Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei’s corpse in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again and will soon be put on display, a Florence museum said Friday. Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museum of the History of Science, said the body parts were removed by enthusiastic admirers in 1737, 95 years after the death of Galileo, left, when his corpse was being moved to Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. The relics recently turned up at auction, were purchased by a private collector and determined by cultural officials to be Galileo’s.

Source: nytimes.com
By: The Associated press

The artists were performing for an event at Spazio Arti e Mestieri, or SAM (Via Giano della Bella 20/1-20/2; www.spaziosam.it), which opened in April. While traditional artisans are struggling in the current economic climate, organizations like SAM are trying to bring the sector into the 21st century, tapping into a growing community of artists, designers and boutique owners who have flocked to the Oltrarno, a tightly packed neighborhood that has long personified the darker and grittier side of the city.

It was here, in the Santo Spirito church, for instance, that Michelangelo dissected and studied cadavers to learn human anatomy. A three-minute walk from that church, you now can browse the collections of the street-art-inspired fashions at Dangerous Work (Borgo San Frediano 17/r), which opened in 2004. Using designs from collaborators like Skki and Jay1, Tarek Hassanien, the shop’s Egyptian-born owner, oversees the production of his label’s series of apparel, which draws on the iconography of pop culture, like contemporary-cut hoodies (130 to 150 euros, or $199 to $233 at $1.53 to the euro).

“Oltrarno is the heart of the city, because here they invent,” Mr. Hassanien said.

As often is the case in Italy, the countercultural heart of the Oltrarno is on the street — especially Piazza Santo Spirito, which at night fills up with a young, hipsterish crowd. Drawing the denizens back indoors over the last couple of years is Libreria La Cite (Borgo San Frediano 20r; www.lacitelibreria.info), which has garnered rave reviews for its mix of affordable books, live music, coffee and even tango lessons.

Deeper into the district, the five-year-old Cantieri Goldonetta Firenze (Via Santa Maria 23-25; www.cango.fi.it), or Cango, offers space for performances and exhibitions, all under the direction of the choreographer Virgilio Sieni.

Mr. Sieni has recruited Oltrarno artisans to participate alongside trained dancers in his continuing “Academy on the Art of the Gesture” project — a multifaceted venture in which both professionals and people from other walks of life teach one another culturally specific gestures. Other Cango events use abandoned spaces, including decommissioned churches and workshops throughout the Oltrarno for performances and exhibitions.

“What I hope to realize here,” Mr. Sieni said, “is something tied to a total vision of the whole Oltrarno.”

By: Joel Weickgenant
Source: nytimes.com

ROME (AP) — Mike Bongiorno, a television host who popularized quiz shows for generations of Italians and became a symbol of national television, died on Monday at his home in Monte Carlo. He was 85.

The cause was a heart attack, the ANSA news agency and satellite television station Sky Italia said.

Mr. Bongiorno was among the first and most prominent personalities to move from state television to private television, contributing to the success of Mediaset S.p.A., the television company owned by Silvio Berlusconi, now the Italian prime minister, in the early 1980s.

Mr. Bongiorno had appeared on RAI state television on its first day of programming in the early 1950s and went on to host a series of successful quiz shows — many of them adaptations of American shows — for more than two decades. Millions of Italians watched as he asked sometimes impossible questions of his contestants.

Nicknamed the Quiz King, Mr. Bongiorno was one of Italy’s most enduring and beloved television personalities.

He was so popular that Umberto Eco wrote an essay called the “Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno,” using him as a symbol of popular culture.

Born in New York, Mr. Bongiorno moved to his mother’s hometown, Turin, Italy, as a boy. During World War II he took part in the Italian resistance and was briefly in a German concentration camp before being freed as part of a prisoner-of-war exchange, ANSA said.

Mr. Bongiorno appeared as himself in a handful of Italian movies, received an honorary degree in Milan and wrote an autobiography called “La Mia Versione” (“My Version”).

He recently left Mr. Berlusconi’s company and was working on a remake of his popular show “Rischiatutto” for Sky Italia.

Mr. Bongiorno is survived by his wife, Daniela Zuccoli, and three children.

Source: nytimes.com

Italians didn’t seem to care much.

The prize is the notorious, magnificent sixth-century B.C. red-figure krater by the Greek artist Euphronios, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art lately returned: the “hot pot,” as Thomas Hoving, the former Met director who bought it in 1972, mischievously took to calling it. A show of recovered spoils at the Quirinale in Rome last year became the pot’s homecoming party, after which it was rushed, like a freshly anointed Miss Italy, off to an exhibition in Mantua, appropriately enough about beauty.

