At 10 am this morning, following a week of fruitless negotiations, Mario Draghi resigned from his position as Prime Minister stating that his government has become untenable. Elections will now take place - for sure - on 25 September. The circumstances around this not-so-sudden implosion are too complex to summarise here, but I’d like to highlight a couple of points. First, it’s striking that Draghi actually won his ‘vote of confidence’ in parliament last week, despite M5S’s betrayal. In the end it was actually the Lega and Forza Italia’s sneaky refusal to support an alternative majority - i.e. one without M5G - that really forced him to resign. Some commentators have been downplaying the prospect of a dramatic shift to the right this autumn on the basis that Italy is too dependent on recovery fund grants to upset the EU. I think this is wrongheaded. Giorgia Meloni, the most likely candidate for the next PM, has actively courted white supremacist and anti-feminist movements on the campaign trail for years now, and the idea this can be normalised without consequences is naive at best. Which takes me to my final point. None of this is really unexpected. The parliamentary wind has been blowing right of centre for a decade now, and elections were due in spring 2023 anyway. So while the circumstances are undeniably fraught, the problem is, in fact, a depressingly familiar one: can the PD, and smaller progressive parties, collectively offer a credible alternative to nationalistic populism, that is democratic, citizen-led and not reliant on technocratic props? Or will they concede long-term power to the far right? Time, it seems, is running out.
A video has been doing the rounds on social media this week regarding the issue of racial profiling on the part of the police. The short thirty second clip (see below) shows officers in Milan apprehending the well-known football player Tiémoué Bakayoko in the middle of a busy road while his partner is held at gunpoint inside the vehicle. Bakayoko was allowed to leave the scene after a few minutes, and the officers insisted the incident was a case of “mistaken identity.” The midfielder, however, was rightly outraged and, following the event, posted a furious update insisting the police had “put him in danger” adding that “if he had not kept his calm” and if “he wasn’t so well known” it “could have ended much worse.” Bakayoko’s case is a high profile one, but it also shines light on a far broader, structural issue. There are no statistics pertaining to racial profiling in Italy, let alone a public debate. Nevertheless, 70% of people of colour in this country anecdotally report having been targeted as part of racialized stop-and-search exercises. Perhaps, then, its time to listen more seriously to bodies like the Council for Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, which has been arguing for years that more must be done to tackle the commonly held misconception that police racism is “only an American issue”, and that it “doesn’t happen in the EU.” Gathering real data on this topic would seem to me a first - and minimum - step in the right direction.
With temperatures currently topping 40 degrees Celcius in many parts of Italy the fire season is well and truly here. In fact, as I’m typing this, the skies above Fiesole are dark with dust and there’s a strong smell of burnt wood, plastic and something like solder in the air. According to the local government, smoke from nearby blazes in Massa and Carrara and Versilia is being blown across Tuscany and - as a result - residents in my comune have all been instructed to keep windows closed and avoid leaving the house without an FFP2 facemask. It’s worrying stuff indeed. 600 people have been evacuated from their homes in the past two days, and authorities are concerned that, with no rain on the horizon, future incidents could be more serious. The situation is deteriorating in other parts of the country too. Residents in Trieste, for example, are currently experiencing blackouts due to fires on the nearby Carso cliffs, and there are heavy delays to trains around Rome as a result of blazes in the surrounding countryside. For real time updates and forecasts, keep your eye on the EU’s Copernicus platform.
Arts and culture: films for the weekend
Back in 2020, just as the novel Coronavirus was beginning to spread across the world, three film directors - Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden) Francesco Munzi (Black Souls) and Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro) - set out to shoot a collaborative documentary about Gen-Z’s experience of contemporary Italy. Their goal, at the time, was to experiment with a new collaborative creative model, to take some time out from their respective individual careers to see if there was scope to reinvent Italy’s long and illustrious tradition of social filmmaking (think Pasolini’s Love Meetings or Mario Soldati and Luigi Comencini’s work for RAI etc). Obviously, in the context of the Coronavirus, the directors’ plans had to change, and the end result turned out to be a fascinating generational portrait about young peoples’ hopes for post pandemic life. The film was released in Italian in 2021 but it’s now available for viewers in ENG to stream, legally, on platforms such as ProjectR. While a little repetitive in places, I do recommend giving it a spin: this is a powerful and humane documentary which gives real insight into the kind of world young Italians would like to inhabit. Thankfully, there’s some wisdom and fun here too, amidst a fair amount of doom and gloom.
Now this one’s a must watch: Jonas Carpignano, one of my favourite young directors, has just released his most recent film A Chiara with English subtitles. If you’re not familiar with Carpignano’s work, I’d probably define it, rather clunkily, as as a form of neo-neo-realist storytelling. His films are raw and often brutal, usually populated by non-professional actors who the director employs from small villages in impoverished parts of Calabria. This time round the plot follows a 15-year-old girl who is trying to investigate the circumstances surrounding her father’s disappearance. On the surface this is a straightforward mafia thriller, but Carpignano’s eye for small details and the clever mirroring between the protagonist’s sociological revelations about her community’s links to the ndrangheta and her own journey towards adulthood, take it far beyond the generic constraints that term would imply. The film is screening in cinemas now and it’ll be available to stream on MUBI from 26 August. For more info, check out this review by Little White Lies.
Recipe: watermelon and mint granita
I won’t bang on too much about the heat, I promise. You know the spiel by now: it’s late July in Italy and cooking is moreorless impossible. Burrata, tomatoes, beans, tuna, anchovies, peppers, chickpeas etc are the extent of my menu these days, usually accompanied with fruit and focaccia in various combinations. And that’s about it. One thing I do like to rustle up this time of year is granita, and this recipe by Leticia Clark, which uses watermelon, mint and lemon, is my absolute favourite. You don’t need an ice cream machine or a gelato churner or any fancy equipment to make this dish: just be sure to source high quality fruit and get ready to spend a day smashing ice from the freezer at regular intervals. The portion size suggested here is absolutely enormous, but it’s worth making a big batch anyway, I’d say, to have on hand for an easy afternoon snack. This also makes an excellent and refreshing after dinner palette cleanser if that’s your kind of thing.
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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