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An Italian psychiatrist is obtaining startling results with patients suffering from schizophrenia and depression by enlisting them in a competitive football team. Mauro Raffaeli trains his players, many of whom cannot work and are on psychiatric medication, twice a week on a pitch on the outskirts of Rome.
Of the 80 who have passed through the ranks since the team formed in 1993, over half have cut down their drug intake, but more importantly, more than half have returned to work. “Drugs you can often never get rid of, but reintegrating into society is as important,” he said.

Former accountant Luca Enei saw his life “go off the rails” when depression set in, but after signing up with Dr Raffaeli’s team he returned to work as a security guard, married and had four children.
Psychology graduate and schizophrenic Benedetto Quirino was pestered by voices in his head until he became a rightwinger for Dr Raffaeli. “When you run out on the pitch, the voices stop,” he said. “Your opponent is no longer inside you, he has come out and you can dribble round him and beat him.”

Since the team was formed, 50 other squads of mental patients have sprung up around Italy, but Dr Raffaeli’s charges remain the benchmark, winning the 2006 all-Italy tournament and are now in search of international fixtures.

The team’s exploits are also the subject of a documentary film, Mad about football, which focuses on players such as Sandro Faraoni, a former presidential bodyguard who bounced back from schizophrenia to become a stalwart defender and now a painter and poet.

“Mental health sufferers are often locked inside themselves, and football allows them to open up,” said film-maker Volfango di Biasi, who wants to de-stigmatise illnesses such as schizophrenia in the film.

Tom Kington - The Guardian

Since he graduated with an architecture degree in 2000, Antonio Incorvaia has held a dizzying number of jobs: graphic designer, television writer, Web editor and journalist for trade and pop culture magazines. At 31, he describes himself as a “serial trainee.”

Like many people of his generation, Incorvaia has had to struggle between the job-for-life mentality of postwar Italy and the realities of a labor market that no longer offers such guarantees.

Many of his overqualified 30-something friends, he said, are in the same boat, flitting from one short-term contract to another without ever being offered full-time employment. Adding insult to injury, he added, “Prospective employers ask you why you’ve changed jobs so often.”

Last December, Incorvaia and a friend, Alessandro Rimassa, made their frustrations public and wrote a novel, “The €1,000 Generation,” which is available, partly free, on the Internet at www.generazione1000.com The semi- autobiographical book about a group of young Italians living hand-to-mouth on a fluctuating income struck a chord: 24,000 downloads later, Incorvaia has a publishing contract and has sold the film rights. The idea, Incorvaia said in an interview, was “to highlight a situation that isn’t talked about - it involves millions of people, but no one takes notice.”

In Italy’s heated electoral campaign, politicians have not taken much notice either.

With Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his main challenger, Romano Prodi, lobbing insults and defending their records, the uncertainty of the labor market for Italians entering the work force has not been a key issue.

Despite the impact of job uncertainty on the lives of young Italians, and notwithstanding protests in France over labor reforms affecting youth, politicians in Italy have focused more on the country’s aging electorate. They are promising higher pensions and better health care, rather than taking positions on first-time employment or education.

“From the electoral point of view, older people are more interesting in a country with a low birthrate,” said Alessandro Cavalli, a professor of sociology at the University of Pavia. “But in the long term, of course,” he said, young people “are very important for the country.”

Population figures made public this week show that of Italy’s 58.4 million residents, more than half - 30.7 million - are older than 40.

The graying of Italy, said Tito Boeri, an economist at Milan’s Bocconi University, has the potential to create an “intergenerational conflict” in which young people are bound to lose. “But an economy that doesn’t invest in young people,” he said, “is bound to decline.”

Boeri pointed to issues affecting young people that candidates have glossed over during the campaign, like the question of Italy’s high public debt, which will translate into higher taxes for future generations.

At the same time, he said, the government’s labor laws have created a parallel labor market of entrance-level workers who move from contract to contract with little protection and intervening spells on unemployment. Poverty is increasing among these young workers, he said.

With no serious progress on pension reform for the last 10 years, Boeri argues, young Italians will have to pay higher taxes to receive lower pensions when they retire.

