Category Archives: de rebus italicis

Happy Italian Liberation Day! A great day to renew our commitment to fight Fascism!

Posted on by

Today is April 25, Italian Liberation Day, the commemoration of the end of Fascist and Nazi rule in Italy in 1945.

Like every year on this day, I take time out to browse the wonderful Archivio Luce, Italy’s historical photography and cinema library. The editors always do a 25 Aprile feature in the days leading up to the national holiday.

It’s also a day that I think back to my early years as a student in Italy in the late 1980s. Many of the parents of my friends at the time were already young adults by the time war arrived in Europe.

Many of the fathers had been soldiers in the Fascist army. They told me stories of prisoner-of-war and concentration camps where they were confined after they were captured in Russia or Africa. My professor’s father was killed by the Nazis in the terrible Cephalonia massacre in occupied Greece.

One of my early mentors in Padua, the great philologist Gianfranco Folena, had been held as a political prisoner in a concentration camp. I would sit rapt on my classroom chair as he would talk about teaching Greek to his fellow prisoners, many of whom were intellectuals like him.

There is war on the continent today and Fascist politicians continue to rise on both sides of the Atlantic. Italy’s current government is its first “post-Fascist” coalition and it openly traces its origins to Mussolini’s party.

I can only wonder what professor Folena would say today.

Just like every year, I scan the faces in the photos and try to imagine what it felt like to taste freedom after more than two decades of murderous authoritarian rule.

And every year, I renew my commitment to fight Fascism. This morning my Instagram feed is filled with posts by Italian friends and colleagues who proudly declare themselves “anti-Fascists.”

Happy Liberation Day! Long live the anti-Fascist Republic and long live our commitment to fight Fascism!

Screenshots via Archivio Luce.

The bunga bunga party is over. Berlusconi, Italy’s long-time buffoon prime minister and political huckster, has died.

Posted on by

Image via Wikipedia Creative Commons.

By the time a wide-eyed U.C.L.A. undergrad made their way to Italy in 1987, the country’s socialist government was thriving, the economy was booming, a year of university studies, even at a top school, cost around $300, and “there was a Benetton on every corner in Manhattan,” as one of their professor’s put it.

But by the early 1990s, that had all collapsed as the government led by socialist leader Bettino Craxi went down in flames and scandal.

That power vacuum led to the rise of the first post-modern politician, as many have called him, Silvio Berlusconi. As he himself openly put it, he got into politics so that he could change laws in order to make himself richer, pay fewer taxes, and avoid legal jeopardy. As he achieved all three of those personal goals, he drove the country’s economy into the toilet with bloated borrowing and destroyed Italy’s image as a progressive nation who protected its vulnerable and cherished its cultural legacy.

He also became the first, in his own words, to legitimize the far and fringe right. Today, the roots of Italy’s first post-fascist (in other words, its first post-war bona fide fascist) government can be traced to his tenure.

Back in the early 2000s, when Italy was the president of the European Union, I was recruited to be an interpreter at the Italian Mission to the United Nations. Because Berlusconi, prime minister at the time, was tasked to address the General Assembly as the president of the EU, the mission needed an extra full-time interpreter. I was assigned to foreign minister Franco Frattini, who represented Italy at the gathering, while the senior interpreter was assigned to Berlusconi.

I never met him but I did attend a meeting where he spoke — and I held my nose.

After his notorious sexual predation parties became well documented by the media, my bandmates and I wrote and produced a song about his bunga bunga. We recorded it in Austin, Texas for our 2011 album “Freudian Slip” (Aeronaut Records). You may have heard it on season 1 (episode 2) of “Emily in Paris” (listen below).

Many have said that Berlusconi created the paradigm, the road map for our country’s own post-fascist, post-supremacist political monster.

But let us not mention the name of that Devil… lest he appear.

Read the Times obit here.

Congratulations to my friend Laura Castelletti, the new mayor of Brescia! In a right wing northern Italy, she and her city are a glimmer of leftist hope.

Posted on by

De humanis illustribus…

Congratulations to my longtime friend Laura Castelletti on her win as the new mayor of Brescia!

Her city is part of Italy’s northern industrial corridor, a network of metropoles that stretches from Turin to Venice.

In recent decades, those cities, once hubs for labor unions and progressive movements, have increasingly shifted toward the right. Parties like the Northern League (now called the League for Salvini Premier, a reference to its leader, the autocratic, xenophobic homophobic, and Russophile Matteo Salvini) have long dominated local politics.

