WorldcrunchLa Stampa, originally known as Gazzetta Piemontese, is a prominent Italian newspaper established in 1867. Headquartered in Turin, it is owned by the Fiat Group and widely distributed across multiple European countries.
NEW DELHI – Mukesh is standing barefoot in front of the computer embedded in the wall, deep in concentration. He’s trying to guide the little arrow of the mouse onto the number eight because the talking machine asked him how old he was. This is the first time that he has come to the “Hole […]
ROME – Benedict XVI couldn’t have imagined this, because his thoughts were elsewhere: but the news of his resignation was met with cheers by thousands of people in Rome. Why? Because the resignation of a pope has the same effect as the Olympic Games or a Jubilee for the city of Rome: it brings tourists, […]
VATICAN CITY – One of the cardinals getting ready to enter the upcoming conclave knows that he himself is not papabile — that is, his is not one of the names being considered as a possible next pope. Perhaps for this reason he has taken the time to lay out to La Stampa, in a […]
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 […]
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.
Italians teach locals in Burkina Faso both the recipe for pizza, and the formula for a successful small business. Is this how foreign aid is transformed into sustainable development?
-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, […]
Nanette Blitz Konig was friends in Amsterdam with the young writer of the diary of life hiding from the Nazis. She recalls seeing Anne for the last time alive, in Bergen-Belsen.
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 […]
Let’s conduct a simple experiment: search on Google for any image of a recent American President — Johnson, Nixon, either father or son Bush, Clinton, Obama — at the moment of their first election victory. Then, search again for an image of the same man a few years later. Each will show the fatigue that […]
Too many travelers ignore some pretty basic American laws that can seem foreign to them. Here’s how it looks to the Italian go-to lawyer in New York for just such cases.
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.
The struggle for power in Lumbini, Nepal as a Chinese group pushes a “mega project” to draw Buddhist tourists from around the world.
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 […]
LANZAROTE – The photograph looks like something out of a glossy tourist campaign: a surfer, board under his arms, coming out of the turquoise waters that lap against the fine, white sand. Nothing out of the ordinary, seeing as the shot was taken on the island of Fuerteventura, famous around Europe for its natural beauty […]
FLORENCE – It is an obvious point, but holds a hidden meaning. The last century did not have many artists who merit the “adjectivization” of their name, like Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Rembrandt or Goya, to define an entire genre. Writers have given us Kafkaesque and Chekhovian, but can we say “Baconian”? The current exhibition at Florence’s […]
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 […]
MOGADISHU – General Barisse’s men are in the pick-up trucks, one next to the other, holding their weapons, looking around. They do not fidget, a military patience having descended upon them: they simply wait. They have been waiting for food, pay, the enemy’s attack — in this, they also wait for the end of a […]
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 […]
CEYLANPINAR – “Is the tea good? It comes from those houses over there.” Ramaazen adds sugar to the already sweet drink, pointing at a line of dwellings on the far side of the barbed wire. On this side of the border is Ceylanpinar, a mostly Kurdish town of 45,000 people. It is the farthest outpost […]
NEW YORK – Chen Guangcheng, the blind self-taught lawyer and one of the best-known Chinese human rights activists, arrived in New York last spring after an incredible escape from his village in the coastal Shandong province. He finally arrived thanks to a last-minute compromise reached between the Chinese authorities and U.S. diplomats who had sheltered […]
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 […]
HERAT – The withdrawal of Italian soldiers here in Afghanistan has already begun, even if nobody back in Italy knows it yet. For several months now, Italians have stopped being on guard at several bases they used to protect. The smallest, the most inconvenient, or the furthest from the contingent’s center of gravity, have been […]
Many years ago, when Italian military service was still compulsory, the army subjected its new conscripts to a general culture test with various types of questions. One asked: “Who is Leonardo?,” which prompted a surprising range of responses. Someone, it seems, even replied “The pope.” The artist behind the most famous painting in the world, […]
VATICAN CITY – Three years ago, on the eve of Pope Benedict XVI’s departure for the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, it was the murder of Luigi Padovese, the vicar apostolic of Turkey, which loomed over the trip. This time it is the killing of four U.S. diplomats in Benghazi and the uprising across the region […]
MILAN – Some stories do have a happy ending. The most multiethnic school in Italy, Lombardo Radice public school in Milan, had a new batch of first graders again this week. Last year it wasn’t allowed to open to a new incoming elementary school class because it had “too many foreigners.” It had appeared to […]
VENICE – Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously said of academic writers that “they muddy the water, to make it seem deep.” Architects, we can say, have been known to do the same. Let’s think for a moment about what we have been forced to endure over the past decades thanks to an alleged building language that […]
Designer Giorgio Armani gave reporters an earful Tuesday following a fashion event in Milan, Italy.