In Tono Minore: The Venice Biennale Retires Its Golden Lions

Italy Today

• Brussels, June 18-19: Meloni enters this week’s European Council summit with explicit red lines: Italy’s share of the EU’s next Multiannual Financial Framework — cohesion funds and agricultural subsidies are non-negotiable — plus the Rome-Tirana migration returns model she has been marketing as a continental template all year. She has already called the budget talks “extremely difficult,” and that’s before the room fills.

• The secession frame: The ongoing battle against autonomia differenziata — the reform that would grant northern regions greater fiscal and legislative independence from Rome — keeps circulating under the opposition label “secessione dei ricchi”: the argument that wealthy northern regions retaining their own tax revenues means less redistribution to the south, where the deficit in schools and hospitals already runs deepest.

Brooklyn Dispatch

• Aperitivo aperto: Italian Aperitif Week runs through June 21 — ten venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn presenting Prosecco DOC-centered cocktails created for the occasion, with the Consorzio di Tutela Prosecco DOC headlining and labels including Mionetto, Villa Sandi, and Masottina. L’aperitivo as a social practice is the hour before dinner, glass in hand, nowhere specific to be. The drink is just the pretext.

• Bar Madonna, Williamsburg: A new Southern Italian arrival is narrowing the gap between Bay Ridge’s red-sauce institutions and the L train with Neapolitan pizza, fried bucatini, fritto misto, and wine on tap. The name is a little heretical. The food is reportedly not.

Arts & Culture

• Il leone è silenzioso: The 61st Venice Biennale Arte — “In Minor Keys,” running through November 22 — is proceeding without its Golden or Silver Lions for the first time in the modern prize’s history. In April the international jury resigned under pressure after announcing it would not award prizes to nations with ICC-charged leaders; the administration replaced them with “Visitor Lions” — a public vote — but eighty artists and pavilions declined to participate even in that. The prize survived two world wars. It did not survive the Gaza conflict.

• In fiore: For Corpus Domini weekend (June 20-21), the Umbrian hill town of Spello carpets its medieval streets in overnight flower-petal paintings — artists work through the night to compose intricate images from petals and seeds across the cobblestones. The flowers are gone by afternoon; the photographs outlast them by years.

Parola del Giorno

Week 3 — Language Spotlight: three phrases from this week’s Italian news

Parola: tono minore (noun phrase, m.) — minor key; from tono (tone, pitch; Greek tónos) + minore (minor, lesser; Latin minor). In music, in tono minore signals a darker, more introspective register — the opposite of in tono maggiore. Curator Koyo Kouoh chose it as the conceptual frame for the 61st Biennale Arte: art from the margins, speaking quietly, without demanding center stage. Irony: the “quiet” edition produced the institution’s loudest crisis in living memory. Suonava in tono minore; non era per niente silenziosa. (In a minor key — but far from quiet.)

Parola: forestierismo (noun, m.) — loanword, foreign borrowing; from forestiero (outsider; ultimately from fuori, outside). What the Accademia della Crusca and Treccani call imported words — smart working, governance, welfare, now AI (officially IA in Italian, for intelligenza artificiale, though speakers use both). The debate has run since French words flooded the language in the 18th century. The outcome is always the same: Italian absorbs the winners. Il forestierismo non è un’invasione; è una negoziazione. (A loanword isn’t an invasion; it’s a negotiation.)

Parola: secessione dei ricchi (noun phrase, f.) — secession of the wealthy; from secessione (Latin secessio, withdrawal) + dei ricchi (of the wealthy). The left’s sharpest rhetorical weapon against autonomia differenziata — the charge that fiscal autonomy for prosperous northern regions drains redistribution southward, reviving the questione meridionale that has shadowed Italian politics since unification. A phrase that invokes a wound, not just a policy.

Takeaway