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.

Even so, many Americans think of Fiat as a global giant with brands like Ferrari, Maserati and Alfa Romeo, as well as control of the new Chrysler Group. They may be familiar with the latest version of the cute 500 minicar, which is likely to be sold eventually through Chrysler dealers. And quite likely, Fiat enthusiasts are hoping that the company’s third time in the United States market will be the charm.

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

 

 

 Amanda Knox foto ©  Ansa

PERUGIA, Italy — An American college student charged with the murder of a housemate took the witness stand for the first time on Friday, defending herself against the charges and accusing the Italian police of poor treatment while she was being questioned.

The student, Amanda Knox, has been held in jail since November 2007, soon after Meredith Kercher, 21, of Surrey, England, was found with her throat slit, semi-naked and wrapped in a duvet in the house the two women shared with two others.

Prosecutors accuse Ms. Knox, 21, of Seattle, who was a student at the University of Washington; her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, 25, a computer science student from Italy; and a second man of murdering Ms. Kercher in a drug-fueled sex game that went awry.

The second man, Rudy Guede, 21, who was born in Ivory Coast and reared in Italy, was convicted last fall of murder and sexual assault and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He is appealing the ruling. On Friday, he was quoted in the Italian news media as saying from prison, “You know you were there, Amanda, tell the truth.”

A tale of a junior year abroad gone bad, starring a fresh-faced American protagonist and set in a beautiful Umbrian hill town, the case has captivated Italy and drawn intense news coverage. Interest has also been piqued by the complicated racial overtones in the case and the intimations of group sex.

On Friday, Ms. Knox appeared in Perugia’s Renaissance-era courthouse to tell her side of the story for the first time. She said she had been yelled at by the police and hit on the head twice while she was being questioned. “They kept calling me stupid,” she added.

Ms. Knox said she had been pressured by the Italian authorities to offer false testimony, in which she accused her boss at a bar where she worked of the crime. In written testimony to the police, she said she had been in the house’s kitchen blocking out Ms. Kercher’s screams as Ms. Kercher was killed by the boss, Patrick Lumumba, originally of Congo.

Ms. Knox said that after hours of questioning, during which the police tried to put ideas in her head, she wanted to write down her testimony to help focus her thoughts. “I wasn’t sure what was my imagination and what was reality,” she said.

Mr. Lumumba was later cleared by prosecutors and is suing Ms. Knox for defamation.

“The declarations were taken against my will, and so everything I said was taken under confusion and pressure,” Ms. Knox said of her written account.

On Friday, Ms. Knox said that she had been at Mr. Sollecito’s house the evening of the crime, where the two smoked marijuana, watched the French film “Amélie” and had sex.

When she returned home the next morning, she said, she noticed the door had been left open, and the door to Ms. Kercher’s room was locked. She said that she and Mr. Sollecito eventually called the police, who found Ms. Kercher’s body.

Four days later, Ms. Knox was arrested. Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito are also charged with tampering with the crime scene to make it look like a robbery. If convicted, the two face life in prison.

On Friday, Ms. Knox appeared confident, ebullient and in good humor throughout the daylong hearing. She spoke in both English and fluent Italian, which allowed her to navigate the many hypothetical clauses in her testimony.

In recent weeks, forensic investigators called by the prosecution have testified that they found DNA evidence of Ms. Knox’s footprint in Ms. Kercher’s blood in the apartment, and traces of the two women’s intermingled blood in several places there.

While no definitive murder weapon has been found, the police said an eight-inch kitchen knife at Mr. Sollecito’s house bore traces of Ms. Kercher’s DNA near the tip and Ms. Knox’s near the handle. In addition, a coroner called by the prosecution testified that bruises on Ms. Kercher’s body indicated that she had been held by multiple assailants.

Defense lawyers accuse investigators of shoddy work and tampering with the crime scene.

Ms. Knox was not under oath when she testified. Under Italian law, only witnesses, not defendants, testify under oath.

