Law-and-order fears, mingled with blatant xenophobia, are providing the anti-immigrant league with lush electoral pastures in the flatlands west of Venice. And its showing here could have a decisive impact on the character of the government that emerges from Italy’s general election on Sunday and Monday.
After bursting into politics in 1994, Italy’s richest citizen became the embodiment of political incorrectness.It was Berlusconi who told a German politician he reminded him of a concentration camp guard. It was he who reacted to 9/11 by urging Westerners to be ”aware of the superiority of our civilisation”.
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/ 24 February 2008
”It’s me,” the man said. ”I’m the real Pasquale Condello.” I Cacciatori, the Hunters — the Carabinieri’s specialist man-trackers entrusted with the last stage of the operation to net ”The Supremo” — had left nothing to chance. They were convinced the 57-year-old mobster lived in one of 12 flats on the outskirts of Reggio Calabria.
Anyone who visits Italy sees one sooner or later, most likely tucked into the frame of a mirror above a bar or taped to the dashboard of a taxi. But lots of devout Roman Catholic Italians carry them in their wallets and purses — little cards bearing the picture (or at least the imagined likeness) of a saint or other religious figure.
As an avid football fan, the pope’s right-hand man, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, knows better than most that in the end it is the result that counts. No one, though, expected Pope Benedict XVI’s new secretary of state to be quite so goal-minded as to bring ÂÂperformance-related pay to the Vatican. But he did.
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/ 9 September 2007
It began with bread. And that is how it ended. Shortly after 4pm, on a sun-filled autumn day, the voices of Luciano Pavarotti and his father, the baker Fernando, ”who had a voice perhaps more beautiful than mine” filled the 12th century cathedral of Modena as they sang together Cesar Franck’s hymn, Panis Angelicus (Bread of Angels).
Protestant churches reacted with dismay to a new declaration approved by Pope Benedict XVI insisting they are mere ”ecclesial communities” and their ministers effectively phonies with no right to give communion. Coming just days after the reinstatement of the Latin mass, the document left no doubt about Benedict’s eagerness to back traditional Roman Catholic practices and attitudes.
You are a leader who wants to move with the times and establish some green credentials; but your scope for installing wind turbines or rubbish-burning power stations is distinctly limited by your country being scarcely bigger than Pooh Bear’s 100-acre wood and made up largely of untouchable gardens and buildings of priceless historic worth. What to do?
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/ 27 November 2006
The Roman Catholic Church has taken the first step towards what could be a historic shift away from its total ban on the use of condoms. Pope Benedict XVI’s ”health minister” is understood to be urging him to accept that in restricted circumstances — specifically the prevention of Aids — barrier contraception is the lesser of two evils.
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/ 13 October 2006
Maurizio Montalbini is Italy’s least gregarious citizen. The 53-year-old sociologist has distinguished himself by spending almost three years of his life in total on his own and underground. On Thursday Montalbini vanished into a pothole near the eastern Italian town of Ascoli Piceno having instructed his support team that, so long as all went well, he should be left undisturbed for another three years.