Articles by: Judith Harris

  • Mammoth Cruise ship in the port of Venice
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    Is Venice Dying? Not quite – But it Is Becoming a Mall

    VENICE – In a fiery new book described as a “pamphlet,” the authoritative archaeologist Salvatore Settis attacks Venice. For Settis, the beloved but troubled lagoon city has now become nothing more than a merchandise mall, in which there is just one inhabitant for every 600 tourists trotting through.

    The decline of the once glorious republic of Venice, which literally ruled the waves at its peak  in the mid-15th century, is hardly a novelty. Following Napoleon's defeat in 1815 the Austrian general Metternich wrested control over Lombardy, Tuscany, the duchies of Modena and Parma, and the Veneto, and all became Habsburg provinces ruled from Vienna. The two Northeastern regions, Lombardy and the Veneto, were the most densely populated, and had rich agricultural production. But Lombardy was also a crossroads on the Italian peninsula and had, as a result, developed such considerable commercial savvy that its capital, Milan, was the wealthiest commercial city in Italy – and still is.

    The Veneto was left behind, and harsh Austrian taxation aggravated the situation. By 1848 the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, as the Habsburgs called it, was home to one-sixth of all the subjects under their rule, but its citizens provided the monarchy in Vienna with almost one-third of their tax revenues.

    By the mid-19th century, the industrial revolution was in full sway, but the two main ports, the Lido and Treport, could harbor only small craft. The difficulties of transport by gondola and of obtaining such industrial essentials as fresh water and coal boosted the cost of manufacturing goods of any type. Furthermore, once goods manufactured in Venice reached the mainland by boat, the roads toward markets were poor.

    It was a crushing blow that the inland Lombards, with their bustling new factories, favored the port at Genoa while the Austrians promoted the port at Trieste at the expense of Venice. The industrial revolution had left Venice "on the periphery," in the words of Venetian historian Adolfo Bernardello. By 1848 the population had dwindled by a quarter, from 126,000 to under 106,000. Ironically, this very aura of decadence attracted American visitors like Henry James, troubled by the new American manufacturing modernism, who came to live in Venice later in the century.

    Today, as Settis points out in his Se Venezia Muore (If Venice Dies), published by Einaudi, the local population had sunk to only 56,684 as of June 2014. In an almost terrifying contrast, the city has 8 million visitors annually. The locals are elderly; in the year 2000, 1,058 Venetians died while only 404 were born. “Its forgotten past weighs upon today’s Venice, but since a shroud wraps everything in a long and indistinct night, there is no complicity, save for indifference,” writes Settis mournfully.

    Another contemporary problem:  he points out that the rich and famous purchase fine Venetian dwellings to use as a vacation home, but for only five or so days a year. The whole city thus risks becoming, itself, a corpse, which awakes for half a day every day with thousands of people wandering past pricy boutiques and then leaving the city empty, all more or less at the same time, writes Settis. In other words, Venice is becoming a watery Pompeii.

    Its administrators did little to improve the situation – on the contrary. On Nov. 5 it was announced that Emilio Spaziante, an ex-general of the tax watchdog police Guardia di Finanza, has plea-bargained a sentence of four years of prison and confiscation of circa $600,000 for his (now admitted) role in the kickback scandal over a giant construction project of mobile dykes in the lagoon called the Mose. Roberto Meneguzzo, former administrative boss of the Palladio Finanziaria group, has also accepted a deal for 2-1/2 years of prison. Prosecutors accused Meneguzzo of having mediated in the corruption scam between Spaziante and the Consorzio Venezia Nuova in an effort to obtain more public funding for the Mose project. The Italian press is also pointing out that Meneguzzo had been among those bidding for control of the insurance mega-group Fondiaria Sai.

  • New Light and Life for the Sistine Chapel

    ROME – This week the curtain was raised on a drastically improved Sistine Chapel. Never, ever have its 2,730 square yards of precious wall and ceiling frescoes by Michelangelo, Pinturicchio, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and other great artists been seen in all their stunning glory as can today’s visitors and, one hopes, visitors in the decades to come. In the words of Italian art critic Helga Marsala, “It’s like a mantle of stars embracing the Chapel.”

    It is certainly a literally brilliant display of scientific ingenuity and good taste. Working  together for the past three years with top experts from all over Europe, the Vatican laboratories have created an innovative new lighting system that reveals details and subtleties that only Michelangelo himself could have seen.

    At the same time the outdated and overwhelmed air conditioning and air exchange system installed twenty years ago has been radically upgraded in order to preserve the Sistine Chapel frescos from the pollution consequent to overcrowding.

    That the precious frescoes, now five centuries old, have been at risk is no secret: from the under three million visitors of 20 years ago there are now over six million a year. The Sistine Chapel is an entirely enclosed space, with not a single external door and its dozen windows firmly sealed to avoid outside air pollution. The question has long been how to avoid air pollution from inside – that is, from people’s breath, dust from their clothing, and sweat, especially when Rome’s hottest months coincide with its greatest number of tourists; in high season the Sistine Chapel attracts up to 2,000 visitors an hour. The air conditioning installed in 1994 was not up to the task, and the old-fashioned spotlights added more heat.

