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TOPIC: italy

Society

Why Every New Parent Should Travel Alone — Without Their Children

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.

I realize it in the morning before leaving: I feel a certain level of excitement about traveling. It feels like enthusiasm, although it is confusing. I will go from Athens to Naples to see if I can finish the process for my Italian citizenship, which I started five years ago.

I started the process shortly after we left Buenos Aires, when my partner Irene and I had been married for two years and the idea of having children was on the vague but near horizon.

Now there are four of us and we have been living in Greece for more than two years. We arrived here in the middle of the pandemic, which left a mark on our lives, as in the lives of most of the people I know.

But now it is Sunday morning. I tell Lorenzo, my four-year-old son, that I am leaving for a few days: “No, no, Dad. You can’t go. Otherwise I’ll throw you into the sea.”

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Milan Forced To Stop Registering Babies Of Same-Sex Couples

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.

MILAN — There will be no more official registration of children born to same-sex couples in Milan. After an attempt at resistance, Mayor Beppe Sala was forced to step back following a request from conservative Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi.

Milan had been one of the few cities in Italy to automatically recognize at the registry office the parenthood of same-sex couples who became parents through heterologous fertilization or surrogacy abroad. The decision to discontinue this practice was announced by Sala on Monday. The certificates made so far remain valid.

The current legislation does not specifically prohibit this practice, but it does not mention this possibility either, which is why some cities, like Milan, decided to enact special laws to allow it.

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The Australian Dream: Lived, Loved And Lost By Yearning Italian Youth

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.

MILAN — “The last two days it was 35 degrees, but last week we got over 40.” It’s December. As he speaks to me, it is just past 10 p.m. for Alberto Bellini, while here, in cold, wintery Milan, the afternoon has just begun. Alberto is exactly 12,992 kilometers away from my phone: he called me from Karratha, a town of 23,000 inhabitants in Western Australia.

Alberto is one of the thousands young Italians who, every year, decide to leave everything and move to the other side of the world, taking advantage of the Working Holiday visa that, thanks to an international convention, allows them to live and work in Australia for up to three years.

Another land, another language, another life. The reasons for leaving are many and always different, as are those that convince so many to return to Italy after months or years spent abroad. In some cases, the desire to leave is dictated by the immobility of the Italian labor market, which benefits those who already have everything.

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Reports Of A Quiet Rise In University Student Suicides In Multiple Countries

On top of the traditional troubles some young people face on their own for the first time are the added factors of social media pressure and the effects of the pandemic. The crisis appears to have hit hard in Italy, with other countries, from India to France to the UK, reporting a similar situation.

TW: Contains references to suicide and suicidal thoughts.

On the first day of February, a 19-year-old took her own life in the bathroom of Milan’s IULM university. As reported in Italian daily La Stampa, a note left in the victim's purse said she considered her life and studies a failure.

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In The News
Ginevra Falciani & Laure Gautherin

Greece Train Collision, Nigerian Election Result, Mummy In A Bag

👋 Ia Orana!*

Welcome to Wednesday, where a collision between two trains in Greece kills dozens, official results are in of Nigeria’s disputed presidential election and a Peruvian mummy winds up in a delivery bag. Meanwhile, German daily Die Welt looks at why the common belief that “talking can’t hurt” is not true for everyone when it comes to psychotherapy.

[*yo-rah-nah - Tahitian]

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Italy
Niccoló Zancan

With Those Mourning Italy's Shipwreck Victims — A Double Immigrant Tragedy

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.

CROTONE — His world is about to be shattered.

In front of the Reception Center for Asylum Seekers in this southern Italian city, a man has arrived from Germany. He is a Syrian refugee, and he is asking about his wife. “She was on that boat! Please tell me she is here. Let me in." The man shows a photograph: "She texted me that she was arriving. It was four o’clock in the morning. She could see the lights of Italy.”

But his wife is not among the rescued, so the man keeps looking. He rushes into the San Giovanni di Dio Hospital in Crotone, in Italy's southern Calabria region. “I need to see the wounded, tell me if my wife is there.”

His wife, 23, was the only traveler of Tunisian nationality on the barge that left Turkey five days ago and crashed 200 meters off the Italian coast before dawn on Sunday. He would later recognized her body among the 63 bodies lined up at the sports hall.

They were married. But their documents did not suffice to allow her a plane ride. “We couldn’t apply for family reunification,” says the widowed man. “We paid the smugglers so we could live together. It was the only way. I was here waiting for her.”

