Electoral laws tend to fall into main categories: majority or proportional. Distinguishing between the two is relatively easy. Majority systems are characterized by one college for each and every parliamentary seat to be assigned. The political party that gets one vote more than the other parties competing for the same seat in any given election wins that seat. In proportional systems, seats are assigned subject … Continue reading How Italy’s Giorgia Meloni Beat The System

Italians come in all shapes and sizes. From north to south, they are as varied as the Country is long. Technically, Italy is a Parliamentary Democracy with a President serving as the Head of State and a “primus inter pares” (Prime) Minister acting as the Head of Government. Parliament elects the President for a term of seven years. In turn, the President appoints the Head … Continue reading Giorgia Meloni Wins By A Landslide Despite Proportionalism

With the sudden collapse of the Draghi Administration, President Mattarella disbanded Italy’s Parliament of about one thousand MPs and called general elections to be held on September 25, less than one month away. Immediately, Antifas began calling on Italians to beware of the ever-present fascist threat to Italian democracy. Lurking in the open are their targets: Giorgia Meloni, a middle-aged Mother that hopes to turn … Continue reading Italy, A Land Forever Haunted By The Ghost of Mussolini?

Almost one thousand kilometers long, the Italian Peninsula and off-shore islands are of invaluable strategic and economic importance to the EU and NATO. One of the World’s most fertile alluvial plains fans out from Piedmont to the Veneto and, in a southeastward direction, follows the Apennines all the way to Bologna and the foothills of Romagna along the Adriatic. Within this vast bowl lies the … Continue reading Italy, A Military Power in Need of Leadership!

Italians are nice and their food is exceptional. They also have a National Health System second only to that of France, which is no small achievement. After that, well… Other than the NHS nothing else works as well. Not the legal system, perennially being tweaked. (I should know I studied Law here. Obsolete when I was a young student, imagine today, after decades of treading … Continue reading Think Twice Before Moving To Italy!

A view of the Valley from Monte Calvario in The High Apennines of Modena on a cloudy afternoon Continue reading hello

This year has been a rough one for me health-wise. January ended with me in the hospital after an ultrasound scan revealed a 9-cm-wide aneurysm to the aorta in my lower abdomen. A young doctor noticed the problem while checking my lymph nodes for traces of a recent melanoma. My lymph nodes were clean. But Doctor Giovanni Della Casa of the FKT Outpatient Clinic in … Continue reading What a Way to Start 2021

On or about three months ago two Italian fishing boats and their crews were high-jacked while in international waters of the Mediterranean Sea by armed militias of one of the most unpredictable dictators in the Arab World. General Haftar, who rules over the eastern half of what was once Libya, ordered the two fishing boats commandeered and forced to dock in a Cyrenaican port, their … Continue reading Why does Italy often act as a junior partner of NATO rather than the senior partner and major naval power that it is?

My Dad would often say that whenever I would leave the room or the house. It was his way of reminding me “to watch my back”. Good advice, especially in Italy, where if you are not careful the authorities will literally take the shirt off of your back in taxes. In this land of unreconciled conflicts of interest and unfair competition (mostly by State Monopolies … Continue reading DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU IN THE ASS!

At 11:37 am on the morning of August 14, 2018, a 200 meter stretch of Genoa’s “Morandi Bridge” suddenly bottomed-out dumping dozens of cars and trucks into the Polcevera river hundreds of feet below. When the smoke had cleared away the death toll stood at 43, making it the worse “automotive” disaster in the City’s history. My relationship with Genoa and the Ligurians, dates from … Continue reading A Tribute to ‘Zena’ on the Inauguration of the New San Giorgio Bridge in Genoa

Continue reading Rapallo and Santa Margherita