The world at my feet

Gaetano Bastianelli is a lucky man. He has a lovely family, a good job and, finally, the house of his dreams: a cottage in the beautiful Umbrian countryside, not far from Spoleto. But quickly the house of his dreams changes in the house of his nightmares. The family is woken by sinister noises in the middle of the night, doors and windows slam without a reason, plates and glasses move on their own: the cottage is haunted by ghosts! The situation worsen to the extent that many objects burst into flames because of spontaneous combustion. At last, our poor Bastianelli decides to take a legal action against the former owners. The law is clear: a purchaser must be informed of any fact that might affect the worth of a property. They knew the house was haunted by obscures presences and called even an exorcist to get rid of them. In the end, they escaped from that den of spirits. Mr. Bastianelli is right. So, the ghosts come in a courtroom. We hope it doesn’t burst into flames.

Photo by Tambas

It is said that Italy is a country of saints, poets and navigators. So is not strange that just the Italians invented the St Faustino’s Day for singles. On 15 February the Italian singles take revenge on the lovers. This celebration was launched in 2001 by the portal Vita da Single  and is already popular in the whole peninsula. Is a Day rather agreeable, where singles who don’t hunt the soul mate and infiltrators from the opposite front, who look for some distraction, make merry in restaurants and clubs. Are there some gadget too? I think so, perhaps a packet of condoms by Dolce & Gabbana. After that saint and that creative, now the Italians can unleash their travelling spirit and to export the Faustino’s Day all over the world. This time the Kuwaiti politicians get a shock.

A Renaissance mystery has been solved. Arsenic killed Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano , the two illustrious humanists both died in 1494. So Poliziano was not a victim of syphilis, thesis claimed by the traditional historiography, but was murdered. This is the result of a seven months’ study conducted on the exhumed bodies. We are faced with a compelling intrigue that sees a double homicide, while the principal in the crime is an enigma. Maybe was Piero de Medici, one of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s sons, famous for his resentful and cynic temper. But maybe it must look for the murderer in the esoteric underworld well-known by Pico and Poliziano. It’s better to not get lost in digressions worthy of Dan Brown, the matter is not over yet and the forensic detectives are studying the DNA. The affair becomes more and more interesting.

Often single women moan that all  best men have already been snared or are gays. Now there is a third option: they are catholic priests.

I read Roberto Saviano’s book “Gomorrah, Italy’s other mafia” and I didn’t find it disagreeable but, according to me, it isn’t even a masterpiece, like it often happens with the books too glorified by the media. However its strength is in the mix between fantasy and reality. It’s a hybrid of fiction and investigative journalism, with Camorra bosses’ true names and surnames. For his courage, Saviano lives under police escort: I take off my hat to him. But there was one name too many for the English publisher Panmacmillan, that asked the author to strike off that of an Italian boss moved to the UK, where lived like in a ivory tower, and arrested on 2006. Law is law and the publisher doesn’t want any legal trouble because in the UK doesn’t exist the offence of mafia association and the boss is innocent until the definitive sentence. Have we arrived at this point with the fear of  libel cases? If you are English and you want to know boss’ real name search internet or provide yourself with a bilingual dictionary English-Italian and translate this post, there is hidden the solution. I know it’s a real teaser, but he who solves it wins a supply of correcting fluid for a year.

Venice, what’s a beautiful city! Venice is one and only. But is it just like that? According to the new book “Welcome to Venice” there are 97 in the world! Edited and distributed by the syndicate Venezia Nuova, a ministerial institution which attends to the safeguard of the city, the volume tells all the Venices of the world, i.e. how the city has been copied, imitated, dreamed. The most famous is the Californian Little Venice, founded at the dawning of twentieth-century by Abbott Kinney, a dreamer self-made man who recruited also 36 gondoliers “made in Italy” who shot through the canals till the Great Depression. Then it had a gloomy period until the Sixties, when the hippies made it very cool. In the USA there are other 31 Serenessime: from the little village in the New York State where the old farms are built in Palladian stile to the mammoth, hyper-realistic, very kitsch Hotel The Venetian of Las Vegas. But also the Latin America isn’t badly off for these copies. There are more than 40 mocks Venices, creations of Italian immigrants’ imagination, one, Nova Venetia, built even in the Brazilian virgin forest, ringed by banana trees and orchids. The others are peppered in the rest of the planet. Perhaps the case more astonishing is the last: in August, in the Chinese city of Macao was inaugurated a gigantic hotel that is the copy of the Venetian. The facsimile of the facsimile. The globalisation to the nth power. At least, if Marco Polo lived these days he would feel at home in China, in the true sense of the word.

Photo credit: .arzan