Category: Italy

Starbucks Faces Struggle to Take on Italian Coffee Traditions

My piece on the rhythms and traditions of Italy’s coffee culture has just been published at Time.

Like the tides of the sea, an Italiancaffé – or bar – has its recognizable rhythms. There’s a rush of office workers at the start of the day, crowding three or four deep at the counter for a quick espresso before their shift begins. And then, just before 10 a.m., another wave: shopkeepers on their way to work.

Davide Casali, 43, a barista at Caffè San Silvestro in downtown Rome, has the timing down to the minute. The busiest time, he says, is right after lunch; it runs from about 1:30 to 2:50 p.m., giving the last of his customers ten minutes to get back to their desks. “Of course, in the summer it’s totally different,” he says. “That’s when everybody’s at the beach.”

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Online Life of American Murdered in Italy Spurs Theories About Her Death

My piece on murder in the age of social media has just been published by Time.

The aftermath of Ashley Olsen’s death is an example of how, in the age of social media, the private can suddenly turn very public.

The 35-year-old American woman’s body was discovered on Saturday, after her boyfriend persuaded her landlady to let him into her apartment in central Florence, Italy. By the next day, after the Italian press had broken the story, strangers had taken to Olsen’s Instagram page not just to post their condolences but also to search for clues and post theories about how she was killed.

“I never knew her but she looked like a sweet and beautiful person!!” wrote one commenter, while others engaged in extended back-and-forths on who might be responsible for her death: “This is the act of an enraged obsessed boyfriend who was just broken up with! Case solved!”

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How 3-D Printing Is Saving the Italian Artisan

Bloomberg Businessweek has just published my piece looking at how cutting-edge technology is rescuing traditional Italian craftmanship.

Northeast Italy’s industrial heartland stretches roughly from Milan to Venice, along the floodplains of the Po River all the way to the Adriatic. In the 1960s, farmers in the region began setting up small family-owned businesses, each specializing in just one small part of a finished product. Within a generation, many of these companies became world leaders in their respective fields, and small Italian cities thrived as manufacturing hubs. The town of Montebelluna, north of Venice, once produced about three-quarters of the world’s ski boots, with different companies specializing in buckles, plastic shells, and foam linings. About 70 percent of Europe’s chairs were designed and manufactured by the 1,200 small outfits centered around Manzano, near Italy’s eastern border with Slovenia—with each part of the production process handled by a different highly specialized company.

Like much of the rest of the country, however, the region has fallen on hard times. Italy’s craftsmen have been undermined by competition from China and other parts of Asia. Since the beginning of the global economic crisis, the northeast’s industrial sector has shed about 135,000 jobs—some 17 percent of its total workforce. “We needed to find an escape route,” says Ignazio Pomini, the president of HSL, a 27-year-old maker of automotive prototypes located in Trento, northwest of Venice. “To use the same technology, the same skills, the same space, the existing investments, but for a new business.”

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Homelands

My short e-book for Deca on an orphan named Patience and a case for open immigration is now up for free at Longform.

When I was in Liberia during the civil war in 2003, I met a four-year-old girl named Patience. Monrovia, the capital of the small West African country, was under siege. Its power grid had failed. Rice was scarce. The taps had run dry. Cholera crawled in the tropical heat. Hopped-up government soldiers ran the streets in looted pickup trucks, and nobody knew what the rebels would do if their push for the center was successful.

I met Patience in a dark room off a dirt lot, in a concrete building in an orphanage placed perilously on a thin strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the river that held back the rebel advance. The night before my arrival, the woman who ran the orphanage told me, two shells from a mortar had passed overhead and fallen—crack, crack—somewhere between the orphanage and the ocean’s shore.

Patience, big-eyed, in stubby braids and a blue-and-white polka-dot dress, watched me from the shadows. Anemic, listless, undersize, suffering from dysentery, she had the measured movements of an old woman and the questioning stare of a toddler. In the same room, another orphan, ten-year-old Emmanuel, leafed through a book of photographs, color printouts, bound in black plastic and covered with a thin transparent sheet: There was green grass and a white-paneled house and a little blond girl smiling. There was a large van and an even larger play set. There was a countertop completely covered with food. “This is a very nice place,” Emmanuel said in a quiet voice. “I would like to go to this place.”

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In Europe, the Refugees Keep Coming

A short piece I did for Bloomberg Businessweek on Europe’s refugee crisis is in this week’s issue.

On a wintry day in early February, four rubber dinghies—each loaded with more than 100 people—pushed off the Libyan coast into the icy Mediterranean and headed toward Europe. By the time the Italian coast guard reached the first boat on Feb. 9, seven of the would-be migrants had frozen to death. An additional 22 died as they were being ferried to shore through 25-foot waves. On Feb. 11, a cargo ship discovered nine other survivors clinging to what was left of the second and third dinghies. Of the fourth, no trace was ever found.

About 56 million people in the world have been displaced by conflict, the highest number of people pushed out of their homes since World War II. The vast majority are fleeing Africa and the Middle East, and many have their sights on Europe. This is putting pressure on asylum systems across the continent as the European Union struggles to form a consensus among governments with little political incentive to deal with a humanitarian catastrophe.

