The plot thickens over the government’s attempt to sell 49.9% of the national airline (la compagnia di bandiera) Alitalia to the highest bidder. Or maybe we should say, the plot thins. When bids were first invited by Economic Minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, there was a field of 11 contenders. Only 5 of these were admitted to the final round, and then the 5 were trimmed down to 3. On May 29, the alliance among the Texas Pacific Group, Mattlin Patterson and Mediobanca announced its withdrawal, leaving 2 bidders still standing. Yesterday the Russian press agency Interfax reported that one of the 2 remaining, Aeroflot, would be opting out also. The announcement was later denied by Aeroflot’s spokesperson, but it still looks as if something fishy is going on. Aeroflot says that the price is too high (but wasn’t it supposed to be an auction?) and that they will make their final decision on July 2, the deadline for closing bids. If Aeroflot drops out, that would leave only 1 bidder, AirOne, owned by Italian financier Carlo Toto. Representatives of AirOne have been talking to Alitalia’s unions. Last year Alitalia lost 626 million euros. Passenger traffic last month showed a 4.5% loss over May 2006. And the strikes go on. Meanwhile, we learned today that Giancarlo Cimoli the ex CEO of Trenitalia, the national rail service, who was moved over to run Alitalia and subsequently replaced (he left the railroad far more deeply in debt than the airline), took home almost 3 million euros in compensation in 2006.

Just when we thought the hype was over, this weekend we got the news that the Procuratore della Repubblica (call him the District Attorney) of the port city Civitavecchio in Lazio is about bring an “obscenity” suit against film director Ron Howard and a dozen other people involved in the production and distribution of the 2005 movie The Da Vinci Code, over a year after its Italian release. The Code is long gone from the first-run screens here, but, after the absurdly high-profile London trial for plagiary, and with production about to start on the movie of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (for which Tom Hanks has signed a contract that will apparently dwarf all previous records), you begin to wonder if the courts are simply ingenuous or part of the publicity team. A lawsuit never hurt sales. The plaintiffs are local celibate clergymen offended by the notion that Christ could have fathered a child or Mary Magdalene have been invited to the all-male Last Supper. They want to know why the movie wasn’t forbidden to minors? Apparently, they had no problem with minors getting their fill of the sadistic Aramaic gore of Mel Gibson’s Passion.

I don’t regret never reading or seeing The Da Vinci Code (or Mel Gibson’s Passion). I imagine that it is typical far-fetched scandal-seeking sensationalist fiction, with no claim whatsoever to being historical, inspired among other things by the success of Umberto Eco’s comparatively sober-sided 14th-century mystery The Name of the Rose, which is set in a Benedictine monastery. (The movie, starring Sean Connery, turned out to be something of a flop.) Eco, an Italian Catholic and a true medievalist by formation, treated the monks in his novel like a group of normal people (there are always a few in any group who aren’t normal). He certainly treated them better than Boccaccio in his Decameron, who actually wrote in the Middle Ages, when there were far more of them around. And what Boccaccio didn’t do to them, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his film based on the Decameron, did.

As of June 15, 2007, a  photographic exhibit at the Museum of Catalonian History in Barcelona, Spain (I specify "Spain", because Italians spell the name with with two l's, and there also is a Barcellona in Sicily) is displaying the Spanish Civil War photographs of Italian Lieutenant Wilhelm Schrefler. Schrefler, who was born over the border from Austria in the South Tyrol, changed his name to Guglielmo Sandri when he enlisted in Mussolini's Fascist army. In 1936 his unit was despatched to Spain to the aid of El Caudillo, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. An amateur photographer Schrefler took many photos of his fellow soldiers, but they were lost until 1992 when a neighbour who was tidying the attic of the Shrefler home come upon the cache and began to classify and put them in order. There are reports of veteran of the campaign who have recognized their pictures. Shrifler died of wounds received in World War II. The exhibit is in tune with the rehabilitation of the losers, the soldiers and civilians on the right who fought against the Allies and the underground Resistance in the Italian Civil War launched when Mussolini was installed by his German allies at Salò on Lake Garda. You can read about it from the viewpoint of a Fascist volunteer in the novels of Giose Rimanelli. My nostalgic Sicilian barber explained to me only yesterday that what Italy needs is another strongman, that she had become a parliamentary democracy too quickly right after the war and had not enjoyed a maturing period under un uomo di polso (a firm and forceful leader) like Franco, head of state until his death in 1975.

