Posted on 04/25/2008 8:50:51 PM PDT by blam
Italy must be broken up, says Berlusconi's wife
By Malcolm Moore in Rome
Last Updated: 1:37am BST 26/04/2008
Silvio Berlusconi's wife added her voice yesterday to the growing calls for Italy to be partitioned.
In an interview with La Stampa, Veronica Lario, 51, said: "Italy has never been well-suited to being a single country, and has never matured enough to become one. There is no longer any value in a unified Italy."
Silvio Berlusconi with his wife. Cabinet posts may go to the Northern League, which wants independence from Italy’s South
Ms Lario, a former showgirl, married Italy's prime minister-elect 18 years ago after catching his eye on a television show. Since then, she has rarely courted publicity, but does run Il Foglio, an influential newspaper.
The prospect of a devolved Italy has grown significantly in recent weeks since the Northern League, a secessionist party, won strong support in the general election.
Umberto Bossi, its volcanic leader, has repeatedly threatened to "take up arms" against the "corrupt" politicians in Rome who divert the wealth of Italy's North to the impoverished South.
Ms Lario disclosed that she was a fan of Mr Bossi and added it was time for Italy to stop being "snobbish" about the League, whose politicians are frequently coarse and populist.
advertisement "This is a disillusioned country, even after Berlusconi's victory," she said. "The League expresses concrete demands from the most productive part of Italy, which is tired of dragging the rest of the country and does not find itself represented by the Left-wing."
Mr Berlusconi, who will find it difficult to maintain a majority in parliament without the League's support, is likely to make Mr Bossi a cabinet minister. He could also appoint Roberto Calderoli, Mr Bossi's second-in-command, as deputy prime minister.
In the past, Mr Calderoli has called for immigrants to be shot in their boats and for a national pork-eating day to defy Islam.
"If the people have voted for Mr Calderoli," said Ms Lario, "that gives him credibility".
Sicily was rich for a long time after the Moors. And during the Renaissance, for instance, northern Italy was at least as corrupt and violent as the South. The disparity has only emerged in the last few centuries. The notoriously corrupt, decadent and reactionary Bourbon regime of the 19th century is a more likely culprit than the ancient Muslim invaders.
Agreed. The Mezzogiorno (from where Clemenza’s maternal ancestors hail) has been nothing but a drain on the otherwise successful Italian economy. Billions have been wasted on “public works projects” which were nothing more than scams to enrich La Camorra. Most of the more industrious southerners left the region a long time ago, first for the Americas, then for Germany and France, and finally for Lombardy and other parts of the north. You will never find a more retched hive of scum and villainy than the region south of Rome.
My "Italian" ancestors are actually a mixture of Greeks, Saracens, Phoenecians, Lombards, Romans, and Spaniards.
Yonkers and Vernon were always dumpy, and their inhabitants looked down upon by the folks upcounty.
Again, Westchester has wealth, upstate has snow (and wine around the finger lakes), and not much else. The white sections of Buffalo are much more depressed than the Latino sections of Yonkers.
I hate illegal immigration, but lets not kid ourselves. It is upstate that has been going down the toilet for the past 30 years. When somebody in Schenectady or Watertown starts a billion dollar hedge fund, then well talk about the benefits upstate provides to those downstate.
Other than that, your post is spot on.
I like upstate, but it is basically the easternmost extension of the rust belt. I remember an article in the journal a few years back that said that the fastest growing jobs outside of health care (lots of aging pensioners in the upstate rust belt) were in the corrections industry.
Don't get me started on how those of us who live in NJ must use part of our property taxes to pay for other districts that are "disadvantaged" and "underperforming." Its the price we pay in place of bussing and district consolidation. Which brings up another point: while NJ has some of the best school districts in the nation, most of these districts are in affluent municipalities that do NOT have to accept students from "underperforming" districts. In other words, these are de facto private schools.
If ever they proposed consolidating the public school systems on the county level, the females of the haute bourgeoisie (many of whom vote Democrat) would be livid.
Hell, I prefer the Ecuadorians and Peruvians you see working on all the construction sites over there to the Albanians. At least the former speak a romance language.
Well, my own for instance.
And the better parts of Yonkers are somewhat wealthier than anything around Buffalo.
Maybe, if you are self-employed. But then where do your customers get the money to pay you?
My customers earn their money like anyone. Lawyers, doctors, yard cutters, assembly line workers, gas station owners, etc etc
The notion you are espousing that all wealth in America is big coporate is decidedly unconservative you know.
Corporations employ people and create business around them. More corporations, more wealth. In the end, most people - lawyers, doctors, assembly line workers, whatever - are commercially connected to, and frequently dependent on, larger institutions. Nothing political about that train of thought.
oh please...do you want limits on business sizes?
So is the USA. What is your point?
Bloodlines do not transmit culture. Traditions do.
Ummmm. Most Roman citizens under the Ceasars would fit that description and you can add gauls, celts, dalmatians and many others who were in turn Romanized. The idea that a Roman is a race (after the Latin tribes assimilated the Etruscans and southern Greeks) is absurd on it’s face. Italic peoples were never native to the penninsula and sea faring tribes moved around for centuries. Roman-ness was a multicultural idea as much as being an American is. In fact as far as the nation of Italy is concerned, it is divided into 20 provinces that are practically identical from the time of the Empire, and citizenship to Italians (as the Romans identified the people who lived there) was the first to be granted.
I thought you were part Samoan
Most countries are geographic expressions as borders tend to be natural and defensible, i.e. a river, a coastline or geographic barrier such as a mountain range. Or boundaries are defined by anti-bellum treaty. In any case ethnic consideration as a self evident claim for national boundaries are a modern phenom from the 19th century- see the Messestrict treaty which redraw Euro political boundaries. Nazi Germany used this argument to claim the Sudetanland, Austria and the coal regions of France.
And Alaska has how much in common as Florida? What is your point?
The north-south disparity is not exclusive to Italy. It was true in the US as well, until the TVA much of the south was dirt poor and without electricity or indoor plumbing or flouridated water.
Yonkers and Vernon were always dumpy
Excuse me but I grew up in affluent North Yonkers. Very beautiful. South Yonkers is dumpy.
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