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    The new lighting system is the most visible novelty because it permits a clearer view than ever in the past of the frescoes; the lower paintings had never illuminated at all.
    First the laboratories of the Vatican and of Pannonia University in Hungary, the Catalonian Energy Research Institute in Spain and Fabertechnica Studio of Lighting Design in Italy studied the effects of Light Emitting Diodes (LED) upon some 260 Sistine Chapel pigment samples. When these studies were complete, the century-old German manufacturer OSRAM installed some 7,000 LED lights, secreted in invisible clusters. OSRAM explains that the benefits are reduction of energy consumption by up to 60% plus elimination of heat emissions and of both ultraviolet and infrared rays. “This new system takes the stress off the paintings,”| OSRAM engineer Roberto Barbieri told the press at the formal presentation Oct. 29 inside the Sistine Chapel. If the new lighting is the immediate showpiece, the air conditioning system is even more important and was designed by Carrier, which had installed the Sistine Chapel’s first air conditioning system aimed to accommodate no more than 700 visitors at a time. Like the LED lights, this system is invisible, installed upon the roof and in hidden spaces beneath the chapel windows. It maintains a temperature of between 20 and 25 degrees C. Telecameras count the number of visitors and adjust the air conditioning units (and hence the humidity) accordingly. In addition, “We had to eliminate dust while at the same time not blowing air onto the frescoes,” a Carrier engineer told me. “This required application of fluid dynamics.” The new system “strategically allows for future updates to help meet the evolving needs of the Vatican,” says Carrier president and CEO Geraud Darnis.

    Although an Italian daily announced that limitations upon the number of visitors would be imposed, this is incorrect. Vatican Museums director Antonio Paolucci holds that the Sistine Chapel can contain no more than 2,000 visitors an hour, entering an 20-minute intervals, and that this number will automatically remain stable. “The challenge has been to calculate an air conditioning system that cleans the air of dust but does not blow directly upon the painted surfaces,” a Carrier engineer told me. “To achieve this we had to work with the fluid dynamics of air.”

    For Professor Paolucci, access to the Chapel is a question of faith. “The Sistine Chapel is sacred to Catholics all over the world,” he has said repeatedly. “They cannot be excluded when they come to Rome.” Yesterday’s visitors, for example, included a family of twelve Catholics from three generations who made their visit to the Sistine Chapel the high point of a family reunion in Rome, where they had convened from their native Sri Lanka, London and Zurich.

    It is implicit that nor can the income be excluded from the ticket sales to tourists like these and for special evening visits organized for small groups through travel agencies or like the private soiree organized by car manufacturer Porsche for its employees and their families.
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    President Napolitano Testifies Before Palermo Court


    ROME – The full text about a presumed swap between the Italian powers-that-be and the Sicilian Mafia back in the Nineties is yet to be released. But already President Giorgio Napolitano’s three-hour testimony Oct. 28 before a Palermo court, transferred inside the Quirinal Palace in Rome, confirmed that the Sicilian Mafia had indeed tried to blackmail the Italian government. Because of his office, Napolitano, 89, was not obliged to answer the questions put to him by five prosecutors and by lawyers for the defense, but elected to do so. In so doing, the President offered an admirable image of democracy at work, while also requesting that the full text of the hearing, held behind closed doors, be released to the public “within a few days.”

     
    The issue at stake is particularly nasty. Following a state crackdown on prison conditions for convicted Mafiosi, a rash of Mafia-style crimes began. Twenty-one murders took place, among them of Sicilian Mafia investigators Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in Palermo. Targeted bombings included of an ancient church in Rome and in a location abutting the Uffizi Museum in Florence. The end of the campaign of violence was seen by some to coincide with a softening of the particularly harsh prison regime for some 300 convicted Mafiosi in 1993, with the result that a link between the two was suspected. The swap theory gained sufficient credence that Nicola Mancino, at the time Interior Minister, came under prosecution for perjury in denying that he had knowledge of negotiations between Cosa Nostra and the state.
     
    A recently discovered Italian intelligence dispatch dated Aug. 20, 1993, entitled “Servizio per le informazioni e la sicurezza democratica” (Information and Democratic Security Service) lends credence to the idea that a swap was at least proposed by Cosa Nostra, headed at that time by Salvatore (Toto’) Riina. According to this report, “At this point the Mafiosi are certain they will spend the rest of their lives sentenced to harsh detentions that can no longer be annulled by a high court, and under a rigid prison regime, far different from that to which they were accustomed until only recently.
     
