Publication: La Stampa

08.12.11 Publication: La Stampa

Sadly, one good day will not save the euro, and neither will pious promises to behave better in the future. For sure, Italy´s austerity plan and the...

13.11.11 Publication: La Stampa

Watching Italy during the past few years has been like watching a slow-motion car crash. Or perhaps a better, more English analogy would be to compare il Bel...

02.11.11 Publication: La Stampa

What is credibility? In one of his films, Groucho Marx might have said that credibility, alongside integrity, is essential in life, and if you can fake that,...

05.10.11 Publication: La Stampa

Having spent most of September in Perugia, I know that it usually feels delightfully isolated from the outside world, except of course that it is full of...

05.10.11 Publication: La Stampa

Having spent most of September in Perugia, I know that it usually feels delightfully isolated from the outside world, except of course that it is full of...

10.08.11 Publication: La Stampa

He won’t think this very often, but as he returned home early from his Italian holiday to take charge of the emergency, the British prime minister, David...

05.08.11 Publication: La Stampa

The turmoil in financial markets is almost enough to make you agree with the President of the Council: Italy looks like the victim of this crisis, not its...

20.07.11 Publication: La Stampa

British scandals, it should now be abundantly clear, work quite differently from Italian ones. In Italy, scandals start with a seemingly huge revelation and...

10.07.11 Publication: La Stampa

During the past two years of writing and talking a lot about Italy, whenever I have said something critical about weaknesses in the Italian economy, almost...

07.07.11 Publication: La Stampa

British journalists can often be annoyingly arrogant and self-important, even while they pretend to disparage themselves as being even less popular than...

07.07.11 Publication: La Stampa

British journalists can often be annoyingly arrogant and self-important, even while they pretend to disparage themselves as being even less popular than...

28.06.11 Publication: La Stampa

In Britain a strange silence, or at least a strange calm, is about to be broken. It has been strange because we have a weak economy, high unemployment and...

10.06.11 Publication: La Stampa

If anyone had told me, ten years ago, that in 2011 I would be writing regular editorials for an Italian newspaper and would have published a book about Italy,...

30.05.11 Publication: La Stampa

We crave simplicity, or at least simple explanations. As Barack Obama made his triumphal, political-celebrity-in-chief tour of Europe last week, many wanted to...

14.05.11 Publication: La Stampa

No sooner do you think you have puzzled out how the Chinese economy works, than it changes, dramatically. That is what happens when an economy grows its GDP by...

14.05.11 Publication: La Stampa

No sooner do you think you have puzzled out how the Chinese economy works, than it changes, dramatically. That is what happens when an economy grows its GDP by...

24.04.11 Publication: La Stampa

It is quite normal to expect politicians to say half-truths or even lies: in this, Italy is not unique, even if it is fairly exceptional in the ability of its...

24.04.11 Publication: La Stampa

It is quite normal to expect politicians to say half-truths or even lies: in this, Italy is not unique, even if it is fairly exceptional in the ability of its...

09.04.11 Publication: La Stampa

It is cherry-blossom season in Tokyo, a time when traditionally the nation celebrates the ephemeral, transitory nature of life, symbolised for centuries in...

01.04.11 Publication: La Stampa

It was pleasing to see Antonio Vigni’s elegant reply (“Tre verita’ sull’Italia”) to my provocative article about “bugie”. His truths do, however,...

13.03.11 Publication: La Stampa

If you have ever wondered why Japan has so few old buildings, or why the most famous Japanese woodblock print, by the artist Hokusai, is of a big wave, or even...

28.02.11 Publication: La Stampa

The resistance of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to accepting either the moral or the practical logic of his situation, holed up in Tripoli and with more than half of...

30.01.11 Publication: La Stampa

A few days ago, a TV interviewer asked me what I thought an alien from another planet, an extra-terrestrial, might think about Italian politics if they were...

18.01.11 Publication: La Stampa

Everyone, it seems, accepts that there is a “G2”, or Group of Two, at the forefront of world affairs except the two countries participating in it: the...