31 May, 2008

Italian News 31st May


After 10 years of work, engineers have stabilised the Leaning Tower of Pisa for the first time in 800 years. It will never be straight because 12th century builders, realising it was tilting, compensated in the construction and it is slightly curved.

La Scala has commissioned Giorgio Battistelli to produce an opera version of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" for the 2011 season.

International research has shown that Italians, both men and women, are the most desired partners for a holiday romance.

58% of Italian women in their fifties, and 38% of those in their sixties, confess to having had an affair, whilst only 11% of twenty year olds say they have.

‘La Ciemonna’ or interplanetary critical mass, is the name given to a mass cycling demonstration in Rome, to promote the healthy effects of cycling.

Museion, the Bolzano museum, has been criticised for displaying a one metre high sculpture of a frog nailed to a cross with a foaming mug of beer in one hand. In 2006 Museion officials were prosecuted over an installation that involved a lavatory flushing to the musical accompaniment of Italy's national anthem.

May 26th was National Bread Day and to celebrate, a Rome bakery has invented the Tottino, a half kilo loaf named after the captain of the national football team.

Based on data from 2006, a report shows that Italy had 3,092 bank robberies compared to 582 in Germany, 438 in Spain and 271 in France. For every 100 bank branches, 9.67 were robbed in Italy compared to 1.37 in Germany, 1.14 in Spain and 0.97 in France. One cause is that Italians still tend to use cash.

Women now account for about half of all wine sales in Italy. Out of 13 million female wine lovers, younger women tend to drink less and pay more attention to quality, whilst the older ones drink more cheap plonk.

Researchers at the Scientific Institute for Food Production have developed a process which eliminates the hard, thorny leaves from artichokes and prepares the artichoke for cooking, but also extends its refrigerator life to up to ten days.

Reservoirs in South East Italy are an estimated two-thirds below capacity and the remaining water is at risk of evaporating due to the current heat wave. The situation is the opposite in the north where, as opposed to recent years, the levels of water in the major lakes are all above average.

The retirement age at Milan's La Scala opera house is 52, compared to 42 in most other countries.

A switchboard operator at Taranto jail has faked blindness for 24 years in order to keep his job. He comes to work on a motorbike.

The Italian Farmers Association has warned that Italy may soon be in the grip of a national prosciutto shortage after Italian pig farmers confirmed they will be going on strike this weekend.

The Court of Cassation has ruled that a wife is not entitled to assets jointly held in the marriage as she disgraced the marital bed by taking a lover. Unfortunately the case has taken 33 years to get to the Court and the Husband is now 75 and the wife 69.

Giancarlo Gentilini, Deputy Mayor of Treviso, is trying to ban foreign breeds of dog from the city. Gentilini once took out all the park benches in Treviso in case immigrants slept on them.

The annual Matanza, the lure of migrating tuna fish into harbours for slaughter, has begun in Carloforte, Sardinia. The largest tuna speared weighed 400 kilos.

150 villagers of Campobasso have issued a petition to police for the release of a 48 year old man accused of wife beating, claiming he is the victim of a plot. The man is also accused of beating his daughter when she tried to intervene.

Mayor of Milan Letizia Moratti is being criticised for stopping a light show at Leonardo’s masterpiece The Last Supper. The show, by British film-maker Peter Greenaway, will project montages, including images of Christ's genitalia, on to the painting, accompanied by actors' voices, in an attempt to link "8,000 years of art and 112 years of cinema".

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