Archivio per November 2008
In Italy, it is called the “Saviano effect,” the intense national focus on the Camorra elicited by Roberto Saviano’s 2006 best seller, “Gomorrah,” which traced the rise of the Campania region’s violent and economically mighty clans.
But while Mr. Saviano, 29, has become a household name — appearing regularly in the Italian news media even after death threats forced him into hiding — others have spent years quietly covering — and uncovering — the same polluted terrain.
One of the most respected is Rosaria Capacchione, a veteran reporter for Il Mattino, a daily newspaper in Caserta, outside Naples, who since the mid-1980s has reported on the short lives, violent deaths and intricate finances of the members of the Camorra’s ruling families, particularly the Casalesi, as those from the town of Castel di Principe are known.
Recently, that has led to another kind of “Saviano effect.” In March, Ms. Capacchione was given a police escort after a Camorra defendant in a high-profile trial issued a death threat against her — as well as against Mr. Saviano and a magistrate, Raffaele Cantone, both of whom already had constant police protection.
Ms. Capacchione hates having a police escort. “I lost all the freedom I had,” she said glumly last week, sitting at her desk at Il Mattino, in a concrete office block in nondescript downtown Caserta.
“The funny thing is, I’ve had much more serious and clear and evident threats over the years. But there wasn’t the Saviano phenomenon,” she said. “The rest of the world didn’t know that the Camorra or the Casalesi existed,” she said, adding, “I’ve been doing this job since before Saviano was born.”
Under the Camorra in recent decades the Campania region, which surrounds Naples, has become the hub of an international criminal web involving drug trafficking, illegal waste dumping, public works fraud and money laundering through semi-legitimate businesses like supermarkets and gaming parlors.
In her first book, The Gold of the Camorra, which appeared this month and is already on Italian best-seller lists, Ms. Capacchione tracks the careers of four of the Casalesi’s most brilliant criminal minds: Francesco Schiavone, Francesco Bidognetti, Michele Zagaria and Antonio Iovine. The first two are serving life sentences; the others are on Italy’s most wanted list.
Using trial transcripts and her own reporting, she shows how the bosses profited from contracts to build a high-speed train to Naples, through construction and through cartels that distribute sugar and other basic commodities to Campania. Thanks to the Camorra, the region also has high rates of cocaine addiction and elevated cancer levels from toxic waste dumping.
“I didn’t want to write a book, but Rizzoli practically forced me to,” Ms. Capacchione said, referring to her Italian publisher. Instead, she sees herself as a beat reporter, uncomfortable with the “media circus” that erupted after she was threatened.
MS. CAPACCHIONE, 48, was born and raised in Caserta and still lives there today. She has heavy, Levantine eyes, a smoker’s voice and a small, sparkling cross around her neck. Reserved and at times sardonic, she sometimes smiles and occasionally laughs. But to be in Ms. Capacchione’s presence is to absorb an intensity — and fatalism — born from years spent covering a violent, seemingly intractable conflict.
Being on the front lines has its risks. Last month, Ms. Capacchione went home to find things had been moved around in her apartment — she lives alone — though nothing of material value was missing. “They took a journalism prize I had won,” she said. “That one meant a lot to me.”
She does not know who did it. She does know that her police escort will only protect her so much. “If they wanted to kill me, they’d kill me with or without an escort here or abroad,” she said.
Ms. Capacchione prides herself on her “scientific” approach — reading the signs, combing through court documents. In one trial, she noticed that prosecutors had not provided as much background information on one defendant as they had on the others. “I went and filled in the missing pieces.”
It is a battle of wits and wills between the Camorristi and the authorities. “The most fun thing is when you find smart authorities fighting smart criminals,” she said. “It becomes like a chess game.”
In the land of the Camorra, there is a blurry line between legality and illegality. It is not uncommon to find organized crime figures with relatives in public office, law enforcement, the judicial system or other state operations like health care, Ms. Capacchione said. “If I buy a sentence, it means that someone sold it,” she said.
While the Camorra may rely less on politicians today, she said politicians still relied on the Camorra to deliver votes. And it is hard for citizens to distinguish between criminals and noncriminals. “You never know,” Ms. Capacchione said. “Or even worse, you do know.”
A study last year found that organized crime was the largest segment of the Italian economy, accounting for 7 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, or $127 billion a year.
