A Little More Italy

Twenty-five years ago, crankyjewishguy (CJG) took a trip to Italy. He loved it. Great food. Beautiful scenery. Friendly people with a real lust for life. If CJG could be reincarnated he'd come back as an Italian painter and live in Umbria in an ancient stone house with a view of the hills, the vineyards and the cypress trees.

Speaking of lust, readers will recall that CJG had a few comments several weeks back about Italy's current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who's in a bit of hot water for his alleged involvement with an underage girl (seventeen at the time). Now, a court in Milan has ordered that Berlusconi stand trial for sex crimes and for abuse of power for intervening on the young woman's behalf when she was arrested on an unrelated charge. With a record like that it's amazing Berlusconi isn't a member of the U.S. Congress, or maybe even President. But all this has really made CJG wish he (a) understood Italian and (b) had whatever cable channel is going to broadcast this trial. It's going to knock the Amanda Knox affair right off the front pages. (In case you missed the latest chapter in that saga, the parents of Amanda Knox, the American student convicted in Italy on sexual assault and murder charges, have been indicted in Perugia for allegedly libeling Italian police whom they accused of abusing their daughter while she was in custody.)

A typical party at the Berlusconi mansion.

If you ask CJG, Berlusconi doesn't have a chance. All three judges who will hear the case are women and will, CJG suspects, be less than favorably disposed towards a 74 year old man who was fiddling, and apparently even diddling, while Rome burned. It sounds as if Amanda Knox may have been the only young woman in Italy Berlusconi hasn't been linked to. Berlusconi, of course, sees all this as an assault on Italy's good reputation. The allegations, he says, "have offended the dignity of the country." Without prejudging the outcome of the case, CJG would say the Prime Minister has been doing a pretty good job of doing that all by himself.

A Shout Out to...

CJG is at a loss to explain it, but suddenly his blog is getting gazillions of hits from Germany, many more, in fact, than from his native USA, and as far as he knows no one is translating his brilliant musings into German. Why is this happening? Who are these people in Germany who find CJG so amusing? If you know the answer, please e-mail CJG! In the meantime, Ich danke Ihnen, Deutschland!