Articles by: Judith Harris

  • Op-Eds

    A Potted Guide to Italian Presidents


    Rome – Now that it appears certain that Giorgio Napolitano will resign as of Jan. 14, at the top of Italy’s political agenda for 2015 is election of his successor. To help prepare for the newcomer, let’s first consider what the function of an Italian president is, and then take a backward look at those from the past. Unlike the royals of Britain or Spain, the Italian president is far more than a ceremonial figurehead.
     
    Among his multiple duties are to defend the Constitution; to ensure that the politicians do not abuse their power; to dissolve Parliament as needed; to oversee national general elections; to conduct discussions for a new government after those elections; and to appoint a premier and his cabinet. Over time, the job description has somewhat changed, however, as we shall see.
     
    The first head of state was provisional, Enrico De Nicola, a Liberal, appointed after abrogation of the monarchy in January 1948. Most historians agree that the real first president, serving from May 1948 to May 1955, was the much admired Luigi Einaudi, a Liberal economist and wine producer who taught at the University of Turin. During the harshest years of Fascism, Einaudi, a Liberal, taught at a university in Geneva, returning to Italy in January of 1945.
     
    His successor until May of 1962 was Giovanni Gronchi, the first Christian Democrat (DC) to be president. A left-leaning founder of the Catholic-oriented Partito Popolare, he opposed the Fascist government in the Twenties, returning to political life only in mid-1942; in 1943 he helped to found the CD. His election was discouraged by the centrists but supported by both right and left, including the Italian Communist party (PCI).
     
    Then came another DC president, Antonio Segni. Elected in May 1963 he served only until December of 1964. Like his predecessors, he had taken no part in another Italian politics during the Fascist era. His resignation was formally motivated by illness, but his term was tainted by serious rumors of a coup d’etat in the works, called the Piano Solo.
     
    Leone’s successor marked a radical political change. Giuseppe Saragat of the Social Democratic party (PSDI)was president from December 1964 through December 1971. He was elected with 646 votes out of 963 cast. During his term the Milan Agricultural Bank bombing, took place in December 1969 in Piazza Fontana, killing 17 and launching a long season of terrorism. Initially blamed on anarchists, later investigations led to a rightist conspiracy involving secret service elements.
     
    On his heels came another Catholic, noted legal expert Giovanni Leone, who had been an alternative to Saragat the previous election. After two full weeks of balloting he won in late December 1971, with 518 votes of 996 from a center-right coalition that included the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MS). On his watch Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered by Red Brigades in May l978. One month later Leone resigned, dodging impeachment proceedings over allegations of bribes (unproven) supposedly received from the Lockheed Aircraft Corp.
     
    A form of national redemption came in mid-1978 through June 1985 with the presidency of the former partisan leader Sandro Pertini. He was elected after 16 ballots by an extraordinary consensus, 832 of 995 votes. One of Italy’s most popular and admired presidents, he had been sentenced to death by the SS during WWII but escaped prison. By this time the role of president had been expanded from the earliest leaders. (For a full biography in Italian, see >>> ).
     
    Francesco Cossiga restored the Christian Democratic party to the Quirinal Palace, and was elected in mid-1985 with a two-thirds majority; it was the first time anyone was elected on a first ballot. Cossiga’s watch was, to put it mildly. These were the “years of lead” (terrorism), and Cossiga had been Interior Minister both when Aldo Moro was murdered in 1978 and when two years later, when neo-Fascists bombed the Bologna train station, killing 85 and wounding 200. He clashed with then Premier Giulio Andreotti and at one point formally resigned from the DC. By the time he left office in early 1992 both the DC and, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the PCI too had faded away. Impeachment proceedings were begun against him but were dropped.
     
    The murder in Sicily of anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone were the background for the election of the staunchly Catholic Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, 74, in May 1992. Italy’s ninth president, he was elected with the backing of the new and left-leaning Partito Democratico (PD). During his term of office, which lasted until 1997, he saw, with disapproval, many of his former Christian Democrats shift into the party founded by Silvio Berlusconi in the early 1990s.
     
    The head of Italy’s central bank Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was a technician chosen to succeed Scalfaro in mid-1999. Like many of his predecessors, he had an anti-Fascist background and had been hidden in the Abruzzi region to avoid German occupation in WWII. Ciampi was very popular with the Parliament, which elected him with 707 of 1010 votes, and with the public, whose polls gave him ratings of up to 80%.
     