    “They have thus come to the conclusion that only institutional chaos, brought about by the rebellion of a civil society worn down by terrorizing bombings, [and] possibly further exacerbated by subsequent coup-style events, can obtain for them a new form of negotiations aimed at notably reducing their imprisonment ….” That is, in this report of 1993, found  in the files of a deceased judge, does not confirm that a swap existed, but does point out explicitly that the threat of an (otherwise unexplained) coup d’etat also existed behind the bombings and murders. (According to the press agency ANSA, “Sources present at the hearing” said Napolitano had testified that he and the then premier Carlo Azeglio Ciampi both feared that such a coup was a serious risk.
     
    Two years ago it was learned that Mancino, suspected of having authorized the swap, had been in contact by telephone four times with Napolitano, who was at that time president of the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies. The Palermo investigators therefore asked for Napolitano to testify. In another important detail, it has emerged that Napolitano himself was a possible Mafia target. Complicating matters was that his close advisor Loris D’Ambrosio may have been a go-between for Mancino with Napolitano. However, when D’Ambrosio himself was put under investigation in 2012, he suffered a heart attack and died before he could be questioned. In what is known from lawyers so far about his deposition, Napolitano said that if D’Ambrosio, who was well known for his rectitude, had genuine suspicions about irregularities, he would have gone straight to magistrates.
     
    The first to have spoken of an swap State-Mafia was Giovanni Brusca, so-called “repentent” Mafioso, back in 1996. The investigation was opened in 2008 following further allegations by another “pentito,” Massimo Ciancimino. Initially Napolitano appeared reluctant to testify, but then agreed to full cooperation. In Tuesday’s hearings inside the Quirinal Palace, which is the President’s official residence in Rome, the lawyers representing the convicted Mafia boss Riina were among those present and, after a lengthy previous debate, were allowed to ask the President direct questions.
     
    But not only Napolitano was at risk. As one of the prosecutors told the press this week, “This is a difficult moment for us, above all because of the nasty threats we are receiving. I want to thank the police for their efforts to protect us.”
  • Life & People

    Politics & the Piazza


    The late British classicist Henry Kitto held that the ancients had little formal democracy, but that their meeting to argue out their problems at the stoa in Athens or a forum in Rome was essentially democratic, whereas the modern British, with their formal democracy, tend to speak only across backyard picket fences. For Professor Kitto, yammering away, arguing, quarreling, and joking in a piazza constitute a real and valuable road to democracy.

    This concept was driven home to me when touring Sicily by car with a friend in 1965. At sunset we heard a drum beating across a valley. Drawn by the steady throbbing, we drove up a winding road to a tiny hilltop town where we saw that the drummer had summoned farm workers, many of them illiterate, to the piazza to hear the evening newspaper being read aloud. Afterward a lively debate began, exactly as Professor Kitto had said.
     
    The architecture of urban life in Italy, still focuses around the piazza, continues to work toward guaranteeing that its diverse standards of living do not isolate people. And what a gift that is, even when the people in the piazza run amok, as was not infrequent in the early Seventies.


    In May of 1969, the Rome Daily American sent me to cover an anti-Vietnam war demonstration during a visit by President Richard Nixon. Demonstrations were scheduled, and police had to protect the American Embassy on Via Veneto. Helping them were several organized squads of right-wing extremists yielding brickbats. After hundreds of demonstrators were forced from Via Veneto toward Piazza della Repubblica, police cars whirled in a circle, sealing the demonstrators as if in a ring. The only sound was a stampede of running feet.
     
    “What are you doing here?” shouted one of the organizers. I was six months pregnant, and terrified. I showed him my press credentials. “Okay. Stay with us,” he said, drawing me toward an inner circle.

     
    These days the piazzas are by and large calm, and favorite haunts of Italians and tourists both. Traffic has always been barred from many, such as St. Mark’s in Venice, which thrive as open-air living rooms. These open spaces are in marked contrast with the Anglo-Saxon concept of a park, such as Washington Square Park, crisscrossed by lanes.

     
    The Italian piazza is an outgrowth of the temple complexes of Greco-Roman antiquity. Many stood within a walled compound and had treasuries containing valuable votive offerings, so that gates were locked at night for security. The transformation from temple compound to busy piazza with a secular function is nicely illustrated at ancient Pompeii, where the older, simpler Greek temple to Apollo within its walls runs alongside the later, larger Roman forum. Centered on its temple to the Capitoline gods, that forum still has walls and gates but is expanded so that flanking the temple are business offices, an elementary school, a public latrine, warehousing, and local government offices. 
     
    This configuration—church, town hall, place of business—continued throughout Italy. During the Renaissance it was the scene of political and religious choreographed events. The Reformation changed its architecture so that the piazza became a propagandistic, theatrical setting for the beleaguered Catholic Church. Personal propaganda was an important function: under Pope Innocent X, Piazza Navona, where his Pamphilj family owned a palazzo, was revamped with Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers as its focal point. The goal was family prestige, and indeed, for a time the piazza was called the Pamphilj Forum.