So what’s the solution? “I don’t know,” Ms. Capacchione said. “It’s a complex problem.” Over the years “they’ve arrested hundreds and hundreds of people.”
Indeed, since the mid-1990s, more than 500 people have been arrested and more than 4,000 investigated as part of operations like the continuing “Spartacus” trial, one of the most complex in Italian history. “My book is the story of investigations,” she says.
And yet nothing changes. The clan members “regenerate themselves.” As a reporter, “I’m on the third generation,” she notes. “They live short lives.”
That everyone knows there is a problem and yet no one — not the government, not the church, not the military — applies the political will to solve it can seem worse than the problem itself.
Public officials have frequently been caught up in the violence. One day in 1990, a deputy mayor of the city of Mondragone, just north of Naples, who was involved in awarding public works contracts, simply disappeared. His remains were found only in 2003, in the course of another organized crime investigation.
In some countries, the murder of a public official would cause a public outcry and things would change. “Oh, really; interesting,” she said in a dark deadpan. “Here, they kill everyone and nothing happens.”
Still, she added, the politicians in question perhaps were not world caliber. “It’s not like they killed John Kennedy.”
Over the years, Ms. Capacchione has learned to read signs. Over a lunch of steak and cigarettes at a local restaurant, she makes a phone call. In photos of a recent murder she’d noticed that the dead man had his hands in his jeans. “What do we make of that?” she says into the phone. “That says to me that he knew and trusted whomever he was talking to.”
As a reporter “you’re a neutral party,” she says. “You go there and look. You don’t have to make an arrest to keep your boss off your case. You can look for the truth.”
After all that she has seen, what was her hardest day on the job? Here Ms. Capacchione pauses for a long time, her fingers clasping a plastic cigarette lighter embedded with a tiny pair of dice. Finally, she draws a breath. “It hasn’t come yet,” she answers.
But she has no intention of changing jobs. “No,” she said decisively. “My plan is to keep doing what I’ve always done.” And with that Ms. Cappachione walked back to her office in the rain, two plainclothes policemen by her side.
Categoria: General | Inserito da Emanuele Bevilacqua | Aggiungi commento
ROME — When it comes to cultural heritage, Italians like to boast that theirs is the richest in the world, even if they are chronically short of the money needed to tend to it.
Yet the art world here is in an uproar over suggestions from Italy’s culture minister, Sandro Bondi, that the country should think of its state museums and archaeological sites as generators of revenue. It hasn’t helped that Mr. Bondi has chosen Mario Resca, who ran McDonald’s Italian subsidiary for 12 years, to head a new ministry directorate to develop the museums and ancient sites. Mr. Resca has no experience in arts management, and commentators have joked that the government is serving up “fast-food culture” or a “McCaravaggio and medium Coke.”
But the deepest concern in art circles centers on the government’s apparent shift from a constitutional mandate to protect Italy’s cultural heritage toward an entrepreneurial model that exploits it. It is lost on no one that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who assumed his office for the third time in May, is a megawealthy businessman and proud of it.
“What’s at stake is the conservation and transmission of millenary values that one government must not be allowed to undersell or demolish,” said Marisa Dalai Emiliani, president of the Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli Association, a cultural research institute. On Monday the association organized a daylong seminar on the arts in Italy ominously titled “Cultural Heritage Emergency.”
A petition against the appointment of Mr. Resca, whose powers as museum supermanager include the authorization of loans and ruling on the cultural or scientific value of exhibitions, was circulated at the seminar and is now online. It has so far been signed by more than 1,100 people, the majority of them museum directors and art historians from around the world.
The appointment hinges on the approval of some Culture Ministry reforms that are to be considered at a Cabinet meeting next week.
Mr. Resca readily agrees that he might not have been an obvious choice for the job. But he says he is confident that he has the right skills to get the most out of what he sees as an insufficiently tapped national resource.
“I’m an outsider, and I know that there are concerns — it’s enough to read the papers,” he said, referring to the deluge of indignant editorials that have been published since he was nominated last week. But he said he saw room for improvement in state museum management.
Italy’s cultural patrimony is a “strategic asset like oil, with zero costs because it’s there,” Mr. Resca said. “Of course, you have to protect it, and care for it, but it has a value that we can leverage and develop.”
