Word: italianity
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...hoop missing its net. Men chat on a porch nearby. Twenty years ago, people from Mabini, a small city in the central Philippines, started to leave for Italy to find better-paying jobs. Today, some 70% of the neighborhood is supported by monthly checks from Rome or Milan. Now, Italian-inspired villas crowd the town's hilly streets. There are flat-screen TVs, luxury cars and pricey Toblerone chocolates. But, as Florian De Jesus, a social worker in the area, observes, "In Italy, there are more women...
...Sunday, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the Italian-born wife of the French President said Berlusconi's comment made her "pleased to have become French." Otherwise, however, the incident has predictably blown over within diplomatic circles. Berlusconi's aides said that he'd received a friendly call over the weekend from Obama, who was making the telephone rounds with world leaders, and that the Moscow comments were not mentioned. What could anyone...
...question lingers: What drives this gaffeur from Milan to continue an unbroken series of comments guaranteed to offend someone? What, for example, was the Italian Prime Minister thinking three years ago when he credited his own "playboy" powers for persuading Finland's female prime minister to agree that a key European Union agency be accorded to Italy? And what prompted him to compare a German member of the European Parliament to a Nazi prison guard, or to flash two fingers of the cuckold behind the head of the Spanish foreign minister during the family photo at a European summit...
...Berlusconi's propensity for crossing the rhetorical line remains one of the central mysteries of his rise to become the most influential Italian politician of his generation. At times, one sees that the former real estate and media mogul is aching to be considered a leading statesman, with all the gravitas that entails. But all too often, it seems, he just can't resist another juvenile jape...
...Interpretations among those in the know in Italy vary. Some say the man known as Il Cavaliere sees the world as his personal stage, simply letting it all hang out in public like other super-rich and powerful people do in private, convinced that his humor and Italian charm will win over the world. Others discern a calculation in his off-the-cuff quips: to divide his opponents, to keep allied pretenders to his throne off balance, and most of all to simply keep the spotlight on himself. By now, having been elected Prime Minister three times, most...