    At age 80 Giorgio Napolitano succeeded Ciampi in May of 2006, with 543 of 1,009 ballots. Originally a PCI loyalist, he headed the party’s international relations wing, but was recognized as the head of its most liberal wing. He took a certain distance from the party early on, and I personally met him at the home of a US diplomat in 1975, two decades before the PCI imploded; not long afterward he had a series of private meetings with Richard Gardner, US Ambassador to Italy from 1977 to 1981. When Napolitano’s presidential term expired in 2013, a three-way political stalemate blocked naming his successor, and he reluctantly agreed to succeed himself. The governments appointed under his presidency have had widely differing political casts: Silvio Berlusconi’s on the right, Romano Prodi’s on the left, Mario Monti’s apolitical technical babysitter government, Enrico Letta’s center-left, and, currently, Matteo Renzi’s left-centrist cabinet.
  • Op-Eds

    Cashing in on its Heritage



    ROME -- Is 2015 the year when Italy will finally cash in on its vast heritage of museums, historic archives, Renaissance and Baroque palazzi and archaeological sites? The country’s cultural czars hope so. Income from what is the richest heritage in Europe brings in only $466 million annually, but management of this publicly owned heritage costs the state $429 million so that the net profit is scant, at under $37 million. Needless to say, most of that income goes to paying the wages of personnel. What is to be done? After months of debate, on Dec. 19 Culture Minister Dario Franceschini signed a government decree, slated to become operative in January, to relaunch the heritage sites with help from private sources and sponsors.
     
    Some outside help is already arriving, needless to say. The managers of Pompeii have accepted a huge European Union grant for the much needed, and much delayed, restoration of the site. A private sponsor, Diego della Valle, is bankrolling the similarly necessary restoration of the Roman Colosseum, which began in 2014 after years of futile debate over conditions for accepting private sponsorship. Private citizens and groups are also contributing. An example is the non-profit Friends of Florence foundation, which is sponsoring restoration of Filippo Lippi’s “Annunciation” in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, commissioned by Niccolo’ Martelli for his parish church. This Renaissance masterpiece shows three episodes from the life of Saint Nicholas of Bari.
     
    How to turn a profit is not the only problem facing those responsible for the heritage. A law bill to improve the heritage was actually passed last summer, but implementation n has been slow, to the point that in November over one hundred eminent Italian art historians, architects, archaeologists, curators and university professors sent Franceschini an open letter listing fifteen serious wrongs afflicting the national heritage. The list began with a denouncement of the lack of qualified personnel including technical-scientific experts. Those in charge today are “in many cases seriously inadequate,” said the letter.
     
    Another grievance is the “marginalization and/or removal of ‘technical’ personnel (superintendents, architects, restorers and art historians), aggravated by the lack of attention given to those working in the field” (Point 5). Other complaints include the “excessively centralized bureaucracy,” which delays decisions; the indifference to “the quality of a restoration project;” and the neglect of “continuing education for technical-scientific personnel.” (Read the entire list >>>
     
    It is no secret that Italy is in a recession, and the Cultural Ministry’s budget has been slashed. Given such pressures, the hard-working and dedicated Franceschini is calling for new funding that will permit the Ministry to promote advanced educational programs for its personnel, hire more custodians for sites and bring into the field a younger generation with a background of serious study and work experience; the average age of today’s ministry personnel is 58. The new decree specifically legalizes “promotional messages on scaffolding and other temporary structures for construction, and the sale or concession of relative publicity space.” (For the text >>>
     
    Franceschini’s also hopes to provide Italian cultural sites with the sort of restaurants, cafes, book stores and guide services which make money in other countries. As the Italian press has pointed out, the New York Metropolitan Museum alone, in part thanks to its shops and restaurant, takes in profits that are about the same as those  gained from all the cultural sites in Italy. Great Britain’s cultural heritage brings in at least $6 billion; the Louvre earns France $3 billion, according to Federico Fubini, writing in La Repubblica daily Dec. 21.
     
    The new law will also create 18 offices for management of the country’s key heritage sites. These include the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the Uffizi Museum in Florence, the Pinacoteca at Brera, the Reggio palace and gardens at Caserta, the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, the Polo Reale in Turin and the Ducal Palace in Mantua.
     
    If anyone doubted the problems that this heritage presents, in Florence, with some 300 quake tremors in late December, the over 14 ft. tall statue of “David” by Michelangelo is now at risk, and the national government has already committed $260,000 for construction of a quake-resistant base to underpin this over four centuries-old marble masterpiece.
     
    Not everyone is convinced. The Civic Gallery of Modena is proposing to replace its customary exhibition of works of modern art with a show from May to October 2015 of typical regional foods – the likes of tortellini, zamponi and balsamic vinegar, so as to take advantage of the proximity of Milan Expo. The museum director Marco Pierini resigned in protest Dec. 19, saying that the foods show would be “incompatible” with the museum’s mission.
     
     
     
  • Op-Eds

    10 Christmas Gifts Italy Gave the World



    ROME – It’s fashionable to list things by numbers, so here goes with 10 Christmas gifts which Italy gave the world in 2014. In the Christmas stocking have been gifts ranging from a coffee maker to eco-friendly fashions, from rubbish art to ancient art.

    1.  BELLS: Bells rang out and bystanders applauded on July 23, two years and six months after the Costa Concordia sank and drowned 32 people, the gigantic cruise ship was successfully refloated and hauled away from the port of Giglio to Genoa, 200 miles distant. The ship, which weighs in at 114,500 ton, is to become scrap metal for recycling. For a video, see >>>

     
    2.  HELPING THE HELPLESS: Throughout Italy volunteers, including countless young people, are helping the homeless, who include a large number of migrants, but not only. As it has for the past 16 years the St. Egidio charity is distributing pamphlets which list places where the homeless and needy can receive food, shelter and clothing. In a single night recently in Milan 2,637 people were listed as homeless; of these, one out of three (36%) was Italian, double the number of the previous year, when only 17% were Italian. In Genoa, similarly, the number of homeless Italians has doubled in five years. Nine out of ten are men, whose average age is 42. Pope Francis donated sleeping bags and food at Christmas to the homeless sleeping rough around the Vatican.