Some say the choice of Mr. Resca was particularly galling because Mr. Bondi named him without consulting top-ranking Culture Ministry officials or its advisory board.
“If the minister had listened, he’d have heard that what museums really need is not a boss, but more flexibility — that is, more autonomy,” said Daniele Lupo Jallà, the national president of the International Council of Museums.
He said the chief challenge for Italian museums was not a lack of central leadership but the “unbearable heaviness of its patrimony, which costs a lot to maintain.”
As economies sputter around the world, the arts have been among the sectors hardest hit by government cutbacks and dwindling private resources. In Italy more than one billion euros ($1.25 billion) have been slashed from the Culture Ministry’s budget over the next three years.
“We’ve been fighting to have more funds, we need them, but the left thinks these have to come from the state,” Mr. Bondi said. “The fact is it just can’t be like that anymore.”
His recipe has been to reorganize the ministry by creating the new supermanagerial position focusing on museums and archaeological areas. Mr. Bondi has done away with the directorate of contemporary art and architecture, which has been absorbed by other offices.
He has also discussed the possibility of renting works of art to foreign museums, a proposal that has also raised an outcry among cultural officials.
Statistics show that the only museums in Italy to rank among the world’s 10 most visited museums are those of the Vatican, which technically lie outside Italian jurisdiction. (They attracted 4.3 million visitors in 2007.)
Pompeii, officially Italy’s most visited site, had nearly 2.6 million visitors last year, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence followed with 1.6 million.
Citing the 8.3 million people who visited the Louvre Museum in Paris or the 6 million at the British Museum in London, Mr. Resca suggested that the Italian numbers were simply too low.
“We have to make museums more accessible, we have to make visiting a more positive experience,” Mr. Resca said in an interview this week.
He said that Italy must also expand its “client potential” through marketing campaigns in economies like China and India, and develop tourism infrastructure in less-visited cities to allow “underperforming museums to grow.”
But museum management experts caution that the vast majority of museums around the world depend heavily on government financing and private donations.
Where there is most room for development is museum merchandising, which has not really taken off since laws were first passed in Italy 15 years ago to allow commercial transactions in what had been hallowed halls of culture.
“You can encourage visitors to consume more, but it’s going to be harder to increase the numbers,” said Massimiliano Vavassori, director of the research center at the Italian Touring Club, which monitors museums.
He pointed out that many of Italy’s best-known attractions, like Leonardo’s “Last Supper” in Milan or the Borghese Gallery in Rome, allowed for only limited numbers of visitors.
“When ticket sales cover around 10 percent of a budget, it’s not realistic that an increase will have much of a financial impact,” Mr. Vavassori said. He added that the impact of a crowd was “more likely to be negative, both for visitors and for the site itself.”
Despite the furor, Mr. Resca said he was optimistic about his prospects. “I need time to learn,” he said. “Maybe in six months I’ll say something completely different.”
Source: New Tork Times
Categoria: General | Inserito da Emanuele Bevilacqua | Aggiungi commento
Per due giorni, venerdì 21 e sabato 22 novembre, i luoghi storici e quelli di design di Rimini si riempiono di personaggi carismatici e noti per il loro intuito e la loro creatività nel campo dell’arte, della moda, del linguaggio, dell’architettura, della gastronomia, del turismo, per interpretare le tendenze in atto e per dare la propria lettura del mondo che verrà. Un vero e proprio Festival dedicato alle tendenze, il primo in Italia: Indicativopresente, trendswatchers in festival.
Nove incontri con personaggi di fama internazionale nel settore della sociologia, dell’architettura, del marketing dei media e quant’altro, per raccontare le tendenze e le trasformazioni in atto.
Il programma completo si può leggere sul sito di uno degli enti organizzatori.
Per chi vorrà, parlerò della potenziale fine dei giornali,
sabato 22 novembre alle ore 15:00.
Categoria: General | Inserito da Emanuele Bevilacqua | Aggiungi commento
The Cleveland Museum of Art has agreed to hand over 13 ancient artifacts and an early Renaissance cross to Italy after long negotiations, the museum and Italian officials announced here on Wednesday.
The accord, signed at a news conference, is the fifth that Italy has struck over the last three years with an American museum in its campaign to win back artifacts that it asserts were looted in recent decades from Italian soil.
