths as of Thursday. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has extended a severe lockdown to the entire country, with all shops, restaurants, cafes and bars being ordered to close, with the exception of grocery stores and pharmacies, until March 25. Amid the chaos and uncertainty, this photograph recalls Gabriel García Márquez” epic […]
Grueling shifts, grave warnings and the spectre of having to choose between the living and the dead.
A Venice-based novelist reflects on the disappearing tourists, imploding economy and politicians siding with the apocalypse.
Entrepreneurs say ‘Basta’ to stop the ordinances they say risk paralyzing the economy.
Shortages of medical supplies are already hitting in the northern city of Turin, in Italy, which is by far the worst hit European country from the COVID-19 coronavirus.
The tendency to compress language belongs not only to humans, but also to this particular African penguin species’ way of communication.
It’s now been a century since the brilliant, Italian-born artist passed away in Paris, France at just 36 years of age.
A group of good Samaritans gathers regularly in Trieste, near the border with the Balkans, to receive weary migrants and tend their wounds.
Locals are pushing back against plans to build a five-star hotel that would throw grape-killing shade on the famed Italian city’s last ‘real’ neighborhood.
The legendary composer — just 13 at the time — left Austria exactly 250 years ago for a lucrative but exhausting odyssey through the powerful Italian kingdoms and duchies of the day.
Fourteen months ago the progressive mayor of Riace, in Calabria, was arrested. Soon after, many of the refugees he’d help settle pulled up stakes and left.
A new rendition of the famous Puccini opera opens this month in Milan, and it all revolves around the powerful and predatory Scarpia character.
‘Entry to Italy guaranteed for €10,000’ is the hook: An inside report of how Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants arrive in Europe, following the death of 39 Vietnamese in a refrigerated truck in Britain.
VATICAN CITY — While several Vatican buildings are embroiled in scandal, a few meters away from the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square the “Palazzo Migliori” is becoming a symbol of goodness and generosity. Pope Francis has effectively “donated” it to the poor. Various entrepreneurs were interested in acquiring it and transforming it into a five-star […]
Medically assisted procreation is restricted by law in Italy to heterosexual couples. A La Stampa reporter posed as a woman seeking to get pregnant and found dozens of willing men online.
A facility that opened last year in the northern city of Monza offers residents a fleeting respite from the lonely, disorienting effects of dementia.
Thousands of Romanian girls are tricked and coerced into working the Italian streets, which are controlled by brutal Albanian mafia clans.
The venerable old city needs to embrace innovation and stop putting all of its eggs in the tourism basket, writes Italian-born architect and MIT professor Carlo Ratti.
With a now-leaderless Democratic Party and no charismatic successor to take over from Berlusconi, his one-time backers may migrate to more extremist parties.
Buccinasco, a town just outside of Milan, was quietly invaded decades ago by the ‘Ndrangheta mob from the southern region of Calabria. But a new program could be sweet revenge.
A housekeeper with serious culinary skills helped feed the mind and mouth of Ancel Keys, the American doctor famous for documenting the health benefits of Mediterranean food.
The infamous 1972 film sparked a years-long legal battle in director Bernardo Bertolucci’s native land. The recently restored court archives are now being made public.
On a recent trip to Sicily, Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua was reminded of the Mediterranean’s still powerful role as a meeting place of peoples and cultures.
Back in 1965, the Italian office machine company launched the revolutionary P101, used by NASA and later copied by U.S. rivals.
A top prosecutor in Sicily informed the UN in a recent report that so-called ‘phantom landings’ — vessels that reach the island undetected — are on the rise.
It was autumn, 1939. Germany had just invaded Poland. France had not yet fallen. Mussolini was Hitler’s ally on paper, but had not yet mobilized troops. And the United States wouldn’t enter the war for another two years. Exactly 80 years ago this week, the Mazzini Society was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, allowing intellectual émigrés […]
The far-right League party in Italy, rising in popularity, now faces the prospect of being marginalized by its extremist rhetoric after this summer’s gamble by its populist leader backfired.
With many in the Northern Hemisphere now making their way back to the office, it’s time to share stories and rankings of our respective summer vacations. One question that always comes up: How crowded was it? Indeed, travels to popular foreign destinations continue to grow worldwide. In 2018, there were an estimated 1,4 billions international […]
It would be a mistake to assume that Italy has seen the last of the controversial ‘Captain,’ who will have a different kind of influence at the helm of the opposition.
A traditional party and a populist movement may join forces to get Italy out of its political crisis and avoid yet another election.
MONTE CASTELLO DI VIBIO — “Sei la figlia di Satana! Gesù non ti ama!” It was 1989 and I was 8 years old — and my teacher was screaming at me in front of my classmates, telling me I was Satan’s daughter and that Jesus didn’t love me. I had been looking forward to my […]
The Italian writer’s work is best known for his role recounting the horror of concentration camps. He was that man, and so much more.