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In The News
Emma Albright, Ginevra Falciani, Bertrand Hauger and Anne-Sophie Goninet

Closing In On Bakhmut, More West Bank Violence, Messi’s FIFA Crown

👋 Dobrý deň!*

Welcome to Tuesday, where Russian troops close in on Bakhmut, violence continues in the West Bank and The Weeknd makes Spotify history. Meanwhile, La Stampa recounts the events that led to the tragic shipwreck off the coast of Italy in which at least 64 migrants were killed.

[*Slovak]

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Migrant Lives
Niccolò Zancan

After Four Days At Sea, A Migrant Tragedy Plays Out Just 200 Meters From Italy's Shore

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.

STECCATO DI CUTRO — “Land!” They kept screaming, praying and vomiting. Force 6 waves. Unrelenting wind.

“When we saw the lights, we thought we were safe," recounted one of the survivors. "‘They’re coming for us!’ we all starting to shout. We were sure we had made it. But the crew started throwing boys down, pulling them by the arms and throwing them into the sea. Panic broke out on board. The boat flipped. And they hadn't seen us; they didn't come to save us."

An estimated 150 to 180 people were on board the trawler, having already survived a terrifying crossing from Turkey. But at least 74 didn't make it, confirmed dead, having drowned just 200 meters from the shore. Just 200 meters from arriving in Europe.

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Society
Annalisa Camilli

How Italy's "Conscientious Objector" Doctors — De Facto — Limit Abortion Rights

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.

COSENZA — At the Annunziata Civil Hospital in this southern Italian city, every single gynecologist is a conscientious objector. So pregnancy termination is possible only twice a week here when the visiting doctor who performs the procedure is present.

“More than six months after the resignation of the only non-objector gynecologist at Annunziata, the service is still lacking and is proceeding in fits and starts," explain the activists of the FEM.IN collective, who met with the hospital's administrative director in December and made them promise to hire two more doctors and guarantee the service in the area.

The hospital is not an isolated case in Italy. According to a Ministry of Health report from 2022, 64.6% of Italian gynecologists were conscientious objectors in 2020, a rate slightly lower than 2019, while 44.6% of anesthesiologists and 36.2% of non-medical staff object to performing pregnancy terminations.

This means that 45 years after the passage of the law that decriminalized abortion in Italy through the third month of pregnancy, the "objection" rate among physicians and health care professionals is so high that it makes the termination of pregnancy effectively impractical in many areas of the country.

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In The News
Emma Albright & Ginevra Falciani

China-Russia Summit, Pope Calls For Ceasefire, Battle Of Oranges

👋 Allo!*

Welcome to Wednesday, where Vladimir Putin meets with China’s top diplomat in Moscow, Japan and China have their first formal security talks in four years and Starbucks launches a new drinks flavor for Italian palates. Meanwhile, we look at how Russia’s war propaganda machine has backfired and actually left Moscow itself as the prime victim of its own lies.

[*Seychellois Creole]

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LGBTQ Plus
Laura Valentina Cortés, Ginevra Falciani and Riley Sparks

LGBTQ+ International: Book Ban In Tanzania, Mexico's "Lesbomaternal" Rights— And Other News

Welcome to Worldcrunch’s LGBTQ+ International. We bring you up-to-speed each week on a topic you may follow closely at home, but can now see from different places and perspectives around the world. Discover the latest news on everything LGBTQ+ — from all corners of the planet. All in one smooth scroll!

This week featuring:

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Society
Francesca Bubba

"In Pain You Shall Bring Forth Children" — The Business Behind Suffering In Childbirth

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.

ROME — “I was told that enduring the pain of childbirth would be the first test as a mother..."

Ginevra Massiletti, 32, went into labor with her first child last year in the southern Italian city of Cosenza, convinced that childbirth should be a fully natural experience.

"I was in too much pain, but I didn't want to give in to analgesia," she said. "In the end, however, I couldn't take it; I asked for an epidural to feel less pain, but in the meantime I was crying and apologizing to my baby, feeling that I had betrayed him because of my weakness and need for relief.”

Ginevra says she's now over the shock, but “for months, I believed I was not up to my motherhood.”

During her pregnancy, reading various blogs and social pages, she had internalized a belief: that childbirth accompanied by anesthesia to relieve the mother's pain was a second-class birth, and especially that in doing so she would selfishly put herself before the baby.

Ginevra’s is not an isolated case. Indeed, online, in some newspapers, and even in certain health circles, a narrative of motherhood that ostracizes any medical-pharmacological support for childbirth, not to mention the use of C-section, is raging in the name of an ancestral vision according to which the mother's body must do everything on its own. Any “little help” offered by science will have negative effects on the unborn child.

Behind this, there is often also a real business, with courses and consultations, strictly on a for-profit basis.

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