 

By RACHEL DONADIO
Sharon Otterman contributed reporting from New York
Source: nytimes.com

                                    Todd Heisler/The New York Times

VENICE — The preview for the Venice Biennale ended this weekend, and after the news media, collectors and dealers left, I wandered to the back of the Arsenale, the ancient former rope factory where part of the main exhibition always unfolds. Calm having descended, the public was now welcome (for $25.50 a ticket), but almost nobody was around. Suddenly I came upon a garden I don’t recall having explored before.

It contained a tumbledown brick pavilion with rusting metal doors, open to the breeze and tucked in the shadows. The smell of jasmine and honeysuckle filled the warm air. Inside, 200 gymnastic rings had been hung close together, at various heights, like clustering vines, for a performance some nights earlier by William Forsythe, the dancer. A young woman was clambering from one ring to another, and at being discovered, mid-climb, she smiled shyly, as if acknowledging a shared secret.

Organized by Daniel Birnbaum, this 53rd version of the venerable Biennale is tidy, disciplined, cautious and unremarkable. If any show can be said to reflect a larger state of affairs in art now, this one suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus. It has prompted the predictable cooing from wishful insiders, burbling vaguely about newfound introspection and gravity.

The Biennale’s ostensible theme is “making worlds.” Mr. Birnbaum has explained in a news release that this means “an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead,” which hardly explains anything at all, of course, while implying that a regrettable inattention to worlds beyond the art world had prevailed. The main show is smaller than the Biennale two years ago, which in virtually every respect seemed more substantial — high-minded and dead serious in light of novelty-addled excess. Part of the Arsenale this time is given over to an advertisement for Abu Dhabi. A prize went to Tobias Rehberger, the stylish German artist, for designing a new cafe. So much for gravity and introspection.

Mr. Birnbaum has also said his show is “about possible new beginnings,” to which end he has included works by the Gutai group, Japanese avant-gardists from the 1950s and ’60s; Lygia Pape, the Brazilian artist who came to prominence around the same time; and Gordon Matta-Clark, the short-lived American iconoclast of the 1970s. The art crowd gladly talked them all up, as if they were news. Devising quasi-utopian projects of hippie-ish experimentalism by often fugitive means, they aimed to engage more than an art audience and to spread joy. They saw themselves as liberationists, optimists, fabulists and troublemakers without exactly being ideologues, who shared an almost alchemical knack for transforming scrappy materials and tests of sensual awareness into fine modernist forms.

Here they bring cool pleasures to several parts of the Biennale’s main exhibition. Pape’s moonbeams of gold thread — a large, ethereal concoction in a vast darkened gallery, titled “Ttéia,” from 2002, two years before Pape died — counts among the few coups de théâtre on view.

But the Biennale is meant to be a survey of new art, and while conscientious young artists now dutifully seem to raise all the right questions about urbanism, polyglot society and political activism, their answers look domesticated and already familiar. They look like other art-school-trained art, you might say, which is exactly what Pape and Matta-Clark and the Gutai group didn’t want their work to look like, never mind that the art market ultimately found a way to make a buck off what they did, as it does nearly everything, eventually.

Here, notwithstanding how far-flung their origins, almost all the artists in Mr. Birnbaum’s show seem to have prominent galleries behind them in New York and Europe, which is not necessarily a problem, but it’s hardly proof of larger worlds being explored, either.

As for the national pavilions, video and film works from Canada (Mark Lewis), Serbia (Katarina Zdjelar) and the Netherlands (Fiona Tan) play for the spotlight. But Bruce Nauman commands center stage unlike any American representative since perhaps the young Robert Rauschenberg, 45 years ago.

A miniretrospective of Mr. Nauman’s career now occupies the American pavilion. It spills over into university buildings on the other side of the Grand Canal, where a new work, “Days/Giorni,” is split between two large rooms. Rows of paper-thin, white loudspeakers, twin gantlets, broadcast voices intoning the days of the week in syncopated varieties (English at one site, Italian at the other).

