I stumbled across this fascinating article (thanks to a posting on Chet Raymo’s excellent Science Musings blog. It’s an old article, but was news to this monkey. I had always presumed that it was accepted fact that Primo Levi had committed suicide. Virtually every mention of the celebrated Italian chemist/author/holocaust survivor ends noting that Levi […]

In the week that the London Metropolitan Police were found guilty of a series of errors that led to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, members of Italy’s ruling coalition voted against holding a committee of enquiry into the conduct of policing at the G8 summitt in Genoa in 2001.

You have to feel sorry for Silvio. While he was in government the European media went to town detailing his every infringement of the democratic norms (of which there were plenty). Since Romano Prodi has been in power scarcely a whimper – for example, how many people outside of Italy know that the current Prime […]

The government of Romano Prodi, who we were led to believe would role back the counless instances of anti-democratic legislation introduced by Berlusconi, have set their sights on regulating the internet in Italy. A new law, devised by former journalist and long-time Prodi collaborator Ricardo Franco Levi, supposedly has major newspapers and publishers in mind […]

Today, according to most of the centre-left newspapers, we’re witnessing a historic moment. The birth of a new party – the Partito Democratico, along with an american style primary to decide the leader of the party – which will be Rome’s mayor Walter Veltroni. On the official face of it, this is a new begining […]

Roberto Calderoli, ‘honourable’ exponent of the Lega Nord, spent his week dreaming up ways to stop a proposed Mosque being built in Bologna. The mosque has already been the subject of hot debate, given its proposed size (a six thousand metre squared building, on land roughly 52 thousand metres squared) – which is apparently much […]

Reading through John Dickie’s highly readable Delizia! – The epic history of the Italians and their food, an episode jumped out involving a conflict of interest that would make modern day politicians – left and right – proud.

Platina, the author of one of the most popular cookbooks of the age (the mid-to-late 1400s), De Honesta voluptate et valetudine (Respectable Pleasure and Good Health), was a leading humanist in Rome, who has left us a good idea of some, perhaps, surprising approaches to cooking in Italy at the time. For example, the use of sugar was widespread, as a seasoning like salt – often being added to what we now consider savoury dishes like Lasagne. The distinction between sweet and savourty is a later invention – in the 1400s celebrity chefs were more concerned with the Galenic theory of the humours. Platina also gives us an idea of the average cooking time for pasta in the 1400s – an hour for vermicelli, and two hours for maccheroni…

One should perhaps feel grateful after the state broadcaster RAI 1 finally decided to cover Beppe Grillo’s massive V-day protest, two days late. If there’s one thing worse than being talked about… The station’s increasingly confused idea of what ‘news reporting’ is meant that the coverage consisted entirely of two main stream political figures giving […]

The disjuncture between what goes on and what is reported has rarely been so apparent. On Saturday, with little-to-no advance television publicity, an initiative got under way in Piazzas throughout Italy. The initiative was to collect signatures to propose a new law with three main clauses: 1) No-one fully convicted of a crime should be […]