     
    Under Mussolini, handsome new cities were built in the Pontine area south of Rome, replete with piazzas. There, the town hall, rather than the church, was designed to be the primary focus.

     
    But even then people conversing, dialoguing, quarreling, and enjoying each other remained at the real heart of the piazza.
     
    Imitation is the finest form of flattery, of course. Proof came in a visit last week to a year-old gigantic and stylish mall complex in Glendale, California.

     
    Its centerpiece is, guess what, a sprawling piazza with a large traditional fountain encircled by outdoor cafes and a small green where children play and grown-ups do tai chi on Sunday mornings. Evviva la piazza!
     

    Judith Harris is a Rome-based American writer and journalist
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    Renzi, Berlusconi Bank on the New-Look Future


    ROME – “Italicum” – the agreement for reform of Italy’s election system hatched last February by that unlikely couple, Premier Matteo Renzi and former Premier Silvio Berlusconi – still looks a bit like pie in the sky. Nevertheless, it is still high on the political agenda, though evolving with important novelties.
     
    About a month ago the two met once more, each with just one aide, to go over the main tenets of the proposal. By the terms of their original agreement a national general election would be, as in France, a two-step affair. First coalitions would face off against each other, and then a run-off would follow. So as to guarantee governance, the winning coalition would then receive a freebie bounty of extra MPs. Today, however, instead of coalitions pitted against each other the plan calls for the horde of single parties to compete before the run-off between the top two. That phase two winner would receive 55% of the MPs. In the revised agreement, moreover, no Senate vote would take place, so as to speed up the process. As Renzi says repeatedly, he wants to “simplify” things political, and these proposed changes, if and when they are finalized, should do just that.
     
    How did it come about that two such unlikely bedfellows, Renzi and Berlusconi, believe they can succeed in rewriting Italian politics? First, the new “Italicum” version (already being called jokingly the “Renzellicum”) reflects Renzi’s rather remarkable success in marshaling broad popular support for renovating the Partito Democratico (PD). “He figures he can win 51% of a vote,” confided one of his insiders. In so doing Renzi is challenging the old-style party he inherited from its past leaders Pier Luigi Bersani and Massimo D’Alema as well as younger traditionalists in the PD like Gianni Cuperlo. Renzi is also at odds with labor leaders like Susanna Camusso, general secretary of the leftist CGIL union, who has called for a nation-wide general strike against the Renzi government’s labor reform called the Jobs Act, which curbs the rights of workers let go.
     
    As for Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia (FI) party now ranks at most third in Italy after Renzi’s PD and Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S), the former Premier seems certain that time is in his favor; indeed, this new agreement with Renzi seems posited on there being no early elections this year. Berlusconi’s point is to watch the other leaders stew in their own juices, beginning with Grillo, some of whose brighter stars are abandoning him. Grillo has done his part to alienate many of his own by kicking out a dozen members of parliament (11 senators, one MP) elected on his ticket and almost as many regional counselors throughout Italy for such acts of disobedience as giving a media interview. Grillo also kicked out four M5Sers who, at the party’s mega-rally in Rome, had demanded greater openness and a more democratic approach to decision-making in the party. As one critic put it, the notion of e-democracy in Grillo’s party has become “a farce.”
     
    Berlusconi seems to believe that in coming months his Forza Italia will gain enough consensus to push Grillo out of the way, and Forza Italia will come in second. Berlusconi’s fiancee, Francesca Pascale, has lent a hand by making overtures to the Italian gay polity (and hence to younger voters) with ostentatious and well publicized appearances at Arcigay meetings. She and Silvio also hosted the trans Vladimiro Luxuria last week at Arcore, Berlusconi’s villa in Milan.
     
    Money also talks, and shortly after Luxuria was there, Berlusconi hosted at Arcore another Vlad, this one whose family name is Putin. Together these two guests shouted at the media-hip world that Silvio is still a major player who protects gays and transexuals and, by the way, Italy’s trade with Russia, Italy’s principal export market. Trade between the two countries amounts to some $13 billion a year, and during the first six months of 2013 it rose by almost 16% over the previous year (ISTAT figures).
     
    One who found the Berlusconi opening to Luxuria & Co. welcome was Angelino Alfano, Interior Minister who split with Berlusconi to create a splinter party, the New Center-Right (NCD). This past week Angelino has come down hard on Ignazio Marino, the mayor of Rome, for celebrating the weddings outside of Italy of 16 gay couples. Alfano’s point seems to be to try to appeal to the anti-gay crowd in Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – those horrified at the photos of Silvio embraced between Francesca and Luxuria. When Mayor Marino welcomed the couples to the Campidoglio (the town hall) and officially registered their marriages on Oct. 18, not only did Alfano declare war on the Mayor, but he also had the Rome Prefecture send a written order to Marino to rescind the registrations immediately. The mayor is resisting the order, however, and threatens to take the case to the Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg.
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    Italy’s School Daze and the Economy


    ROME – Most Italian schools reopened after the summer vacation on Sept. 15. This was good, for just four days before the Big Day, in a classroom at Tivoli outside Rome, a 3-ft.-square chunk of ceiling fell down. Had school already been in session, students could have been injured. As it was, two teachers gearing up for the new school year were. Such incidents are remarkably common: on Oct. 14, 2008, the ceiling of a classroom at the Darwin Liceo, a high school at Rivoli, collapsed, killing 17-year-old Vito Scafidi and seriously injuring four other students. 