It claims center stage partly because, among the usual competitors, Britain’s entry, Steve McQueen, has phoned in his work, which is a video about the Biennale’s leafy Giardini in off-season. Claude Lévêque, representing France, has constructed an inexplicable monstrosity in the form of a cross-shaped prisonlike cell with black flags blown by electric fans, of no apparent meaning. Germany, eschewing nationalism, abdicates its pavilion to a British artist, Liam Gillick, who has installed bare pine kitchen cabinets. It is the lamest German entry in decades, by wide consensus.

Aficionados instead made a kerfuffle over “The Collectors,” by the Berlin-based team of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, jointly occupying the Danish and Nordic pavilions. An installation about a broken-up family and their dead gay neighbor (his corpse floats in a pool outside the Nordic pavilion), it’s an inside joke, an elaborate stage set, clever but shallow.

Mr. Nauman’s work manages to be funnier, in dark ways that plumb psychic depths foreign to the likes of Elmgreen & Dragset. Formal panache lends visual rigor to what Mr. Nauman intends, at a glance, to appear jury-rigged and kind of dumb. The needle-stuck-in-the-groove annoyance that he also cultivates demands, like any grueling endeavor, a degree of sacrifice, which may try even the most sympathetic viewer’s patience.

But the effort is its own reward, a Beckett-like concept in line with Mr. Nauman’s philosophy. From the start John Cage and the Minimalist composers have also been lodestars to Mr. Nauman, whose art often makes odd music out of grating sounds, psychotic rants and everyday speech. “Days/Giorni” takes mindless recitation and turns it into a sort of polyphonic choir.

I mentioned, at the start, discovering Mr. Forsythe’s pavilion in the garden because it summoned to mind stumbling for the first time on the Biennale as a student in Italy years ago and finding, late one hot summer day, far from the crush of tourists and churches, in the silent, whitewashed pavilions of the tree-lined Giardini, a work by Mr. Nauman. Its strangeness seemed then, as his art still does, both a rebuke and a universe to be explored.

The memory of it made me wonder about the other big event taking place here, timed to coincide with the Biennale. François Pinault, the billionaire French collector, has installed part of his collection, like choice spoils of war, on long-term view at the Dogana, Venice’s former customs house, which the city has turned over to him and the architect Tadao Ando has refurbished.

The building’s renovation is a sober and airy arrangement of thick wood beams and concrete, with half-moon windows gazing onto bobbing yachts of Russian oligarchs in the sparkling lagoon. The view is apt. Mr. Pinault’s relentless assortment of trendy blue-chip works from the last decade or so, lighted like so many cadavers in a medical school operating theater, reeks of pre-crash money and Bush-era cynicism. Their installation creates the weird, antiseptic aura of Dr. No’s lair.

It came as a relief to retreat back to the Giardini and give Mr. Birnbaum’s exhibition another shot. In the quiet after the opening, things emerged. Simon Starling’s kinetic sculpture, a projector beaming onto a wall a black-and-white film about the construction of the same object at a metal fabricator’s in Berlin, made satisfying whirs and clanks. Tony Conrad’s large rectangles of yellowing paper, framed by slashes of colored pigment, post-Minimalist haikus from the ’70s, slowly faded like aging doges in the late afternoon light.

Yoko Ono had posted on a typed sheet of paper, tacked to a gallery wall, an injunction titled “Cleaning Piece III,” from 1996.

It read:

“Try to say nothing negative about anybody.
a) for three days
b) for 45 days
c) for three months

See what happens to your life.”

That seemed like a signal to return to the garden behind the Arsenale, just before it closed, when the sun was still high in the sky.

The last visitors wearily trudged out. The rusty doors to the pavilion were still open. The young woman had left, and a distant belch of a ship’s horn broke the silence. No one was watching. So I tried out Mr. Forsythe’s rings.

By:MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Source: nytimes.com

 

In the aftermath of the earthquake at L’Aquila, Italy, on Monday that killed nearly 300 people, splashy headlines suggested that these victims didn’t have to die.

An Italian researcher, Giampaolo Giuliani, began to sound alarm bells a month earlier, warning that an earthquake would strike near L’Aquila on March 29. The prediction was apparently based on anomalous radon gas concentrations in the air; the region had also experienced a number of small tremors starting in mid-January. Mr. Giuliani was denounced for inciting panic by Italy’s Civil Protection Agency, and he was forced to take his warning off the Web after March 29 came and went without significant activity.

Should Italian officials have listened? Should the public have heeded the warnings? With 20-20 hindsight the answer certainly appears to be yes. The real answer is no.

Scientists have been chasing earthquake prediction — the holy grail of earthquake science — for decades. In the 1970s American seismologists declared that the goal was reachable. Yet we have little to no real progress to show for our efforts. We have a good understanding of the planet’s active earthquake zones. We’re pretty good at forecasting the long-term rates of earthquakes in different areas. But prediction per se, which involves specifying usefully narrow windows in time, location and magnitude, has eluded us.

The key question is, can we find precursors that tell us that a large earthquake is imminent? Various phenomena have been investigated: radon levels, changes in earthquake wave speeds, the warping of the earth’s crust, even the behavior of cockroaches and other animals.

The game goes like this: you look back at past recordings of X, where X is radon or whatever, and find that X had shown anomalies before large earthquakes. But the problem is that X is typically what we call a “noisy signal” — data that includes a lot of fluctuations, often for varied and not entirely understood reasons — so finding correlations looking backward is about as meaningful as finding animals in the clouds.

We do know that some earthquakes, including the L’Aquila event, have foreshocks, but we can’t sound alarm bells every time little earthquakes happen because the overwhelming majority — 95 percent or so — will not indicate a coming major quake.

The public heard about Mr. Giuliani’s prediction because it appears to have been borne out, albeit several days after he said the earthquake would happen. But there are scores of other predictions that the public never hears about. And that is a good thing because scientists have yet to be able to accurately predict coming earthquakes. Investigating precursors like radon is a legitimate avenue of research, but until and unless the track record of a method is shown to be statistically significant, making public predictions is irresponsible.

Progress is slow in developing prediction methods, since, after all, they can be tested only by waiting for earthquakes to happen, and the earthquakes we care most about, like the deadly 6.3 magnitude quake in Italy, fortunately don’t happen every day. In the meantime, society’s keen interest in the subject occasionally collides with deliberative research, and misunderstandings like that involving Mr. Giuliani are the unfortunate consequences.

The public would like scientists to predict earthquakes. We can’t do that. We might never be able to do that. What people and government can do is work to make sure our houses, schools and hospitals don’t fall down when the next big one strikes, and that we’re all prepared for the difficult aftermaths. We can look around our homes and our workplace and think about what would happen to them if the terra firma suddenly ceased being firm. We can stop worrying about predicting the unpredictable, and start doing more to prepare for the inevitable.

By Susan Hough, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey.
Source: thenytimes.com

 

 

 

 

ROME — State archaeologists are up in arms over a proposal to shift control of fragile ancient monuments here to a government committee with special powers, saying it will undermine their authority.

Nearly 4,700 people have signed an online petition arguing that the proposal “mortifies the professionalism” of the archaeological staff. On Thursday morning archaeologists and employees at the ancient sites plan to stage a three-hour protest at the Culture Ministry; during that time the principal sites here and in Ostia will remain closed. A similar protest on Friday left thousands of tourists standing outside locked gates.

The director of Italy’s civil protection agency was designated on Jan. 30 to lead the new committee that is to oversee repairs and restorations at the Colosseum, the Palatine Hill, the Ostia Antica ruins and other sites. The panel would have the equivalent of emergency powers, letting it circumvent legislative restrictions and bureaucratic obstacles.

