Word: italianity
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...stop nightlife in St. Tropez. The tiny island of Lampedusa, the southernmost dot on Italy's map, is prized above all for the crystal clarity of its turquoise waters. But this same stretch of Mediterranean is rapidly acquiring a much darker notoriety. Once again this summer, as both Italian and foreign sun-lovers soak up their beach holidays, boatloads of would-be immigrants from North Africa have been aiming for Lampedusa's coastline in a desperate attempt to reach European shores. And with tragic predictablity, the lovely waters have turned lethal. Officials fear that as many as 60 people perished...
...additional troops to deploy within the next two weeks, with firm promises from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and Nepal. But Europe will likely get on board soon. On Friday, Italy's government formally agreed to participate once there are precise rules of engagement. "We don't hide the difficulties," said Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema, "but our country has to respond to the United Nations' appeal." Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has argued that Turkey cannot risk being sidelined in its own region, as it was in Iraq, and should therefore send troops to Lebanon. Spain and Belgium both...
...editor Indro Montanelli took him aboard and, as if to quell all Severgnini's provincial doubts, made the 27-year-old the paper's London correspondent. That London jaunt not only took Severgnini's fledgling journalistic career to the national level, but also gave him the material for An Italian in Britain, which became a best seller in the U.K. in 1991 and established him as a writer with global appeal. Severgnini, a fan of contradiction, prefers the term "provincial international." In La Bella Figura, Severgnini's third book to be exported from the Italian peninsula, his propensity for contradiction...
...Severgnini's book is a bit like a lawyer's defense against a long line of pessimists. Luigi Barzini, a foreign correspondent and prolific writer, in perhaps the most authoritative of Italian portraits, described a country resigned to a downward spiral in his classic book, The Italians. Barzini paints his people as peddlers of "ruses to defeat boredom and discipline, to forget disgrace and misfortune, to lull man's angst to sleep and comfort him in his solitude." Severgnini uses much finer brushstrokes in his interpretation of Italians' shortcomings, which borders on praise. In Crema, where he's still based...
...private life. A tally of how much they see each other (14 days a month on average since the beginning of 2005) merited front-page treatment by the New York Times. Even the unveiling in April of their official portraits at the Smithsonian--hers, a luminous profile, evoking the Italian Renaissance; his, a sporty pose you might have expected to see over the fireplace at Southfork--had the sharp-eyed tabloids noting that no wedding ring was visible...