Now it’s ensconced at the villa, its new permanent home, in a bulky glass case with odd little Christmas lights. Maybe overexposure explains why this didn’t strike Italians as particularly big news. The media mostly gave the event a pass. The gallery was empty the other afternoon.

A new book may help revive interest. “The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece,” just published by William Morrow, makes a first-class page turner out of the stolen krater’s travels from ancient Greece to Etruscan Italy to New York and then back here — and of the travails of another work also by the sublime Euphronios, a kylix, or chalice, which was looted from the same spot here in Cerveteri, a town northwest of Rome.

Vernon Silver, a 40-year-old American journalist and a doctoral student in archaeology at Oxford, wrote the book. “This is the whole illicit antiquities trade writ small,” he said a few days ago. “The two works started out in the hands of the same Greek artist, 2,500 years ago, ended up going through the same shady Italian dealer by different routes to America, one the public route, the other underground, and both end up back here in Italy.”

The tale is one neither Met officials nor Italian authorities will be pleased to find so conscientiously recounted. It turns out that balls were dropped and that plenty of other shenanigans transpired on both sides, even before the Met (obviously without trying too hard to check the facts) paid $1 million, an unprecedented sum at that time, for what was the finest example of painted pottery by the greatest known vase painter of ancient Greece. The museum’s story was that the krater, illustrating the Homeric tale of the death of Sarpedon, Zeus’ son, belonged to a Lebanese collector. But rumors instantly started circulating that the pot had been looted. Italian police began hunting for evidence in Cerveteri, the former Etruscan city of Caere, known for its ancient tombs. (Etruscans collected Euphronios the way that Gilded Age Americans collected Rembrandt.) Not coincidentally, modern-day Cerveteri is famous for its tomb robbers.

Mr. Silver returned one sweltering day last month to the patch of countryside on the edge of town where, late in 1971, a lookout watched while five tombaroli, as tomb robbers are called here, stuck poles into the wet earth until they struck something underground. They tunneled some 15 feet down and came upon a complex of ancient burial chambers. They knew they had hit pay dirt when they unearthed painted pottery, broken but (all things considered) mostly in tip-top condition.

The man who bought the loot from them later passed it along to a restorer in Switzerland, who repaired the pots before they were sent on to a dealer, who in turn approached the Met. It wasn’t until reading in the newspapers, months later, how much the museum had actually paid for the Euphronios krater that the robbers realized that they had themselves been bamboozled.

The site today is thick with prickly brush, yellow broom and purple malva, a picturesque ruin, scented by wild mint and fennel. It isn’t hard to figure out why the robbers looked here. Local superstition had it that the place was haunted by a demon, so tombaroli steered clear for eons. Looting-wise, it was virgin territory.

“This is also a place where you find things just lying around in plain sight,” Mr. Silver said. “So it was obvious that something might turn up.” At that moment, resting in the dirt near Mr. Silver’s foot, was a shard of ancient pottery with traces of paint still on it. A second piece lay beside it.

The demon ended up being an ancient sculpture of a gnarly monster, buried along with other stone sculptures. To cover their tracks, the looters filled in the tunnels, after which hasty Italian investigators bulldozed the grounds in a curious rush to uncover the ransacked tombs. It became impossible after that to reconstruct how the works had lain when the tombaroli found them.

“Had someone properly excavated the site,” Mr. Silver said, “we could have learned so much more about the Etruscans.”

But the looters did bring to light the krater, which millions of people then saw at the Met, where for decades it was the centerpiece of the ancient-vase collection. Much of what Italian authorities fished out of the ground afterward, lesser finds, ended up in Cerveteri’s small archaeology museum, which even now keeps strangely mute about the looting.

The silence is even more striking at the Villa Giulia, where not a word about Cerveteri accompanies the newly installed krater. Museum authorities insist that the arrangement is temporary. They say the work will move to a display of artifacts from Cerveteri that they’re preparing in the villa.

Meanwhile, the krater is divorced from the spot where the looters discovered it, not to mention from its Greek origin. A Greek pot sold to an Etruscan buyer and stolen from an Italian site and ending up in New York, it has become a Greek pot in a Roman museum dedicated to Etruscan art, displayed now alongside other artifacts recovered from American museums with labels identifying not the archaeological legacy of these objects but the institutions that gave them back. What matters to the Italians, it would seem, is not simply straightening out the archaeological record. It’s also providing cautionary tales for prospective collectors in the illegal antiquities trade via trophies like the krater.