    3. BLAST-OFF COFFEE: Not only did Italian Air Force Capt. Samantha Cristoforetti become the first Italian woman in space, but as she traveled into orbit in November she hauled along a 20-Kg coffee machine made by Lavazza and the engineering firm Argotec, specialist in space food, whose designers had to devise “extraterrestrial” capsules that work in microgravity. Now able to enjoy an espresso with her on the International Space Station (ISS) are American and Russian cosmonauts. For the video see >>

     
    4. FASHIONABLE FAKES: The many worldwide who oppose the wearing of the fur of dead animals will take pleasure in seeing the newest Italian fashions. Among the Italian fashion leaders who took giant steps in 2014 toward making truly trendy what are called “eco pellicce” (environmentally friendly furs) were Trussardi, Gucci and Kaos. “Real furs are superfluous today,” opined one designer.

    5. THE ACTOR IS A LADY: At age 78 Virna Lisi died of cancer in her home in Rome in December. The extraordinarily beautiful actor first became a star in the Fifties in a film, “Lo Scapolo,” with Alberto Sordi. She went on to win top prizes in Italy and at Cannes and indeed was so successful, as is known only now, that the American Mafia took her in their sites and tried to induce her to move to Hollywood. She had no knowledge of who those approaching her were, but decided that at any rate she preferred her career and life at home in Italy with her architect husband Franco Pesci and son Corrado, born in 1962. It was Corrado who just revealed the Mafia’s interest in turning her into a U.S. star big time. For a scene from one of her best films, “Signore e signori,” see >>>


    6. PIAZZA PURITY: Rome Mayor Ignazio Marino has blocked the invasion of supposedly Christmasy stalls in one of the world’s most beautiful piazzas, Piazza Navona. Once an elongated horseshoe-shaped race track for the emperor Domitian, the piazza became a market square during the Renaissance, when it was moved by Michelangelo from the Capitoline Hill. More recently it became a jumble of stalls for a prolonged Christmas season, where traditional craft items were sold, such as figures for the nativity scenes. In recent years the market lost its character by an invasion of trashy objects far from the Italian tradition and manufacture. Ignoring the predictable protests at the radical change, the city is holding events for children in the now tidy space.

    7. RUBBISH ART: A special Christmas exhibition at the Carlo Bilotti Museum, which is in the Orangery of Villa Borghese in Rome, shows works of art by sub-Sahara African  refugees made of 10 tons of plastic waste. Sponsors are the city of Rome itself, REFUGEE ScART (an Onlus), the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR and the Jesuit Centro Astalli, which works especially with youth to help refugees. Any income from the effort goes to the refugees, but, through the charity Emergency, the refugee artists are giving back a portion to a mobile health unit for the needy at Castel Volturno. Through Feb. 1.

    8. CLIMBING THE COLUMN: Trajan’s Column inside the Roman Forums dates from around 113 AD to celebrate the Romans victory of the Dacians. The column stands about the height of a 10th story building, or 30 M high, which means that its remarkable pictorial diary in bas relief of that victory cannot readily be seen and admired. Now, thanks to the Roman cultural administration, each scene has been photographed for display on nearby panels. Not all are edifying – this was war, after all – and many of us were shocked to see (now that we can see it) a scene of three evil Dacian women torturing a Roman prisoner of war.

    9. COLOSSEUM SHORED UP: Finally, after years of indecision, work to shore up the weak one-quarter of the Roman Colosseum is well underway. That weak side rests not upon rock, as does the other three-quarters, but upon the softer soil of a drained river bed, which had brought to that portion 16 inches of subsidence.

    10. FOOD IN ART: No Italian list could be complete without mention of food. “Il Cibo nell’arte” (Food in Art) is an exhibition of 100 works from the Renaissance through Andy Warhol that will be on view in Brescia from Jan. 24 through June 14, with a catalogue by the Milan publisher Silvana Editoriale. The Milan Triennale will also exhibit a show on Arts and Food in conjunction with the Expo, April 15 – Nov. 1.
     
    Because I live in Rome, the list is disproportionately Roman, for which I apologize. It would be delightful to hear readers’ ideas of other gifts Italy gave to others in the world this year.
  • Op-Eds

    Italian President Napolitano Polite But Firm: “Dialogue”

    ROME – In his customary cordial way, President Giorgio Napolitano read the political elite of Italy the polite equivalent of the riot act. On Tuesday the president made his traditional end-of-year address to the ranking elders of the Italian state, and it obviously represented a carefully considered sermon in which he urged quarreling parties (but also factions within parties) to engage in a positive dialogue. 

    This appeared likely to be his last such Christmas greeting in the Quirinal Palace.

    Napolitano’s remark that he had “personally committed himself to guaranteeing institutional continuity until the end of the European semester” is being read here as a deadline because those six months, during which Premier Matteo Renzi, 39, heads the Council of the European Union, end Jan. 13. 