“They’re twice hurt,” Boeri said.

At the same time, Italy is attempting to reduce government expenditure by discouraging workers from taking early retirement, which means that younger workers must further postpone their entry into the workplace.

Job instability, experts agree, is a big reason why Italian young people are staying home longer and getting married and having children later than before.

“The pension crisis is slowing he process of generational renewal and there’s a real contradiction,” said Cavalli, who pointed out that in a country that “rewards seniority,” the average age of the political class was also high, making it difficult for young politicians to emerge. “At the same time no political group wants to assail the pension system in a country of pensioners.”

Berlusconi’s main campaign tactic has been to defend his government’s record. In a glossy publication sent to millions of Italian families this month, the prime minister cites labor reform as his government’s main achievement.

Experts say that the reform, which introduced greater flexibility, had the merit of opening up a stagnant labor market. But in Italy’s zero-growth economic climate, some worry that various innovative elements, like temporary contracts, are becoming permanent.

“You can’t eliminate these jobs, but lawmakers and unions should work together to ensure that these temporary jobs don’t go on forever,” said Carlo Dell’Aringa, a professor of political economy at Milan’s Catholic University. “If they stretch out, they turn into insecurity about the future.”

One corrective proposed by the center-left during the campaign would be to make it more onerous for employers to hire workers on temporary contract - an incentive to hire workers full time.

Simone Baldelli, who heads the youth movement of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, is also running for Parliament in the Marches region. In a telephone interview, he dismissed fears about job instability as “leftist propaganda and pessimism” and defended Berlusconi’s labor reforms as “opening new opportunities in Italy.”

He blamed past governments for today’s problems.

“We’re still paying the price of the promises made by the generation that came out of 1968 - promises of secure, well-paid and creative employment - that cannot be maintained,” Baldelli said. “That’s an unrealistic dream machine. The truth is that people want concrete proposals.”

In a fightback against the global spread of super-sized frappuccinos and iced cappuccinos, Italy has certified what it considers the classic cappuccino.
In a snub to the Starbucks-driven craze for loading gallons of hot frothy coffee-flavoured liquid into cardboard pots, Italy’s National Institute for Italian Espresso is defending the traditional squirt of steamed milk over a shot of espresso that is knocked back by millions of Italians every morning at zinc-topped bars up and down the country.

The newly certified milky coffee, weighing in at only 150 ml and served in a ceramic cup, was offered to MPs and ministers at a Christmas event sponsored by the Italian parliamentary culture commission.
The institute has already given a government-backed certification to the perfect espresso coffee and yesterday the organisation’s president, Marco Paladini, stood up for the beleaguered cappuccino, promising “to protect this important expression of our national gastronomic culture… A great success abroad, but not always made with adequate sensory quality”, the newspaper Il Giornale quoted him as saying.

More froth than liquid, the Italian cappuccino can be swallowed in seconds, and according to purists should leave a smear of milk on the inside of the cup. Stirring the beverage to mix the milk with the coffee that lurks in the bottom should not produce an overall brown colour, but streaks of coffee in the pure white foam. A white moustache is de rigueur after drinking.

According to many Italians, the light brown colour is similar to that of the robes worn by Italy’s Capuchin monks, hence the name, while others credit Capuchin monk Marco D’Aviano with the invention of the drink, after he discovered a sack of coffee captured from the Ottomans during the battle of Vienna in 1683. D’Aviano was beatified in 2003 for his missionary work and miraculous power of healing.

There is no debate over when a cappuccino is drunk. Italians line up every morning in bars before steaming, shiny coffee machines to gulp down their coffee, possibly returning for a another cappuccino after a late night. One allowed variant is the caffelatte, usually served in a tall glass, with extra milk added.

Only tourists take a cappuccino or caffelatte after lunch, as Italians believe the milk plays havoc with digestion.

Nescafé may be making inroads in Italy through advertising of its instant granules, but Starbucks and other global coffee chains have yet to set foot in the bel paese. And if they did, they might find their margins shrinking. An average cappuccino, drunk standing up at a bar in Rome, costs around 78 pence, an espresso 47 pence - although prices may rise by 100% if the drinker takes a seat and waits to be served.

