Worldcrunch 1. ARGENTINA “Benedict XVI resigns because of waning energy” – Clarin 2. CHINA “Pope announces resignation” – Apple Daily 3. USA New York Times 4. FRANCE “Pope resigns. Benedict XVI doesn’t have “enough energy” to lead the Church. He will be stepping down on Feb. 28.” – Libération 5. ITALY “Pope announces: I will […]
Tag: italy
ANSA, LA STAMPA, VATICAN RADIO (Italy) Worldcrunch ROME– Pope Benedict XVI stunned his Church and the world at large, by announcing that he will resign from the papacy on February 28. He made the announcement himself, in Latin, during Monday morning’s consistory for the canonization of martyrs of Otranto, victims of a massacre in 1480. […]
LA REPUBBLICA (Italy) Worldcrunch NAPLES– They say if you want to enjoy Italian theater, just walk out the front door. That goes 20 times over in the endlessly colorful southern city of Naples. Just such teatro di strada is all here in this amateur video (below), as a man unsuccessfully tries a U-turn in a […]
ANSA, LA STAMPA, LA REPUBBLICA (Italy) Worldcrunch FLORENCE– It only took a step in the wrong place by a worker doing maintenance in the floor above to bust through a 500-year-old fresco in the famed Uffizi Gallery. According to ANSA news agency, the fallen piece depicted an allegorical female figure from the 16th Century. The […]
LA STAMPA (Italy) Worldcrunch ROME– Like every other weekday, 100,000 free papers were handed out in the main metro stations around the Italian capital on Tuesday. But, reports La Stampa, the regular menu of political back-stabbing, soccer trade rumors and crime blotter were missing. In its place were hard-to-believe reports about an Italy and the […]
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 […]
CORRIERE FIORENTINO, LA STAMPA, LA REPUBBLICA (Italy) Worldcrunch ROME – Meet Tommy and Toldo, two Italian pets deeply attached to their owners. In fact, they’re still searching for them, months after they died. Tommy is a German Shepard who lives in the town of San Donaci in the southern region of Puglia. He goes to […]
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.
Just before the first anniversary of the deadly sinking of the Italian cruise ship, La Repubblica daily’s website posts a never-before-seen video of the final desperate moments.
DIE WELT (Germany), PNAS (USA) Worldcrunch PISA – Take a guess how many types of medication you have in your medicine chest. Fifty? A few hundred? Medication is a banality in our day – but things looked very different 2000 years ago when there were no pharmaceutical giants and mass production facilities. Hippocrates had to […]
TRAPANI – After Pretoria until 1993, and Alabama through the early 1960’s, the Italian city of Trapani has discovered Apartheid in 2013. The cold bureaucratic language of Trapani City Council member Andrea Vassalo leaves little room for doubts: the head of the council’s urban territory commission cited the “frequent complaints of the indigenous” (using exactly […]
LA STAMPA (Italy) Worldcrunch PISA – This story is a yawner. You’ve been there before: standing in line or sitting around the conference table when some sleepy-eyed dude lets loose a big ol’ yawn, and you – tired or not – start yawning too. Yes, yawns are indeed contagious. Research has shown that some 50 […]
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 […]
So far Benedict XVI’s new @Pontifex on Twitter has avoided controversial topics.
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 […]
Worldcrunch Almost three quarters of central Venice was underwater Monday as severe weather and strong tides submerged the Floating City. However, nothing could put a damper on tourists’ spirits, choosing to snub the gondolas for a dip in St. Mark’s Square. Take a look at these 15 photos that show Venice as one of the […]
LA STAMPA, LA REPUBBLICA, CORRIERE DELLA SERA (Italy) Worldcrunch ROME – Italy’s struggling economy appears to have at least one good shot at bouncing back: immigrant entrepreneurs. According to La Stampa, the businesses of non-EU immigrants account for 5.7% of Italy’s GDP. Confesercenti, the Italian association for small and medium businesses, says the number of […]
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 […]
LA STAMPA, CORRIERE DELLA SERA (Italy) Worldcrunch MILAN – Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was sentenced Friday to four years in prison for tax fraud in his dealings with the Mediaset televsion network, which he owns. The case, which took six years to arrive at a verdict, is the latest in a long string […]
STERN, SPIEGEL ONLINE (Germany), DIARIO CÓRDOBA (Spain), LA STAMPA (Italy), IZVESTIA/RIA NOVOSTI (Russia), CENTRAL NEWS (Japan), PEOPLE.COM (China), EPOCH TIMES (Chinese-language, U.S.) Worldcrunch From Chinese labs to German geology groups, the aftershocks are being felt across the global scientific community. Earlier this week, six seismologists and an official in the Italian city of L’Aquila were […]
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 […]
CORRIERE DELLA SERA, LA STAMPA, TG5 (Italy) TWITTER Worldcrunch ROME – For one brief, shining moment, he was back. For those who like their politics, well, colorful, the prospect of another run for office by controversial three-time Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had hung in the air for the past two months in Italy. But on […]
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 […]
LA REPUBBLICA (Italy) Worldcrunch LECCE – Though Barcelona has “King Lionel Messi”, this week the Italian city of Lecce is rolling out the red carpet for Iya Traore (“The Prince of Paris”) and Abdellah (“Amsterdam’s Maradona”) to show off their tricky soccer skills at the Red Bull Street Style soccer world championship. Held in São […]
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 […]
IL MATTINO (Italy) Worldcrunch ROME – With some quick thinking, she might have found a good response when the Carabinieri officers pulled her over. Here’s my seeing-eye dog’s license… It’s a Google car… Oh, am I in the car? I thought this was the elevator… Apparently the 66-year-old woman from the central Italian town of […]
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 […]
LA REPUBBLICA, AGI (Italy), BBC SPORT, REUTERS (UK), EUROSPORT (France) Worldcrunch ROME – An Italian tribunal has confirmed today a 10-month ban for Juventus FC coach Antonio Conte, reports La Reppublica. Football Federation judges rejected his appeal against a verdict handed down earlier this month, adds Reuters. Antonio Conte, who played for Juventus from 1992 […]
RAI, LA REPUBBLICA (Italy) Worldcrunch It has become an Olympic tradition for an athlete or two or three to test positive for banned substances during or after the Games. Also traditional are the subsequent heartfelt denials, stone-faced defiance and/or mysterious disappearance of said suspected performance-enhanced athlete. This year, however, we have a new response: The […]
Protests are rising against plans to convert vast tracks of the sprawling Rome movie studios that were at the heart of La Dolce Vita, both in real life and on the big screen.