“Even Satire must stay within the limits of civilized and decent behaviour” – Maurizio Gasparri in his capacity as Minister for Communications[1] “There was nothing to laugh about. It wasn’t all satire. In certain moments […] it appeared like a political manifesto. Without balance. It crossed the line.” – Marcello Veneziani, member of the Board […]
Imagine the scene: An athlete jogs nervously down one of Bologna’s main thoroughfares, clad in a politically-correct, unisex, running suit clutching a futuristic-looking, metalic, flame-flowering torch. It’s hard to get a view of him/her though as the athlete is surrounded/accompanied by 15-20 particularly uncomfortable-looking riot-police, jogging (or speed-shuffling in most cases) in phalanx formation. The […]
Italy’s minister for Foreign Affairs, Gianfranco Fini (TIFOF
We kick off the new year some kilos heavier after a December spent sampling the culinary delights that make Italy such a good place to live. This may account for the scarcity of entries during the final month of 2005 – It’s hard to be quite so opinionated on an over-full stomach. A brief entry […]
World AIDS day, the 1st of December, in Italy garnered much the same news time as the preparations for International Mountain Day (“an opportunity to create awareness about the importance of mountains to life”). News reports on the State broadcaster RAI focussed on the growth in HIV infection worldwide, in the main in third world […]
November 30th marked a worldwide protest against the death penalty. The date was chosen to commemorate the first State to officially abolish the death penalty – the Duchy of Tuscany in 1786. There’s little to add to this, apart from the fact that the number of States where the death penalty has been abolished is […]
It’s rare that this monkey feels the need to defend Sig. Silvio Berlusconi, but reading this week’s Lettera dall’Italia in Internazionale, written by film critic Deborah Young, I have the unsettling urge to rally to Berluska’s defence. Young, on contemporary Italian film making writes: “The worrying thing is that the last spaces for freedom of […]
A new report from England, on the effects of texting on literacy, will be of some comfort to Italy’s cultural guardians. The study, conducted at the the department of communication and science at City University in London, found that there were no significant differences in the instances of grammar and spelling mistakes between two groups […]
Last night in Rome ten to fifteen thousand people marched in a candlelit procession to the Iranian embassy, to protest against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that ‘Israel should be wiped off the map’. Were this Monkey in Rome yesterday, he would have attended the march, albeit with an apprehension as to what one’s presence […]
November the 2nd is, across the Catholic world, the day of the dead, a day when families visit the final resting places of their dearly departed, physically or metaphorically. Thirty years ago today, on a patch of wasteground near the beach resort of Ostia, the brutally beaten body of poet and film director Pier Paolo […]