As for the kylix that Mr. Silver also writes about, it shattered a few years ago when dropped by a Swiss policeman after a raid on the Geneva warehouse belonging to Giacomo Medici, the Roman middleman who bought the hot pots from the looters and passed them along to Robert Hecht, the American dealer who sold the krater to the Met. Today the kylix remains in pieces behind locked doors in a fake Etruscan temple on the grounds of the Villa Giulia. Occasionally, a visitor will try to peer through the keyhole, oblivious to what’s inside.

If any doubts remain about whether the Euphronioses were really looted, by the way, Francesco Bartocci is still around. So far as he knows, he’s the last survivor among the tombaroli. He acted as the lookout. A farmer by trade, now 70, he lives in a modest house in Cerveteri. He was standing on his patio in sandals, T-shirt and baggy trousers when his wife emerged from the cellar, lugging a pitcher of homemade olive oil and a plastic bag full of broken pieces of ancient pottery that she explained had turned up when the patio had recently been repaired.

“They’re everywhere,” she said about the potsherds, before asking if Mr. Silver might wish to take the bag off her hands. (No thanks, he said.)

“They stole a whole lot of money from me,” Mr. Bartocci declared when asked about Mr. Medici (not a relative of the aristocrats, if you were wondering) and Mr. Hecht. “But what was I supposed to do? I was a thief like they were.”

He shrugged. The job was his only stint as a looter, he wanted to make clear: “I’m a farmer, not a tombarolo, but I had a truck, a three-wheeler, which they needed because there was so much stuff to cart away.”

In this region where looting has long been an open profession, and where there’s even a store selling reproductions of ancient pots cheekily called the Metropolitan Museo, Mr. Bartocci is hardly ashamed of what he did.

“I’m proud,” he said. “I’m sorry the vase went to America and that I didn’t make more money.” He laughed. “But I’m honored to be associated with something so great.”

And now he’s glad to hear the Euphronios is back in Italy.

IF ever there were a threat to the reputation of ’60s British sports cars as the most heartbreaking form of transportation sold in America, it probably would have come from Fiat.

Like classic Austin-Healeys, MGs and Triumphs of the bell-bottom era, Fiats could be lovely to look at and delightful on the road. In particular, they were loads of fun when driven with urgency — ideally with the engine screaming at maximum revs and with minimal regard to the tires’ limits of adhesion.

But they also carried the stigma of being unable to return home from dinner and a movie without an alternator dying, a fuel pump expiring or a head gasket blowing. Worse yet, many of the cars that Fiat sold in the United States before pulling up stakes in 1983 tended to age badly, suffering from poor paint, metastatic rust and fragile trim.

The reputation for shoddy quality may be the product of a few historical factors: pressing demand in postwar Italy for low-cost cars; a desperate need to export as the country rebuilt; and trade restrictions that kept high-quality Japanese cars out of the home market.

Bill Baker was the public relations director for Fiat North America in 1978-83, and he was a busy man. During his tenure, the federal government issued a highly unusual recall for the Fiat 850 — going back 10 years — for rust problems. Mr. Baker also had to cope with dealers who had never received service manuals in English for some models.

The 1979 introduction of what was supposed to be a world-beating economy hatchback, the Strada, instead turned out to be a swan song: that car was the last Fiat-branded product in the United States. Among the Strada’s myriad faults, Mr. Baker recalls, was an engine compartment that got so hot the electric cooling fan, controlled by a thermostat, would never shut off. It simply stayed on until it drained the battery. Even impressive gas mileage — the E.P.A. highway rating was 38 m.p.g. — would not sustain the troublesome Strada.

Jonathan Stein, an automotive historian who comes from a family of Fiat owners, recalls a particular 1981 Fiat 131 sedan bought after sitting on a dealer’s lot for a year. “The car already had body rust when we bought it,” he said. “Every six months, we had to return it to the dealer to have the rust repaired.”

My mother, Joyce Sass, recalls her 1981 Spider 2000, painted a pretty shade of light blue, as the “bring it on by” car. It earned the name because that was the phrase consistently offered by the service manager of Archway Imports in St. Louis, in response to her latest description of the car’s malfunctions.

