The appeals in Italian football’s match-fixing scandal began early on Saturday in a Rome hotel, Italian media reported. A sporting tribunal must decide whether to confirm the relegation of Juventus, Fiorentina and Lazio to the second division for their part in influencing which referees were selected for their matches last season.
Juventus, Lazio and Fiorentina reacted with fury on Friday after they were all relegated from Italian football’s top-division and banned from Europe for their part in the country’s match-fixing scandal. Juventus were also deducted 30 points from their total for next season and stripped of their last two league titles.
The remains of the celebrated 18th-century Italian castrato Farinelli have been exhumed to find more about his peculiar powers as a singer, a university professor said on Thursday. The remains were removed from a cemetery in the northern city of Bologna where the singer died in 1782.
Juventus, Fiorentina and Lazio will be relegated to the Italian second division, according to a report in the Gazetta dello Sport newspaper on Friday. Italy’s premier sports newspaper claimed it was revealing the long-anticipated ruling in Italy’s match-fixing scandal, due to be given on Friday evening.
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Fifa may strip disgraced French skipper Zinedine Zidane of his World Cup best player award, the organisation’s president Sepp Blatter has told Italian newspapers. Zidane was announced as the winner of the prestigious award on Monday morning, the day after the World Cup final which saw him sent off for head-butting an Italian opponent.
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Italy’s march into the World Cup final at the expense of Germany was met with banner headlines in the Italian press on Wednesday. The 2-0 extra-time win over the hosts in Dortmund was an historic one for the Italians, ”who could beat anyone — even the Martians” wrote the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero.
Italian football went on trial on Thursday at a sports tribunal hearing in Rome that will decide whether four of the country’s top clubs colluded to rig matches over a period of several years. The scandal, which broke last month, has dominated headlines in football-crazed Italy, and could result in the teams being excluded from European competition and relegated to second-division play.
Italy announced a new blow against the Sicilian Mafia with 45 arrests on Tuesday, including 16 alleged clan leaders, two months after the man said to be the network’s top boss was seized in a major coup. A dawn raid by 500 armed officers rounded up the suspects on the Mediterranean island.
Diego Maradona had some time on his hands on Tuesday, until Italian tax police near Naples took two Rolex watches the Argentine soccer legend was wearing, to chip away at a â,¬30-million (,5-million) unpaid income tax bill. ”We were surprised he was wearing them because he knows that when he comes to Italy he risks losing something,” said tax policeman Geremia Guercia.
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By tradition, the heavens beneath which Italy’s Azzuri train for a World Cup is of a blue as deep as the team’s shirts. But this campaign at the retreat in Coverciano on the edge of Florence began under a weeping, leaden sky. ”Even God wants to piss on us,” shrugged a security official at the gates.
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The scandal threatening to bring Italian football to its knees is now starting to affect the national team’s World Cup preparations, according to the Italian press on Wednesday. With 41 people and most of Italy’s big clubs being dragged through the mud, the press said a ”morbid atmosphere” has descended over the camp.
Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is still banking on a check of spoiled ballots from last month’s super-tight elections to return him to power, according to a copy of a letter to world leaders reproduced in the media on Thursday. ”I hope to return to government after more than a million spoiled ballots are checked,” the conservative Berlusconi wrote in the letter.
World motorcycling champion Valentino Rossi said on Wednesday he would be sticking to two wheels and not joining the Ferrari team to race in Formula One. ”I will continue, at least for some time more, to race motorbikes,” the Italian told the official Ansa news agency.
Coastguards escorted to land hundreds of migrants floating at sea off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa on Monday, causing an emergency at its overwhelmed transit centre, the Ansa news agency reported. Coastguards intercepted three vessels, carrying some 400 suspected illegal immigrants, to the Italian island south of Sicily early on Monday.
Italian football is in meltdown with the World Cup less than a month away. Four Serie A clubs stand accused of match-fixing, a referee and his assistants have been pulled off the World Cup list while being investigated for corruption, Italy goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon may also miss the tournament as a result of a betting scandal, and the national organising body is in administration.
Italy’s financial police searched the offices of scandal-hit Serie A club Juventus on Thursday. Officers arrived early morning and went through documents. Former Juventus general director Luciano Moggi, the central figure of the Italian match-fixing scandal, has now been placed under formal investigation for suspected false accounting and tax evasion.
Italy’s new Prime Minister Romano Prodi unveiled a new centre-left government on Wednesday, ending weeks of political stalemate and pledging to rebuild solidarity after bitterly divisive elections. As expected, it features former prime minister Massimo D’Alema as Foreign Minister and former European Central Bank board member Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa as Economy Minister.
