Troubles cause other troubles. A controversial decree – reported the Ansa agency – reinstating government candidates for the coming regional elections later this month will have no bearing on the exclusion of government candidates in the Lazio region, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said yesterday.
“First of all I wanna thank the Academy for this unbeliavable honour”. This is the very first phrase expressed by a very touched Mauro Fiore, the Italian who won the Oscar of Cinematography for the movie Avatar. Originally from a small village in Calabria, Fiore moved to Chicago with his parents, and after they returned to Italy he decided to stay in the States to pursue his career in the cinema business.
“The public service has been humiliated and violated” said journalist Michele Santoro, after the Italian public television (RAI) decided to interrupt the weekly political talk shows on tv: Ballarò (tuesday), Annozero (thursday) and Porta a porta (monday) to preserve a climate of par condicio in relation to the coming Regional elections, scheduled for the end of March.
Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PdL) party, has been excluded from the ballot in Rome province for the March 28-29 elections, because the electoral office said the centre right party had failed to hand in its list of candidates by the noon cutoff on Saturday.
More than 2000 people attended at the funeral of former MP Enzo Fragalà. The famous criminal lawyer and member of the National Alliance party died last Friday after he was hardly beaten outside his office on Tuesday night in Palermo, Sicily. He had remained 3 days in hospital fighting to survive at the attack.
An Italian citizen was killed among at least 17 people in a Taliban suicide attack in Kabul this morning, as reported by Afghan sources. The blasts happened in a shopping centre and very close to a hotel used by foreigners. The unidentified Italian apparently was a member of the AISE external secret service, formerly known as Sismi.
BlogSicilia yesterday wrote a letter to the President of Palermo football club, Maurizio Zamparini, to explicitly ask him a sign of solidarity for the Fiat’s workers of Termini Imerese who lost their jobs. Next Sunday infact there will be an important football match: Juventus – Palermo, that in those difficult days it is not only a sport meeting, but obviously implies the fact that there will be the city of Turin versus Palermo, and above all Fiat versus Termini Imerese.
Former Formula 1 pilot, Alex Zanardi, who lost both legs in a terrible car-crash, will take part in this year’s Rome Marathon next March 21st. Zanardi, who last year Zanardi won the Venice Marathon for disabled in a wheelchair, is 43 years old and will compete in a handcycle, sponsored by the Barilla foods group, similar to the one he used in the 2007 New York Marathon, where he came in fourth for his division after just four weeks of training.
Here it comes… the very first episode of the Sicilian sitcom “PC – Panelle & Crocchè”. Sketches and jokes take place in the most famous “Focacceria” in Palermo, where the local and traditional food is not the only protagonist of the fiction. You will start getting to know Carmelo and his family that runs the place, as well as the Baron and his wife, Don Mario, ecc…
I read this article on the Ansa website and I find it very interesting. In these days thousands of pilgrims are gathering in Padua, hoping for a rare glimpse of the bones of the city’s hugely popular patron, Saint Anthony. The remains of Anthony, the unofficial saint of lost causes, have gone on show for the first time in 29 years, generating a frenzy of excitement among the Catholic faithful.
Yesterday BlogSicilia was quoted by one of the most important and preeminent Italian newspapers, the Corriere, with regard to what Massimo Ciancimino, the son of the mafioso and former mayor of Palermo Vito Ciancimino has recently said.
Today is the Memorial Day of some atrocious facts happened in Italy during the Second World War and kept silent for too long: “the massacres of the foibe” in the regions of Dalmatia and Venezia Giulia to the detriment of Italian citizens.
Massimo Ciancimino has written again for BlogSicilia today. The son of Vito Ciancimino, the mafioso ex-Mayor of Palermo (Sicily), is testifying about the connections between the Mob and the Government, especially during the slaughters of the magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in Palermo in 1992.
“I don’t use cocaine to go crazy, I am not interested in that. I smoke it only as an anti-depressive. Psychiatrists have always given me very strong medicines that made me sick. But cocaine is much better. Even Freud used to prescribe it.” These words caused the exclusion of Morgan (real name Marco Castoldi) from the Sanremo Music Festival.
Unemployment rate in Italy rose to 8.5% last December. So again, after Termini Imerese, we keep on talking of the fundamental “job issue”. Yesterday afternoon about 400 Alcoa workers staged a sit-in in Rome, in front of Berlusconi’s office in Montecitorio, during a meeting between the American multinational of aluminium, trade unions and the Italian government.