The processional cross, dating from around 1350, was not excavated but apparently was kept at a church near Siena, Italy, until the 1970s. The museum purchased it in 1977 from a German dealer, Cleveland officials said.
As part of the pact the Italian Culture Ministry plans to lend objects of similar value to the Cleveland institution and cooperate on exhibitions and cultural exchanges.
Yet not all has been resolved. A committee will be set up to discuss two other objects in Cleveland: a first-century chariot attachment depicting a Winged Victory with a cornucopia, and a renowned fourth-century B.C. bronze statue of Apollo slaying a lizard, which the museum attributes to the classical Greek sculptor Praxiteles.
The museum bought the statue in 2004 from a Swiss gallery that belongs to Hicham and Ali Aboutaam. Experts said it has puzzling gaps in its ownership history. Last year the Louvre in Paris withdrew a request to borrow the statue for an exhibition on Praxiteles after the Greek government said it was fished out of international waters and belonged to Italy.
“Let’s just say the Greeks put the organizers in Paris in a rough place,” said Timothy Rub, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Forensic tests would be carried out on the statue, he said, “to see what they can tell us about its origins.”
The panel will report on the other artifacts in Cleveland in six months, officials said.
For the most part the objects claimed from the Cleveland museum — including a fourth-century B.C. Apulian volute krater by the so-called Darius Painter and a ninth-to-sixth-century B.C. bronze of a warrior from Sardinia — were acquired in the 1970s and 1980s. Several were donations.
Mr. Rub said the museum acted in good faith when it acquired the pieces, but when presented with evidence of problems, it resolved to “honor our obligation to acquire in a manner that is ethical and transparent” and returned the works “to their rightful owner.” The 14 objects are to be shipped to Italy within three months.
Categoria: General | Inserito da Emanuele Bevilacqua | Aggiungi commento
These little volumes, mirror images in several ways, make exquisite companions for the armchair traveler who dreams in the languages of literature and art. Each book is a love letter to an ancient Italian city by the sea: Venice, on Italy's upper thigh, and Naples, about two thirds of the way down its shin. Both are also billets doux to the marriages of their authors, each couple containing one biographer (Anka Muhlstein, Francis Steegmuller) and one novelist who worked for years in a nonliterary profession (Louis Begley, a lawyer, and Shirley Hazzard, a staffer for a decade at the United Nations). In both books, the authors write about a place they know well from having lived there intermittently over decades, with, in each case, New York as their other home.
Finally, each book is a compilation of previously published and newly minted writing. Venice for Lovers is built around a lecture about the way the city figures in the fiction of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Begley himself. Begley delivered this piece in 2002 at a benefit for Save Venice, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the city's architectural treasures. Muhlstein contributed a personal essay that focuses on the couple's friends among the city's restaurateurs, which permits her a discussion of the devastating flood in 1966. Begley added a new short story, set in Venice, about the romance of frustrated lust, and the couple collaborated on a preface that explains the circumstances in which the book came to be. Both writers are exemplars of the windowpane school of prose: We are able to visualize their subjects as soon as we take in their sentences.
The Ancient Shore - less gregarious and yet more comforting, oddly, in its long-range views and aristocratic reserve - collects several impeccably constructed essays (first published in U.S. magazines and newspapers) about the history, architecture, geography and volcanoes of Naples. Hazzard's elegant and ruminative prose is offset by Steegmuller's muscular account of being brutally mugged in the Piazza San Francesco and of the humane medical treatment he received in two rather impoverished Neapolitan hospitals. The page-turning tension of his storytelling serves as a reminder that Steegmuller, who died in 1994, was a devotee of Flaubert and also published several detective novels under the pseudonym David Keith. One or two small, new essays and a handful of magisterial photographs of Naples - by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Herbert List, Bruno Barbey and David Alan Harvey - complete the volume.
These books enlarge the imagination while they satisfy the hunger to learn about a place: how it feels to walk its streets and encounter its people, how its buildings from different eras look in the light at various hours, how memories and book learning can affect the way one perceives a tower or alleyway. By temperament, I incline toward the understated appreciations of art and people I find in The Ancient Shore, although many readers will take delight in the life and energy, as well as the connoisseurship and - here and there - disdain that pepper Venice for Lovers. And I'm probably alone in questioning a point that Begley makes about Proust: that the first lesson to be learned when one character obsessively torments and manipulates another out of jealousy, resulting in the severance of the pair, is that "the extinction of love is tragically simple: we change as time passes."