    While not yet a swan song, the implication is that Napolitano, who is 89, will resign the day afterward, Jan. 14, ending his second term as president which would normally conclude only in 2020. With visible reluctance last year Napolitano agreed to serve a second eight-year term in order to quell a particularly intractable political crisis. Recently, however, he has made no secret of his readiness to hand over the reins. 

    The suggestion that his presidency will end in less than a month touched off the guessing game as to possible successors, but not yet with any hint of a winner; the latest list shows 21 candidates. In an IPSOS poll this week 53% of respondents said they want a “new individual who will give a sense of change” while 43% said they prefer “an expert so as to guarantee stability.”

    Time is limited, however. By law, within 15 days of the vacant office, the combined houses of Parliament plus 58 regional deputies must meet to elect a new president, chosen during the first three votes by a two-thirds majority, and after that, by simple majority. The choice is important, for the role of president goes well beyond the passive-ceremonial; when a government collapses, it is the president who babysits the nation while overseeing selection of a new government, which Parliament then votes into office. 

    In his nine years as president, Napolitano has done more than merely wait for crises. While never authoritarian, he has ensured stability for the country during the past eight years of severe recession, and polls show he is admired by 38% of the Italians queried, more than any other single politician, including Renzi, with 34%. 

    In his pre-Christmas greetings to the high representatives of the state, Napolitano began by saying that the situation calls for “institutional continuity,” or keeping the present governing coalition headed by Matteo Renzi in office as long as possible.  With this signal praise for Renzi were particular words of regard for the “value and affability of Minister [Pier Carlo] Padoan,” minister of the economy and finance.

    “The year 2014 is not ending in exactly a positive way,” Napolitano went on to say, but the Renzi government has promoted serious reforms which all the political parties should be supporting. It has also “augmented the authority of the concert of Europe” while developing proposals for new political directions for all of Europe, “beyond the suffocating  limits of austerity.” 

    The president had sharp words for the raucous minority within Premier Renzi’s Partito Democratico (PD), fraught with futile “hypothetical” discussions and demands for early elections which amount to little but a “waste of time and newspaper ink.” Napolitano also urged the PD and the antagonistic trade unions, who staged a national general strike last week in blatant opposition to the PD, to work toward a more harmonious relationship. Passage of one of Renzi’s coveted reforms, the so-called Jobs Act, which makes it easier to fire redundant workers, was praised. 

    In the background are two remarkable developments, both unexpected. The first is the revival of the fortunes, and its debut on the national (rather than regional) political scene, of the formerly scandal-ridden Northern League under the direction of Matteo Salvini, the brash 41-year-old who has taken the place of former League head Umberto Bossi. Among Salvini’s initiatives was to fly to Moscow to be received by Vladimir Putin. Salvini’s brief there was to sympathize with Putin on opposition to Western economic sanctions and to plead on behalf of Italy-Russia trade. The result: in current polls Salvini now outshines former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, by a stunning lead of 5% in this week’s La Sette poll. 

    The second development is the spreading scandal of kickbacks and corruption which began in Rome, but has tentacles in both the North and South. After the first 37 arrests, more are expected. In the halls of justice meanwhile a huge debate is underway about exactly what the word “Mafia” means when applied to those arrested in Rome, as it is by the current prosecutor. An individual convicted of Mafia crimes is subject to particularly harsh detention under the terms of the “41 bis” Law.

    If not defined as a Mafia crime, prison detention is normal. Those arrested these past weeks in the Rome corruption investigation are protesting that the magistrates are unfairly calling them Mafiosi. 
  • Life & People

    A Christmas Confusion



    ROME -- ‘Twas the notte before Natale,

    and all through the piazzas

    Not a macchina was stirring, not even the usual pazzas.

    The calze were hung by the camino with care

    In hopes that Babbo Natale soon would be there.

    I bambini were nestled tutto snug in their lettini

    While visions of panettone danzed in their testolini.

    Papa’ in his berettino and I in my sciallino

    Had just settled down to a long winter’s pisolino.

     

    When out on the terrazza there rose a baraonda,

    I ran to the finestra, yanked up the seranda.

    It seemed clearly a case for the portiere

    Or maybe even a Carabiniere—

    The Luna on the breast of the new-fallen pioggia

    Gave the scintello of acqua to the whole alloggio.

    When, macche’, to my wondering occhi did appal, O’

    ‘Twas a mini carrozza and an ancient cavallo,

    Driven by a piccola vecchietta so brutta and malsana

    I knew in a momento it must be La Befana.

     

     

    And then in a twinkling I heard from the attico

    Sounds of prancing and pawing, it was all quite gotico.

    As I drew in my testa and was turning around,

    Into the salone came La Befana with a bound.

    She was vestita in stracci from testa to scarpina,

    In an outfit that was quite terrifically sporchina.

    She carried a saccone flung on her back,

    And looked like a ladro who’d just filled his pack.

     

    She walked a bit zoppa and carried a scopa—

    Her figura was scarna, with no trace of pancia—

    Honestly, I expected she’d ask for a mancia.

