I ended up writing quite a long comment on a site I frequent about places to see in Italy, and it occurred to me that I don’t often write much about that here. To tell the truth, part of the reason is that I think I could write a book about it, there’s so much…

This was part and parcel of their plans to rework things, so it’s not unexpected. One thing I didn’t mention in the previous article, is that trading of Alitalia shares has been suspended since June, meaning small time investors who perhaps bought shares thinking that Berlusconi was going to turn it around will probably be…

The latest Alitalia news: A new company has been formed (“Compagnia Aerea Italiana”) which will be where investors put money to buy out the assets of the old “Alitalia”, which will be allowed to fail under a bankruptcy law that the government will craft just for the occasion. In reality, the company will be divvied…

Ferragosto, August 15th, is the D-Day of vacation season in Italy, the day when everyone who is in any way mobile gets out of the big cities and heads to the mountains, the beaches… anywhere but home. The month of August is itself pretty much a writeoff in Italy, and the middle of August is…

I read an insightful book a while back, called The Paradox of Choice, which has a lot of relevance to people in our situation: we could basically move anywhere in the US or Europe – we’re lucky enough to be able to live anywhere in a relatively large portion of our world. Along with that…

The latest: Last week, Berlusconi announced that now there are talks with a “foreign firm”, about an “alliance”. Obviously there were no actual details, just the same vague declarations that have been forthcoming since last spring. Why anyone would want to partner with Alitalia is a good question… it would be sort of like dancing…

I spend a lot of time thinking about the differences between the cultures of the countries I’ve lived in, but once in a while, it’s fun to relax and enjoy one of the more puerile aspects of living abroad: laughing at inadvertently funny names. For instance, here in Innsbruck, and Austria: Mega Putz: http://www.voelser-wirtschaft.at/neues_archiv/neues_archiv5.htm#putz –…

Today’s news in the ongoing Alitalia saga: It appears as though it will be necessary to fire 5000 people from Alitalia, according to the Berlusconi plan, significantly more than the Air France plan called for. However, he said, the unions are pretty much faced with a “take it or leave it” offer – leave it…

One of my “guilty pleasures” in life is reading cowboy books by authors like Zane Gray and Louius L’Amour, about a fictional and romanticized “old west”, and I have to admit that it makes for nice daydreams. Where I grew up in the rainy, green, fertile Willamette valley of western Oregon isn’t really “the west”,…

Forget “The Sopranos”, the Alitalia saga is just as exciting, and despite seeming too strange to believe at times, isn’t fiction. Alitalia is Italy’s national airline, created in an era when everyone, even tiny Belgium, had their own airline. Today, it teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, as Italy’s politicians shovel wads of cash at…