     
    As if marking that sad anniversary, yet another schoolroom ceiling collapse occurred this Oct. 14 at the Istituto Selvatico in Padua. While there were no injuries, Veneto middle school students launched a region-wide series of piazza protests. As one angry student said: “You simply can’t risk your life by going to school.” In fact, only one-fifth of funding for public schools today goes to infrastructure and four-fifths, to salaries.
     
    The problem of maintaining and improving the physical conditions of Italian public schools would be enormous in the best of times, but is all the more complex during the present economic crisis because the costs involved run counter to the need to give jobs to people, including teachers. The government headed by Matteo Renzi has offered a plan which would give jobs to 148,000 new teachers and educational helpers while introducing merit promotions. But the Renzi project has come under criticism from teachers because it would cut salaries across the board and from others because the bill – one of the major structural reforms his government proposes – is limited to job creation at the expense of infrastructure. 
     
    “The text of the bill doesn’t take into account the lack of those structures indispensable for the normal functioning of a school,” Mario Pirani, author and journalist specialized in economics, wrote in the daily La Repubblica, of which he was a founding father. Pirani also complains that with the “expansion of the offer” comes no specific information about what the students are to study and the teachers to teach in the hours added to the school day. Even if hours are added to the school day, most schools still lack cafeterias. 
     
    Another of the proposed novelties is to allow teachers to teach subjects akin to their own specialty, but it is unclear just what this means. Something similar happened in the Seventies, when under-employed graduates of technical schools were encouraged to teach mathematics without specific training in math. The results were unfortunate, to put it mildly, yet here we are again. “In our schools we have graduates in pharmacology who teach math, teachers of sociology teaching English, and so on,” Pirani says. 
     
    This is not to denigrate the good news. In Genoa students have literally heroically rolled up their sleeves and, en masse, have turned out to help clean up their drowned city, and have mocked those politicoes arriving belatedly (and with the media in their wake) to give a hand. In the past decade the number of university graduates has doubled, and on pan-European tests Italian graduates score better than even in the recent past. Moreover, the median score in mathematics of an Italian university graduate is of 289 points, not far below the points of the Danes, Finns and Japanese (292), according to an OCSE study of schools in 30 countries. 
     
    But here the OCSE study suggests that the Renzi reform bill is on the right track, for it suggests that an increase of 2% in the number of teachers makes a dramatic difference to the students’ grasp of the material. At the same time the study, according to Andreas Schleicher of OCSE, that although the spending on students worldwide has bounced up by 30% in the past decade, the level of acquired learning has remained flat in most of those countries. And even the OCSE report acknowledges that the typical Italian student
     
    In the meantime the students continue to take matters into their own hands. In Rome the 300 students who organized a two-day sit-in at the prestigious Giulio Cesare classical high school risk formal investigation by a prosecutor on potential charges of “invasion of a public building.” At the same time school principal Carla Sbrana has acknowledged that the students did no damage and on the contrary had actually cleaned off offensive graffiti from the walls, including a swastika by her name. To this a student added that, “We also repainted a dressing room wall.” Three other Roman schools are also witnessing marches and student assemblies.
     
    In another genuine innovation, this week Lazio Region President Nicola Zingaretti put forward four financial projects for the school year 2014-15 for some $160,000 to focus on prevention and monitoring of homophobia and LGBT bullying. The project will involve parents as well as teachers, researchers and psychologists.
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    Renzi’s “Jobs Act” Passes Confidence Vote in the Senate and Among EU Opinion-Makers


    ROME – In a turbulent session late Wednesday Premier Matteo Renzi’s labor reform bill known as the “Jobs Act” was passed in the Senate. Accompanying its passage was a vote of confidence for his harried government, 165 votes in favor, 111 opposed and two abstentions. The vote marks a much-needed success for Renzi, who has come under sharp criticism for having promised significant reforms that, until now, had by and large failed to materialize.
     
    Even before ratification in the Chamber, EU leaders were congratulating Renzi on grounds that the Jobs Act will, among other things, help make Italy more appealing to foreign investors. The importance of the act, expected to be passed in the Chamber of Deputies before Christmas, is due to its aim of making the labor market less rigid by its whittling away at Seventies-era measures. Aimed at protecting workers from exploitation, they are today considered a barrier to employment.
     