    Her zigomi were all hollow, just ike a crow’s.

    Under the crook of her naso, arched like some bows,

    Was her buffa little bocca, the color ciliegia.

    She was magra like a spilla, a right triste old strega,

    And I tremavo for the silver on show in the bagghega.

     

    When suddenly she spied on the Christmas table

    The avanzi from cena, the best we were able.

    There was anguilla in salsina, and pasta al ragu’,

    Vino from Frascati (quasi genuina),

    There were biscotti and Baci Perugina.

    Setting down her pacco, she filled un piattino,

    And swiftly knocked down a good bicchierino.

    Then, speaking not a parola she went straight to her lavori,

    Filling our calzini with wondrous regalini.

     

    Then laying a dittino aside of her nasino,

    She turned with a sorriso that riempiva all our cuori—

    With an allegro saluto out the finestra she volava…

    She sprang to her carrozza, to her cavallo gave a fischio,

    And via they all zoomed quite heedless of rischio,

    And I heard her cantare ere she volava out of vista,

     

    “Buona notte a tutti, and to all buona Festa!” 

     
  • Op-Eds

    Italy’s Millennial Youth Under the Microscope

    ROME – Two new studies are examining under the microscope Italy’s so-called millennial generation, to analyze both their aspirations and the ways they are facing a new globalized world while challenged by tough economic prospects at home.

    During 2013 some 82,000 young people set out for foreign pastures, almost 21% more than in
    2012; of this new generation of Italian emigres, one out of six holds a degree from an Italian university.

    A two-year scholarly survey of Italian youth, conducted by Milan’s Istituto Toniolo, an offshoot of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, has produced a particularly thoughtful analysis of the generation. Its second annual report reflects the views of some 5,000 Italians over 18 but under 30, and was published by Il Mulino this month as “La condizione giovanile in Italia, Rapporto Giovani 2014” (The Condition of Youth in Italy, Youth Report 2014). A copy of the book was brought to Rome by a delegation of 44 scholarship students from the Institute, who presented a copy to Senate President Pietro Grasso.

    The study shows that eight young people out of ten consider themselves happiest (that is, “very satisfied”) with their friends and family. Friendships loom larger than ever in the past; because many are only children, they adopt friends as the equivalent of a sibling. Seven out of ten see little chance of conditions improving in Italy; hence the vital importance of private life and personal friendships.

    Their single dearest friend and help-meet nevertheless remains La Mamma, but the figure of Il Papa has shrunk considerably, to the point that Father has tumbled in the ranking down to number five. “Father has become a symbolic figure,” said Alessandro Rosina, professor of demography as the Milanese university and chief editor of the publication.

    They have few illusions about getting rich quick: almost 34% of the young men and 41.5% of the young women believe they are unlikely to earn more than $1,250 or $1,800 a month. 
     

    Says  psychologist Eleana Marta of the same University of the Sacred Heart: “The data shows us a sort of unfinished revolution regarding the figure of the father. It is a metamorphosis that began 15 years ago, when the men became more involved with the children. They began to share home life and finally quit their authoritarian function.

    For these young people, politics are also changed drastically. Instead of becoming engaged in traditional party politics, they rally each other via cell phones and tweets to turn out together for a given cause. 

    The second survey was conducted by the respected polling organization IPSOS, with 677 in-depth interviews with students between the ages of 19 and 26. Of these, 115 are studying outside Italy. The goals between those at home and those abroad are curiously different: those at home dream of a well-paying job (39%) while those abroad long for a “job that gives satisfaction” (56%).

    Twenty-seven percent of these say that being well paid is notably less important than it is for those who have stayed at home. Not surprisingly, these distinctions tend to reflect class differences because of the cost to parents for sending their youngsters outside Italy to study.

    “Job security is not among their principal ambitions, neither for the Italian students at home nor for those abroad,” said Nando Pagnoncelli, popular TV presenter, university professor and a director of IPSOS Italy, in presenting the survey results to the press. “The study shows that our young people are less inept and more open to the world than they are often depicted.”

    In a separate study of Italian schooling, we learn that the country has, all told, 7.3 million students, with a tendency in the South, and only in the South, for the number of children in school on the rise.

    The problem is that, as this study shows, the European median of school leavers is 14.5%, but in Italy significantly higher, at 18.8%. Italy has about 4.3 million school leavers between the ages of 14 and 18, which means that a staggering number, ,over 800,000 drop out before they enter high school. 
  • Op-Eds

    Italy’s Architects Show the Way

    ROME – Italians architects continue to be world leaders in design. Renzo Piano, 77, is the creator of no less than 21 projects for museums all over the world; only the most recent is his redesign for the once stodgy Harvard Art Museum in Boston.

    Now Stefano Boeri, 58, has just won the $62,000 International Highrise Award for his “Bosco Verticale” (Vertical Woodland) twin high rise towers of 111 and 78 floors ((100 M and 80 M) respectively in Milan.

    Renzo Piano burst into worldwide fame in 1977 for the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which he designed together with Richard Rogers.

    That building was portrayed by the Economist as the “manifesto for a new kind of museum, a thumb in the eye to those who believe that art must be quarantined from the unwashed masses.”