Many archaeologists and arts administrators see more ominous designs behind the provision, which the Italian cabinet is expected to ratify on Friday. They fear it will lead to the gradual dismantling of a century-old system of state-run conservation, allowing private investors to gain a stake in some the most lucrative tourist sites in Italy.

With some 4.5 million visitors in 2007, Rome’s downtown archeological complex is the most traipsed spot in Italy, with nearly $38 million a year in ticket sales.

The divide reflects opposed visions of who should maintain the country’s cultural patrimony, with one side pushing for conservation as the top priority and the other for a more commercial strategy that includes private investment.

A decision last year to appoint Mario Resca, the former chairman of McDonald’s Italy, to a post in which he would enhance the money-making potential of Italy’s monuments drew ridicule and broad protests. His appointment has not yet been ratified.

Archaeologists concede that some ancient monuments seriously need repairs, especially after heavy rains this winter, but question whether emergency powers are needed for that.

Vittorio Emiliani of the Comitato per la Bellezza (Beauty Committee), an arts-protection group, opposes the notion to bring in Guido Bertolaso, the civil protection chief of Italy. “Civil protection means erupting volcanoes or tsunamis,” Mr. Emiliani said. “I don’t understand the emergency here.”

Italy’s undersecretary for culture, Francesco Maria Giro, countered that the monuments suffer from “total and unacceptable degradation.”

“Important decisions had to be made,” he said in a telephone interview. He described abandoned archaeological excavations, half-complete repairs, flooded sewers and worn scaffolding abutting buildings, such that “you can’t tell whether they support the monuments or vice versa.”

There are other concerns for archaeologists and arts groups. In its Jan. 30 news release on the proposal the Culture Ministry said that Mario Corsini, the Rome city councilman in charge of urban development, would work alongside Mr. Bertolaso. That caused speculation that the government, which set aside $23 billion last week for a building program that includes a bridge over the Strait of Messina, could subjugate the protection of ruins to construction projects that would generate jobs and revenue.

Under the current system Culture Ministry officials must sign off on building projects in areas where archaeological remains may exist, including the outskirts of the capital.

“In moments of economic crisis perhaps one wants to have a free hand in the Roman countryside,” Adriano La Regina, the former chief of Rome’s archaeological heritage, said dryly in an interview last month in the newspaper La Repubblica.

Rome’s downtown archaeological area is unusual in that it is managed partly by the state and partly by the city. A spokesman for Mr. Corsini said on Wednesday that the makeup of the new committee and its mandate would not be known until Friday at the earliest.

Mr. Giro said that the committee’s special powers, granted for a year initially, will let it cut the red tape that often keeps things from getting done in Italy. Even after the committee is running, he added, the state archaeological authorities will still have a say in conservation matters.

Angelo Bottini, the current state-appointed chief of Rome’s archaeological areas, said he saw nothing wrong in allowing Mr. Bertolaso to deal with genuine emergencies at the sites. But he cautioned that there was no substitute for his own staff’s conservation work. “It would be serious to intervene in questions of our competence,” he said.

Tourists strolling through the Roman Forum on Wednesday seemed unaware of any crisis regarding the site’s condition.

“Isn’t this what ruins are supposed to look like?” said Peggy Schelgel, an instructor of biochemistry at Penn State University. “It’s kind of hard to tell.”

Leanne Kilroy contributed reporting.

By Elisabetta Polovedo
Source: The New York Times.it

 

 

That gorgeous site of perpetual disaster, Naples, Italy — where the inhabitants have been playing a losing game of We Dare You with their volcano for centuries and garbage collection has to be enforced by armed troops — has been sent a valentine.