Giorgio Napolitano, sworn into office on Monday as Italy’s 11th president, is a former communist who, at the age of 80, is one of the country’s most-experienced politicians. The life senator and former speaker of the lower house Chamber of Deputies moves into the presidential Quirinale Palace for a seven-year term.
Rafael Nadal clinched his 50th successive victory on clay in Rome on Thursday with a 6-2, 6-2 win over Britain’s Tim Henman to reach the Rome Masters quarterfinals as he closed in on Guillermo Vilas’s all-time record on the surface. If Nadal successfully defends his title on Sunday, he will equal the record set by Argentine Vilas who managed 53 straight wins on clay in 1977.
Former communist Giorgio Napolitano (80) was elected Italy’s new president on Wednesday, gaining an absolute majority in a Parliamentary vote that underlined the country’s political divisions. The election of centre-left leader Romano Prodi’s candidate was bitterly opposed by the conservatives of outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Italy’s Parliament failed to elect a new president of the republic in a second round of voting on Tuesday, with the country’s two opposing blocs engaged in intense negotiations aimed at resolving the political stalemate. Giorgio Napolitano, a highly respected life senator backed by Romano Prodi’s centre-left coalition, has emerged as the front-runner.
Italy’s Premier Silvio Berlusconi resigned on Tuesday, paving the way for a centre-left government led by Romano Prodi after weeks of refusing to acknowledge the outcome of last month’s elections. President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi asked Berlusconi to remain temporarily as caretaker prime minister.
Italian actress Alida Valli, who featured in films by Alfred Hitchcock and Luchino Visconti, died in Rome on Saturday at the age of 84, Ansa news agency said. She made her cinema debut at the age of 15 and appeared in more than 100 films, including Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947).
Overtaking at the San Marino Grand Prix is about as difficult as passing another car on the narrow, single-lane country roads that surround the Enzo and Dino Ferrari circuit. Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso know the routine all too well. Schumacher held off Alonso for nearly half of the 62 laps in a duel to the finish on Sunday.
Seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher returned to the fore by claiming a record-breaking 66th pole position in Imola, Italy, on Saturday for the San Marino Grand Prix. Ferrari driver Schumacher (37) set the standard in a time of one minute and 23,431 seconds to break the record of Ayrton Senna.
Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher was left in a positive mood in Imola, Italy, on Friday after setting the day’s fastest practice time ahead of qualifying for the San Marino Grand Prix. The 37-year-old German topped the time sheets in the opening free practice session in a time that was unbeaten for the rest of the day.
Media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi was set to take a bow as Italy’s prime minister on Wednesday, but has promised to be a thorn in the side of centre-left nemesis Romano Prodi in opposition. The supreme court was expected to copper-fasten Prodi’s provisional victory in last week’s polls.
Ludovic Giuly scored off a pass from Ronaldinho on Tuesday to give FC Barcelona a 1-0 win over AC Milan in the first leg of the Champions League semifinals. The France forward beat an offside trap to send a left-foot shot past Milan goalkeeper Dida in the 57th minute after a chipped pass from the 2005 European and Fifa World Player of the Year at the San Siro.
Italy’s political leaders must move quickly to resolve the country’s post-election gridlock if poll winner Romano Prodi is to kick-start the stagnant economy, analysts warned on Thursday. ”It’s not a good start for the new government,” said Bank of America economist Matthew Sharratt. Italy faced a likely two months of ”administrative paralysis” before a new government could be sworn.
Italy nursed a post-election hangover on Wednesday, distressed that centre-left leader Romano Prodi failed to pull off a more emphatic victory and irritated by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s refusal to go quietly. Giancarlo Traverso, an activist for the centre-left Union coalition, said that their camp was ”convinced” that Prodi would be declared the winner in the end.
Romano Prodi on Wednesday dismissed calls by outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for a German-style grand coalition in Italy, saying he would form ”a strong government” despite his wafer-thin majority in the Senate. ”There is no need for a grand coalition because we have a majority that allows us to govern,” Prodi said.
The Italian elections split the nation in half, with a bitterly contested race failing to produce a clear winner in Parliament on Tuesday, more than 12 hours after polls closed, and threatening a new season of political instability. Near-final returns on Tuesday showed Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s conservatives holding a razor-thin lead in the Senate and Romano Prodi’s center-left winning the lower house by the smallest of margins.