    Even as a senator, he has retained some of those populist impulses, the Economist points out; and although President Giorgio Napolitano made Piano a lifetime senator, he still gives a modest description of himself as a “geometra genovese” (Genoese geometrician). 

    Some of those populist impulses predominate his ideas for the future of Italy. “When I was made a senator I thought that the sole contribution I could make would be to continue to do my regular job even in the Senate and put myself at the disposal of the collectivity,” he wrote in an article published Nov. 26 in La Repubblica daily.

    He took inspiration, he added, from what Massimo Troisi, playing Pablo Neruda, said in the film Il Postino: “I’m a poet and I express myself in that language.” 

    My language, said Piano, is architecture, and being an architect is in effect a political job; the word itself comes from polis, which means city in ancient Greek. “So what I was seeking as a lifetime senator was a long-term project.”

    This led to his decision to focus on the problems of the transformation of  the Italian city into a metropolis whose new, neglected suburbs – la periferia, as the Italians call them – have in recent decades become home to the vast majority of Italians. 

    This country’s agglomeration of vibrant, strikingly differing city-states, from Venice to Bolzano to Siracusa and Spoleto, have been and remain the country’s wealth in terms of urban architecture, art, food, music, university life and other cultural forms, not to mention as tourist attractions. But today only 10% of the Italian population lives in these historical town centers, and the majority of the others, in suburbs, “with which we associate the word ‘degradation,’” says Piano. “And yet, if not exactly photogenic, these are the cities of the future – the ones we bequeath to our children.” 

    In recent months Piano, 78, has been putting forward his ideas on this in public appearances and in articles in specialized journals as well as in the popular media (see: www.renzopianog124.com). Last year he also turned his senatorial stipend over to six young architects, charged with studying how these boonie suburbs can be improved.

    “We are an extraordinary and very beautiful country, but at the same time very fragile,” he says. “Both the landscape and cities are fragile, as are in particular le periferie, where no one has the time and money for their maintenance.” But these are the cities of the future, “where human energy is concentrated.” A green belt is also needed, he maintains.

    And why not a vertical green belt? This was Boeri’s contribution to the Milanese landscape for the Isola quarter in Milan. On the balconies of the two skyscrapers Boeri designed there, as part of the Porta Nuova urban renewal project, are hundreds of plants on terraces. Boeri’s winning design outshone even the likes of Rem Koolhaas, with whom Boeri and others coauthored the book Mutations, published in 2000. The congratulations came from both President Napolitano and Milan Mayor Giuliano Pisapia, who said with obvious pleasure that Milan itself was also being awarded. 

    Boeri was born in Milan and teaches at the Milan Polytechnic. He is also a visiting professor at Harvard University, and at university institutes in Moscow, Rotterdam, Lausanne and Mendrisio. Like Piano, he is interested in urban renewal with projects regarding port cities like Genoa, Naples and Trieste, in Italy and in Marseilles and Doha. For Sardinia he rebuilt an abandoned military complex. His prize-winning Bosco Verticale for Milan is described as a “biodiversity residential complex” and was completed this year.

    And there are other world-class architects in today’s Italy. Massimiliano Fuksas is one – an “archstar,” according to the daily Corriere della Sera. For Rome’s EUR suburb, built in the days of Mussolini, he designed “La Nuvola” congress center, which until recently had suffered from a shortage of funding, now resolved. The inauguration is slated for the opening of Expo 2015 in Milan. 
  • Events: Reports

    Low Turnout, High League Vote Mark Regional Elections


    ROME – It was night in Rome’s down-market suburb of Infernetto, and to show that immigrants are unwelcome there, rightwingers fashioned gruesome mannequins clothed all in white, and hanged them from bridge rafters over a main road. In case anyone missed the point, a banner proclaimed, “Italian hanged, migrant protected: Italians [come] first.” The signature scrawled on the banner, familiar to Romans, was Forza Nuova, an extreme right-wing political organization that harks back to early postwar nostalgia for Fascism.


    Behind the gesture, which immediately ignited an avalanche of protests against racism, was the Rome city fathers’ decision to transfer thirty immigrant youths to a shelter for refugees at Infernetto, a small town near modern Ostia. The previous year, when Congo-born Dr. Cecile Kyenge – at the time Italy’s Minister for Integration – was to visit the same area, red-stained (as if bloody) dummies were similarly draped about as a protest measure.


    Inside the Infernetto refugee center itself, police had to intervene when a fistfight broke out between some of the minors from Eritrea and others from North Africa; the five injured included one of the shelter’s social workers. Local residents complain that within a square mile, some 1,600 immigrants plus another thousand Roma (Gypsies) are housed. As the daily Corriere della Sera reported, this is an area “already suffering from illegality, social degradation and unemployment,” where prostitution, make-shift huts and night-time burning of toxic waste aggravate the already difficult situation. The immigrants are blamed, and, as a result, on Nov. 22, an anti-immigrant rally was held in the town, with the enthusiastic backing of a member of the European Parliament, Mario Borghezio of the notoriously anti-immigrant Northern League. The good news was that no more than 150 turned out.


