Articoli, saggi, post– category –
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Mediterranean Summer, chapter 2 – Matera, the unbelievable ‘city of stones’: from dust to stardom
You’ll see no Rome, Florence, Venice or Taormina in this diary. Instead, I’ll take you to small unknown places of rare beauty often harbouring next to territorial or industrial diseases, ‘ugliness’ of various kinds that makes Italy the c... -
Mediterranean Summer, chapter 1- Malta: Christendom facing the Muslim dominion
You’ll see no Rome, Florence, Venice or Taormina in this diary. Instead, I’ll take you to small unknown places of rare beauty often harbouring next to territorial or industrial diseases, ‘ugliness’ of various kind that makes Italy the cr... -
Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley (1958): Trump, Berlusconi and Brexit were already scaringly there
The essay Brave New World Revisited is an astonishing prediction of the XXI century's shrinking democracy in the West. Here is an annotated long extract I edited as part of my research work for Silvio Berlusconi's Italy. In times of... -
Clean Hands’ 25th anniversary: and they lived corruptly ever after
1992 is modern Italy’s D-year. It is the time of the death of the decadent First Republic and the birth of the more degenerate Second one, which is probably about to end these days. It is the year of Mani Pulite (Clean Hands, or Tangento... -
Who killed Giulio Regeni?
Of Arab Springs turned dictatorships, state tortures and murders, commercial bonds over human life: one year after, we don’t have to live and let Giulio die. Shocked, outraged, bewildered, overwhelmed: that’s how I feel today, on the six... -
“Theirs is a cultural richness like no other”: Italy’s earthquakes and the loss of great human fabric
On October 30, 2016 another tremendous earthquake hit central Italy again, the greatest one in the last decades of a series that started in August, killed almost 300 people and destroyed the cultural treasures of the medieval small towns... -
Education in Italy (part two): the foul play of Berlusconi’s and Renzi’s reforms
In Education in Italy part one I describe the decline of the Italian Education system since the beginning of the new century and the birth of the scuola/azienda, of the student/customer and of the consumers’ school, with its parallel dow... -
Education in Italy (part one): Nothing worth Teaching can be Taught?
Education in Italy: Nothing worth Teaching can be Taught? In Education in Italy part one I’ll describe the decline of the Italian Education system since the beginning of the new century and the birth of the scuola/azienda, of the student... -
Well-fed young television-watchers or freedom fighters? Of juvenile rebelliousness and social commitment
Since my book on Italian society in the last ventennio is also a warning against the contemporary erosion of democracy in the Western World - as I have said time and again, the Italy of the so-called Berlusconi Age is a privileged observ... -
Mafia Capitale: dirty hands over the Eternal City
Mafia Capitale: a shocking Christmas gift to Italian people As I write in the introduction of my book on Berlusconi's Italy, later that year [2014], we discovered that also Rome was not willing to stay behind [Milan and Venice, in w...
