giovedì 15 maggio 2008

Panarea (written last August)




There’s a full moon over Panarea tonight

Constellations of mast-top lanterns mirror the same starts above

That guided Phoenician sailors, ancient astronomers,

Summer seducers and vacationing dreamers

Tonight music, voices and the ripple of waves float up to my patio

from catamarans and velieri swaying in the sepia sea below

Dattilo, Basiluzzo, pipe-smoking Stromboli and proud, isolated trees

sit like cut-out shado in a motionless diorama

Above a dandruff of fades starts watch over sugar cube villas

climb up from the coast like a tropical candy crèche




mercoledì 14 maggio 2008

Italian’s Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face

(from today's New York Times, I've heard similar, documented stories, and believe me, even if it's only a few thousand, it's really bad for America's image in Europe and for it's tourism industry, especially now that the Euro is so strong. There is no excuse for there not being any quick reviewal service, safeguards or swift administrative punishment for immigration staff who abuse their broad powers. read the rest of the New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14visa.html?th&emc=th . Unlike the immigration officials who made the mistakes and then punished the Italian for trying to contact his embassy to see his girlfriend, I love my country.)

Italian’s Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: May 14, 2008
He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.
Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
Mr. Salerno’s case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States — problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors

.......

Ms. Cooper said that at the airport, when she begged to know what was happening to Mr. Salerno, an agent told her, “You know, he should try spending a little more time in his own country.”
Another agent eventually told her to go home because Mr. Salerno was being detained as an asylum-seeker.
“The border patrol officer said to my face that Domenico said he would be killed if he went back to Italy,” she recalled, voicing incredulity that, in his halting English, he could express such a thought. “Also, who on earth would ever seek asylum from Italy?”
Twelve hours later, when Mr. Salerno was granted a five-minute phone call, he called Ms. Cooper and denied saying anything of the kind. Instead, he said, the asylum story seemed to be retaliation for his insisting on speaking to his embassy.
After being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was taken to the Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, Va., where he ended up in a barracks with 75 other men, including asylum-seekers who told him they had been waiting a year.

..........

(It is also totally absurd that anyone sane would ask for asylum from Italy in the US. Whoever invented that should be fired, or at least required to spend their next vacation doing volenteer work in Italy at their own expense.)

martedì 13 maggio 2008

The Leopard

Change for black or the same old leopard?

Much attention has been given to the press about Italy's political tide to the right. Not only was Silvio Berlusconi's coalition sent to power with a landslide, the Center-left's candidate old job - Mayor of Rome - was won by Alemanno who was an activist in the ex-fascist party in Mr. Berlusconi's coalition.

In a parallel to the way Washington Repubblican's media-attacks on Hollywood, the new mayor has alread publicly announced that left wing actors like George Clooney will be much less welcome at Rome's film festival. (He later partially backtracked on the statement, and commentators did point out that the City does not control the festival outright, nominating only one member of the Board)

So Italy is swinging heavily to the right and those of us living her are in for a major period of change.
Or are we?

It is common currency here that Italy is, as the Sicilain novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa put it in "The Leopard", like a Leopard: it may have different spots but it is always a leopard.

(The movie was later brought to the silver screen by Luchino Visconti with Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon - a must see for movie buffs).

In other words, the City of Rome passes from an ex-communist (Veltroni) to an ex-fascist (Alemanno) and no one is running to the hills (yet). Heads are rolling in town hall but that's the old spoils system at work.

Only time will tell if the has changed into anther beast, or just its spots.