A Climate Change Disaster
Plus local elections and a Venice Biennale preview
[*note: I’m travelling pretty intensely for the foreseeable future, so I’m afraid the next Week in Italy won’t be delivered to your inbox until 1 June. Thanks in advance for the patience, and buona lettura!]
There's no beating around the bush here: it's been a disastrous week for much of Italy. For once, this was not the fault of the current government, organised crime, or EU bogeymen but a far more insidious enemy: the weather. Over the past 10 days, a quasi-tropical storm has been raging across the east coast of Italy inflicting unbelievable damage. Storms are normal at this time of year; as cold and hot air currents mix ahead of the summer. Still, 2023 has been something else entirely. All across the Adriatic, from Venice to Puglia, rains have been falling without mercy. 23 rivers have burst their banks. There have been 280 landslides. 41 cities and towns have been engulfed by mud and water. Where I live, in Tuscany, the showers have been manageable; even pleasant. After a dry, hot spring I’m pleased to see the vegetation breathing again. But elsewhere it’s carnage. Ravenna is more or less underwater. Much of the pianura, and Bologna, is similarly submerged. 10 have died so far, and 20,000 have been rendered homeless in the worst floods for 100 years. Seen from a climatological standpoint, over the past two decades, this is, unfortunately, becoming a trend. Hot winters and spring droughts are prepping the way for increasingly violent storms in early summer. To awkwardly quote La Repubblica's headline today: "Il clima malato presenta il conto" [our sick climate presents its bill].
Over the weekend local elections took place in 595 municipalities across Italy, and the results were…actually interesting for once (!) The voter turnout was 58%; not bad given the apocalyptic weather. Most contests were in small and medium sized communities. Unsurprisingly Fratelli d’Italia is still enjoying a lot of support, though that does seem to be waning. The real story, concerns the Lega. Matteo Salvini’s party is losing ground, fast. Across the northern heartlands, from Friuli to Liguria, Salvini’s voters simply didn't come out. Take Brescia and Vicenza. These two cities are usually seen as die hard right wing strongholds; hotbeds of anti-migrant sentiment and middle-class rage. This time, however, both flipped allegiances to support… the left wing Partito Democratico! This is big news. I’ve lost count of how many folk have discounted Elly Schelin, the new PD leader, as a communist maniac who only appeals to young metropolitans, liberals, Marxists, queer folk etc. Well, this is proof to the contrary. Italy’s deep, conservative, rural, alienated electorate is, apparently, finding good reason to throw their vote behind the new, 38-year-old face of progressive change. While deeper analysis is needed regarding the motives, if I were Giorgia Meloni I’d be starting to worry…
Arts and culture: The Laboratory of the Future
It's opening weekend for the Venice Biennale and the press buzz is just getting started. This year's architecture edition - curated by Lesley Lokko - is running with the title: The Laboratory of the Future [note the interesting absence of a question mark]. Ahead of the opening Archdaily has published an intensive overview of each of the pavilions, detailing the project managers, directors and concepts in an intimating list of 63 national participants. For such a comprehensive website, Archdaily is bizzarely lo-fi. It's pretty clunky and awkward. Nevertheless, I spent a good 30 mins clicking through each of the new exhibitions to make a list of what’s of interest. A few jumped out. The U.S. pavilion on plastics looks a must-see, as does the Greek entry on water (mis)use; but I'm particularly looking forward to exploring the work of African and Diaspora practitioners that Lokko has, wisely, decided to foreground here, and who, historically, has been so excluded. The exhibit runs from May 20 to November 26 - and you can read a great interview with Lokko on the curatorial concept over at the FT here.
Chora media, Italy's pre-eminent podcast making factory, has a new show out that's well worth a listen. Cinema Eros, by Alessandra Coppola, tells the story of a forgotten terrorist attack that took place at the very end of Italy’s dramatic years of lead (the anni di piombo). Specifically, the presenter unpacks the events that took place in Milan on 14 May 1983 when a group of neo-Nazi fascist militants set fire to a pornographic cinema in that city’s red light district, killing six people. The attackers, in their own words, were motivated by a sense of moral puritanism. Their desire, they later confessed, was to cleanse the nation of "disgusting" and "delinquent" individuals, and they hoped that others would support them in copy-cat actions. Ultimately, the terrorists were jailed, and justice, so-to-speak, was served. But this is a grim story indeed. Not only is it one of the most brutal bombing attacks in Italian history - after the Bologna train station bombing and Pizza Fontana - the events have also been almost-totally, collectively, forgotten (a fact which, if anything, is as worrying as the crime itself.) Listen to part 1 below. ITA only I’m afraid.
A morbid end to the newsletter this week, but a fascinating one nonetheless! Last week the editorial team at WIRED Italia asked the AI image generator MidJourney to produce images of Italy's most famous monuments; but in a post-apocalyptic dystopian style. The results, which you can see here, and a few of which I've pasted below, are appropriately eerie, creepy and sci-fi looking. But they're also - and this is the key part - oddly specific. In Venice we see that the sea level has risen, and the building lines are functioning like a new dam between the lagoon and sea; in Naples the climate has warmed and the vegetation has become jungle-like. In Rome the ruins of great ancient monuments blur into continuum with more recent shells of towerblocks and apartment buildings. These are striking images in their own right, but they're also an impressive demonstration of how far these deep learning algorithms have progressed; and how much better these technologies have become at interpreting and delivering-on human commands.
Recipe of the week: Griddled Courgettes, Burrata and Fregola
If you’re not an Italian food nerd there’s a slight chance you might not have heard of fregola. To be honest, it’s not nearly as obscure as it sounds. Fregola is basically a kind of giant wholewheat couscous that originates from Sardinia. All across that island people cook it as their basic carb, tossing it with fish, seafood (clams) or sometimes just some vegetables and olive oil. It's an adaptable base for many toppings. It has a nutty flavour. It works hot and dry, cold and sloppy. It works like a pasta, topped with sauce; it works as a soup. Here, though, I wanted to share one of my favourite preparations and favourite spring recipes for that matter: a simple salad of fregola topped with griddled zucchine and burrata. I first found this recipe in Diana Henry's book A change of appetite and ever since then it has become a regular part of my early summer food rotation. So here’s the link!
About Me
My name is Jamie Mackay (@JacMackay) and I’m an author, editor and translator based in Florence. I’ve been writing about Italy for a decade for international media including The Guardian, The Economist, Frieze, and Art Review. I launched ‘The Week in Italy’ to share a more direct and regular overview of the debates and dilemmas, innovations and crises that sometimes pass under the radar of our overcrowded news feeds.
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