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27 Dec 07

La dolce vita turns sour as Italy faces up to being old and poor - Times Online

- relates to my blog entry Dec.23/07,"High Rents=Mamma's Boys?" Interesting comments thread, with many agreeing w/ article, others saying that it's not so bad. In either case, stagnation seems to be setting in (symptom of what?, political corruption?, more than that?). Sounds like a Donna Leon mystery come to life (as fiction, that's great, but as reality, that's not a compliment...).
One of the comments came from http://www.ilquiquiri.com/ who pointed to (his?) YouTube video of his region festering under the garbage strike (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6gpnIK-WY0) : very graphic.

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article3085338.ece - Preview

corruption development italy socialcritique times_online

Yet, at home, Italians are consumed with a sense of domestic decline. “When an
entire country goes into crisis over the ‘who are we and where are we going’
debate, it means we are reaching new heights of hysteria,” the writer
Umberto Eco said. “This explosion of provincialism is truly painful.
Personally I feel depressed.”

So do many of his fellow countrymen. There is a sense that while the past is
Italy’s glory, it is also its prison, with politics and business dominated
by a gerontocracy and the younger entrepreneurs and politicians held back.
- - you can read/ understand Eco's comment as saying that the self-flagellation is "hysteria," is overblown, and is not based in reality (i.e., that he's contradicting the article's premise) - on 2007-12-27
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“The problem is that the leaders of our governing class are greybeards
whereas, say, Spain’s are practically kids,” says Michele Salvati, a leading
economist. At this year’s Miss Italia beauty contest, the contestants were
all in their teens while the average age of the judges — who made headlines
by arguing over whether a girl’s bottom should be judged part of her charm —
was 70.
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- When Larry Gagosian, the dynamic American art dealer, opened a new modern art
  gallery in Rome last week, some critics accused him of making money instead
  of praising an attempt to put Rome at the cutting edge of contemporary art.
- Vincenzo Cremonini, 44, who has expanded his meat-producing business at Módena
  to include railway and motorway catering — including the new Eurostar
  service from St Pancras — identifies three other factors holding Italy back:
  bureaucracy, the slow judicial system, which is used by protesters to hold
  up modernising initiatives such as the Turin to Lyons high-speed railway,
  and the “selfperpetuating political elite”.
  
  A book on Italy’s cocooned elite, La Casta (The Caste), a runaway bestseller
  this year, pointed out that Italy had the highest number of official
  chauffeur-driven cars in Europe, and that the presidential palace, the
  Quirinal, cost four times as much to run as Buckingham Palace.
  - - more than Buckingham Palace? That's crazy. - on 2007-12-27
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- The workforce at Alitalia, itself a symbol of the Italian malaise, is
  threatening a Christmas strike over the proposed sale of the troubled
  national airline to Air France-KLM. Even La Scala opera house in Milan is
  disrupted regularly by industral unrest. “Italy needs a Margaret Thatcher,”
  Francesco Caltagirone, one of Italy’s top entrepreneurs, said yesterday. “We
  need rigour and deregulation, a leader who will force Italians to make
  sacrifices.”
- Even the Italian nuclear family, once the bulwark (along with the Catholic
  Church) of Italian society, is in decline, with growing divorce rates, a low
  birthrate and the rise of single parenthood. The family still provides a
  haven for young Italians, many of whom live at home until they are 30 — but
  this, too, holds Italy back, as those who should be carving a niche for
  themselves opt instead for Mamma’s cooking and laundry services. Many do so
  because they cannot afford to make their own way.
  - - they live at home b/c they can't afford to move into their own place(s) - on 2007-12-27
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- The result is that Italians are the least happy people in Europe, according to
  a poll conducted for the University of Cambridge by Luisa Corrado, of the
  University of Rome. Danes turned out to be the happiest. Tellingly, in
  Denmark 64 per cent said that they trusted their parliament. In Italy it was
  only 36 per cent.
- After the Second World War, millions of Italians emigrated in search of a
  better life. The movement is now the other way, with nearly four million
  immigrants in Italy. “The problem is that a country like Spain sees
  immigrants as useful workers, whereas in Italy the headlines tell us they
  are all criminals who go round robbing and stabbing Italians,” Carlo
  Bastasin, an economist, said.

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