Italian News Snippets: 06.03.07
A few newsy bits for your Sunday afternoon reading…
- If you visited Rome recently and found the air simply intoxicating, you weren’t far off – they recently found traces of cocaine and marijuana in the air of The Eternal City.
- Fitting in somewhere often costs money – and that’s very true in Italy. Australia’s new ambassador to Italy was granted a “clothing allowance” as part of her stipend.
- There are times when the “ugly tourist” moniker is completely justified… Some idiots defaced a famous fountain in Rome recently. Thankfully they were apprehended, mainly because they were completely drunk and dancing around in the fountain they’d just vandalized when the police showed up.
- Lamborghini enthusiasts who can’t afford one of the cars will soon have another option – the famed Italian car maker will be getting its own postage stamp.
- Even if Italian mothers don’t rank highly, Italy is still the best place to be a kid.
- Apparently RAI had a bad financial year in 2006. It seems that if there was some way for Italophiles like me who don’t have access to Italian TV to get it, we’d pay for it – maybe that would help their financial crisis.
- Italy apparently has the oldest population in Europe, and only ranks second worldwide to Japan.
- I’ve never seen shark meat on an Italian menu, but it appears that Italians are increasingly fond of it – which is a problem for a species that isn’t as plentiful as it once was.
- This is very cool news for any art lover – there’s a new balm in the art restoration arsenal which might be able to salvage artwork that has been previously deemed unsalvagable.
- In other not-so-artistic news, a piece of “shit art” – hey, that’s what the media’s calling it – by an Italian conceptual artist from 1961 has fetched a crazy amount of money (€124,000 if you’re counting).
- If Italian firefighters are anything like firefighters elsewhere, the idea of having them strip down as a form of protest sounds like something some people might want to see happen more often. Rowr.