This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice in 1807. When Garibaldi was born there, Nice (or Nizza) was Italian-speaking and had been ruled by the House of Savoy (Casa Savoia) since 1388; it was ceded to France in 1860 as a trade-off in the Unification of Italy under the Savoy monarchy. Thinking perhaps of the lack of self-interest and the talent for self-effacement that he shared with Roman Republican hero Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, British historian A. J. P. Taylor declared: “Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.”

Cincinnatus was appointed dictator in an emergency in 458 B.C., when Minucius was besieged by the warlike Aequi tribe on Cold Mountain (Mons Algidus) in the Alban hills. He defeated the Aequi but, despite invitations to stay on, he resigned his dictatorship after sixteen days and returned to the relative obscurity of his farm across the Tiber. In Garibaldi’s case, the place he went to to step out of the public eye was the barren wind-swept little island of Caprera off the northeast shore of Sardinia, where you can still visit his house and his tomb.

A. J. P. Taylor’s enthusiasm for Garibaldi has not always been shared by contemporary historians. It was certainly shared by George Macaulay Trevelyan, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who devoted a classic trilogy—Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic (1907), Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909) and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (1911)—to the Hero of Two Worlds, as the Italians know him. Come to that, the whole of the Italian Risorgimento has met with a mixed reception from the revaluators or professional debunkers.

This week’s New Yorker magazine (July 9 & 16, 2007) features a review, entitled “The Insurgent: Garibaldi and his Enemies,” of another academic historian’s somewhat jaundiced view of Garibaldi. The reviewer is novelist and essayist Tim Parks, author, among several other fine books, of Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona (1992), who lives and teaches in Italy and knows Italian mores like few others. The volume under review is Lucy Riall’s  Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (Yale, 2007, published more or less simultaneously in Italian by Laterza), which presents Garibaldi’s career in Brazil and Uraguay—the two countries recently issued commemorative postage stamps—as well as in Italy as so much smoke and mirrors, a well-managed Victorian publicity stunt. Parks defended General Garibaldi against another skeptical account—cultural historian Daniel Pick’s Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi (Jonathan Cape, 2005, Random House, 2006)—in the July 21, 2005 issue of the London Review of Books. There, Parks’ article, which discussed among other things Garibaldi’s support for a well-meaning but anti-historical public health project to reroute the Tiber away from Rome, was entitled “Stewing Waters”.

As Parks points out, there was certainly no need to defend Garibaldi against his followers. Garibaldi fancied himself as an author of historical fiction, and one of his admirers was a literary colleague, the most important Italian fiction writer between Alessandro Manzoni and Giuseppe Verga. Ippolito Nievo (1831-61) joined the Expedition of the One Thousand and fought alongside the General in Sicily. He died in fact at sea between Palermo and Naples, carrying the records of the Sicilian campaign back to the north, when the ship on which he was a passenger foundered. His ironically named Confessioni di un septuagenario (he died at 29) was published posthumously in 1867. The work was partially translated into English as The Castle of Fratta and is available in a Greenwood Reprint.

Nievo dedicated a naively enthusiastic poem, entitled “The General”, to his commander and companion in arms.  It goes in part like this: “He has something in his eye / that shines forth from his soul / and seems to incline people / to go down on bended knee; / even in a thronging square / I have seen him step courteously and humanely through the crowd / and offer his hand to the girls. // Whether on flower-strewn streets / or in the midst of songs and music / or among whistling bullets / and the blasts of cannons, / he was born with a smile / and he cannot change his nature. / Only to the enemy is his eye terrible, / and to the coward. // Exhausted, in disorder, / they sometimes mill around him, / the soldiers press him. / With a word he revives them, / he shares their many hardships, / he shares their scanty sleep, / and never once did it occur to him / to observe that they were ragged. // His horse, aware perhaps / of who is in the saddle, / gallops over all terrain / and never sets a foot wrong. / Sometimes, white with foaming lather, / he halts, and on either side / the jostling soldiers / applaud their living god.”

Generals Washington or Wellington could hardly have asked for greater adulation. But then, maybe Nievo was part of the scam.

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.

In his speech the pope intended to denounce the latest policies of the Nazi-Fascist Axis and reaffirm the independence of the Catholic Church against the pressures being brought to bear on it by the Fascist government. Pius XI passed away before he could make the speech, but he had seen to it before he died that printed copies of the text be made for distribution to his prospective audience.

Documents recently brought to light by Vatican archive researcher Emma Fattorini and illustrated in a book published this week entitled Pio XI, Hitler e Mussolini, La solitudine di un papa (Einaudi) prove beyond doubt that it was the pope’s Secretary of State and confidant Eugenio Pacelli who prevented their distribution and insisted that all copies of the defiant speech be destroyed.

Pacelli was destined to be elected as Pius XI’s successor with the name of Pope Pius XII.

We were already aware that Pacelli had censored the encyclical letter Humanae Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race) prepared by the American Jesuit John LaFarge and a couple of Jesuit colleagues at the express request of Pius XI. The encyclical, the draft of which was published by French researchers Georges Passeclecq and Bernard Suchecky in the 1990s (English version: The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, Harcourt Brace, 1997), condemned Fascist anti-semitism but not without indulging in a little old-fashioned Catholic antisemitism of its own.

The publication of this new document calls into question once again the role of Pius XII in combating Nazi atrocities. In last week’s Sunday’s supplement to the economic newspaper Il Sole-24 Ore (May 27, 2007), Emilio Gentile, author of a book on the 1937 Oxford University international conference of Christian churces against totalitarianism, to which the Roman Church declined to send a representative, characterized Pius XI’s fulminating approach as “prophetic” and Pius XII’s circumspect approach as “diplomatic”. Pius XII wanted to avoid at all costs a counter-productive confrontation, thinking there was more to be gained by attempting to persuade the Duce and the Führer to change their policies. I guess there’s no reasoning with some people.