Some Fiat owners did get excellent service from their cars. Rich Williams of Santa Barbara, Calif., owned a 1976 124 Spider from 1986 until 2001. “I bought it not because I had any interest in Fiats per se, but simply because I was a poor grad student,” he said. “It was cheap transportation, and the top went down.”

Mr. Williams’s care for his 124 was not exactly that of a doting owner. “I rarely changed the oil, and I bought the cheapest parts for it possible,” he said. “Still, I got about 125,000 miles out of it. It only broke down on me once.

“I did go through numerous convertible tops, though. When they wore out, I just drove to the manufacturer in L.A., bought a top and replaced it myself.”

Mr. Baker said he thought that at the time Fiat left the United States in 1983, the company’s management simply didn’t understand how the American market was evolving. “We kept telling them that quality was becoming the most important attribute to American buyers, and their response was, ‘How good is good enough?’” he said.

Still, Fiats were often a darling of the enthusiast press. In 1967, Road & Track called the Fiat 850 coupe “one of the handsomest, best-balanced designs ever seen on a small car.” And of the 1100R sedan tested the same year, it said, “Despite the car’s first purpose as economy transportation, it can deliver more sheer fun than almost any small sedan on the market.”

Little has changed in this regard. John Montgomery, president of Fiat Lancia Unlimited, a club based in Coldwater, Mich., said vintage Fiat sports cars had a junior-exotic appeal, giving enthusiasts of average means a taste of the Ferrari experience.

In addition to common ownership, Fiat and Ferrari have often shared the services of styling houses like Pininfarina and Bertone, Mr. Montgomery points out. Little surprise, then, that the Fiat 124 Spider bears more than a passing resemblance to the Ferrari 275 GTS, and the wedge profile of the Fiat X 1/9 can be seen in the Ferrari 308 GT/4.

It is curious, then, that the values of vintage Fiats have remained relatively low while prices of vintage Ferraris and even comparable British sports cars from the same era have increased. Both the 124 Spider and X 1/9 were more technologically advanced than their MG and Triumph competitors. The X 1/9 was one of the first inexpensive midengine sports cars, and the 124 Spider had an alloy twin-cam engine, four-wheel disc brakes, a 5-speed transmission and one of the best convertible tops ever.

At the same time, the British made do with 4-speeds, rear drum brakes, cast-iron pushrod engines and leaky convertible tops that seemed to have been engineered by the Marquis de Sade.

Mr. Montgomery, the club president, said that in marketing and service support the British had Fiat beat. “There were simply more MG and Triumph dealers out there, they were better stocked with parts and technicians and they spent more on advertising,” he said, noting that the gap seems to carry over today. “It’s much easier to find someone willing to work on an old MG or Triumph than it is to find an Italian-car mechanic.”

Andy Reid, senior editor of Classic Motorsports magazine, agrees. “Usability factors heavily into collector-car values, and the perception is that Italian cars are just more difficult to live with than British cars,” he said. “Fiats are more complex and far more difficult for the average guy to work on.”

Additionally, Mr. Reid said, there are fewer sources for parts for Fiats than for British cars, and the parts tend to be a bit more expensive.

Values for collectible Fiat sports cars have remained steady for some time, Mr. Reid said, with a nice but not perfect 124 or Spider 2000 available in the $5,000 to $8,000 range and an X 1/9 (produced from 1973-86) at $3,000 to $7,000. A 1200, prized by collectors for its cuteness, recently sold at auction for almost $40,000.

“Rare models like the Fiat Dino Spider, with a Ferrari-engineered V-6, can sell for up to $60,000,” he said.

Recent surveys have shown that Americans expect Fiat quality and reliability to be of little concern, though J. D. Power & Associates studies of customer satisfaction in Europe rank the brand near the bottom of all carmakers.

By ROB SASS
Source nytimes.com

Libro consigliato: Marchionne & Co. (Cooper, 2008)

Sneaking a smoke now and again is not the worst presidential flaw imaginable.

Our president is positively monkish compared with Silvio Berlusconi, whose Vesuvial vices spurred a trio of women academics in Italy to write an “Appeal to the First Ladies.” It urges Michelle Obama and other wives of world leaders to boycott next month’s G-8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, to protest the Italian prime minister’s “sexist” and “offensive” manner toward women.

One of the things the petitioners objected to, according to The Times of London, was Berlusconi’s attempt to put up actresses and showgirls as candidates in the European elections (not to mention as allegedly remunerated ornaments for wild parties at his posh villas).

