Coming Soon: The Week in Italy 2.0
Time to experiment
Dear readers, I’m back… or at least… I’m in the process of getting back to work. As you’ll have deducted from my temporary absence, it’s been a tough few weeks. The family emergency is ongoing, but the situation has now stabilised and I’m pleased to be in Italy again, slowly returning to writing.
Thanks for your kind messages, support, patience and understanding throughout this period. While I haven’t had time to reply to all of you, I’m hugely grateful. I don’t and won’t make a habit of sharing deeply personal stuff online, but it’s great to know there’s a whole community reading here and that so many of you are on-side in spirit. Grazie di cuore.
I’ve been thinking about the Week in Italy. How it’s going, what’s good, what’s less good, how it fits into my life, my other work, and what I’d like to do next with this space. So allow me to share a quick update on where I’m at.
On the plus side: I think the bitesize news-curating format has worked pretty well over the past couple of years. From my end, I’ve found it really satisfying to bring together different stories, to organise them, to unpick them, to establish a certain rhythm and voice. Writing this newsletter forces me to read the news better, more attentively and more broadly. I like to think it helps me think more critically - and expansively - about Italy today and the ways we narrativise and imagine the country. Put simply, it’s been fun!
At the same time, I can’t help thinking, perhaps inevitably, the newsletter has sometimes perpetuated some over-simplified media tropes. Each segment is short. Sweet, sometimes. But at other times underdeveloped. Likewise, while I’d like to think my editorial instincts provide you guys with a better reading experience than, say, an AI aggregator, I do sometimes feel forced into reaction mode; into information packaging as opposed to critical and creative writing. And that’s exactly what I was trying to escape when I set this whole thing up.
All of which is to say: I’ve decided to reboot The Week in Italy into a new experimental 2.0 [beta] phase — to try some new things out this spring as I re-establish my flow.
So what’s it going to look like?
Well, frankly, in the DIY spirit of this whole venture, I think it’s best if I work that out as I go along. But it will be probably mean some more long-form updates. I might pick a single story and unpack it: one week politics, another week a report from an event, the next a book review or cultural essay or a food story. I might integrate some new formats; the odd interview, for example. I’d like to get some new graphics sorted. To integrate a musical dimension in a more systematic way; some regular or semi-regular playlists. Most of all, I’d welcome some collaborations! ‘The Week in Italy meets X Y Z’ to pluralise the voice(s) in this space.
There’s a risk here I know. A lot of you enjoy the current Week in Italy format. Someone once told me they are “addicted”, to it, which is great (I think?) and I’m super grateful for that. Why try and fix what isn’t particularly broken?
It’s a fair question. But I just feel this thing is reaching a threshold of some kind and it’s time for a change. Aspects of the “old” newsletter are likely to remain, but I want to keep re-inventing, to offer something more ambitious, thought-provoking and bold. When I started this project, sometime back in the Covid days, it was just a bit of fun. But over the years it’s become an important part of my routine and wider writing activities. It’s time - I think - to integrate these updates more seriously with my other work in journalism, criticism, poetry, reportage, political commentary, travel-writing and all the rest of it. So that’s what I’m going to do.
The Week in Italy will be back in earnest next week with a deep-dive into the local election results in Sardinia and Abruzzo and, in particular, I’ll be looking at possible openings for a broad-left coalition to rebuild something resembling a coherent opposition to Meloni. After that it’s back to the drawing board and the beginning of a new chapter for this newsletter-community.
Best wishes to all of you in the meantime and here’s to a creative, collaborative, forward looking primavera!
A presto
Jamie
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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