    The most controversial section of the Jobs Act is its Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute. Accurately described in the Italian press as labor’s “sacred cow,” this article makes it extremely difficult for an employer to fire an employee. Needless to say, its revision is being fought savagely by trade union leaders as well as by 35 parliamentarians in Renzi’s own Partito Democratico (PD). These PD opponents include many in the old guard, but also the younger in-house opposition led by Pippo Civati and Gianni Cuperlo. Despite their opposition, all but two of Renzi’s PD opponents voted in favor of confidence in the government; one, Senator Walter Tocci, voted for the bill and then immediately resigned from the party.
     
    However, emboldened by the huge majority of PD votes he copped in the party’s primaries last year, and further encouraged by the solid support of top EU leaders who were coincidentally meeting in Milan, Renzi has little need to pay attention to his PD opposition. José Manuel Barroso, European Commission President, and Angela Merkel were among those congratulating Renzi.
     
    In the Senate Wednesday before the vote the political battle turned nasty, with what appeared to be a brief fistfight. Then one Northern Leaguer heaved a hefty tome of Senate regulations at Senate President Pietro Grasso. Not least, Sen. Rosetta Enza Blundo of the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) rushed forward to toss coins at the government ministers. Other M5S senators made enough of a scene that Grasso – in an exaggerated reaction, according to some observers – ordered their senate group leader to be removed bodily from the hall; this left many with a bitter taste because never before had a group leader been ousted from the Senate.
     
    If the Jobs Act is today’s showpiece for the government, elsewhere the news on the political front has been literally devastating. The most serious is the admission by the former head of the Veneto Region Giancarlo Galan that he had taken millions of dollars of kickbacks for construction of the controversial Mose barrier, a huge, moveable water barrier intended to protect Venice from the increasing number of damaging high water events. Galan, among the founders of Silvio Berlusconi’s original Forza Italia party in 1993, had served as Italy’s Agriculture Minister and then, in 2011, as Culture Minister.
     
    Venetian prosecutors accused him of having accepted annual gifts of one million euros plus a one-off of two million and almost as much again for reconstruction of his personal villa, all in exchange for facilitating the permits for construction of the mobile dikes of the Mose water barrier, built at a cost of over $6 billion. Although last June Galan, who is a member of Parliament (which voted 35 to 138 for his parliamentary immunity to be lifted), proclaimed that he was “totally extraneous” in the Mose investigation, this week, in what amounts to his acknowledging guilt, his lawyers asked the court for his sentence to be reduced to two years and ten months under house arrest plus a fine of almost $3 million in exchange for his cooperating with justice.
     
    Prosecutors were accepting this proposal on grounds that it fit in with their ideas of “re-education,” a term all the more ironic since in 2013 Galan was made president of the Chamber of Deputies’ Commission on Culture, Science and Education. In prison since July, Galan will not know if this solution is accepted until a judge passes sentence later this month, but may shortly be released to house arrest anyway. Of the 35 accused in the Mose scandal, so far 20 are trying to negotiate lighter sentences in exchange for cooperating with investigators.
     
    One of those indicted is former Venice mayor Giorgio Orsoni, accused of using Mose funds for illicit campaign financing. Orsoni claims that he knew nothing of illegal donations to his winning election campaign of 2010, and this week declared that, “From the primaries up to the elections management [of my campaign] on the organizational, and financial level was handled, by the PD structure, using resources completely unknown to me.” A PD commission is still trying to work out just what happened.
  • Art & Culture

    Migrants: Remembering Oct. 3 and The 360 Lampedusa Dead

    TREVIGNANO ROMANO – Trevignano is a small town north of Rome with a surprisingly big cinema tradition dating back to the Thirties. This Sept. 25-29 it hosted a five-day festival of debate and documentary and fiction films from around the world dedicated to migration. On view were such outstanding films as Machan (Buddy) by Italian director Uberto Pasolini, based on the true story of Sri Lankan migrants who faked membership in a handball team in order to obtain visas for Germany. Forced to play in a real tournament, the “team” lost every match, before disappearing into the woodwork just as German police caught onto the fraud. Other films showed migrant realities in Belgium, France, Mexico, and South Korea, among others.

    The Trevignano Film Festival, whose chief organizer was journalist Corrado Giustiniani with

    the participation of actors Carlo Verdone and Monica Guerritore, was timed to draw attention to the first anniversary of the drowning Oct. 3, 2013, just off the coast of Lampedusa, of some 360 migrants arriving via Libya from Eritrea, Somalia and Ghana. When the 66-foot fishing boat into which they were crammed began to sink within sight of Lampedusa, a man set fire to a blanket to draw attention. The flames ignited gasoline, and the migrants shifting to escape the fire overturned the burning boat.

    That disaster did not go unnoticed. On July 8 Pope Francis had already visited Lampedusa to lay a wreath in the water for those who had lost their lives, and on Oct. 3 he tweeted a prayer for these new victims. The then premier Enrico Letta similarly tweeted. Jose Barroso, European Commission president, said that the disaster should be a “wakeup call to increase solidarity.” To save lives, Italy itself mounted a unique Mediterranean rescue mission, called “Mare Nostrum.” At a cost of over $12 million monthly (according to Rai News), during this past year Mare Nostrum has rescued some 40,000. (For the Italian Navy’s account in English with photos see >>> ).

