ROME - While football attendance numbers dwindle, Italian interest in Rugby Union is going from strength to strength. A year on from the national side's move to the 70,000-seater Stadio Olimpico, spirits have never been higher. But one Italian daily has warned that the consequences of this "rugby-mania" could be disastrous.
JAMES WALSTON
ROME - On Sunday evening the lights on the Colosseum were turned off as part of Rome’s contribution to the Day of Memory. For almost 20 years now, turning off the lights has been the city’s gesture against injustice. Initially it was part of the campaign against the death penalty and in recent years, the scope has widened.
30 Jan 2013
INSIDER NEWSDESK
ROME – On Sunday night Brendan Lynch, 26, prop for Rome’s Capitolina and employee at the FAO, was killed in a motorbike accident on the Roman ring road.
Lynch, who had started his career playing for Rotherham in South Yorks, was headed home after a match against Florence on Sunday, when he fell from his motorbike. The exact causes of the accident are unknown. Wet and dark conditions made the road dangerous, and witnesses have reported seeing the motorbike “squeezed between lorries”. He died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.
29 Jan 2013
Laura Simmons
ROME - “In so many ways Mussolini did well, but instating the racial laws was his worst mistake” declared Silvio Berlusconi on Holocaust Remembrance day. “Italy doesn't have the same responsibility that Germany has,” he continued, “but there was a complicity which at the start wasn't completely well-informed”.
28 Jan 2013
Angus Campbel
ROME -- It was grey and cloudy as we picked our way down the gangway of our flight from Sicily to Rome, feeling the urge to turn on the lights that grips Romans landing in London from il bel paese. We were flying up to clear our Roman flat in the centro storico to accommodate our son and his family, victims both of the world’s economic backthrust and the short-sighted knee-reactions of global commercial enterprises to inadequate Government solutions.
22 Jan 2013
Laura Simmons
FLORENCE - During a large part of the middle ages, the gold coin of Florence, the Florin, was the major European currency. Made of gold and bearing both the city’s coat of arms, the fleur-de-lis, and a fantastic representation of St John the Baptist in a hairy coat, it was made in banks across Europe and accepted in many places of trade for large transactions (a Florin was roughly equivalent to 200 dollars today).
21 Jan 2013
Desmond O'Grady
ROME - Cullen Murphy sees the Inquisition not as a remnant of an obscurantist era happily left behind but as harbinger of surveillance States which pry ever more insistently into peoples’ lives.
19 Jan 2013
MARCO ZOPPAS
ROME -In 1978 when Aldo Moro, former Italian Prime Minister, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, the prisoner’s voice desperately cried out to be heard -- nobody listened.
14 Jan 2013
MARCO ZOPPAS
ROME -- Whoever said wine and Japanese food don’t go together should try a new initiative of sushi aperitifs with Prosecco at Rokko Restaurant in Passeggiata di Ripetta, 15 in Rome. You’ll be delighted to find out what a perfect combination it can be.
14 Jan 2013