Sometimes, it can be salutary to distance oneself from the dark sides of the great masters and seek lightheartedness in the living, as when Muhlstein describes two exhausted men after the '66 flood roasting bass the tide had washed up and proclaiming it the best they had ever tasted. Or when Hazzard writes that "those of us who first came to Italy in the 1950s were more than lucky: we were blessed... We were surprised by pleasure... The impressions that poured over us in those years and our own readiness to be pleased can never be mocked or repudiated." Such passages, simple as they are, constitute the unalloyed traces of love.
Categoria: General | Inserito da Emanuele Bevilacqua | Aggiungi commento
Carla Bruni risks European split with attack on Berlusconi for suntan 'joke.
Why François becomes Mohammed The pop singer-wife of President Sarkozy courted controversy today by criticising Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, for his remarks on Barack Obama, and denouncing France for systemic racial discrimination.
Italian-born Carla Bruni, 40, a former super-model and icon of leftwing chic, created a stir with her outspoken support for a petition in favour of affirmative action in France in the wake of Mr Obama’s presidential victory. She singled out Mr Berlusconi's joke on Friday in which he remarked that Mr Obama had an admirable suntan.
“
When I hear Silvio Berlusconi ... joke about the fact that Obama is ’always tanned’, that makes me feel funny,” she told le Journal du Dimanche newspaper. “That will be put down to humour. But often, I am very happy that I have become French,” she said.
Source: timesonline.com
Categoria: General | Inserito da Emanuele Bevilacqua | Aggiungi commento
Suggested dvd: Bill Viola: The passing
Silent Mountain, 2001
If one had the time, it would take more than seven hours to sit through (well, stand, through) all the video installations by Bill Viola that are now on show at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni until Jan.6. “Interior Visions,” which brings together works from 1995-2007, is the first major retrospective of the American artist in the capital (not to mention Italy) so there might be an audience out there willing to try the full-immersion experience. It’s certainly worth it.
It’s hard to convey the Bill Viola experience: The suspended sense of time and place, the out of worldlinessness of it. Suffice it to say that in a city whose excitable residents seem to be in a hurry most of the time, I watched Romans actually stand still for a spell so that they could absorb the works. That’s practically unheard of. At the show’s inauguration, curator Kira Perov, who happens to be Viola’s wife and long-time collaborator, said the underlying theme of the exhibit, not to mention his work, was “a spiritual journey devoted to those in search of themselves; a visualization of the mysteries of life.” The show does encourage serious navel-gazing.
Viola is the quintessential video artist, a perfect product/expression of this time. But if you’ve had a chance to visit Italy’s churches and museums you might be struck, as I was, by the extent to which Viola’s art is firmly rooted within art historical tradition while seamlessly blending past and future. “The Greeting” (1995) was inspired by Pontormo’s Visitation, which is in the church of San Michele in Carmignano, near Prato; the striking “Emergence” (2002) was inspired by Masolino’s Pieta; “Catherine’s Room” (2001) was based on a 14th century predella by Andrea di Bartolo with scenes from the life of St. Catherine. Viola spent 18 months living in Florence in the 1970s, where he worked as technical director of production for one of the first video art studios in Europe, Art/Tapes/22. The show also includes recent pieces like “Ocean Without a Shore,” which he created for the 2007 Venice Biennale. The excellent website has video clips of some of the pieces.
Source: Elisabetta Povoledo in Exhibits, Rome, General
Categoria: General | Inserito da Emanuele Bevilacqua | Aggiungi commento
The way we are.
"MOSCOW -- Italy's famously impolitic Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi described U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday as "young, handsome and even tanned."
Berlusconi appeared to be joking about America's first black president at a news conference following talks with Russia's president.
The Italian leader, who has a history of controversial remarks, was asked by a reporter about the prospect for U.S.-Russian relations, which have plummeted to Cold War-levels in recent months.
Berlusconi responded by saying that the relative youth of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, 43, and Obama, 47, should make it easier for Moscow and Washington to work together.
Then, smiling and speaking in Italian, he said through a translator: "I told the president that (Obama) has everything needed in order to reach deals with him: he's young, handsome and even tanned."
Medvedev did not visibly react to the comment.
