Word: italianity
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...miniskirts and stilettos, three young women bend over ironing boards, pressing men's shirts before a live studio audience. They're competing to be schedine, young women who dance a little, wear little and say little on Quelli Che ... Il Calcio (Football Fans), a popular Sunday afternoon show on Italian state TV. "Schedine have to be beautiful, but they've also got to be practical," grins the show's presenter. "Let's see how they do!" An ex-footballer descends to judge the ironing contest, awarding the prize to a lissom blonde...
There's nothing new about breasts, thighs and silliness on Italian TV. They have bedazzled viewers since the 1980s, when the television stations of Silvio Berlusconi, a mere media mogul before entering politics, revolutionized the airwaves by putting Italians on a diet of American soap operas, football and sex all over his Mediaset empire. But the formula was about more than TV ratings; it also boosted Berlusconi's political fortunes. (See pictures of Berlusconi and the politics...
...travel book Beyond the Mexique Bay, Aldous Huxley compared Guatemala's Lake Atitlan to Italy's Lake Como. The Italian body of water, he wrote, "touches the limit of the permissibly picturesque." Atitlan, however, "is Como with the additional embellishment of several immense volcanoes. It is really too much of a good thing." Guatemalans have interpreted this declaration by the author of Brave New World to mean that Lake Atitlan is the most beautiful lake in the world - which is the billing on most of the tourist brochures, despite Huxley's ambivalent phrasing...
Marrazzo's scandal is the third major public controversy in four years involving prominent Italian men and transgender prostitutes. In 2005, Lapo Elkann, the grandson of the former head of the Fiat auto dynasty Gianni Agnelli, was rushed to the hospital when he overdosed on cocaine at the Turin apartment of a transsexual prostitute. (He survived.) Two years later, photographs surfaced of Silvio Sircana, chief spokesman for then-Prime Minister Romano Prodi, having a conversation with what appeared to be a transvestite prostitute on the outskirts of Rome. Sircana insisted he was not soliciting the prostitute...
With the revelations splashed across TV and newspapers, Italians in bars and over espressos are asking themselves just what the attraction is for these men? Indeed, some see the iconic, often macho image of the "Maschio Italiano" (Italian male) coming a bit unraveled...