Shirley Hazzard, the noted Australian writer, lives in New York but has spent long stretches of time in a house on Capri. She counts herself as one of the few Anglo-Americans with a lifelong crush on Naples, rather than the usual Italian cities: Florence, Rome or (as in my case) Venice. In “Ancient Shore: Dispatches From Naples,” she writes poetically about the lure of an intimate daily relationship with the architectural remains of Naples’s many rich historical epochs.

This love affair, sparked when the city was in the sadly prolonged aftermath of World War II, has continued for more than 50 years. The book contains five charming essays on the refined and informed pleasure Hazzard takes in the decayed grandeur left by everyone from Greeks to Fascists, including a variety of Romans, royals and republicans.

Make that four charming essays. The fifth vents her irritation at the intrusion of modern regimes in 1994, when various heads of state and finance ministers attended the G-7 meetings of industrialized nations in Naples. Her gratitude for a civic clean-up of unaccustomed efficiency is overwhelmed by annoyance at their security measures and scorn for their failure to ramble through the ruins.

Otherwise, Hazzard’s Naples is curiously unpeopled by the living. She loves visiting other centuries, a lure that every history-hungry traveler will recognize, and beautifully describes the wonders strewn everywhere in the region. Her sense of the presence of past visitors like Augustus Caesar, Goethe and Lord Byron should resonate with any lover of Italy.

That the city and its surroundings should be a vast museum to casual visitors is understandable. But establishing a permanent relationship should involve more than enjoying the beloved’s glamour and good looks. Surely it requires taking account of the beloved’s baggage, and Naples has more than its share. In addition to the still-threatening Mount Vesuvius, where generations of Neapolitans have insisted on building settlements, the region is also threatened by earthquakes, the criminal network known as the Camorra and levels of government corruption and street crime notorious even in today’s wicked world.

That last problem did intrude on Hazzard’s roamings, and when she refers to the living city it is with periodic references to thefts of cars and wallets, with a warning not to carry anything “snatchable” by the thieves on motorcycles who whiz through the streets. Her husband, Francis Steegmuller, the critic, translator and biographer who died in 1994, had a bag snatched, and while he lost only a guidebook, he was badly injured as he held on to it and was dragged behind the attacking motorcycle.

Steegmuller’s account of this, “The Incident at Naples,” reprinted from The New Yorker, is, in contrast to Hazzard’s essays, filled with living Neopolitans. Not only did friends rush out in the middle of the night to assist with logistics, but passing strangers kept calling to him beforehand to watch out. In the aftermath of the crime, witnesses ran up to offer sympathy and assistance, doctors and nurses treated him skillfully and (in contrast to his New York doctors) with instant attention and friendly respect, and other patients put aside their own woes to commiserate.

He thus pays tribute to the humanity of Neapolitans whom he would not have met but for the theft. Yet taken together with his wife’s essays, this seems only to emphasize the distinction between the people of present-day Naples and those who appreciate the city primarily as a fount of history and beauty.

Here is my own Incident at Naples, offered as evidence that this distinction is ­artificial:

It took place at a dinner party in an old building near the Bay of Naples, where the host had to throw a slug coin down to the courtyard so his guests could operate the elevator. In mid-meal, to my astonishment and alarm, a quarrel broke out between him and his wife. Voices rose and eyes flashed. My Italian was not yet good enough to follow the rapid exchange of impassioned declarations, but I picked up enough to know that the issue was “bourbon” — and that really worried me.

This was a dignified, long-­married Neapolitan couple with kind and generous natures, people who had always seemed warm and gentle with each other. Only late that evening did I venture a timid inquiry that produced an explanation: Some chance remark in the guests’ conversation had set them fighting about whether the Bourbon dynasty of the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries was good for Naples.

“There is no cause for concern,” the husband said with a smile. “We’ve been arguing about this for 30 years.” He took his wife’s hand and kissed it, adding, “I can never make her understand.”

“Don’t listen,” she told me. “He is the one who doesn’t ­understand.”

Judith Martin’s latest book is “No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice.” She also writes the Miss Manners books and columns.