Italian news agencies said Berlusconi later defended the remark, calling it "a great compliment."
"Why are they taking it as something negative? ... If they have the vice of not having a sense of humor, worse for them," the ANSA news agency quoted him as saying.
Later, Berlusconi told Sky TV-24 Ore the remark was meant to be "cute" and he lashed out at those who disagreed, calling them "imbeciles, of which there are too many."
Berlusconi, 72, is infamous for eyebrow-raising comments.
He once compared a German lawmaker to a Nazi camp guard, asserted after the Sept. 11 terror attacks that Western civilization was superior to Islam and claimed more recently that the new Spanish government had too many women.
Italy's only black lawmaker, Jean-Leonard Touadi, called Thursday's comment embarrassing.
"In the United States, a joke like that wouldn't just be politically incorrect, but a great offense to this amazing example of integration, which it seems the Italian premier should take as an example," Touadi said."
Source: Washingtonpost.com
Categoria: General | Inserito da Emanuele Bevilacqua | Aggiungi commento
This is Italy (2)
"A boom in the illegal marriages is a byproduct of voluminous immigration by Muslims. Authorities largely ignore the unions, leaving the women in a murky world with no recourse when things go wrong.
Few miles from the Vatican, Najat Hadi kept house with her husband, his other wife and their assorted children, an unhappy home with a hateful woman 10 years her junior and a cruel spouse who left her with a jagged scar peeking from her collar. Finally, she says, her Egyptian-born husband, who worked in Rome making pizzas, beat her so badly that she left him. But he kept her children. Thousands of polygamous marriages like Hadi's have sprung up throughout Italy as a byproduct of a fast-paced and voluminous immigration by Muslims to this Roman Catholic country.
Despite the obvious culture clash, Italian authorities largely turn a blind eye, leaving women in a murky semi-clandestine world with few rights and no recourse when things go especially badly, as they did in Hadi's case.
"It is absurd that in a civilized country like Italy, so little is acknowledged about this," said Souad Sbai, a Moroccan-born Italian lawmaker who has emerged as a one-woman champion of female Muslim immigrants here.
Italy is one of several European nations faced with the issue of polygamy. In Britain and Spain, where large Muslim communities have also settled, some officials favor recognizing polygamous marriage as a way to ensure the wives' access to pensions, medical care and other state benefits.
But Sbai, who has lived 27 of her 47 years in Italy, thinks that misguided attempts at cultural sensitivity backfire when customs that stray into illegality are tolerated. Italian law sanctions marriage between a single man and a single woman only.
Sbai estimates that there are 14,000 polygamous families in Italy; others put the number even higher. Many take advantage of the so-called
orfi marriage, a less formal union performed by an imam, that does not carry the same social or legal standing as regular marriage.
She is convinced that the polygamists in Italy are practicing a more fundamentalist and abusive form of multiple marriage. Because they feel so threatened by the Western culture around them, the men often imprison their wives and confine them to a life of solitude wholly dependent on the husband.
"They are kept in a kind of ghetto," Sbai said.
When Sbai recently created a hotline for Muslim immigrant women, she was inundated with 1,000 calls in the first three months. To her astonishment, she had tapped into a hidden community of women desperate for information, many trapped in violent, polygamous households, isolated and lonely.
Hadi, a Moroccan, had endured beatings and humiliation because she felt she had nowhere to turn. She said she met and married her husband in 1987 in Italy, where she was visiting on holiday. They had a religious ceremony at a local mosque and a legal wedding at the Egyptian Embassy in Rome. Over the next decade, she gave birth to four children.
Then, one day in 2000, Hadi returned from a vacation in Egypt, where she had taken the children to spend time with her husband's family. In her Rome apartment was a new woman. Her husband had married again while she was gone.
"I returned and found her in my house," Hadi, 46, said. Hadi said she at first challenged her husband but then decided there was little she could do.
"He said, 'I've married this woman.' I wanted to know why. I told him to send her away. He refused. But where could I go with four children?" She tried to accommodate the other woman, an Egyptian whom Hadi describes as full of hatred.
"I tried to accept her, for the children," Hadi said. "But she wasn't a woman with a brain."
Her husband's beatings got worse, landing Hadi repeatedly in the hospital. The pale scar on her chest is a remnant of the time she says he took after her with a knife.