Historically, Brescia has had both conservative and progressive governments. But it has remained a center for leftist thought and policy. Today, its historic downtown is known as the “Stalingrad” of Italy, one of the last bulwarks of progressivism in an increasingly “post-Fascist” Italy (last year, when Giorgia Meloni was elected as Italy’s prime minister, she was widely called the country’s “first post-fascist leader” and “first hard-right leader”).

For the last 13 years, Brescia has been my home away from home and Laura has been a warm and generous friend. I couldn’t be more thrilled to see her achieve this long-desired goal. My beloved Brescia couldn’t be in better hands.

Evviva Brescia e i bresciani! Evviva la sinistra!

Long live Brescia and the Brescians! Long live the Left!

Happy Italian Liberation Day! Long live a united, free, and anti-fascist Italy!

Posted on by

Above: Italian resistance fighters in Piazza San Marco, Venice in 1945 (images via the Archivio Luce).

Today is Italian Liberation Day: Festa della Liberazione, April 25. Established in 1946, it commemorates the end of Nazi and Fascist rule in Italy.

It’s a national holiday in Italy and most Italians took yesterday and today off from work (an Italian ponte or bridge, as it’s called, a long weekend).

This morning, a colleague and friend from Italy sent me the following message.

“Buon 25 aprile,” he wrote. “Viva l’Italia, libera e antifascista 🇮🇹”

“Happy Liberation Day. Long live Italy [and may it remain] free and anti-fascist.”

Check out this slide show by the Archivio Luce. It features images from Italy after Mussolini’s fall.

Happy Italian Liberation Day! Long live Italy and may it remain free and anti-fascist!

In Turin, a 17th-century villa looks out over the old city.

Posted on by

My Vinitaly began not in Verona but in Turin, the capital of Piedmont and former capital of Italy, one of Italy’s most beautiful risorgimento cities, with the architecture and urban planning befitting a world touchstone.

Not far from its origins in the Cottian Alps, the mighty Po river flows through this majestic metropolis, hugging its eastern border and dividing it from the rolling hills where the Villa della Regina — the Queen’s country house — looks out over the famed Mole Antonelliana, one of Italy’s most recognizable architectural landmarks.

I wish I could tell you more about the 17th-century villa, just up the road from the Queen’s sojourn, where a group of my colleagues and I were hosted by one of the city’s leading citizens.

But I can share the foods we ate.

There’s really nothing quite like vitello tonnato when it’s homemade. Thinly sliced veal topped with a sauce made of anchovies, capers, and olive oil-cured tuna. It’s a Jewish boy’s dream.

Also above, those are the classic tuna-stuffed eggs from the Piedmontese culinary canon, otherwise known as “deviled” in Anglo-Saxon culture.

These stalks of Apium graveolens were slathered with creamy gorgonzola. Please try this at home.

No self-respecting torinese host would end a meal sans fromage. After all, the region is renowned for its pastures, breeds, and traditions.

I wish I could reveal more about our host and the reason we were gathered there in the days leading up to the fair.

But that will all come in time… Thanks for sharing the adventure with me and more to come!

The never-ending saga of the Italian traffic ticket.

Posted on by

Above: a shot taken while waiting for stop light in Rome in September 2022.

The last time I got a traffic ticket in Italy, it was because of an utterly honest mistake.

It was my first time returning after the lockdowns in 2020. I was rolling into the town of Bra, Piedmont, where I stay during my teaching gig at Slow Food U.

During the health crisis, they had expanded the pedestrian area to include outdoor dining at the hotel where I stay. In years past, I could drive through there to access the hotel’s courtyard parking.

Because the parking area was no longer accessible (owing to the tables and chairs blocking it), I was forced to make a trip around the block. As a result, I had no other choice but to enter the dreaded ZTL — the zona traffico limitato or limited traffic zone — for which you need a resident’s permit. It was a mistake anyone could have made.

As with previous tickets, I received a “preview” from the rental company.

Being that I would be returning to Bra a few months later for a second round of seminars, I decided to go to the police station and pay the fine directly. I was hoping to avoid the late fees I’ve incurred in the past when I’ve waited for the “official” ticket to be forwarded.

It turns out that it was a bad move. Even after I paid the ticket through the proper channels, I still received a notice via email from an agency called Nivi saying that I still needed to pay, including exorbitant late fees.

After much back and forth, including impeccable documentation of my payment, they finally managed to find my payment. And I was absolved…

I’m glad I played it the way I did but in retrospect, I wish I had just paid the late fees when Nivi came calling. I could have avoided a lot of anxiety in the meantime.

