Latest work
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The puppetmaster
Read more: The puppetmasterThe master of his own drama. My printer is a stubbornly sentimental middle-aged Communist. He sobbed when his big dog died and dutifully calls me whenever Silvio Berlusconi hits a rough patch. The latest call came after Italy’s constitutional court struck down an executive immunity law that the Berlusconi government…
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The Japanese pope
Read more: The Japanese popeJordan Bonfante of Time Magazine, left, and the author waiting for smoke in August 1978, radios and walkies-talkies in hand. In May 1978 I was hired as a reporter in the Rome bureau of United Press International. Rookies often got slow Sunday shifts, but they came with a burden: Sunday was…
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The Italian method
Read more: The Italian methodAt first, nationalistic talk of crushing kidneys. For modern Italians, participation in other people’s war should stop short of death. It can cause theatrical opprobrium and generate censure of the United States, lately considered the world’s foremost war-maker. It can generate reams of political prattle. But when a war actually…
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The fight club
Read more: The fight clubRome’s Olympic Stadium is a cauldron for clashes. Early in Richard Ford’s latest novel, narrator Frank Bascombe ponders American mobility. Not upward mobility but moving itself — across, away, passage to some better or imagined elsewhere. Why do Americans move so much? Because they can. This, muses the middle-class Bascombe,…
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The dud
Read more: The dudLario, 50, and Berlusconi, 70, met in 1980 — he divorced to marry her. At the moment of her deepest distress, here’s what Veronica Lario’s could have done to legitimately establish a nonpartisan claim to a nonpartisan complaint. The only wholly unsound and capricious choice was to deliver an astringent…
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The Dart Side
Read more: The Dart SideIl mondo, tutto intorno a te” — and closing in. Bill Gates is a picture of Globalization. Microsoft’s latest ad campaign recommends you “Start Something.” Central Rome is filled with “start something” posters. But do Italians get it? Do they get the water-cooler colloquialism, the relentlessly American jargon-mongering? Probably not.…
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