Italians are very proud of their traditional coffee, and even have a National Institute for Italian Espresso. Use the following recipe to make your own perfect cup.

Ingredients
125ml milk, no warmer than 3-5C, containing a minimum of 3.2% protein and 3.5% fat
25ml shot of hot espresso coffee

Directions
Add coffee to a 150-160ml capacity ceramic cup
Froth milk with steam to a temperature of 55C, and add to cup
Add sugar and stir gently

Tom Kington - Guardian

Many examples remain of civil and residential architecture designed by the greatest specialists of the time on behalf of the Medici family which governed the city of Florence and most of Tuscany between the XV century and the first half of the XVIII century.
Quite a number of villas surrounded by splendid parks and gardens were built, and are today destinations of considerable monumental, artistic, cultural and historic importance.

The Medici Villa at Poggio a Caiano was built by Giuliano da Sangallo towards the end of the XV century over a villa that previously belonged to the Strozzi family. It belonged to Lorenzo the Magnificent and hosted illustrious royal personages including Vittorio Emanuele II. Its architecture is splendid, with a terraced ground-floor portico. A double-ramp staircase leads to the exquisite central loggia, inspired by classical motifs. Inside, it is a sort of little museum (outside sixteenth-century frescoes), while outside it is surrounded by a beautiful park.

In the vicinity of Comeana, “La Ferdinanda,” also known as Villa di Artimino was commissioned by Ferdinando I de’ Medici to Buontalenti towards the end of the XVI century.

The Medici Villa at Castello is a fine piece of Renaissance architecture, restored by Vasari and surrounded by a beautiful garden designed by Tribolo. The villa is headquarters of the Accademia della Crusca.

The Medici Villa of Petraia is among one of the most beautiful residences in the surroundings of Florence. It was transformed on a project by Buontalenti (second half of the XVI century), commissioned by Ferdinando I.
Not far from Fiesole is another Medici Villa also known as Belcanto or Palagio di Fiesole. It was built by Michelozzo (1458-1461) on order of Cosimo the Elder.

On the outskirts of Florence the Medici Villa of Careggi was purchased by the family during the first half of the XV century and restructured by Michelozzo for Cosimo the Elder. Surrounded by a splendid park, this residence was among the favourites of Cosimo who died there in 1464.

Another Medici Villa is located at Coltano, not far from Pisa, and is the Visitors Centre of the Migliarino-San Rossore-Massaciuccoli Natural Park. The Medicis commissioned Buontalenti to restructure it (1587) into a sort of hunting lodge.

TIME runs at a different pace in Otranto, where the brutal June heat shuts the town down for the entire afternoon, and memories cycle in centuries rather than hours. Perched in the Apulia region, on the southeastern point of Italy’s heel, Otranto is surrounded by a raw, arid landscape more redolent of Greece or Cyprus than of the rolling hills and vineyards of Northern Italy. The Adriatic, a peerless turquoise with a white sand bottom, feels thickly salted compared with the more gentle Mediterranean.

The remote, sometimes primitive southern coast is dotted with a rich array of architecture — from medieval to Byzantine to Baroque — reflecting the relentless waves of invaders that washed over the Salento peninsula. Its picture-postcard buildings range from Otranto’s castle, which resembles a child’s sand castle on a grand scale, to trulli, the humorous conical huts in the Itria valley, to the lacy filigree of Lecce, “the Florence of the South.”

Compared with the dark, labyrinthine palace evoked by Horace Walpole in his famous novella, “The Castle of Otranto,” the real thing is a benign, if hulking, presence, stuck on the edge of this city like a sturdy millenniums-old barnacle. The closest thing to a Gothic atmosphere is the turret used for falcons; a multitude of pigeons inhabit the castle, and the falcons and a falconer had been brought in to control the problem.

