The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, was isolated, the sole holdout to a landmark European Union fund for Ukraine worth billions. As pressure mounted on him on the eve of an emergency E.U. summit last week, he needed someone to talk to. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, who had long shared his antagonism to the […]
Read MoreTag: Berlusconi, Silvio
Italy’s Raucous Holiday Classics Are Not Your Standard Hallmark Movies
On a recent evening inside the Hotel de la Poste, an alpine hotel in Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy’s most ski-and-be-seen winter destination, a boisterous party celebrated the birth of a cinematic era. Forty years earlier, the libidinous, up-chalet down-chalet comedy “Christmas Holiday,” set in the lodge, was released. Nominally about a plain but lucky-in-adultery piano bar […]
Read MoreItaly Misses a #MeToo Moment in Prime Minister Meloni’s Breakup
Since Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, announced over social media last month that she was dumping her longtime boyfriend, Italians have hardly stopped talking about it. They have obsessed over the leaks of audio and video tapes revealing Andrea Giambruno, a television news anchor who is also the father of the prime minister’s […]
Read MoreItaly’s Giorgia Meloni Broke Up With Her Boyfriend, and It Matters
The leaked recordings, deeply embarrassing for the prime minister, were the last straw. Ms. Meloni reportedly read the whole operation as a conspiracy against her. Who was behind it? Marina Berlusconi — a 57-year-old businesswoman and the oldest child of Silvio Berlusconi, the four-time prime minister who died in June — was the obvious culprit. […]
Read MoreBerlusconi Bequeaths a Warehouse of Art Befitting the Man
As his political fortunes sank, his legal and love life tangled, and his age caught up with him, Silvio Berlusconi stayed up late in his mansion outside Milan calling the hotlines of late-night art shopping television channels. It didn’t really matter what the oil painting and antiques vendors hawked. Landscapes. Sculptures. Portraits. A fair share […]
Read MoreGiorgio Napolitano, Italian Post-Communist Pillar, Dies at 98
Giorgio Napolitano, modern Italy’s longest-serving president, who orchestrated the transfer of power from a scandal-scarred Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to a little-known economist in a 2011 debt crisis and turned his nation back from the brink of collapse, died on Friday in Rome. He was 98. His death, in a clinic, was announced by Italy’s […]
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