Parole Come Armi: Bologna's Third Night of Fakir Protests, and a Slur Reclaimed as Pride

Italy Today

• Update: the Fakir case hasn’t cooled off — it’s escalated. Two nights after clashes left officers injured near the prefecture, more than thirty civic and political associations published a joint appeal calling Abderrahim Fakir’s death a “very serious episode,” and a new assembly — “Verità e giustizia per Fakir” — fills Piazza del Nettuno tonight at 7 p.m., demanding the scudo protection clause be revoked outright rather than merely tested.
• Update: the Roggero family just split into two tracks. While his lawyers pursue the ordinary legal route — asking Milan’s surveillance court to defer his sentence — jeweler Mario Roggero’s wife separately appealed directly to Mattarella for “an act of clemency and humanity,” a plea our July 22 brief hadn’t caught: the courts and the Quirinale are now being petitioned in parallel.
• A linguist takes apart an insult and finds a compliment inside it. Accademia della Crusca member Michele Cortellazzo used Treccani to dissect Roberto Vannacci’s launch speech for his new party, arguing that calling his own base la feccia — “the scum” — is a deliberate rhetorical strategy, not an accident.

Brooklyn Dispatch

• Update: Bensonhurst finally has its dates. After our July 22 brief flagged them as unposted, organizers confirmed the Feast of Santa Rosalia will run Aug. 18–28 on 18th Avenue between 68th and 75th Streets — the 52nd consecutive year, one more than our July 22 brief had it, since 2025 was the 51st.

  Review

  “the 52nd consecutive year” — this is the brief’s own derived count, not a figure the cited Brooklyn Paper article states outright, making it a single-sourced numeric claim without a hedge — add unverified flag or attribute the year-count explicitly to prior reporting.

• Third Avenue gets its own night tonight. Bay Ridge’s first Summer Stroll of the season closes Third Avenue from 82nd Street to Marine Avenue from 6 to 10 p.m. — not an Italian-specific event, but a reminder that the avenue running through the neighborhood’s old bakeries and pork stores still knows how to fill a summer evening.

Arts & Culture

• Guardiola is thinking about it, and Italy is trying not to hold its breath. FIGC technical director Paolo Maldini flew to Barcelona to pitch Pep Guardiola not just the national team job but an entire “Progetto Azzurro” rebuild of Italian football’s youth pipeline; Guardiola has until Sunday to decide, and Antonio Conte is already the federation’s quiet fallback.

  Review

  “Guardiola has until Sunday to decide” — this is an extremely fast-moving story; a same-window report elsewhere is headlined “Guardiola declines the Italy job” — if that broke before this brief’s publication, the “still deciding” frame is already overtaken — verify timestamp before publishing as-is.

  Review

  “Antonio Conte is already the federation’s quiet fallback” — the underlying source frames this more narrowly as Serie A clubs pushing Conte, with Mancini publicly denying any contact with the federation, not as the FIGC’s own fallback plan — soften wording to reflect the actual sourcing.

• Venice sets its lineup, and two Hollywood veterans get the victory lap. The 83rd Mostra (Sept. 2–12) opens with Danny Boyle’s Ink and hands career Golden Lions to George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn, while five Italian films — including débuts from Anna Foglietta and Tommaso Landucci — compete for the top prize.

Parola del Giorno

Parola: feccia (noun, f.) — dregs, scum; from Vulgar Latin faex (the same root, oddly enough, as the English “feces”). This week it’s the word Roberto Vannacci chose to describe his own political base at the founding rally of his new party, Futuro Nazionale: “Siamo la feccia, i figli di nessuno, e fierissimi di esserlo” (“We are the scum, nobody’s children, and damn proud of it”). Per Crusca linguist Michele Cortellazzo’s analysis (see above), the move lifts a slur straight out of old anarchist and communist protest songs and repurposes it as a badge of belonging. Usage: “Vannacci ha trasformato un insulto nella sua bandiera.”

Takeaway