    Still, what may seem isolated incidents are not. Anti-immigrant feeling is beginning to play a part in the broader political picture, as was shown in regional elections held this past weekend in Emilia-Romagna in the North and in Calabria in the South. Showing notable disaffection with traditional politics, the turnout in the once highly political, left-leaning Emilia-Romagna was under 38%. By comparison, only four years ago the turnout for regional elections in the region’s main cities like Bologna, Modena, Reggio Emilia and Ferrara was around 70%.


    If not quite so dramatic as in Emilia-Romagna, record abstentions also marked the Calabrian vote, along with a stunning decline in votes for Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle. Grillo’s party claimed less than 5%, or one voter out of twenty. The difference since last May’s European parliamentary elections is literally stunning: only six months ago the M5S had copped over 20% of the vote in Calabria.


    Although Stefano Bonaccini, the candidate representing Premier Matteo Renzi’s center-left coalition, prevailed for regional presidency in Emilia-Romagna, the Northern League’s candidate Alan Fabbri won almost 30%. In what had been heartland leftist territory it came as a shock to the left when, throughout the region, the League claimed almost 20% of the vote; by comparison it had won only 14% in regional elections in 2010. “For the League, this is an historical victory,” crowed League national leader Matteo Salvini on RAI Radio 3.


    The losers there were Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia with just over 8% and the rightist Fratelli d’Italia-Alleanza Nazionale, with under 2%. Speaking on behalf of the League, Salvini said, “If I were Renzi, I’d be worried because he doesn’t seem to keep his promises” (le promesse iniziano ad avere le gambe molto corte).


    Renzi seemed undisturbed, dismissing the low turnout with praise for the new president of Emilia-Romagna, the candidate of Renzi’s Partito Democratico. “I have all the respect in the world for the chatterers,” said Renzi, evidently referring to Salvini. “But in the meantime we have taken back from the center-right four regions [of 20]. Our goal remains to change Italy.”


    Change remains the watchword, but who is to bring it about? The background chatter this month is also a counterpoint wave of industrial strikes. In the acid words of Maurizio Landini, who is general secretary of the metals workers of Fiom and the leftist trade union CGIL: “The abstentions in the regional vote show that people don’t turn out to vote. But our workers’ strikes are having a success without precedent. People understand that there is an autonomous and independent trade union that wants to change things.”

  • Global Warming, Cement= Disaster


    ROME – As the Italian saying goes, “Piove sul bagnato” (It rains where it’s already a-wash.) And indeed it is, with floods sweeping away cars, in which hapless victims have been drowned. Or – as happened Sunday in picture-perfect Laveno Mombello near Lago Maggiore – the rainfall was so persistent that, with a gigantic roar, it made a huge section of hillside collapse, in a landslide that tore straight through a house and into two upstairs bedrooms. A 16-year-old girl and her 70-year-old grandfather were both killed as they slept. It is a sad irony that the very word Laveno comes from the Latin labes meaning landslide.
     
    This November such landslides and serious floods caused by seemingly endless rainstorms have left 16  victims in one month; ten died only this past week. Two thousand people have been evacuated from their homes, and there is concern for others who are completely isolated, like the 180 families at Brigna near Voltri. Genoa and its region of Liguria are especially hard hit, with damages estimated at $1.3 billion and 300 roads blocked. But Lombardy, the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont have been hard hit, and there is great concern for the Po River in coming days as the intense rains show no sign of abating. At Bolzaneto a cemetery wall crumbled away, and 70 coffins were washed into a stream that had become swollen into a river. To fight back, 160 soldiers have been mobilized in Liguria to remove landslides and another 40 in Piedmont to reinforce  the Po River banks.
     
    Who is to blame? Global warming is certainly a cause, but closer to home is another culprit, cement, thanks to the casual (not to say criminal)  dispensation of building permits that began in the 1960s. According to art historian Tomaso Montanari, the building programs excogitated by the national governments of the past decades, but also by regional and local authorities, permitted the destruction of five million hectares (19,300 sq. miles) of farmland in the half century after 1950. For architect Arturo Sandrini, writing in 1997, the building speculators took Italy into “a delirium of construction.”
     
    The mayors of the various cities, beginning with Marco Doria of Genoa, have been literally assailed by irate citizens, some of whom have lost everything. In turn the mayors have attacked the national government headed by Matteo Renzi for having failed to provide the funding for, among other things, the reinforcement of river banks and of buildings at risk, and the replanting the trees whose roots prevent hillsides from collapsing. 
     
    Because Renzi is in Asia attending the G-20 meeting in Brisbane, his undersecretary Graziano Delrio went to Genoa for a first-hand look at the disaster. “Other countries like Holland, Germany and Switzerland have a culture of the territory and take better care of their rivers than we do,” he said. “Within the coming year funds for disaster intervention, currently blocked, will be made available: “Our Civil Protection agency must have sufficient funding.”
     
    Delrio’s promises have so far failed to keep the government he represents from continuing to come under fire. The aim of one of Renzi’s pet projects, “Sblocca Italia” (Unleash Italy), is to stimulate the economy by financing construction of highways and tunnels. But to this end it also whittles away at some of the existing restrictions whose purpose is protect the environment.
     