Then, about a year and a half ago, he turned on the children. And that was when she decided she had to go. From other Moroccan women, she learned of Sbai's center and prepared to file a criminal complaint against him. But he seized the children and fled to Egypt. Hadi has not been able to move authorities to help her regain custody.
Sbai, the politician, remembers polygamy from her childhood in Morocco. There, at least officially, the husband could marry no more women than he could adequately and justly care for. Here in Italy, she says, polygamy is often distorted. The immigrant experience is turned on its head: regression and isolation instead of integration.
Of the hundreds of women Sbai hears from, most are Moroccans and illiterate, at a much higher percentage rate than in Morocco. That also tends to isolate them, a condition compounded by mistrust of Italian authorities and fear of the unknown. Aliza Kalisa, 50, joined her Moroccan husband in Italy in 2001. They had been married for many years, but when she arrived in Rome, she found he had used his time here to take on a second wife.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she recalled asking him.
"I needed a woman here, and you were in Morocco," he responded.
Kalisa was devastated. She lived with her husband, his other wife and the woman's two children in a one-room apartment, where she was forced to sleep on the floor and listen as her husband and the younger woman had sex. He treated her badly, flaunting the second wife like a prize and forcing Kalisa to do the housework and care for the children -- the second wife's children.
He forced her to fork over all her earnings as a maid in an Italian family's home. He beat her. Kalisa thinks the other wife delighted in the abuse she suffered; the woman peppered Kalisa with taunts that she was the favorite.
"I had been his wife such a long time," Kalisa said. "Then I was like the servant."
When, at the end of her rope, she threatened to leave, her husband locked her in the apartment for 10 days. Eventually her screams prompted an Italian neighbor to call the police, and Kalisa was able to leave. At Sbai's center, Kalisa is learning to write her name for the first time.
Zora, a Moroccan who has lived in Italy for 27 years, met and married an Egyptian in Rome in 1989. Though he swore he was single, it turned out he had another wife back in Egypt. Zora (who asked that her last name not be published) learned of the marriage when a grown son from that union showed up at her Rome apartment.
"I was speechless," said Zora, who is 52 but looks 35.
Zora began to suspect that her husband's son was molesting her son, who was 6 at the time. The boy was bruised and terrified to be left alone with his older half-sibling. She, in turn, was terrified to say anything to her husband. When Zora confirmed that the abuse was taking place, her anger overcame her fear. She grabbed her son and fled.
Sbai, the politician, helps women such as Zora get or keep jobs, however low-paying, and begin to navigate the basics of Italian legal red tape. Zora, for example, is trying to have her son's name removed from her husband's passport and added to hers to prevent him from taking the boy and leaving the country. The women are also receiving elemental education and are given access to a psychologist, though counseling has been slow-going because most are reluctant to discuss their ordeals.
"We are not at the point of integration yet," said the psychologist, Lucia Basile. After what they have been through, "we first need to teach them that they have dignity and that they exist."
Hadi, for one, has taken up that cause. As she campaigns for the return of her children, she has joined Sbai's office, works the emergency hotline and is reaching out to other Moroccan and immigrant women to inform them of their rights and opportunities.
"It's always the women," she said, "who pay the price.".
Categoria: General | Inserito da Emanuele Bevilacqua | Aggiungi commento
This is Italy.
"Students and teachers took to the streets of Italy for the third consecutive day to protest reforms and cutbacks by the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi".
Source: NYTIMES:COM
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"Good morning mr obama. make your day"
Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.
The election of Mr. Obama amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country.
But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history,
a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.
Mr. Obama, 47, a first-term senator from Illinois, defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, 72, a former prisoner of war who was making his second bid for the presidency.
To the very end, Mr. McCain’s campaign was eclipsed by an opponent who was nothing short of a phenomenon, drawing huge crowds epitomized by the tens of thousands of people who turned out to hear Mr. Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago.
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The presidential campaign sure has been
a long, strange trip full of lots of highs and lows. It's almost hard to fathom that just months ago most Americans had never even heard the name “Sarah Palin.”
And Palin is hardly the only overnight phenom to emerge from this race to the White House.
The cast of characters includes Gayle Quinnell, a.k.a. "crazy McCain lady"; Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the Plumber; and many more.
In this retrospective, we take a look back at some of the best speeches, worst gaffes and biggest shockers of this election season.
Source:
Los Angeles Times
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