Italian News Snippets: 22 January 2007

There’s just too much news out there. Will they stop making news? Probably not. So, I’ll play catch-up here and let you investigate further on your own:

• Search for Leonardo’s “lost fresco” – Da Vinci Code art sleuth and all – is back on, while the Mona Lisa’s burial place has been located in Florence.
• You’ve read about the Pope’s new calendar. How about adding some real-life Calendar Girls to your wall? (Except these ladies aren’t posing in the buff… Details…)
• Naomi Campbell’s angry tantrums reach all the way to Rome, and we can only hope those “soothing crystals in her bra and panties” start to work. Either that or the anger management classes she was sentenced to.
• In addition to the allegations of unclean (and unsafe) hospitals in the press recently, we now have another reason to stay healthy in Rome – a report claims that dead patients’ eyes were stolen.
• Computers can now tell us what Vesuvius looked like when it turned Pompeii into a museum piece.
• The police have arrested two suspects in the shooting death of a young soccer player in southeast Italy.
• Will Smith chose an Italian director for his most recent film – does that explain the misspelling of the title?
• Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is starting his overseas Presidential campaign in the mother country.
• Naples will host the world’s first global salt fair in May, which they say will be “an event of cultural importance.” This comes from what could be Italy’s most superstitious city, though, so take it with a grain of…
• Il Bel Paese isn’t immune to the problems of modern life – smog is “suffocating” Italy’s cities.
• Venice has only three bridges spanning its Grand Canal at the moment, but construction on a fourth began last week. Now if they could only get the city to stop sinking.