    In the hard-hit North of Italy, writes Montanari, “They thought that ‘development’ was a perfect synonym for cement – and still think so.” But building speculation is like a drug, he goes on to say. “Everything happens faster, and a community, without anyone forcing it, elects politicians willing to corrupt the laws, because corrupt laws permit corrupting the environment.”
     

    The brutal storms began Genoa Oct. 10, when a 57-year-old man drowned near the Brignole train station. Only a few days later a woman near Trieste was killed in a landslide and two elderly couple were drowned in a raging river.  At the same time hundereds of people have been saved by hard-working firemen, including three who were pulled from their car near Alessandria in Piedmont as they were drowning.
  • Op-Eds

    Fallout Even Before Napolitano Resigns


    ROME – President Giorgio Napolitano, who was born in 1925 and took office in 2006, will neither confirm nor deny the persistent reports that he will announce his resignation, perhaps during the customary New Year’s Eve speech. But even without confirmation the scuttlebutt is that it will happen, and that, as the president approaches his ninetieth year, the resignation may take effect in March. 

     
    “I simply can’t go on,” Napolitano reportedly confided to his aides at the Quirinal Palace. His old friend Emanuele Macaluso, like Napolitano a long-ago (but always independent minded) Communist party member, told an Italian reporter that Napolitano has also been under pressure to resign from his wife, Clio, presumably for reasons of health. Said Macaluso: “The question is closed: Napolitano has always said that he would wind up his presidency, not when his seven-year term expires, but when a new political process has begun. And it has.”
     
    With or without confirmation, the political fallout is already having visible effects upon the present government headed by the youthful Matteo Renzi. The first is that the guessing-game scramble for a successor is underway. The second is that the hasty calling of national general elections appears to be on hold for a decent interval, and certainly until well after election of a new head of state. True, not all agree on this: Renato Brunetta of Forza Italia maintains, on the contrary, that Napolitano’s resignation “would mark the end of the legislature.” But most believe this is so.
     
    By law, a president is elected for seven years by all members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate plus three representatives of each of Italy’s twenty regions (the exception is the Val d’Aosta, with just one). For the first three ballots a two-thirds majority is required; after that, a simple majority. But, bearing in mind that only two of Italy’s fourteen presidents have ever been elected on a first ballot, few are banking upon election during those first three ballots. Election by a simple majority is the more likely scenario. This being the case, the relative strengths of the parties is now a hot topic. 
     
    In the most recent Demos survey, Renzi’s Partito Democratic (PD) today commands 41.2% of the hypothetical vote (compared with 40.8% six months ago). This is a comfortable lead but not a simple majority without votes from other parties. The second leading party remains the embattled Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S), with 19.6%, or significantly less than the 21.2% of six months ago. Third down the popularity list is former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, with 15.6%. However, like Beppe Grillo’s M5S, the FI has dropped down from its 16.8% of last March. Either could seal a deal with Renzi over the name of a new president; otherwise he must have recourse to the minor parties. Among these, the largest is the Northern League (Lega), which has surged up from 6.2% of six months back to today’s 8.8%. 
     
    Among the names floating about as possible candidates are several clever women: Anna Finocchiaro, longtime PD (and its predecessors) loyalist; Emma Bonino of the old (and now toothless) Partito Radicale, who has solid experience in international affairs; the relatively inexperienced Roberta Pinotti of the PD; and Laura Boldrini, currently president of the Chamber of Deputies, but put down by the radical daily Il Fatto Quotidiano as “a flop,” in the kind of insult that just might make her popular with everyone else.
     
    As for the men, the names bruited about include former premier Romano Prodi; Walter Veltroni of the PD old guard; briefly premier Giuliano Amato, once close to Bettino Craxi;  and Piero Grasso, currently head of the Senate. The respectable Mario Draghi’s name is being mentioned longingly, but the president of the European Central Bank seems to prefer not being a candidate.
     
    The noise in the background comes from the big trade unions, who continue to threaten a general strike; and in Rome Tuesday strikers were already out in force. Their contesting a government which at least theoretically represents the center-left is a real complication, and has riven the PD into warring camps. The unemployment rate of 12.6% in September, and youth unemployment at around 40%, explain why, but do not tell the whole story. Sociologist Franco Cassano is a member of Parliament elected in the PD lists in 2013 and the author of a new book called “Senza il Vento della Storia, La Sinistra nell’era del cambiamento” (Without the Wind of History, the Left in the Era of Change).  
     
    Professor Cassano’s thesis is that the left represented by the trade unions are still locked into three glorious decades, from the Sixties through the Eighties, when Italy’s economy was in expansion, and the unions effectively represented the solidity of the economic organization. All that is over, says Cassano, and today the well-organized, self-protective unions represent a minority that has failed to come to terms with the new reality and instead try to protect an ever narrower margin of the population. They meantime ignore “the new individual dimension of autonomous work” in a labor market characterized by the self-employed and the precarious. 
     
    What is needed, implicitly, is for the unions to begin a search for a new sense of social justice, different from that sought and in good measure achieved in the Seventies. 

Pages