Italy
Bayesian Mysteries
British tech billionaire Mike Lynch, his daughter and five others drowned in a purportedly unsinkable luxury yacht. In England on the same day, his lifelong friend and business partner was hit and killed by a car on a country road. A conspiracy theorist couldn’t make up the background story.
The Dark Side of Tuscany’s Farms
Beautiful Tuscany has a dark side. On farms that produce the region’s famous produce, women who fled war and poverty labor in appalling conditions 12 hours a day, summer and winter. Paid less than male migrant workers, and far less than Italians, they are also sexually exploited by predatory bosses.
The Olympics Transformed a Tiny Italian Village — But at a High Cost
Cortina d’Ampezzo, a mountain town of about 5,000 people, has won a bid to co-host the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics together with Milan. The event will come 70 years after Cortina hosted one of the first Winter Games post-World War II, in 1956, which helped propel the town to stardom, making it a must-stop for jet-setters as a home to elite sports and the most extravagant real estate and shops. But the locals are left with another set of options.
The Normalization of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni
If Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s New Year’s resolution in January 2023 was to gain international acceptance, then she has succeeded. Love her or loathe her, the perception of her as an unreliable firebrand with neo-fascist sympathies has changed. But her authoritarian style of governance remains a danger.
Lenin Still Has Pride of Place in a Tiny Italian Town
The enduring legacy of the Lenin bust is a story about present-day Italy and the country’s long history of activism — the kind that shaped a small town’s identity for over a century and continues to do so — but also about far-right sentiments carving out ever-larger spaces in national politics.
My American and British Friends Used To Laugh About Berlusconi’s Populism. They’re Not Laughing Anymore
The beating heart of populism is telling people what they want to hear, which is, by its very nature, nation-specific. You need to speak to your audience’s particular weaknesses, fears and wounded pride. Italians have a phrase, “He spoke to the stomach of the people.” And that’s what Berlusconi did.
The Italian Far Right’s Long March Back to Power
Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to “Make Italy Great Again” aim to purge the negative memory of fascism as a kind of “black spot” in Italian history for a defensive anger against those who seek to saddle Italians with a feeling of guilt.