His wife, Veronica Lario, a former actress who met him while she was starring topless in “The Magnificent Cuckold” and who is now divorcing him, has operatically upbraided him twice: once two years ago after he had a public flirtation with a TV starlet whom he later appointed as Minister of Equal Opportunities; and again last month when Lario charged her randy hubby with “consorting with minors” after he went to the 18th birthday party of a model and gave her a diamond and gold necklace.

Naturally, Berlusconi, who likes to be called “Papi” by his flock of chicks, upped the antics.

The paparazzi splashed photos of topless babes — or “L’harem di Berlusconi,” as they’re known — and a buck naked ex-Czech prime minister romping at Berlusconi’s villa in Sardinia.

And a comely 23-year-old starlet named Barbara Montereale told La Repubblica this week that she got paid by a hospital equipment vendor for going to the villa in January — an incident now under police investigation.

“We played with a little puppy that Bush had given him as a present,” she said.

She claimed she went with another girl, an “escort” named Patrizia D’Addario, who told her that she had had sex with the 72-year-old prime minister and asked for a favor about a building project but never got it. Now a disillusioned D’Addario has released a secret recording she made in which Berlusconi’s voice is heard saying: “Go and wait for me in the big bed.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night that Berlusconi, in an interview with the Italian society magazine Chi, which is owned by his holding company, denied that he had ever paid a woman to spend the night with him. “I’ve never understood what would be the satisfaction if there isn’t the pleasure of conquest,” he said, adding that he had “no memory” of D’Addario.

Given Berlusconi’s louche ways, L’Aquila is a safe place for President Obama to indulge his lingering smoking habit.

It’s interesting that someone with such daunting discipline can’t apply his willpower to cigarettes. The day after he signed a historic tobacco bill, the president conceded at a White House news conference that he “constantly” struggles with his vice and falls off the wagon sometimes.

He got testy with the McClatchy reporter who asked him about his bill and his habit, pointing out that the legislation was meant to stop “the next generation of kids” from smoking. Then he got even snippier with Major Garrett of Fox News, who referred to the president’s strong opening statement on Iran, noting: “You said about Iran that you were ‘appalled’ and ‘outraged.’ What took you so long to employ those words?”

The president protested that he had been consistent in trying not to let the White House and C.I.A. become foils that the Iranian government could blame.

When CBS News’s Chip Reid later asked Mr. Obama if he was “influenced at all by John McCain and Lindsey Graham accusing you of being timid and weak,” the president grinned dismissively.

But Mr. Obama regularly has to be cajoled by supporters and critics into using bolder rhetoric. It happened in his battle against Hillary during the campaign and with the A.I.G. bonuses and now Iran.

Privately, he gets irritated at those who make him out to be a wimp just because he tends not to react dramatically or visibly to events. That doesn’t mean he’s not responding or that he’s not tough, he says; it just means he’s not doing it on the timetable or at the decibel levels that some would prefer. Like the Bushes, he will point out, as he did at the press conference, he is the president and his critics are not.

He also got prickly with NBC News’s Chuck Todd when Todd said the president had “hinted” that there would be consequences for a repressive Iran.

“Well, I’m not hinting,” Mr. Obama said. “I think that when a young woman gets shot on the street when she gets out of her car, that’s a problem.”

When Todd asked why he wouldn’t spell out the consequences, the president shot back, “I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I’m not. O.K.?”

It was enough to make a guy sneak out to the Truman balcony for a smoke.

By MAUREEN DOWD
Source: nytimes.com

MILAN — As the June sun beats down on the Piazza degli Affari, groups of men in their 30s stroll back to work after lunch. Some have taken off their jackets and rolled up their sky-blue or white shirtsleeves. Most wear ties. And the navy, black or brown of their neatly tailored cotton and wool crepe suits distinguishes them from their sun-bleached surroundings, if not from each other.

Ten hours later, a similar group of men are clustered around the colonnades on Corso di Porta Ticinese. Now they are wearing polo shirts and sneakers in all the colors of a candy store, but often with the same kind of suit trousers.

Marco, a senior financial consultant, could be one of these men. He buys about three suits a year, all in sober colors, from the likes of Dolce & Gabbana and Prada. But his suit jackets in light fabrics and fitted shirts from Dior and Prada cross over into weekend wear as he matches them with jeans and sneakers.