May 24, 2007. Yesterday the Istituto nazionale di statistica (ISTAT) released its annual report of facts and figures. The report sums up the statistics for 2006. Reacting to the findings, Prime Minister Romano Prodi observed that Italy’s three most worrisome problems are an aging population, widening economic gap between North and South, and the difficulties new applicants, especially women and young people, run into when trying to find a job. The job situation in Italy, declared Prodi, is more comparable to that in North Africa than in the rest of Europe.

People are being born less frequently in Italy, but they are living longer. The ratio of those under 15 to those over 65 is 100 to 141. Only Japan, with a ratio of 100 to 154, has an older population. The birthrate, which went below 2 children per adult woman in the mid-1970s and reached an all-time low of 1.19 in 1995, is holding at 1.35. Life expectancy here—78.3 years for men and 84 years for women (as against 77.6 and 83.2 in 2005)—is the highest aggregate in Europe (though in Sweden the men live longer) and among the highest in the world. Attempts to explain why cite the Mediterranean diet and improvements in national health care.

14.7% of Italian families (one out of six) say they have difficulty stretching out the family income till the end of the month. In the South, this figure rises to 22.3%. In Sicily, the hardest hit region, 11.1% of families (2.5 million) live below the poverty line. The average monthly wage for an Italian family in 2004 was around 2,750 euros. In the same period 57% of Italians declared no change in their incomes from the previous year, while 5.3% said they earned substantially less. The average family income in Lombardy it was more than 32,000 euros, whereas in Sicily was 2,100, three quarters as much.

The aging of Italy’s population is somewhat offset by the very high number of immigrants, for the most part young men and women looking for work. As of January 2006, Italy’s officially registered immigrants numbered over 2.7 million or 4.7% of the general population. They come from all over the world, including the Philippines, China, Pakistan, Ukraine and Bangladesh, but one third of the overall total comes from three countries: Romania (271,000), Albania (257,000) and Morocco (240,000). 88% of them live in the large towns of northern and central Italy. Foreigners make up 32% of the prison population. Mixed marriages between (mostly male) Italians and foreigners, though still rare, are becoming more common. Last year they made up 13.5% of all marriages, compared with 4.8% in 1995. The number of women immigrants is now equal to that of men and the number of immigrant couples is on the rise.

My next blog will report on Italy’s May 12 Family Day. Why did its organizers give the Rome demonstration an English name? Maybe because, for all the political rhetoric that the event occasioned, Italy is the European state that devotes the smallest proportion of its annual expenditures to the family: a mere 4.4% compared with a European average of 7.8%.

Fumata bianca! At five minutes to 1 p.m. today, on the fourth round of voting, ballots in favor of Giorgio Napolitano reached the one-vote majority needed to elect him President of the Republic.

It was not a win that bodes well for Italy. The final count of votes for Napolitano was 543, only two more than the Unione’s majority of 541 in the assembly. In other words, there were virtually no cross-over votes from the Casa delle libertà. Mistakes were made on both sides. Commentators are already saying that Napolitano is President of half of Italy.

The total number of voters was actually 1,009, not 1,010 as previously stated, because one of the senators of Forza Italia, Berlusconi’s lawyer Cesare Previti was sent to prison last week for corrupting a judge. They say don’t shoot the messenger, but both the corrupted judge and the man on whose behalf the judge was corrupted—guess who—got off.

The way the past two days’ voting went was odd to say the least. Though he turned out to be their one and only candidate (and not a stalking horse for Massimo D’Alema as many feared), the Unione opted not to vote Napolitano’s name but to cast blank ballots for the first three rounds (in which a two thirds majority was called for). The subtleties of this parliamentary tactic for the moment escape me (though I am looking for someone to explain it). More comprehensible was the Casa delle libertà’s decision to cast blank ballots in the fourth round (the first in which a simple majority would suffice). They had little or no chance of electing an alternative candidate.

