Milan prosecutors moved last week to bring charges against Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi, other members of his family and an inner circle of company executives for their alleged part in one of Europe’s biggest corporate fraud scandals.
Michelangelo’s statue David may be clean in time for his 500th birthday this year, but experts are concerned that his left ankle may not be strong enough to keep him standing forever. A Bologna University team has begun analysing tiny cracks in the marble masterpiece since restoration work began on the statue last September. Sophie Arie reports from Florence.
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/ 16 January 2004
As scabby-kneed kids, Calisto Tanzi and Fausto Tonna sat on the same schoolroom bench in the small town of Collecchio, outside Parma. Decades later they were running a booming dairy firm, first dominating the Italian market and eventually building the company into a multinational dairy business, Parmalat.
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/ 14 October 2003
At the end of a potholed dirt track in an impoverished Albanian port town stands a concrete hut with a small TV antenna fixed to the roof. Outside a scrawny cow picks for grass between shreds of old plastic bags. Inside, Fatmira Bonjaku, seven months pregnant, explains why she gave away her three-year-old son to a childless Italian couple.
Art restorers in Pisa have found that a bacterium can do the job no chemical
has managed to achieve: reveal part of a vast medieval fresco that was
covered with a layer of glue during an unfortunate restoration attempt half
a century ago, writes Sophie Arie in Rome.
Silvio Berlusconi this week set a dubious precedent in Italian legal history by becoming the first serving prime minister to appear at his own trial. The latest twist in Berlusconi’s corruption trial has sent the Italian political class into spasms of fear.
The leaders of Italy, Australia, Britain and Spain are all swimming against the tide of public opinion in their quest against Iraq. The Guardian examines four leaders who have found themselves at odds with the opinion polls, and how they have reacted to their position