Sitting in one of the vaulted cells at the top of the castle, I paged through Walpole’s story. Watching the falconer put the birds through their bloodthirsty paces, it was easy to imagine the place as a full-fledged fortress, cannons blazing. Although the surrounding moat was bone dry, used these days for events like concerts, a cannon and catapults stand sentry in the courtyard, reminders of the town’s most vivid memory. In 1480, Otranto was attacked by the Turks, and 800 martyrs were decapitated during the slaughter, an event still constantly evoked, from the skulls on display in the crypt of the town’s cathedral to Martyrs Hill (also called Minerva Hill after an ancient temple), where the Sanctuary of St. Mary of the Martyrs memorializes the dead.

The cathedral is an amazing potpourri of the architecture that permeates the region. Its bell tower (which clangs crazily to mark the hours — ringing, say, 13 times at 7 p.m.) was built by the Normans. The otherwise plain facade boasts a Renaissance rose window. But it’s not until you get inside that you see its greatest treasure — a 12th-century mosaic floor beneath the 17th-century Moorish coffered ceiling.

Painstakingly created by a monk, Pantaleone, at the behest of the Archbishop Jonathan, the astonishingly detailed mosaic looks like the work of someone tripping on acid. The nearly 1,000-square-yard pictogram borrows its images from everything from pagan times to ancient Greek and Hindu mythology to the Old and New Testaments to medieval history. Using the Tree of Life as its central motif, it weaves a wildly chaotic chronological web ranging from creation to the fall of Adam and Eve. Here King Arthur and Alexander the Great share floor space with the Tower of Babel, elephants, dragons, hydra-headed beasts, griffins, unicorns, minotaurs, Norse gods and horned devils. The cathedral’s ornate crypt, columns and even the charming remnants of its early-Italian frescoes pale beside this nutty masterpiece.

Carlo Pisanelli, our guide, spoke an ornate broken English as he described the details of the floor. “The mosaic covers the history of man,” he said, pointing out some “bad angels,” as well as a “legendary, very dangerous cat living in Switzerland that King Arthur had to fight.” Like all of Otranto, the ancient merges seamlessly with the current, and the mosaic, rather than being off limits, is covered with chairs for the congregation.

During my two-week stay as member of a residency for artists and writers planned by the BAU Institute, a cultural organization, the cathedral was the scene of at least a dozen fancy weddings. It seemed that there was always a bridal limousine pulling up to the castle, or a glowing young couple posing in the ruined arches near a favorite lunch spot, Agli Angeli Ribelli, where even the simplest bruschetta with arugula, mozzarella and tomatoes was, thanks to the freshness of the ingredients, a feast.

From Piazza Basilica, it’s just a narrow, winding street away to Otranto’s main drag, Corso Garibaldi, which runs parallel to the sea. The street is a perfect example of Otranto’s weird coupling of the antique and the honky-tonk; think Provincetown if it were set in a Crusades-era stone village. The narrow street, which leads down to the tiny park with its carousel, is filled with tourists and lined with shop after shop hawking everything from beach garb to coral jewelry to gelato. Colorful scarves and skirts from India and Indonesia flutter in the breeze. Everywhere there are bars and restaurants specializing in the hearty Pugliese cuisine. And then there’s the harbor, with its cement boardwalk and stone quay, and the beaches. From dawn until past dusk, they are studded with swimmers and sunbathers.

In this part of the world, the ancient is omnipresent. Just outside the centro storico, or old city, about 10 minutes south of Piazza de Gasperi, is Torre Pinta, a bee-hive-shaped stone structure probably used as an ancient temple. A small group of us wandered through a field to enter the place, which contains a chamber that is illuminated by sunset. The cone’s interior is honeycombed with odd, recessed pigeonholes, possibly meant for candles or religious items. It felt eerie even in daylight.

ANOTHER evening we took a field trip to an extraordinarily numinous place, driving through haunted valleys where “the cats are not cats and the dogs are not dogs,” as the founder of the BAU Institute, Paola Iacucci, puts it. Deep in the olive groves near Minervino di Lecce, just about a half-hour’s drive from Otranto, are some of the mysterious stone mounds known as dolmen. These strange, carefully piled rock slabs were the sites of ancient rituals, including sacrifices.

The closest city to Otranto, about 45 minutes away, is Lecce, famed for its over-the-top Baroque architecture. Like Otranto (and for that matter, all of Italy) it shuts down between 1 and 5 in the afternoon, but in the evening the beautiful old city comes to life. The well-lit remains of a Roman amphitheater create a dramatic first impression.

