#6 Al Bar
A mayor out of prison and straight to dinner with Vannacci, a beach reality show that stops the country, and the sale of the house that was Berlusconi's Versailles.
Al Bar, every Thursday at 6 PM Italian time. If you’re far from Italy — or have never lived inside it — this is the way back in: the country as it actually is this week. The week the way Italians argue about it at the counter, in six short rounds in the rhythm of an aperitivo. What people are debating, who said what to whom, the verdicts being handed down over a drink. Ten minutes, and for a few of them you’re standing at the bar with the rest of us. The price of a coffee a week.
It’s Thursday, six o’clock, and the country is cooking. We’re inside the longest heatwave in years — the meteorologists named the African anticyclone “Caronte,” Charon, the one who ferries you across to the underworld, which tells you how we feel about it. Seventeen cities on red alert today, a man dead in a field in the Lodigiano, courtrooms in Palermo shut until Monday. And in the middle of all that: a former mayor of Rome walked out of prison and announced his dinner plans, a reality show about cheating couples opened to the usual national audience, and the house that was the throne room of Berlusconi’s Italy got sold to the royal family of Qatar. Pull up a stool — six rounds, ten minutes, the week the way we actually argue about it. Salute.
Una Coca Zero
Gianni Alemanno — former mayor of Rome, former minister, a man who came up through the post-fascist right — walked out of prison this week. And the first thing he did was give the press his evening: “Meloni has done nothing about overcrowding in the prisons. Tonight I’m having dinner with Vannacci.”
Two sentences, and the whole Italian right is in them. A man who has just served time turns his release into a political act — a jab at the prime minister over the state of the prisons, which are genuinely past breaking point, and a public embrace of Roberto Vannacci, the general-turned-politician who is currently the most disruptive name in Meloni’s own coalition. The grievance and the alliance, announced in the same breath, on the courthouse steps.
In Italy nobody leaves the stage. They exit through one door and book a table at the restaurant next to it.
Una birra
Here’s a small story that explains something larger. Raffaele Giuliani is twenty-three, has hundreds of thousands of followers, and over the last year has become the closest thing the Italian left has to a star — a fixture on the talk shows, the self-described “social divulgatore” with the Che Guevara shirt, the curls, the round glasses, the long earnest videos against capitalism and in support of the pro-Palestinian boycott of brands tied to Israel.
