The Italians (53 page)

Authors: John Hooper

Tags: #Europe, #Italy, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Travel

BOOK: The Italians

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In honor of
Tangentopoli,
or “Bribesville,” the name given to the slew of scandals that led to the fall of Italy’s political order in the early 1990s.

*
See
here
.

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Calciopoli
gave rise to two sets of criminal proceedings. In the first, Moggi and his son were accused of duress and attempted duress respectively. They were found guilty at both the trial and appeal stages, and received prison sentences. But in 2014 a statute of limitations quashed the charges against them. The second case, involving charges including conspiracy, had not run its course at the time of writing. After the first of two appeals, Moggi faced a sentence of two years and four months; the former managing director of Juventus, Antonio Giraudo, risked a sentence of one year and eight months. Five other ex-officials and referees faced sentences of between ten months and two years. However, because of a retrospective pardon enacted in 2006, it was highly unlikely that any of the defendants, who denied wrongdoing, would see the inside of a prison cell.

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The Vatican’s condemnation was lifted in 1904, but only after it decided that Socialism represented an even greater danger.

*
See
here
.

*
Hereafter, a capital
M
is used to designate the original, Sicilian Mafia, while a lower case
m
will be used to refer to Italian organized-crime syndicates in general.

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In the early 1990s, the ’Ndrangheta helped create the Basilischi, an alliance involving members of the ’Ndrangheta and small groups of gangsters in the Basilicata region. Major police operations were launched against this “fifth mafia” and the threat posed by the organization is thought to have since receded, though not to have disappeared.

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Messina, Ragusa and Siracusa have always been largely mob-free.

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In 2013 Grasso went into politics and became speaker of the Senate.

*
See above, Chapter 13.

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Onore
in this context does not really translate as “honor” in the sense that that term is understood nowadays in English. The meaning is closer to “respect.”

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In recent decades, a school of revisionist historians has argued that the history of the south has been distorted by being viewed largely through northern eyes. Some have stressed the relative prosperity of parts of the Bourbon Mezzogiorno and the marginalization of the region after unification.

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It also meant “grandson.” The Italian
nipote
has the same dual meaning.

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Mopeds. But the term is often applied to scooters as well.

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Known charmingly in Italian as a
centauro,
or centaur.

*
See above, Chapter 8.

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I stress “most.” Very broadly speaking, rule breaking diminishes as you head north. There are towns in places like Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont where the population is as law-abiding as anywhere in Scandinavia.

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With a fine literary—or is it biblical?—flourish, a
condono
that buries an infraction for good is known as a
condono tombale
.

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Overbearing, authoritarian fathers.
Padre padrone
is the title of an autobiographical work by Gavino Ledda, the son of just such a parent. His father, a Sardinian shepherd, removed him from school before he could learn to read and write, and kept him in check with savage beatings. By dint of sheer determination, Ledda provided himself with an education. After graduating from university, he returned to Sardinia as an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Cagliari. His story, published in 1975, was made into a film of the same title by the Taviani brothers.

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Known by the name of
cronaca nera.
The news in Italian newspapers, apart from sports, business and foreign news, is divided between two sections. One is
politica
(which also includes news about the Vatican); the other is
cronaca,
which takes in everything else. Reporters who do not cover the police and courts form a subsection known as
cronaca bianca.

*
Berlusconi himself has never made the distinction, and was still describing his left-wing opponents as
comunisti
almost a quarter of a century after their predecessors had forsaken Marxism.

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He was acquitted of bribing the revenue guards. The other accusations gave rise to two trials. One was cut short by a statute of limitations. The other had to be abandoned after Berlusconi’s own government changed the law on false accounting.

*
See
here
.

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The contemptuous description applied to Italy in the early nineteenth century by the then Austrian chancellor Prince Klemens von Metternich.

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See above, Chapter 1.

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The battle has been made a central part of the nationalist mythology created by the Northern League, which depicts it as an example of “Padanians” uniting to drive out the hated Germanic interloper. This is more than a little inconsistent with the rest of the League’s reading of history, according to which the Padanians are ethnically separate from other Italians, being descended from the Lombards, who were, well, Germanic invaders.

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In 2005,
Corriere della Sera
reported the discovery by NASA of an asteroid named Apophis that was on course to collide with the earth later this century. The headline was: “
2036, un asteroide contro l’Italia
” (“2036 is an asteroid [directed] against Italy”).

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One of its most distinguished teachers was a woman, Trotula, believed to have been the author of the first treatise on gynecology, published around the year 1100.

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It is therefore ironic that the pejorative term used by northerners in reference to southerners should be
terrone,
which derives from
terra
(earth) and equates very approximately to “yokel.”

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Only those born after 1947 qualify for descent through the maternal line.

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Romania became a member state in 2007. But under transitional arrangements, its citizens did not acquire an automatic right to work in Italy until 2012. It was at around the time that Romania entered the EU that the term
immigrati
began to replace
extracomunitari,
perhaps because it could be used to encompass the Romanians and preserve their “otherness.”

*
See
here
.

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Balotelli was born in Palermo to parents from Ghana. His parents moved to Lombardy, where at the age of three he was adopted by a Jewish Italian family whose name he later took.