Italian News Snippets: 05.04.08

Some Italian news for your Sunday reading pleasure:

• News Flash – all Eurofly flights from New York to Italy in May are only $499. Do not pass go, do not stop for lunch, just buy these tickets now!
• There’s another “36 Hours” series entry from the NY Times, and this one’s in Naples.
• Padre Pio’s exhumed body (which has been “cosmetically enhanced,” apparently) is drawing big crowds. Italofile has a photo of the exhumed priest, too. Jeez, I hope I look that good when I’ve been dead for 40 years.
• The incoming (for the third time) Prime Minister’s wife thinks that Italy should be split up, that it was “never well-suited to being a single country, and has never matured enough to become one.”
• Beppe Grillo’s “V-Day 2” had the Italian news media in its sights, and it sounds like at least several thousand people agree with Grillo enough to have rallied in public about it.
• Murano is famous for its glass blowing, but this story is about a guy who’s engraving the glass for a unique and beautiful effect.
• Italy’s outgoing PM turned down a job offer from Vladimir Putin. That sentence just sounds so damned weird…
• The incoming foreign minister says there should be a minimum income level for all immigrants, below which they shouldn’t be allowed to stay in Italy.
• Italy’s largest opera house (and Europe’s third largest) is in Palermo. Who knew?
• As I’ve noted before, visiting Italian wineries isn’t as easy as you might expect (it’s not like it is in Napa Valley, for instance). But Moving2Italy2 has a good list of wineries that open their wine cellars for “Cantine Aperte” day.
• After the recent elections put the right back in control of Italy’s parliament, Romans elected a seriously-right-wing mayor. Supporters even greeted him with fascist-era chants. Here’s a bit more about Rome’s new mayor.
• Vacations in Italy aren’t just about the museums and monuments – they’re also about the markets.
• Bleeding Espresso has some good information on May Day, one of Italy’s biggest national holidays.
• The European Union looks like it’s actually going to sue Italy over the garbage in Naples.
• Five French mountaineers died in an avalanche in the Italian Alps last week – one person survived.
• Italy may be 90% Catholic, but apparently most of those Catholics don’t know “even the most basic facts” about their holy book.
• Information about how much Italians had paid in taxes was available online for a few hours last week… Before the site was shut down. Most people are more angry that the information went up in the first place than the fact that it came down.