Traditional Sicilian food, sense of humour, sketches and a smell like home are the main ingredients of a brand new Sicilian sitcom thought and created for the Web. The renowned “panelle”, which are famous local chickpea fritters and the potato croquettes give the title to this comic fiction, playing also with their initials PC that have a second meaning, referred to the personal computer, which is the only “place” where the sitcom can be seen.
Just like the 1998 American movie “Patch Adams”, starring Robin Williams, who was interpreting a clown doctor, Italy takes a step forward hospitalized children.
”We think a little laughter is important to the healing process, especially for kids, and we’re happy to support any effort to do that,” said Equal Opportunity Minister Mara Carfagna, who recently unveiled fresh funding…
After Fiat announced that it intended to stop production at Termini Imerese, so workers and unions have been protesting against the decision climbing on the roof and camping there until the situation will be solved. So now the factory is currently at a standstill because employees will not allow supply trucks to enter the facility.
Yesterday Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said that Italian parliament is considering a ban on veils that hide Muslim women’s faces, just like France proposed last week. Wearing face-masking veils should be illegal in public buildings like hospital and schools, as well as public transports.
Today is the Holocaust Memorial Day. In Italy schools organize particular events or in-depth studies to remember what happened in the Nazi’s concentration camps during the Second World war and why.
There have been thousands of witnesses and testimonies about the slavery and the tortures perpetrated by the Nazis towards Jewish people, especially books and movies.
Tomorrow a new museum is opening in the evocative town of Siena, the heart of Tuscany. The name, Museum of Water (Museo dell’Acqua) referred to the ancient and hidden 25-kilometre water network of the area, developed over the past centuries and dated back to the 11th century, when the city lacked a ready water supply.
Rich or poor, employee or unemployed, beautiful or ugly, everyone in Italy dreams of winning the National Lottery, known with the name of Superenalotto. There are people who play regularly three times a week, and there are the ones who just try from time to time, especially when the jackpot goes up.
I’ve come across a very unusual story today, browsing some online newspapers. Some days ago in a junior high school of Treviso, a Veneto city, started a specific course with the aim of giving adolescents a better approach to emotions and sexuality.
Yesterday the session of the Sicilian Assembly was a revolutionary one for two reasons. First, Sicily voted against the return of the nuclear energy promoted by the Berlusconi government, aligning itself with the other 13 Italian regions that already expressed negative opinions about this delicate topic.
Cinema arrives in Sicily. Tomorrow the 20th of January Tuscan director Paolo Virzì together with screenwriter Francesco Piccolo, will be in Palermo to promote the brand new movie “La prima cosa bella” (transl. The first beautiful thing) now in theaters.
The piece of news of the day is the brand new nonsense declared by minister of Public Administration Renato Brunetta: “I would for children to leave home at 18 by law”. It actually was an obvious provocation, but these are pretty hard times, and we definitely don’t need ministers who like to make jokes about this situation. The minister likes to talk, but doesn’t give interesting answers to think over.
As the majority of the press agencies said, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, also on behalf of the Italian people, sent a message of condolence and support to his Haitian counterpart, Rene Preval. Italian Foreign minister Franco Frattini, currently in the middle of a week-long seven-nation African tour, is “deeply concerned” over the situation in Haiti and is in constant contact with his ministry’s crisis center which is monitoring events there, the sources added.
Yesterday I heard a nice funny story about a very distract Italian woman, Felicia Lettieri, 72 years old, who went to New York to spend the festivities with her daughter and other relatives. On Christmas’Eve, she took a taxi and chatted a bit with the taxi driver, laughing about the fact that he was native of Bombay and she was from Pompei, small town near Naples.
We are glad to publish a synopsis of a book written by one of our foreign reader. “Dreaming of Sicily” is the title, and it is an enlightening, entertaining and oftentimes hilarious travel memoir written by Betsy Vincent Hoffman and beautifully illustrated by Kathleen Citrolo Gwinnett.
Riots and tension, attacks and rage have been the protagonists of these past few days in Rosarno (Calabria). Rosarno’s immigrants fed up with wretched pays, insults and ill-treatments fought for their rights in a hostile place.
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PC - Panelle e Crocchè è arrivata al termine del suo primo ciclo, 4 puntate oltre la zero. Un prodotto, la web sit com siciliana, che se forse non fa ridere a crepapelle fa sorridere molti e non deteriora l'immagine di nessuno.
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