The unique town square, the Piazza del Duomo, is gracefully asymmetrical, with a massive cathedral sandwiched between a five-story bell tower and the bishop’s palace. But it’s the 16th-century Basilica of Santa Croce that is truly jaw-dropping. With its extravagantly ornate facade entirely covered with beautifully carved cherubim and mythical beasts — from mermaids to wolves — it epitomizes the architecture known as Leccese Baroque, the diametric opposite of the dolmen hidden in the olive groves.

It is the dichotomies — the civilized juxtaposed with the pagan, the Eastern sensibility juxtaposed with the Western — that give Apulia its unique and unsettling flavor. In Galatina, for instance, a small inland town about halfway between Otranto and Lecce, there is the 14th-century church of St. Caterina d’Assandria, a Calvin Klein store and on the night of the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, June 29, the yearly ritual of the Pizzica Taranta.

Gathered in a circle, the men played accordions and slapped tambourines adorned with the image of a tarantula, while the women performed a frenzied dance originally intended to exorcise them of evil caused by the spider bite. The Cajun-sounding music was hypnotic as the dancers stalked each other, spider and prey, dangling weblike red scarves. (Freudians and feminists could have a field day deconstructing the origins of Tarantismo, which evolved as a way for the repressed peasant women to express their subconscious, dancing until they literally fell down in a hysterical trance.)

Otranto feels as though it’s in the middle of nowhere, and to a certain extent it is. But toward the end of my stay, a group of us explored several other Apulian towns: Ostuni, Martina Franca and Alberobello, all within an hour or two to the north. Our first stop was Ostuni, “the white city,” where we arrived at high noon. The stark, whitewashed town shimmered like a mirage in the sun. It was Sunday, and almost everything (including the cathedral) was closed, but we found relief from the heat at a delightful restaurant, Taverna della Gelosia.

About half an hour west of Ostuni is the Itria valley, dotted with the unique huts called trulli. Like mushrooms, they seem to sprout everywhere, with their signature cone-shaped cobbled roofs topped with white orbs. They are as funny as they are magical — one half expects to see hobbits or Snow White’s seven dwarves emerge from the low doorways.

When we returned to Otranto, the World Cup was on, and there was a video screen set up at the base of the park. But as soon as we stepped through the gates of the centro storico, we were once again plunged deep into the distant past.

PHOEBE HOBAN - NYT

Today the Abruzzo Apennines are home to wolves, eagles and bears, but millions of years ago the area was dominated by a very different predator.

An Italian biologist, Dr Paola Ottino, has discovered shark teeth in the Majella area of the Apennines that date back to the Miocene period - 23-5 million years ago.

“At that time the area was populated by sharks and all sorts of fish,” Ottino explained.

The teeth are part of evidence Ottino has compiled that show how Abruzzo was once home to a marine environment with a coral reef similar to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

“We have found fossil remains with typical elements of a sea bed, including molluscs and coral,” she continued.

“We have even unearthed the teeth of delta Crocodilian animals similar to today’s Gharial reptiles of the Ganges.

“This shows that in the Miocene era the area was covered by tropical seas that were not too deep and quite near to the coast”.

It is a scenario that present day visitors to the Majella national park will find difficult to imagine. Geological movements have since created peaks that climb over 2,700 metres above sea level.

Ottino said only the sharks’ teeth have survived because the rest of their skeletons were cartilaginous and decomposed.

But this has not presented any major problems for the researcher.

“It’s easy to imagine how the sharks would have lived and what they would have looked like,” she said.

“They are such perfect predators that they have hardly evolved since the Miocene period. So they would have been pretty similar to the sharks of today”. The Majella area is famous for its cluster of mountain peaks, over 30 of which are more than 2,000-meters high. The tallest is Mt Amaro, which at 2,793 metres is the second tallest in the Apennines.

The Majella national park spreads out over an area of 74,000 hectares split between the provinces of Pescara, L Aquila and Chieti.

The landscape is rich with rivers, waterfalls, fauna and flora, making it popular with trekking enthusiasts.

ANSA