Celebrating Community
The Odessa Journal is the major English-language newspaper in Southern Ukraine, founded in early 2020 by editor Ugo Poletti, an Italian entrepreneur whose aim, as stated on their website, is to cover “culture, economy and historical amenities in Odessa”, the biggest urban area and trading port across the Ukrainian seaside. But the war, with its overwhelming energy, has cast apart […]
It’s not an easy task to speak with someone belonging to a people oppressed like the Ukrainians are currently; you might expect to feel pity, shyness or horror. None of those feelings came to me when I spoke to Alla Pysana, an active member of the Ukrainian Community in Turin, Italy, which has organized many sit-ins and demonstrations for peace […]
France had been since the early 19th century a major occupying power in Africa. Its Empire ended mostly after WWII, but Paris has never totally left alone its former colonies and still exercises strong control on most of them through the International Organisation of La Francophonie. Not all the formerly occupied nations are in the organization and it is striking […]
As in much of the globalized world, the pandemic has become a battle not only of health, but politics as well. Italy has struggled with COVID for two years. The introduction of the Green Pass has marked a turning point in strategies adopted by the Government. In April 2021 the European Union created the Pass which is a certificate with […]
Italian linguistic scholars were caught off guard by a wave of criticism of the lack of a neutral form in Italian to call non-binary people, who feel discriminated because of it. While a solution to this has not been agreed upon, proposals include the usage of a schwa (a backwards ‘e’)or an asterisk to replace the ending vowel, which for […]
There are few things more Italian than the canals of Venice. They’re so rooted in the common consciousness that despite their relatively small area, they’re so representative of its appeal all around the world. The same appeal that back in 1948 moved Peggy Guggenheim, maybe the greatest art collector in the twentieth century, to buy a noble palace, Palazzo Venier […]
As Svetlana Tikhanovskaya was greeted last July 28th by POTUS in the White House, a new signal of support was granted by the US to the Belarussian opposition which is struggling against the country’s dictator Lukashenko. Despite this, her struggle seems not to have strong ties with the Belarussian territory itself, where the president Lukashenko is making scorched earth in […]
What’s nowadays mostly marking the return to the so-called normality in Europe after the outbreak is the UEFA European Football Championship, a tournament played every four years. The tournament was scheduled for last year, but…. That is why the championship is still called EURO2020 despite happening this year. The structure of the whole event sees 24 national teams competing match-by-match […]
Italy’s LGBT community is in turmoil because of a great controversy a would-be law is causing. The DDL Zan (DDL stands for decree) is a bill which would create new categories of crime based on sexual and gender discrimination, adding to the already existing hate crimes punished by the Italian state. Alessandro Zan, the signatory of the law and an […]
If there’s something that strikes foreigners coming to Europe more, that surely is the huge glazed royal palaces that span across the continent’s most remarkable cities. Turin, a remarkable west of Milan, lays its foundation in Savoia’s Royal Palace, a Baroque style building that housed the Savoia dynasty. The dynasty ruled from 1561, heading only a Duchy based mostly in […]