The tried in the first ballot, writing in the name of Gianni Letta, but he barely got a third of the votes. Then they tried the “Divide and rule” tactic, proposing what they called a “rose” of names that they hoped would split the rival center-left vote: Franco Marini, the recently nominated speaker of the Senate, former socialist prime minister Giuliano Amato, European Commissioner Mario Monti and former prime minister Lamberto Dini. The center left refrained from choosing, reaffirming their one candidate Napolitano.

There was in fact no horse-trading, just the old “wall against wall”, neither side making any concessions. This was a pity, since it aggravated the pre-existing polarisation. There were elements of the center-right, Casini’s UDC and Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale who seemed willing to deal. Casini in fact publicly deplored the stance of the Casa delle libertà he belongs to. But the stubborn refusal of Umberto Bossi’s Lega won the day. Berlusconi vowed he would never, never, never vote for an ex-Communist, not even for a right-wing (so to speak) former Communist reformer like Napolitano, now safely institutionalized as a senatore a vita.

The fact is that for Berlusconi, despite his proposing a German-style grand coalition the day after he lost the elections, reconciliation with the center left and the good governance of Italy are less important than hanging on for dear life to the votes of his half of the country. More important to him, it seems, than the bipartisan election of a President of the Republic is not alienating his electorate by supporting a candidate from the left. Berlusconi has his eye on the upcoming referendum on the constitutional reforms proposed by his government, to be held on June 25-26. The constitutional experts I read unanimously agree that the proposed changes—what goes by the English designation of “devolution” (the pet project of the Lega) coupled with an expansion of the powers of the prime minister--would be nothing short of a disaster. The referendum, in which voters are asked to confirm the laws already voted on by the parliament, will be carried by a simple majority.

It is now 5 PM and the first round of voting for the new President of the Republic (the guardian of the Italian Constitution) has begun. The total number of Grand Electors (630 deputies, 322 senators and 58 regional representatives) is 1,010, which means that 674 votes in favor would constitute a two-thirds majority. The Unione coalition has decided that in this first round they will cast blank ballots, while the Casa delle libertà plans to vote for 71-year-old Gianni Letta, a long-time Berlusconi associate and something of a discreet “eminence grise”. Barring surprises, it is very unlikely therefore that today’s vote will produce a winner. To use the language of the papal conclave, the upshot, in other words, will be a “fumata nera”, not a “fumata bianca”. The vote is taking place as I write in the Montecitorio Palace, home of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, where for once deputies and senators are gathered together. The will be only one secret ballot today, but voting is expected to continue tomorrow, Tuesday, with two additional rounds, also calling for a two-thirds majority. The following day, Wednesday, May 10, a simple majority of one (in other words, 506 votes) will be sufficient.

Outgoing President Ciampi (elected 1999) has been one of the most popular and respected of the ten presidents who have been figureheads of the Italian Republic since 1946. The second most popular was probably Sandro Pertini (elected 1978). After the vote on his successor, Ciampi will join two other former presidents, 78-year-old Francesco Cossiga (elected 1985) and 87-year-old Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (elected 1992), as a life senator.

The remaining former presidents were transitional President Enrico De Nicola (1946-48), followed by Luigi Einaudi (elected 1948), Giovanni Gronchi (elected 1955), Antonio Segni (elected 1962), Giuseppe Saragat (elected 1964) and Giovanni Leone (elected 1971 after what seemed like an endless series of 23 ballots, and by common consent the least deserving of the lot). Do you remember them all?

At 4 PM this afternoon voting begins for Carlo Azeglio Ciampi's replacement as President of the Italian Republic. Despite the urgings of Berlusconi and his Casa delle libertà coalition, last week 86-year-old Ciampi let it be known that he did not intend to run for a second term. His decision is understandable, but regrettable. It is going to be very difficult to find another candidate who can command the same bipartisan support.

The problem is the unusual coincidence between the recent general elections (with the resulting change in administrations) and the simultaneous expiration of the President's seven-year mandate. (The government's mandate is for five years, so the terms do not normally coincide.) This means that this time around the election of the head of state, which would normally take place in mid-administration in a relatively relaxed and leisurely atmosphere, has become politicized to the max.

The atmosphere since the general elections has been electric, with Berlusconi refusing to admit defeat and claiming (on what grounds?) that, though he lost numerically, he was instead the "moral" victor. My barber, who voted for Berlusconi, energetically defends this point of view. He has nothing but scorn for the center left (which he identifies of course with the most rabid fringe, the trouble-makers who burned the Israeli flag on May Day and said in essente that the more carabinieri die in Nassiriya the better).