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%.

In October 2006, the Mondadori publishing house released a 100-page volume entitled La casa di Olgiate e altre poesie by Eugenio Montale (1896-1981).

Well, to call it a book by Montale is a bit of an exaggeration. In the care with which he put his books of poetry together, Montale was almost as meticulous as the founding father of Italian lyric poetry Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who spent fifty years arranging the 366 poems of his one-book Canzoniere.

What we have in La casa di Olgiate is a group of poems that Montale never published and that ended up in the hands of his faithful Tuscan housekeeper Gina Tiossi.

It was Gina who donated the originals to the Fondo Manoscritti, which collects autograph manuscripts of twentieth-century writers, at the University of Pavia.

The philologists at Pavia did the rest. The 56 poems--mostly short, many just a few lines long--were composed between 1963 and the poet's death in 1981, the bulk of them in the poet's last two or three years.

Montale's poetry, from Ossi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones", 1925) to Quaderno di quattro anni (1977) and Altri versi (1981), changed a great deal. His debut volume has a distilled and concentrated feel that made it the voice of a generation. Or better, the voice of part of a generation, the part that did not, could not embrace Fascism, perhaps as much for aesthetic as for political reasons.

The poems commemorating the years leading up to or following WW II or the poet's experience of those years--Le occasioni (1939), La bufera e altro (1956) are more difficult, more syntacticaly complex, more "hermetic," more allusive.

The new poems that came out in the 1970s, after a twenty-five year silence, were completely different, simpler, more ironic, more overtly autobiographical, more intimate, more epigrammatic and ultimately more resignedly pessimistic . The poems in La casa di Olgiate belong to this later manner. Just one example, chosen for its brevity rather than its optimism:

Se anche si scoprisse / il come e il perché dell'universo ? venire al mondo sarebbe / tempo perso. [Even if we were to discover / the how and why of the universe / coming into the world would / still be a waste of time.]

Incidentally, an excellent anthology of translations from the works of Montale is the one edited with an introduction by Harry Thomas and published in 2002 by Penguin Books and in New York by Handsel Books in 2004.

Thomas often gives more than one translation of the same poem, though it is occasionally hard to believe (especially since there is no facing Italian text) that the translators were working from the same original. Among them Allen Mandelbaum is one of the more conscientious and literal, while "confessional poet" Robert Lowell is the one who--"imitating" rather than translating (his 1961 collection of translations is entitled Imitations)--does most violence to the translatee's text (and not only for Montale).

Several of the translators included have won prizes for translation. Which leads one to the realization that translations are often judged on their merits as convincing free-standing poems by people who don't know the original language.

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.

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?

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?

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!

Only last Wednesday, I was outside Palazzo Madama in Rome, the seat of the Italian Senate, near the Piazza Navona and across from the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, which has several dramatic Caravaggio paintings.

A couple of tips for eating well and not too expensively in Italy's capital.

Delicious Italian Jewish food (which is basically local Italian food, only kosher) is to be had in the former ghetto, between Via Arenula and the Teatro di Marcello, where the modern Synagogue is located on the Lungotevere dei Cenci. At 30 Piazza delle Cinque Scole an unassuming anonymous door (i.e., without a sign or a name) admits you to the tiny trattoria of Sora Margherita. It is so small, it was closed down as few years ago by the health inspectors, not for sanitary reasons but because the space was considered inadequate.

Their answer was to reopen the restaurant as a private club, so the first thing visitors must do is to sign up for free membership! Then they can order. As a "primo", I ordered meat-filled "agnolotti con sugo di coda" (a kind of ravioli topped with the gravy from the specialty dish, "coda alla vaccinara" (stewed oxtail). As a "secondo", I went for the"coda alla vaccinara" itself. Both were fantastic. As I sidedish, I tried a "carciofo alla giudia" (Jewish style artichoke), an incredibly light deep-fried artichoke that is another speciality of this district of Rome. Naturally, succulent roast lamb also figures high on the menu. Whatever you order, you can't go wrong! And the price is right too. It appears that Sora Margherita, however, is only open for lunch.

For dinner you might try the Taverna del Ghetto in nearly Via Portico d'Ottavia. The food is excellent, but it's an internationally "in" destination and the prices are consequently higher. The bottle of local kosher white wine I ordered had a label that said it had been imported into the USA by a New York wine merchant, but I figured it was from a case that was due to cross the Altantic. I don't think it had made the round trip!

Another outstanding quality-price venue is Da Sergio at 27 Vicolo delle Grotte (a "vicolo" is a narrow alley), just down the street from the Palazzo or Galleria Spada, which stands next to the French Embassy in the enormous Renaissance Palazzo Farnese. At Sergio's, on another day, I tried "tonnarelli [a form of long pasta whose name comes from the adjective "tondo" meaning "round"] cacio e pepe" (with cheese and pepper), another Roman speciality. As a second course, I asked for "trippa alla romana", but it wasn't the day for tripe, so I settled for scrumptious "calamari con piselli" (sliced squid with green peas). Again, the whole menu is great. Be adventurous.

Finally, if you are looking for good food really cheap, I would heartily recommend Mario's at 56 Via del Moro in Trastevere, just across the Ponte Garibaldi between Piazza Belli and Piazza Trilussa, two squares named for famous Roman dialect poets. Mario's (that's the way they spell it on the sign, with the apostrophe, in the right place for once!) is a few doors down from the Almost Corner Bookshop, which specializes in English-language books. You can eat a full menu of fine Roman food at Mario's for twenty euros or less.

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.

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!