Italy

Italian citizens’ role in the Shoah: Michael M. Rosen reviews Simon Levis Sullam’s new book ‘The Italian Executioners.’

Ann Marlowe visits the Pilotta museum complex—one of Italy’s overlooked gems.

Amy Henderson reviews the new novel by the author of ‘Under the Tuscan Sun.’

Christopher Caldwell on the euro and the damage it wrought.

When it comes to abortion, the Pope is Catholic.

Andrew Ferguson’s boon companion in Rome.

People have been forecasting the end of the euro since the currency came into being in the late 1990s. Yet the euro has survived five sovereign bailouts—including three successive ones of Greece (the continent’s most troubled economy)—and two bank rescues aimed at Spanish and Cypriot banks. The…

A political establishment of long standing always suffers from a kind of mental illness. No matter how unambiguously it is repudiated or how joyously it is driven from office, its members will continue to remember the episode as accidental, temporary, and unjust. This week in Italy such arrogance…

In March, Italian voters decided they had more to fear from corruption than from incompetence. Despite the warnings of experts, they voted overwhelmingly for two parties that want Italy to reclaim its sovereignty from the overweening European Union. One of those parties, the League, is on the…

For the first time, a populist coalition has taken over a Western European state.

Pleasure, war, and the mad torment of Lord Byron.

Pius IX, the creation of modern Italy, and the transformation of the papacy.

‘Pasta for Nightingales’: A charming Renaissance collection of birdlore and beauty.

Maybe not since the proto-Protestant radical Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and set on fire with two of his clerical accomplices in 1498 has Florence seen a weekend so filled with terrifying surprises and reversals of fortune. On Sunday morning, March 4, the city awoke to discover that Davide…

Since January, the most important person in the campaign for the Italian elections coming on March 4 has been a missing person. Sad selfies of Pamela Mastropietro, a troubled 18-year-old from Rome, have appeared on the front pages of Italy’s newspapers since her body was found, chopped up, rinsed…

Forget Detroit, let's all move to Italy. During the economic crisis, there were hundreds of stories written about distressed properties in Michigan. Now, in Sardinia, you can buy homes for $2. Of course, there are strings attached. As Thrillist reports:

In 2016, during the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Bard was feted by dozens of books, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, performances of his plays, lectures, and a Shakespeare Day gala attended by Prince Charles himself. The London Tube map replaced the names of its…

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) painted watercolors throughout his European childhood. Like his family, the dependents of the peripatetic Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, watercolors were portable and picturesque. Sargent continued to paint watercolors in the 1870s as a student in Paris and in the 1880s…

Kamakura, Japan

If Venice dies, we will be left with nothing but the dozens of cities and suburbs with Venice in their name and Disney-like replicas in Las Vegas, Dubai, and Chongqing, along with yet another being proposed right next to Venice itself. If Venice dies, the world would lose “an unbearable challenge…

If Venice dies, we will be left with nothing but the dozens of cities and suburbs with Venice in their name and Disney-like replicas in Las Vegas, Dubai, and Chongqing, along with yet another being proposed right next to Venice itself. If Venice dies, the world would lose “an unbearable challenge…

The first words I learned in Italian were gamba di legno, or wooden leg, for which Benito Mussolini and Walt Disney are to blame: After the war, my mother, who was fluent in Italian, had been involved with a charity that provided artificial limbs for Italian amputees. And for decades thereafter,…

The European state system, Leon Trotsky wrote in 1932, resembles "the 'system' of cages in an impoverished provincial zoo." The European Union, the ideal of postwar reconstruction, was intended to replace the tariffs, borders, and belligerence of the old Europe. With the euro currency and the "four…

The European state system, Leon Trotsky wrote in 1932, resembles “the 'system' of cages in an impoverished provincial zoo." The European Union, the ideal of postwar reconstruction, was intended to replace the tariffs, borders, and belligerence of the old Europe. With the euro currency and the "four…

