Some news from Italy for your Sunday reading pleasure:
- For the first time in ten years, Italy is poised to surpass France and become the world’s largest producer of wine. If that’s not an excuse to drink more Italian wine, I don’t know what is.
- In a less-coveted competition, Italy leads European countries in the number of illegal immigrants who arrive by sea.
- Some women in Naples, tired of having to deal with the injuries that their lovers get from playing with firecrackers, have started a committee that’s declaring the men will have a simple choice: sex or fireworks.
- Italian men who are too busy to date now have a new TV show to come to the rescue: “SOS Patata,” in which four babes in lingerie lounge around a TV set waiting for lonely men in distress to call them. Just when you thought Italian TV couldn’t get any worse (or better, depending on your point of view).
- After the recent Venice floods, you’d think even the former naysayers would be getting on board with the decades-long effort to build some sort of tidal barriers outside the lagoon. But you’d be wrong.
- And speaking of Venice, the photos of the flooding here are out of this world. Amazing stuff. Definitely click through to check them out.
- One more Venice flood-related note – Nan at Living Venice thought to get out the recorder to capture the sound of the flood warning sirens in the city; you’ll only get two of the four tones here (more tones indicate higher water levels), but it’s enough to give you a flavor of the haunting sirens. Talk about a feeling of impending doom…
- But it’s not just Venice that’s dealing with bad weather lately – much of Italy was inundated with storms last week, and at least one death in Rome is blamed on the deluge. The city has declared a state of emergency, as the Tiber River has risen more than 50 feet in the last week.
- As if I needed another excuse to be hungry for Italian food, there’s this article on affordable restaurants in Tuscany.
- 70 nurses and other hospital workers in Southern Italy have been arrested after allegedly having bought false medical degrees online.
- Spending Christmas in Rome but want to go to Christmas mass in English? Here is a list of the churches that generally do an English-language mass at Christmas.
- A major strike which was planned for last Friday was scaled back a bit due to the transportation problems the heavy rains have been causing in Venice and Rome.
- A film was made recently involving Amanda Knox, the American college student who’s been held in a Perugia jail since being accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in late 2007. The film was started before Kercher’s death, but the film has caused an uproar among those who feel like Knox is getting preferential treatment as she awaits her trial.
- Color me surprised – the Vatican says it’s in favor of decriminalizing homosexuality.
- Although Michelangelo is more often associated with giant carvings like the “David” in Florence, he also did much smaller works (especially early in his career). One such carving, only attributed to him in 2004, is a small wooden image of Christ on the cross – and it’s just been purchased by the Italian state.
- Super sweet satsumas and mandarins are one of my very favorite things about winter, and that was never more true than when I had easy access to the oranges from Sicily. Karen at South of Rome has me salivating with her post about Sicilian oranges.
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