I still can’t figure out what the acronym Nivi stands for. But its website says its a “European Municipality Outsourcing” group — a collection agency.

Now I’ve received a notice from the rental agency that I was clocked doing 118 kilometers per hour in a 110 zone. I was literally less than 5 mph over the speed limit!

I called up a friend in Italy who was happy to pay the fee and help me avoid the late fees. But the codes on the “preview” wouldn’t allow him to do that. He called the “municipality” that issued the citation. They said that I would have to wait until the “official” ticket arrived. But they also said that I might not be forced to pay.

I’m happy to pay my traffic fines. And I consider myself a very safe, cautious, and respectful driver. But I can imagine how daunting this may all seem to someone who just wanted to enjoy their vacation in Italy. Hoping this is helpful.

As Italy awaits its first post-fascist leader, Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay on “fuzzy totalitarianism” comes once again into focus.

Posted on by

Above: “Chi non è pronto a morire per la sua fede non è degno di professarla — Mussolini” (“those not ready to die for their faith are not worthy of professing it”). No one has ever bothered to erase a Mussolinian aphorism from the main square in Gaiole in Chianti. Photo taken by me earlier this month.

Italian politician Giorgia Meloni, whose party won the lion’s share of votes in elections on Sunday and who is expected to be elected as prime minister in coming weeks, is widely being called “Italy’s first post-fascist leader” and “Italy’s first hard-right leader.”

The epithet is owed in part to her anti-immigrant, anti-liberal (read anti-woke), and protectionist polices — spiked with a dash of conspiracy theory, Euroscepticism, and anti-globalism (sound familiar?).

The moniker is also owed to a symbol — an avatar if you will — that appears in iconography for her political party, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, a lyric borrowed from Italy’s 1847 national anthem): the Fiamma Tricolore or Tricolor flame that was adopted by the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Itaian Socialist Movement), the post-World War II incarnation of the fascist party. For all intents and purposes, her party is the current-day expression of that political platform, worldview, and aesthetic.

Never before today — almost 100 years to the day that Mussolini marched on Rome and seized power from the monarchy — has MSI fielded a prime minister.

For Italians born during the fascist era, the thought of a seated post-fascist government is practically, well, unthinkable. It’s as if Italy is finally having its Trump moment (many of my Italian university-era friends have called it that): the unthinkable has come to pass.

In the light of Italy’s election on Sunday, I’m not the only one who was reminded of Umberto Eco’s famous 1995 lecture at Columbia University, later published by the New York Review of Books, “Ur-Fascism” (and later translated into Italian as “Fascismo eterno” or “Eternal Fascism”). That essay is where he coined not only the term “Ur-Fascism” but also “fuzzy totalitarianism,” an expression that has taken on new and urgent meaning with Italy’s shift toward the hard right.

Here’s a link to read it in its entirety.

In the first part, he describes what it was like to grow up during fascism in Italy (he was born in 1932). It reads like the opening sequence of a Fellini movie, replete with comedy, redemption, and salvation.

In the second part, he offers “a list of features [14 of them] that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

Those bullet points have been frequently cited in the Trump era. But to read them in context, prefaced by his memories of growing up under fascism, gives the essay renewed meaning and relevance. I highly recommend it to you.

City of Houston declares June 2 “Italian National Day.”

Posted on by

Above from left, Italian Consul General Federico Ciattaglia, Italian MP for North and Central America Fuscia Nissoli, and Houston Councilwoman Mary Nan Huffman.

At yesterday’s celebration of Italian Republic Day (June 2), the City of Houston proclaimed the day “Italian National Day” in the city. The proclamation was delivered on behalf of Mayor Sylvester Turner by Houston Councilwoman Mary Nan Huffman.

Hosted at the beautiful Cohen House on the campus of Rice University, the event included addresses by Ciattaglia, Nissoli, and Huffman, as well as a performance of “Fratelli d’Italia” (“Brothers of Italy”), the Italian national anthem, followed by the “Star Spangled Banner.”

Members of the Italian Air Force, stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, were also in attendance.

In one bittersweet note during the festivities, Italian Consul General Federico Ciattaglia shared the news that his mandate will end this fall and that he will be leaving Houston.

Please consider giving to Unicef’s Ukraine child refugee fund. This link takes you straight to the donation page.

Debunking Chianti myths, speaking Chianti truths.

Posted on by

There is no Italian wine more closely tied to the country’s culture and history than the wine we know today as Chianti.

