The year in referenda
Plus, student demonstrations and miserable beach towns
If you read this newsletter regularly you may remember a few weeks back I made a retrospectively cringe-worthy journalese statement that 2022 was going to be the ‘year of the referendum.’ Well, hackiness aside, Italy’s constitutional court did indeed begin signing off on the concrete issues that citizens will and will not be voting on this week. The headline news is that a petition for a public ballot on legalising euthanasia has been rejected. Campaigners succeeded in amassing 1.2 million signatures in favour of a vote, but despite this, and to the dismay of many, the courts have dictated that the issue is one for national lawmakers to resolve. Hannah Roberts has more details over at Politico. Other proposed plebiscites, though, do look good-to-go. As things stand Italians will be asked to decide later this year on four highly technical adjustments to the justice system, including, most controversially, a motion to repeal the Severino law (which was put in place to prevent those charged with offences from running for office). ANSA has a very nifty write up here if you’re interested in the other topics. Among them is a proposal to stop prosecutors changing careers to become judges, as well as a much-anticipated public vote on cannabis legalisation.
I’m very grateful to the writer Andreas Petrossiants for sending me this link to an interview he recently conducted with Niccolò De Luca, a 17-year-old organiser with the student movement known by the media as ‘La Lupa’. De Luca and his colleagues have been protesting against the Buona Scuola bill, a piece of Renzian legislation from 2015 which, among other things, introduced 90 hours of mandatory workplace internships for students. Critics complain the programme provides little in terms of future career benefits and given the positions are usually unpaid the scheme is - essentially - an abusive labour practice designed to prop up a failing economy. Unfortunately, this isn’t even the worst of it. As in the rest of the workplace, even basic safety is far from guaranteed. On January 21 this year, in grim confirmation of this fact, a young man called Lorenzo Parelli died during one such placement when he was crushed by a metal bar while working in a factory in the small northern town of Lauzacco. In response, students across the county have - understandably in my view - been occupying their places of education and organising strikes. Sixty schools in Rome alone have been involved so far; and teachers and administrative staff have come out in solidarity across the country. For more details check out De Luca’s own lucid account of what is at stake over at AJ+ ‘subtext’.
Over the weekend Jacobin published a podcast featuring a discussion between their long reads editor, Daniel Finn, and John Foot, a Bristol-based historian and author of The Archipelago: Italy Since 1945. Clocking in at a whopping 1hr 10 minutes this is an epic journey through the ‘Two Republics’ of the post-war period. Together the pair explore the partisan resistance, the ‘proto culture wars’ of the anni di piombo and a series of corruption scandals from tangentopli to berlusconismo. There are moments when – understandably – Foot sounds pretty world-weary as he recounts Italy’s undeniably sad story. Thankfully, though, there’s also some light amidst the gloom. Franco Basaglia’s revolution in mental health care and the perseverance of this country’s ever-defiant social movements arguably stand paramount as beacons of hope. I learnt a lot and I’m sure you will too. Listen in full here.
Arts and culture: in the shadows of history
The Austrian director Ulrich Seidl has a new Italy-related film out which has just premiered at the Berlin film festival. Rimini, as the name suggests, is set in the eponymous Adriatic port town during the annual November-February downtime. The plot follows “Ritchie Bravo”, an aging crooner with a drink problem, who is facing-up to a profound existential crisis during a long winter in the not-so-balmy Mediterranean seaside resort. I have to say, I also find myself – against my better judgement – perversely interested by these kind of spaces. Resorts as experienced at a time when they are surely at their bleakest; when the spritzes and ombrelloni and crappy house music are replaced by “freezing mist and actual snow. Refugees huddling on the street and some groups of German and Austrian tourists taking what must be bargain-basement package vacations at off-season rates in the tackiest hotels” to quote Peter Bradshaw’s four star review in the Guardian. The vibe from the trailer is tragi-comic to put it mildly, and I’d wager to bet this is the kind of film that will either prove to be a work of quiet genius or else prove totally unwatchable. Here’s a clip.
Flicking though a million news tabs the other day I paused when I came across this piece on Asymptote by one of my favourite Sicilian authors, Gesualdo Bufalino. ‘Museum of Shadows’ is a stunning piece of work which flies in the face of the myriad inauthentic-romantic fantasies about the island’s rural past. Here, the author confronts the changes of recent decades in a way that fully faces up to the pains of the “onward march of progress” but which never succumbs to conservative nostalgia. On the surface this is just a list of old ‘lost professions’: the lupine bean seller, the stone breaker, the cart painter and so on. Bufalino’s descriptions, though, aren’t just anthropological. Every figure is allocated their own poetic vignette in which the author uses some wonderfully subtle shifts in tone and rhythm to evoke their position in a wider network of social relations. Julia Conrad has done magnificent work rendering this into English. I’m totally blown away.
Recipe of the week: Smoked tuna with grapefruit, fennel and chilli
Is this dish really Italian? Who knows? And who really cares? To be fair I did take it from a recipe book by Theo Randall called Italian Deli - which is entirely dedicated to modern takes on old cold-cut favourites - so at least in this sense it qualifies. I’m pleasantly struck, anyway, by how much people here enjoy eating raw and smoked fish dishes. From traditional Mediterranean specialities (under oil and citrus) to more recent fixations on sushi and ceviche and poke bowl it’s a part of many Italians’ diet. This dish isn’t so much a recipe as an easy - if vaguely decadent - assemblage of seasonal products. OK I’m lucky as smoked tuna is on sale pretty cheap here in the local supermarket, but salmon could work fine here too I think. Just lay the slices out on a bed of leaves, thinly cut some citrus and fennel, top with chilli or even a little avocado - if you like me are so millenially inclined - then serve with a little bread. Trust me, it’s a perfect treat for a weekend brunch.
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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