    In what is an absolutely unprecedented situation, some 135,000 migrants have flooded into Italy so far this year. Many are women and children. In 2012, there were 5,232 unaccompanied children; this year the number has soared to 9,700. A chief reason is war, and UN statistics show that over the past year 11,000 individuals entered Italy from Syria alone. “Let’s be honest: the arrival of migrants is no longer an ‘emergency.’ It is the new norm,” said one of the Festival speakers flatly. “It is an everyday, regular occurrence, which we have to learn to treat as such.”

    Italy has repeatedly asked the EU countries for help. Carlotta Sami, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), told the Festival audience that “Mare Nostrum has been a unique help,” and that cooperation with other European countries is increasing. However, what seems to be arriving is criticism and a move simply to block migrations through a pan-EU military force called “Frontex Plus,” slated to begin patrolling Mediterranean waters by late November though exactly what it will do remains uncertain. Its official goal of “border management” excludes “humanitarian” aid. Utilizing at least 10 ships and four airplanes, it will not enter international waters.

    If the aim is simply to block migration and return migrants to their homelands, this overly simplistic solution fails ignores the realities of the migration. “Most of those arriving have a legal right to request exile,” Sami pointed out. In a brief interview she also told me that the governing chaos in Libya has frustrated efforts to block the smuggling racket there.

    Some accuse Mare Nostrum of attracting an excessive number of migrants to Italy specifically because other Mediterranean countries turn them back. Germany laments that only half of those arriving in Italy are identified, meaning that during the past year some 70,000 unidentified individuals simply disappeared. said Sami. “The Italian government knows it must get the data on each one, but many refuse to give their fingerprints, especially the women. It is hard to force them to do so,” she said. Even some of the unaccompanied minors have been expelled and repatriated.

    Why do they refuse? Because the current law known as the Dublin Regulation establishes that, once fingerprinted, the individual cannot leave that country, and if he tries, will be sent back. However, the vast majority of those arriving have legally resident relatives, including husbands, whom they will be joining in Northern Europe; if fingerprinted in Italy, they cannot leave this country. Similarly, the risk of Jihadists hiding among them, as some news accounts predict, is something of a red herring, and the experts here point out that most of those arriving take l8 months at least to do so.

    Moreover, if returned home where they are identified, relatives risk being punished. One of those sent back “home” was interviewed in a courageous documentary, made by Valerio Cataldi for Tg2 Dossier, La Neve per la Prima Volta (The First Time Seeing Snow), shown at the Festival. A migrant interviewed in Sweden had fled from Eritrea only to be shipwrecked near Malta. From there he was shipped back to Eritrea and thrown into a remote island prison for one year. After the prison year he was sent into the Eritrean army and escaped to Sudan. There his application for a visa to Sweden was accepted. During his interview he showed his drawing of the terrible tortures to which he and the prisoners had been subject in Eritrea, his homeland.
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    Visco, Stiglitz, Piketty Agree: Austerity Doesn’t Pay


    ROME – In case anyone is not worrying about the Italian economy, here’s a depressing statistic, just released by Cerved. By the reckoning of this respected Italian business reporting service, over 4,000 business failed in just three months, April through June, or over 14% more than during the same period of 2013. The national business association Confcommercio concurred, reporting that the first half year of 2014 showed 8,000 business failures. So what is to be done?
     
    Even as Germany’s economic policy of austerity prevails within the EU, discord over it is increasingly heated. In a private conversation the other day a ranking Italian economist was literally sputtering with frustrated rage at the enforced austerity policies, which hamper investment. She is not alone, as a growing body of dissenting opinion shows.
     
    At the annual Iea-Isi Strategic Forum conference underway this week at the Bank of Italy, keynote speaker Ignazio Visco, governor of the Bank of Italy, warned that, “We are in unexplored territory. We need to refocus our economic policies,” he continued, in order to stimulate aggregate demand and investments.” This will require creating a context more favorable for private investments plus, “We must reverse the drop in public investments too, and stimulate [investments] in the infrastructure,” he said.
     
    The failure to invest in the infrastructure limits funding for, not least, spending on education, where the lack adds to the difficulty of recovery. Still in many ways recognized for quality in education, Italy shows signs of faltering, and a recent OCSE survey, reported by the ANSA press agency, placed Italy twenty-third down the list of thirty countries in relative efficiency in education spending. This sophisticated study of the price/quality ratio calculated the link between spending and schooling because the more efficient the school, the better the level of education tends to be.
     