The Italian prime minister will resign. Reuters has more:

Two years ago, I wrote a piece in these pages about my multi-year struggle to see Gianolorenzo Bernini's greatest bust—possibly his greatest sculpture—his Constanza, which lives on the top floor of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, the national sculpture museum. The Bargello, whose…

Florence, Italy

Ventotene, Italy

Ventotene, Italy

Turin

Friends of mine once saved for a trip to Europe by emptying their pockets at the end of each day and placing any money in a big plastic jug. Occasionally, when short of cash, they had to turn the jug upside down and withdraw a bill or two with a pair of tweezers, but the system worked. After a…

The Obama family, minus the president of the United States, will head to Europe later this month, according to the White House. They'll be visiting the United Kingdom and Italy.

Springtime in the Mediterranean: The skies are clear, the waters are calm, and the migrants are drowning. In 2014, the U.S. Border Patrol estimated that 307 people died while being smuggled into the United States from Mexico. So far this year, more than 1,650 people have drowned as they attempted…

Our friends at the admirable Italian newspaper, il Foglio, have announced a rally in front of their headquarters in Rome Wednesday night. The rally has two goals: First, to support the right of Israel to defend itself -- something that will be a useful challenge and rebuke to the anti-Israel…

Italy has long been Europe’s political laboratory, having invented fascism, incubated eurocommunism, launched the postwar economic miracle, and brought the social democratic nanny state to ruin. Most Italians are very unhappy, as well they might be. Unemployment is at record highs (13 percent…

Tim Parks has followed in that predominantly British literary tradition of making another country one’s home and then making that home one’s principal subject. Gerald Brenan chose Spain; Lawrence Durrell and Patrick Leigh Fermor shared Greece; William Dalrymple has claimed India. For the last three…

Perhaps the most terrible thing about fascism was its enormous popularity. The German and Italian people—the same who had given the Western world many of its most notable cultural achievements—not only endured fascist tyranny; most of them were active and enthusiastic participants.

Rome

Italy has long been the political laboratory of the West. From Roman republics and tyrannies through the city-states of the Renaissance, into the Counter-Reformation and on to fascism, Eurocommunism, and homegrown terrorism, the Italians have provided us with advance looks at our future. We should…

A new chart, set to be released later today by the minority office of the Senate Budget Committee, finds that, in the next five years, "U.S. Per Person Debt To Increase 7 Times Faster Than Italian Debt."

The Republican Senate Budget Committee will release this new chart later today, showing that the "U.S. Spends More Per Person Than Portugal, Italy, Greece, Or Spain."

The $489 billion cut to defense budgets engineered by Barack Obama — as well as the played-for-fool Republican accomplices on Capitol Hill — won't just mean less American military power. These cuts have significant consequences for America's allies, as well. 

This thoughtful and useful book is misnamed: It should be called Italy, a Historical Portrait of a Failed State. But David Gilmour’s timing is impeccable, giving us this affectionate profile just as Italy raced to the brink of self-destruction. If you want to understand better how and why Italy…

Greece and Italy may be ungovernable, but America is ungoverned. The president ducked out of the country for an Asian tour while the supercommittee tried to reach agreement on a plan to cut the deficit. But the Democrats refused to offer specific cuts in entitlement spending, despite a Republican…

Mario Monti’s appointment as prime minister of Italy has given some hope to observers of the current crisis in the eurozone. Monti, a former student of Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin at Yale and president of the Bocconi University in Milan, has strong academic and policy credentials.…

Alan I. Abramowitz: "Why Barack Obama Has a Good Chance of Winning a Second Term"

Megan McArdle: "Euro in Crisis: Is the Italian Domino Falling?"

Last Friday, the American embassy in Rome held a panel discussion on the subject “Is the Internet Changing People’s Engagement in Democracy?” Fair enough. But the curious part is the identity of the featured speaker: one Sam Graham-Felsen, identified on the embassy website as “the Chief Blogger of…