The expression that recurs in the daily headlines is "muro contro muro", unbudging confrontation. Neither coalition is prepared to parlay with the enemy. Each has nominated its own candidates.

In the case of Romano Prodi's center-left Unione, which is preparing to attempt to govern the country for as long as the opposition will allow, a single candidate has been presented, 80-year-old life senator Giorgio Napolitano, a former president of the Chamber of Deputies. Napolitano, however, represents a fall-back position, a minimal concession to the center right. The center left's previous candidate was the abrasive secretary of the Democratici di sinistra, 57-year-old Massimo D'Alema. D'Alema and Napolitano belong to the same party, the party that won the most votes in the center-left coalition. Having won the most votes, they feel entitled to at least one of the plum positions. The presidency of the Senate, however, went to Franco Marini of Francesco Rutelli's Margherita group, while the presidency of the Camera went to Fausto Bertinotti, secretary of Rifondazione comunista.

According to the logic of "lottizzazione" or the distribution of the spoils, which Prodi appears to have bought into, the sole institutional role left, the Presidency of the Republic, must be alotted to the DS. But this important role, which is supposed to be that of a mediator, has never been considered up for grabs in this way before. The constitution in fact attempts to ensure that the President will be someone who is "super partes", making a two thirds majority of all those voting (deputies, senators and representatives of the regions) necessary for his election. At least this was the hope, because a two thirds majority is necessary only for the first three rounds of voting. After that, political realism clicks in, and on the fourth vote a simple majority will carry the day. This means of course that, if no across-the-aisle consensus emerges from the first three votes (the most likely outcome at the moment), the coalition that (barely) won the election can impose its own candidate. Which may be still be Giorgio Napolitano. But it could also be Massimo D'Alema.

Why do we use the term "Byzantine" when "Italian" would do just as well?

Yesterday, in addition to the confirmtion of Fausto Bertinotti as President or speaker of the Camera dei deputati, 73-year-old ex-Christian Democrat trade unionist Franco Marini was confirmed as President of the Italian Senate at the third round of voting, with 165 votes going to Marini as against 156 for his last-minute rival 87-year-old Giulio Andreotti.

This means that Prodi's center-left coalition was able to maintain strict voting discipline and hang onto its tiny majority in the Senate, at least this time around. Speculation suggests that most of the life senators ("senatori a vita"), made up of a couple of ex-Presidents of the republic and other distinguished Italians, including the dean of the Senate 93-year-old scientist Rita Levi Montalcini, voted for the "younger" candidate.

In addition, the first-time contingent of representives of Italians living abroad was also reputed to be about to give its vote to Marini. Berlusconi's former Minister for Italians Abroad Mirko Tremaglia is still trying to change the result his new law unexpectedly produced, alleging a complete foul-up in administering the law he was supposed to oversee.

I don't know with what authority, but I heard a rumor last week according to which disgruntled leader and ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is planning to run for mayor of Naples. If he does, with his billions he can easily repeat the ploy of fabled mayor, shipping magnate Achille Lauro, who, legend has it, used to distribute a left shoe or a right shoe to potential supporters with the promise of completing the pair if they voted for him and he won the election!

On Friday of this week, voting will begin on the future Presidents of the Italian House and Senate. Thanks to the "premio di maggioranza", Romano Prodi's coalition obtained a comfortable majority in the Camera (House), so there should be no problem in voting in the candidate of the center-left for President of the Camera, Fausto Bertinotti.

In the Senate, however, Prodi's majority is much much slimmer ("risicata"), maybe as few as one or two seats, and the election of ex-Christian Democrat Franco Marini looks more problematic. The contribution of the new senators elected by the Italians Abroad may well be decisive.

Add to this the fact that the Berlusconi's center-right coalition have proposed a rival candidate of their own, the 87-year-old life-senator Giulio Andreotti, also a former member of the Christian Democrat (DC) inner circle, head of several DC governments and a frequent minister in others. His candidacy is something of a Trojan horse or a spanner in the works.

