Word: severgnini
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Twenty-three years ago, Beppe Severgnini was a small-time writer at a local daily in his hometown, Crema. For most people, it's a town of 33,000 folded away in the hills outside the Milan metropolis. For him, he says, it's "my everything." So when he was tapped for a job at Milan's Il Giornale, a leading national paper, Severgnini humbly [an error occurred while processing this directive] declined. He left journalism altogether to study law - his father's trade. A few months later, he came to his senses. Il Giornale's editor Indro Montanelli took...
...Severgnini's book is a bit like a lawyer's defense against a long line of pessimists. Luigi Barzini, a foreign correspondent and prolific writer, in perhaps the most authoritative of Italian portraits, described a country resigned to a downward spiral in his classic book, The Italians. Barzini paints his people as peddlers of "ruses to defeat boredom and discipline, to forget disgrace and misfortune, to lull man's angst to sleep and comfort him in his solitude." Severgnini uses much finer brushstrokes in his interpretation of Italians' shortcomings, which borders on praise. In Crema, where he's still based...