Formal wear has not disappeared from Milanese men’s sartorial vocabulary. Tomas Maier, the creative director of Bottega Veneta, who has been focusing his menswear on an easy elegance based on soft tailoring, says, “I often see these young kids who are really inspired and are wearing the small fitted jacket, bowties, classic shoe” — but incorporated into a modern wardrobe rather than a formal style.

The Milanese man is trying to find a place where the values of “bella figura” — the classic Italian style of “the beautiful figure” — coexist with a foreign sense of ease. And the two worlds are just as manifest in the city’s shopping.

On one side of the Duomo are the traditional Italian suitmakers and formal wear brands like Ermenegildo Zegna, Tom Ford and Armani. Then there are the boutiques around the Corso di Porta Ticinese — denim brands like Diesel and Lee; skater brands like Carhartt and Stussy; fashion-forward boutiques like Frip and WOK, which mainly sell Scandinavian designers; and casual outfitters like American Apparel.

Tiziana Cardini, fashion director at La Rinascente, the largest department store in Milan, says the “bella figura” has a strong cultural imprint, even for the younger generation. So, despite the economic downturn, the store’s sales show that “pieces sell well if they retain quality and style.”

La Rinascente sells menswear on two floors: the first has secondary lines like Versace Jeans Couture, Just Cavalli, Lacoste and Armani Jeans, whose faded gray jacket of leather and denim retails for €520, or $725. Upstairs, the customers are men in suits buying more suits.

The days of that second floor are numbered, said Renzo Rosso of Diesel, speaking from the label’s headquarters in Molvena, Italy. “Nowadays, the formal men’s suit has been replaced with a more comfortable wardrobe, and this is a great goal for men, who can wear clothes they feel more at ease and stylish in.”

Anna Zegna, image director of her family’s company, Ermenegildo Zegna, notices a similar trend but does not look at it in the same light as Mr. Rosso.

She talked about the importance of “bella figura” across generations of Italian men, describing the splendor of her father’s tuxedo brought back to life on her 18-year-old son, and how Zegna was careful to present linen in a way that it looks worn and “as if one has always had it.” She lamented the loss of a gentleman’s aesthetic, an appreciation for the old and historical.

But Mrs. Zegna is all for bringing the heritage forward. “I was looking in the archives recently,” she noted, “and I picked up a summer suit jacket which weighed as much as a winter coat would now.” Stripping out the linings, which concealed the craftsmanship beneath, and choosing lighter padding and fabrics is all part of that effort.

To Mrs. Zegna, the Milanese sense of caring about how one dresses betrays a certain environmental awareness, like her own recent fabric research on what the brand calls “High Performance Cool Effect” that reflect the sun’s rays.

Tom Ford echoes Mrs. Zegna’s approach, saying, “The beauty of fine Italian menswear is that it is steeped in tradition and beautifully made, and this is not something that has changed over the past 20 years or will change any time in the near future.”

10 Corso Como stocks Mr. Ford’s suits as well as his €3,355 silk robes.

“For a long time now, formal business wear has loosened up, and there is more of a mix of sportswear and formal,” said Carla Sozzani, who founded the bazaar-like boutique-come-gallery in Milan. “The new generation is looking for more special things; the brand is not so important anymore to give security and self-confidence.”

So 10 Corso Como’s strategy is to sell top-range formal wear from the likes of Tom Ford and Charvet alongside graphic T-shirts and gold-winged Adidas sneakers, as well as limited-edition pieces designed for the store by designers like Paul Smith, Raf Simons and Borsalino.

“A Milanese man might wear a T-shirt,” said Federica Zambon, co-owner of WOK, a colorful store near the Porta Ticinese. “But the cotton should be of the finest quality, and he’ll wear it with particular trousers, not just shapeless jeans.”

She displayed a pair of putty-colored cotton trousers in a high-waisted, baggy-kneed silhouette by the Swedish designer Henrik Vibskov — an example, she said, of how “bella figura” is evolving, rather than disappearing.

The pants, she said, are selling very well at €175: “The pleats at the waist are a very popular detail. It’s not a silhouette that men over 40 can wear easily — they’re not used to it. But these changes in shape are being embraced by the younger Milanese man.”

Ms. Zambon maintains that “bella figura” is evolving, not being discarded.

“The Italian man is still spending as much as he ever did,” she said, “and he’s never going to compromise on quality, and will never, as a result, abandon high fashion for the high street.” 

By BENJAMIN SEIDLER
Source: nytimes.com