Sorce: The NY TImes

 

 

Dec. 28 marks the Feast of the Slaughter of the Innocents on the Catholic calendar. Once the final day of the Christmas season, it instead signaled, by 1908, a return to normal life, as children were headed back to school and parents to work for the first time in weeks.

Alarm clocks were set the night before, at the end of a Sunday that had been uncommonly cold and gloomy across southern Italy, so much so that people forsook the traditional visits to friends and family and stayed home.

My grandfather’s family would not have ventured out in any event, because that night they welcomed a new addition, another sister for 10-year-old Lorenzo — his sixth — to go along with his little brother, Giuseppe.

My grandfather lived in Pellaro, a small town just south of Reggio di Calabria on the Strait of Messina. His family lived alongside that of his uncle, aunt and five cousins in the Via Madonella, a road that dead-ended into a sandy beach. His childhood was idyllic: the sea right outside his door to play in, Mount Etna rising fantastically across the blue-black waters.

That late-December morning, Pellaro smelled strongly of perfume; it was harvest time for the bergamot, the small citrus fruit that is the principal ingredient in all manner of cologne and grown only on this narrow strip of the Calabrian coast.

Lorenzo was awakened shortly before the dawn, not by his alarm but by the loud low rumble of the earth and the awful crashing that followed. Living in an area recently wracked by earthquakes, most people immediately knew what was happening. During seismic events the majority of deaths are caused by people’s homes collapsing in on them — a fate suffered by few in Pellaro, which was a sparsely built farming community.

People gathered near the water, thinking it the safest place to be, but 10 minutes after the main shock the sea began to recede from shore. Boats at anchor tottered and hit bottom. There were two words in Italian to describe what was happening, one native (maremoto) the other borrowed from Japanese (tsunami).

There was no time to outrun the water, but someone pushed my grandfather up into an olive tree along with his little brother, whom Lorenzo held onto with all his strength. The roar of the sea was deafening — the tidal wave crested at more than 40 feet — and fight though Lorenzo did, the impact broke his clutch on Giuseppe.

No one will ever know how long my grandfather wandered the ruined coast, calling out the names of his brother, of his family. Everything Lorenzo had ever known was destroyed. The land beneath his neighborhood collapsed and fell, Atlantis-like, into the sea. The Church of the Madonella was open to the sky, a boat docked in its altar. Farther up the beach, a crack in the earth revealed ancient Greco-Roman tombs, still intact.

Across the straits, Messina — one of the most ancient cities in Europe — had been annihilated. More than 50,000 were dead. It took only a few hours for civilization to break down among the survivors. Looting ran rampant; thieves cut fingers from the dead rather than waste time prying their rings off. Marconi’s new radio transmitter at the mouth of the strait had gone silent, and many believed themselves to be the only people left alive, anywhere.

The 1908 earthquake stands as the most lethal natural disaster in recorded European history. (And only the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 has dwarfed it recently.) Nearly 100,000 people perished, including all 16 of my grandfather’s relatives in Via Madonella.

The response of the royal Italian government makes FEMA’s effort in New Orleans look like a model of efficiency. Most disgracefully, the shacks built as temporary shelter for the homeless would remain occupied for 30 years while the reconstruction dragged on. My grandfather himself was shuffled among relatives in Calabria before boarding the steamer Europa in 1921 to seek a better life in America.

Grampa, who died in 1990, always said he had been born under a lucky star. I assumed this belief was the sign of an earlier, more stoic generation. In fact, it was not. People went insane with grief over the events of Dec. 28, 1908. But a few survivors came away from the experience with the knowledge that they had stared apocalypse in the face and found the strength to come through it. And, having done so, they could endure anything — including arriving in America with little money and even less English, and raising eight children through a Depression and a war against their home country.

Grampa’s lucky star was in fact mine, and my brothers’, and all our cousins’.

John Bemelmans Marciano is the author and illustrator of Madeline and the Cats of Rome

Source: New York Times