    In his address Sept. 23 to the Strategic Forum, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz agreed with Bank of Italy president Visco, observing also that Premier Matteo Renzi is “on the whole doing what is right, though his hands are tied.” Europe, on the whole, is showing slow growth, and Germany itself is in recession, he added. The larger European picture shows economic failure linked to the politics of austerity, “slowing growth and increasing the deficit” while the consequent drop in tax revenue, including in Italy, has left little room for maneuver, he said.
     
    French economist Thomas Piketty, who rocketed to worldwide fame as the author of the surprise best-seller, 700-pages long, Capital in the 21st Century, takes the argument a step further. For Piketty, the EU fixation on the public debt is aggravating the problem. In an interview with the daily “La Repubblica” last week, Piketty said that in order to reduce the public debt, “as Italy is attempting to do, would take decades.” His studies of the history of money and public debt over the centuries show, he said, that interest payments for repayment of the debt cost more in the long run than the debt itself; in the end the debt cripples the economy.
     
    However, Piketty argues, “My book shows that the fundamentals of Europe are better than we tend to think, with patrimonies and income never before as high as they are  now…. You can’t just say, ‘Let’s have less austerity and more investments’ -- it’s easy for Germany to say no to this. So Italy and France should show more courage and put on the table right away a project for political union. At that point the Germans too would be in trouble.” His proposal, based on the concept that economic union without political union cannot work, would be for a form of political union beginning with Italy, the UK, France, Germany and Spain.
     
    The more disconcerting economic news is that, thanks to a new accounting system, Italy’s GNP has been adjusted upward by 3.7% or $75.8 billion (E59 billion) for the year 2011, with similar positive results for 2013 due to be reported any day now. How did this happen? By taking into account the illegal income from narcotics, prostitution and cigarettes. Added to the hidden income from the underground economy, this contributed almost $200 billion (E15.5 billion) or 12.4% to Italy’s GNP.
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    Augustus Bimillennary: Now, his Palatine palazzo is reborn

    ROME – The Eternal City’s celebration of the second millennium of the death of Augustus in that month that takes his name proceeded this week with the formal opening to visitors of newly restored rooms in his palace and of the stunningly renovated Palatine Museum. Augustus was the emperor who famously said, according to Suetonius, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” The empire was taking profit from its expansion, but, in addition, new marble quarries had only then been discovered at Luna, near today’s Carrara, on the Italian coast.

    In a curious way the dozens of experts who have beavered away on the Palatine for the past two years, and spent the relatively modest sum of $3.2 million of public money, have done something of the same: the team found an inchoate mass of ruins and left them vastly improved. The Palatine is an area of extraordinary importance, but for most of us who are not classicists, its ruins have been a tough read, until now.

    The Palatine was inhabited well before 1000 BC, and archaeologists have excavated traces of its bronze age huts plus the famous dwelling of the first king of Rome, Romulus, traditionally dated to around 750 BC. The Palatine’s prehistoric aspect is reproduced in a model inside the museum, at the same time newly outfitted with up-to-date video aids to understanding, including a short film on the life of Augustus.

    The five halls of the museum cover the origins of Rome, with tools, pottery and utensils from prehistoric times; the period from the early monarchy under Etruscan kings to the dawn of the Republic; the era of the Republic itself, when the Palatine Hill became the residence of the Roman hierarchs with their expanding military reach; and, finally, the Augustan era, when his palace stood on the Palatine. (That word, of course, comes from the name Mons Palatinus, the centerpiece of the famous seven hills of Rome overlooking the Roman Forum on one side and, on the other, the Circus Maximus.)

    The museum offers a broad collection of findings from all over the Palatine Hill and reflecting its various eras. Augustus placed himself under the protection of the god Apollo, and frescoes from the Apollo sanctuary on the Palatine are among the treasures on view. Some of the tiny votive offerings to Roman deities date from the Republican era but, from around the Third Century AD, comes a singular anti-Christian graffiti panel showing a Cross topped by the head of a donkey and, below it, insults to those early believers in Christ.

    Under Augustus the style was dominated by things Greek – caryatids, decorative motifs on walls – because, scholars tell us, they reflected his propagandistic desire to be identified with the Golden Age of Athens under Pericles. Among the masterpieces therefore are fine white marble sculptures of a newly restored Aphrodite – on view for the first time ever – and of a life-sized nymph seated upon a rock. In another first, finely carved marble wings are on view, discovered only in 2011 in the House of Tiberius. And there are also dozens of strictly Roman realistic portraits in terra cotta and stone of emperors (one is Nero), of soldiers, solid citizens, little children, and one that looks like a cheery, busybody housewife.

    Visitors can also access for the first time not only the House of Augustus, and see through a glass panel the famous, perfect “Studiolo” (Little Study) of the emperor and his reception rooms with their fine polychrome marble flooring, but also the House of Livia, with its frescoed walls. The emperor’s house and that of his beloved wife Livia were divided by the temple to Apollo (not preserved).

    The number of viewers into the House of Augustus proper is limited, but reservations can be made by telephone: +39 06 3996 7700

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