When the broad-spectrum Christian Democrat party broke up after the Tangentopoli corruption scandal, its members didn't just go home. As politicians tend to do, they stayed on in politics allying themselves "transversally" across the political board.

There are former Christian Democrats on the right and on the left. Pier Ferdinando Casini's center-right UDC is made up of former Christian Democrats, as is Clemente Mastella's tiny center-left UDEUR party. But so is Rutelli's important center-left Margherita, the second most voted political group and the group who proposed rival candidate Franco Marini.

The fear now, since the vote is secret, is of Christian Democrat crossovers from the center-left coalition in favor of such a prestigious (though extremely controversial) Grand Old Man as Andreotti.

And let us not forget that the President of the Senate is the second highest office in the Republic, in other words, the first stand-in for the President of the Republic, currently 86-year-old Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, whose mandate expires in May 2006.

The election of Andreotti would have the effect of tying the new government's hands at the outset of their proposed legislation.
Voting begins on Friday, April 28. If the first round does not produce a two-thirds (i.e., bipartisan) majority, voting continues with a lowering of the electoral bar, making the election of the new President eventually possible with a simple majority vote.

Changing the subject, I am leaving Bologna for a few days in Sardinia starting next Monday. I'll get back to you from there. I won't be staying at Berlusconi's luxury villa on the Costa Smeralda.

The general elections in Italy produced a number of ironies.

First, the electoral law introduced at the last minute in order to guarantee the success of Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition produced the opposite effect, the victory of his opponents led by Romano Prodi. The law bucked the trend in Italy to move towards a two-party system, with one majority winner. A special Ministry of Reforms was created to devise a fail-safe electoral law and to propose constitutional reforms favorable to the ruling coalition, and it was placed in the hands of Northern League representative Roberto Calderoli. (If the name sounds familiar, Calderoli is the same minister who went on national TV at the height of the anti-Islamic cartoon scandal and unbuttoned his shirt to exhibit a tee shirt on which the cartoons had been printed!) His solution to the voting problem was to reintroduce proportional representation of the myriad large and small parties and to make it impossible to vote for individual candidates (who would be chosen sight unseen by the winning parties after the elections from a previously prepared list). In other words, a return to the dreaded partitocracy of the not so distant past. In addition, it was decided to allot a special additional premium to the coalition receiving the most votes. A second irony was that the special measure designed to ensure victory for the Casa delle liberta', the granting of the right to vote to Italians residing outside of Italy, also blew up in their faces. Another special Ministry, this time for Italians Abroad, was created and put in the hands of Alleanza Nazionale senator Mirko Tremaglia, a proud veteran of Benito Mussolini's last-ditch Repubblica di Salo'. Apparently Tremaglia was convinced and convinced Berlusconi that practically all Italians living abroad were Fascists and would vote for the Right. As it turned out, they weren't and they didn't. At the victory rally of Prodi's "Unione" in Rome, an ironical sign, reminiscent of the enthusiastic outcry that followwed the death of Pope John Paul II, invoked the immediate canonization of Minister Tremaglia: "Tremaglia Santo Subito!"

A third irony concerns the leader of the "Alternativa sociale" party, Alessandra Mussolini, the Duce's granddaughter, allied with the Casa delle liberta'. A couple of weeks before the elections, she appeared on TV in a debate with Vladimir Luxuria (the last name is a pseudonym), a candidate of the extreme left Rifondazione comunista party. Luxuria is a trans-sexual who dresses and behaves like a woman. S/he (who prefers to be called "she") is also an able debater who knows how to stay cool. The clkimax of the exchange came when Mussolini, in defense of the rights of "our children", screamed from across the studio "Meglio fascisti che froci!" ("Better Fascists than faggots!"). Whatever one's opinion on that particular choice, it is interesting to note that, after the elections, Luxuria is a potential member of parliament and Mussolini is not. He small party did not obtain sufficient votes to be represented.

Homophobia seems to run on the right. Sme time back, the same Mirko Tremaglia used a variant of Alessandra Mussolini's "f-word" to console fellow minister conservative Catholic Rocco Buttiglione when his Vatican-inspired principles caused him to be rejected for the position of human rights commissioner by the European Commission. Tremaglia hastily conveyed his public condolences to Buttiglione for his having been turned down by the "culattoni" or "bum-boys" of Europe. Readers, this is all true!