Girandola: Rome Celebrates Its Patron Saints While Meloni Eyes an Early Election

Italy Today

• Buona festa, Roma: Today is the Feast of Santi Pietro e Paolo — a public holiday exclusive to Rome, while the rest of Italy goes to work. The morning opens at St. Peter’s with the papal mass and the conferral of the pallium on new Metropolitan Archbishops. Tonight: the Girandola fireworks rise over the Pincio, above Piazza del Popolo, in a ritual that dates to the Renaissance. Milan and Turin: at their desks. Rome: not.

• Meloni eyes the exit — from the right: Bloomberg reported June 23 that Meloni is weighing elections as early as April — driven by falling approval ratings and the budget-calendar problem of a late-2027 election. The pressure is partly internal: General Roberto Vannacci’s Futuro Nazionale formally launched as a party in mid-June, has drawn eight parliamentary defectors from her own coalition, and polls at 4–5% — potentially decisive in a closely matched race. Meloni’s coalition is fraying from its own flank.

• Missing in a volcanic lake: Search teams from Rome, Naples, and Florence worked through the night using underwater drones and sonar in Lake Vico — a volcanic crater lake north of Rome — for Luigi Cavallari, 84, husband of Family Minister Eugenia Roccella. He dived from a boat on Saturday afternoon, surfaced briefly to say he felt unwell, and did not resurface. The lake’s volcanic waters drop to near-zero visibility below 1.5 meters. No body recovered as of Monday morning.

Brooklyn Dispatch

• Italian New York on public TV: NYC Media, the city’s official broadcaster, selected NYU Casa Italiana’s web series Nuova New York for Immigrant Heritage Month in June. The series excavates the city’s Italian-American palimpsest through landmarks left in plain sight — the first Italian-American statue in the city, an East Harlem bank, a surviving housewares shop in Little Italy. History that was always there; just needed someone to point.

• Ten days out: il Giglio: The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s Giglio celebration opens July 8 on Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg — same address since 1903. The Dancing of the Giglio is July 12: a 4-ton obelisk lifted through the street on the shoulders of 120 men called the paranza. It’s the oldest Italian-American feast in New York City and the most singular physical event in Brooklyn every summer. Start carbo-loading.

Arts & Culture

• Update — Spoleto, Week 2: The Festival dei Due Mondi continues through July 12, entering its second weekend. Yannick Nézet-Séguin makes his festival debut this week conducting the London Symphony Orchestra alongside pianist Beatrice Rana — the headline concert of a program that opened with Barber’s Vanessa under the Radici theme. More roots to unearth before it closes.

• Venice sets its jury: The 83rd Venice Film Festival (September 2–12) has named Maggie Gyllenhaal as jury president; the full lineup drops July 23. Early rumored contenders include films from Werner Herzog and Martin McDonagh. Venice is where Italian cinema makes its biggest international case — and Italy’s audiovisual sector, up 9% in revenues to €16.3 billion in 2024, arrives at the Lido in noticeably better financial health.

Parola del Giorno

Parola: girandola (noun, f.) — pinwheel, spinning top; also the name of Rome’s ancient civic fireworks display. From girare (to spin), from Latin gyrare, from Greek gyros (circle — same root as gyroscope, gyro, and anything else that turns on itself). The Girandola over Pincio tonight is a ceremony Berlioz heard and wrote home to Paris about, that Goethe watched from the hill. A word that names both a child’s pinwheel and a Renaissance imperial spectacle: this is Italian efficiency.

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