Another endorsement for Italy Today

Written by well known specialists and young researchers from Italy or outside, this book is dedicated to Contemporary Italy, considered as the sick man of Europe. All the aspects of its decline are studied in an interdisciplinary approach.
Marc Lazar, Sciences Po, Paris.

Italy Today at NYU

Italy Today: Politics, Economy, Society
November 20 2009, 6:oo pm
Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, New York University

24 West 12th Street, NYC

A panel discussion with:

Claudio Gatti (Il Sole 24 Ore)
Matthew Kaminski (Wall Street Journal)
Raoul Minetti (Michigan State University)
Giuseppe A. Veltri (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Seville, Spain)

Introduced by:
Gianluca Galletto (i-italy, iMille)


On the occasion of the publication of:

Italy Today. The Sick Man of Europe
(Routledge, 2010)

Edited by Andrea Mammone, Giuseppe A. Veltri


Gianluca Galletto is a former finance executive, a contributor to I-Italy and iMille.
Claudio Gatti, journalist of Il Sole-24 Ore in New York, is a contributor of the New York Times.
Matthew Kaminski is a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, and previously,from 2004-08, was the editorial page editor of the paper's European edition, based in Paris.
Raoul Minetti is Associate Professor of Economics at Michigan State University and contributor of the book “Italy Today, a sick man of Europe”
Giuseppe A. Veltri is Scientific Fellow at European Commission and Co-Editor (with A. Mammone) of “Italy Today, a sick man of Europe”.

Review of Italy Today

Faced with the attention-seeking antics of Silvio Berlusconi and his political allies, increasingly the temptation is not to treat Italy seriously. The great achievement of the contributors to this excellent volume is to reach behind the façade of political posturing to show that Italy does matter, because the failure of Italy’s political system to come up with solutions to the chronic problems facing the country today poses questions that are relevant to all advanced democracies. Italy today, but where next?

John Davis, University of Connecticut

Ciao Alda

In memory of Alda Merini

Interview to Nadia Urbinati

Today, you can find on the Italian magazine 'L'Espresso' an interesting interview to Nadia Urbinati of the Columbia University about the moral status of the Democratic Party (PD) in Italy.
There some interesting parts, in particular those on the status of the 'Mezzogiorno'.

The text is in Italian and can be found here. (But Google translate might do the trick)

How the book was born

There is one remarkable thing about Italy Today: it's really the outcome of one of the phenomena described in the book.

I met Andrea when we were both kids, in remote village in Calabria. We both had one of our parents coming from there and therefore it was common to spend some summer time in this village. However, we were not living far, in two different cities not far from there.

We lost contact during college years for quite some time to randomly meet during summer when both would spend some time in Calabria. Then I moved to London and he moved to Leeds, we were both in UK but none of us were aware of that. Thanks to our parents, we discovered our common emigration in UK and started a contact. I don't remember actually how.

A couple of years after, during we were both busy in our PhDs, we had a chance to seldom met during summers for a pizza or a dinner to discuss of our experience in UK and chat about Italian Affairs.
Discussing about Italy, we were deeply shocked of what was happening in our country. Having the particular perspective given by being expatriates, we amazed of the lack of discussing that affected many of the country's problems.
The political discourse was the routinely flow of insults and superficial slogans expressed by an immutable political class. We were worried.
Every meeting was the occasion of heated political discussions. Berlusconi was in full swing and future looked gloom. International newspapers and magazines started to have interested in the Italian crisis.
Living away, we felt powerless. As PhD student, the only tool at our disposal was academic work.
It all started having the opportunity of being guest editors for a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. We dedicated much time in trying to have a holistic view of the Italian crisis. We were convinced that Italy was living a structural crisis in which many unsolved old issues were become chronic and entwined with new problems of Italian society.
It was not only Berlusconi. Italy's problems were much deeper and profound.

About the book

This volume represents one of the most comprehensive analyses of contemporary Italy. It is a provocative and an innovative collection of essays that aims to highlight the current 'crisis' of the country through an analysis of several different 'dark shadows' of contemporary Italian society.

From the new emerging mafias to the predicaments of the political system, from the ongoing presence of Fascism to the failed reconciliation of the years of terrorism, from the missed opportunity of the EU funding to the increasing regional economic gap: these are only a few of the critical issues that affect the country of la dolce vita and that have been here analyzed in an unprecedented effort. Italy already had a long history of 'unsolved' issues, several chronic problems and contradictions that have been ignored for a very long time, during which they have assumed dramatic proportions and gravity. The peninsula has henceforth become the 'Sick Man of Europe', a country facing a veritable decline also caused by apparent incapacity and difficulties of the ruling economic, political and social elites.

Welcome to Italy Today: the sick man of Europe Blog ! !

Work in progress