Few remember that the great visionary of Chianti was also the second prime minister of United Italy, Baron Bettino Ricasoli (1809-1880). He, like his parliamentarian predecessor Camillo Cavour (from Barolo), believed that Italian wine could become a major export for the newborn monarchy. It wouldn’t come to pass in his lifetime. But by the 1960s, Chianti had become one of the most recognizable wines in the world.

Over the course of my career in wine writing (and reading), I’ve come across countless canards about Chianti and its origins. As I prepare for a talk to be delivered at the Chianti consortium tasting and seminar today in Houston, I wanted to share these debunked myths about the appellations that form what we know simply as “Chianti.”

Myth: Tuscan ampelographer Giovan Vettorio Soderini was the first to sing the praises of Sangiovese in his 1590 treatise on grape farming in Europe.

Truth: he praises a grape he calls Sangiogheto for its ability to produce a lot of wine but warns how difficult it is to make it into fine wine. (Modern day ampelographers also question whether the grape he mentions is even related to what we know as Sangiovese today. Most believe that Sangiovese didn’t appear in Tuscany until the 18th century.)

Myth: the etymon (origin) of the ampelonym (grape name) Sangiovese is sangue di Giove or blood of Jove [Jupiter].

Truth: while this folkloric etymology is theoretically possible, it’s hardly plausible, scientifically speaking. To date, there is no evidence whatsoever that points to this as the origin of the grape name (and believe me, I have looked under every stone I could find). It sounds cool and romantic but it’s just not a philologically tenable etymon. It would be fair to say that some people think that the name comes from the blood of Jove. But their source is a mere folkloric etymology. In other words, they once heard someone say that.

Myth: Chianti was cited as Tuscany’s best wine in an edict published by Cosimo de’ Medici III in 1716.

Truth: “Vino del Chianti” (“Wine from Chianti”; not “Chianti, the Wine”) was mentioned among other Tuscan wines that were illegal to “counterfeit.” The document does not point to “Vino del Chianti” as being superior (many wine-focused historians believe that Carmignano, another wine mentioned in the edict, was considered the top wine from Tuscany at the time). The interesting thing about Cosimo’s bando was that it created a de facto and ante litteram appellation system in Tuscany more than 200 years before the DOC system was introduced.

Myth: Baron Bettino Ricasoli, the Sangiovese pioneer and visionary, wrote a recipe for Chianti in the 19th century.

Truth: Ricasoli famously wrote that he liked to blend some white wine in his Sangiovese to make the wine more approachable in its youth. He did not propose a set formula, nor did he write that white wine needed to be added to make the wine later known as “Chianti.” (We should remember Ricasoli for the fact that his research and experimentation with Sangiovese led him to grub up the other grape varieties planted on his large farm. He was arguably the first to recognize Sangiovese’s potential as a grape for fine wine.)

Fun fact: did you know that Machiavelli was a grower and producer of Chianti? After his exile from Florence, he retired to his farm in San Casciano where he produced and traded wine among other agricultural products.

Machiavelli portrait via Wiki Creative Commons.

Italians can’t come to the U.S. So we’re bringing them to you via Zoom. Taste with me in Houston next week.

Posted on by

best lambruscoDespite our hopes that Italian winemakers would be able to join us in the U.S. this fall, Europeans are still banned from coming to the U.S. by the Biden administration. They can come here if they quarantine in certain countries for two weeks before arriving. But they can’t come directly from the EU.

When I was in Italy teaching at Slow Food U. in August, my Italian counterparts were optimistically expecting the ban to be lifted. Slow Wine had its tour planned for the U.S. in October, editor-in-chief Giancarlo Gariglio told me over dinner at his house. Villa Sandi’s export director Flavio Geretto, another good friend, was gearing up for the Gambero Rosso tastings also scheduled for October (he was even planning on bringing his son to attend a concert in Houston!).

Italian winemakers had hoped to boost sales with in situ visits during the last and historically most lucrative quarter of the calendar year (“OND” or Octobero-November-December, as it is known in the trade). But all plans and hopes have been dashed by the continued prohibition.

And that’s why we’re bringing the Italians to you.

Next Wednesday in Houston, I’ll be hosting a hybrid virtual/in-person wine dinner with one of my dearest and closest friends, Alicia Lini. She will be joining our group of guests in the dining room at Roma restaurant, where I write the wine list, via Zoom. And other guests will be also be joining via Zoom from their own dining rooms (they will pick up the food and wine beforehand).

For those interested in attending, see the menu and details here. Roma’s kitchen is doing a wonderful seafood — yes, seafood! — menu to pair with Alicia’s white, rosé, and red Lambrusco. It’s going to be super fun. I hope you can join us. Thanks for your support and buon weekend.