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Rome Blogger Exposes City Ravaged by Neglect

Bloomberg Businessweek has just published my piece on Rome’s degradation.

The neighborhood in which Massimiliano Tonelli is walking is more than 100 years old, built in central Rome shortly after the unification of Italy. Monumental buildings rise around a central park, in the corner of which lie the ruins of an ancient Roman fountain. The Colosseum is a 15-minute walk away.

As the 35-year-old blogger ambles, he counts off the blemishes: cracks and pits in the sidewalk; walls plastered with posters and pamphlets; beer bottles lying around a garbage bin; cars illegally and dangerously parked; a man drying his laundry on a park bench. “The city is so beautiful, potentially,” he says. “It’s absurd that it be left like this.” He looks up at one of the 19th century buildings, its facade resplendent in the morning sun. “Rome is a city that’s only beautiful from 3 meters high and upwards.”

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Matteo Renzi: ‘Italy Will Never Be a Normal Country’

Time has also published my Q&A with Matteo Renzi.

Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi spoke to TIME on April 24 in his first interview with a non-Italian news organization since becoming premier in February. The conversation touched on a wide range of topics, from his plans to reform the Italian political system to his desire for a United States of Europe

I’ve been reading your interviews and speeches, and I’ve seen many phrases like “In a normal country, this wouldn’t happen.” In what way is Italy not a normal country?

Italy will never be a normal country. Because Italy is Italy. If we were a normal country, we wouldn’t have Rome. We wouldn’t have Florence. We wouldn’t have the marvel that is Venice. There is in the DNA of the Italians a bit of madness, which in the overwhelming majority of cases is positive. It is genius. It is talent. It’s the masterpieces of art. It’s the food, fashion, everything that makes Italy great in the world.

But then, we’re not a normal country because we have a complicated bureaucracy, a political system that’s appalling. We have twice as many parliamentarians as the United States. We pay some presidents of [administrative] regions more than the United States pays its president. We would like to make Italy a normal country from the point of view of the political system.

Where did Italy go wrong?

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The Italian Job

My profile of Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is in this week’s Time Magazine.

Less than a month after Matteo Renzi was sworn in on Feb. 22 as Italy’s Prime Minister—at 39, he is the youngest in the country’s history—he traveled to Berlin to meet his most formidable European partner, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Italy’s creaking economy was at the top of the agenda. Burdened with record levels of debt—only Greece has a bigger load in the euro zone—the country is struggling to recover from its longest postwar recession. Aware of Merkel’s belief in strict budgetary discipline, Renzi was at pains to reassure her that his plans to revive the Italian economy would not involve a splurge in spending. In a toast at a dinner with the German leader, he said he would follow the example of the Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo, who, when he began working on his statue of David, took a block of marble and chipped away “whatever was in excess.”

The moment was classic Renzi: bold, inspiring, elegantly expressed—but short on specifics. “That’s how I see Italy,” he tells Time, in his first interview with a non-Italian news organization since becoming Premier. “If we cut away all the things that are in excess, bureaucratically, fiscally, something will come out that’s more beautiful than the David,” he says, lounging across one of the yellow armchairs in his palatial office in central Rome.

“More beautiful than the David, let’s not exaggerate,” he adds, catching himself. “As beautiful as the David.”

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Even Political Expulsion Can’t Take Berlusconi out of Politics

Bloomberg Businessweek has just published my story on Silvio Berlusconi’s expulsion from the Italian senate.

It wasn’t the first time that journalists sat down to write Silvio Berlusconi’s political obituary, and Italy’s former prime minister was making it clear he’d do his best to ensure it wouldn’t be the last. Even as the Italian senate prepared to expel him, the media mogul was promising a crowd of supporters in front of his house in central Rome that he was far from through with politics. “We’re here on a bitter day, a day of mourning for democracy,” he said. “Now, none of us can be sure of our rights, of our liberty, and so we mustn’t give up the fight.”

Things have never looked so grim for Berlusconi. Sentenced in August to a year of community service for tax fraud, he also faces a 6-year ban from public office. His party suffered a schism last month when his onetime lieutenant refused to join his attempt to bring down the government. Other charges, including a conviction under appeal for paying for sex with a minor and abusing his office to cover it up, are looming ever closer. The loss of his senate seat strips Berlusconi of his parliamentary immunity, opening the possibility that a judge could put him under precautionary arrest.

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Why Berlusconi Will Rise Again

My piece on why it’s too early to count out Silvio Berlusconi has just been published by Time.

The Sunday after Prime Minister Enrico Letta survived an Oct. 2 attempt by Silvio Berlusconi to bring down his government, Letta went on television to declare victory. “I think a political season has been closed,” he said, referring to the country’s nearly 20 years of political domination by the sex-scandal-plagued former Prime Minister. “The page has been securely turned.”

Letta is not the first leader to prematurely declare mission accomplished. The Prime Minister has fractured Berlusconi’s political party, forced him into humiliating surrender on national television, and all but ensured that later this month he will be booted from the Senate, a punishment for the one-year sentence for tax fraud Berlusconi received in August. But it’s far too early to declare him politically dead and gone. Whatever his faults, Berlusconi’s recurring political success reflects an enduring failure of Italian politics: its inability to deliver durable results. And on that front, there’s little reason to believe anything has changed.

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