Panchina Vuota: Italy's National Coach Search Collapses Twice in Four Days

Italy Today

• Diesel just missed the all-time record, and the government moved today. Self-service diesel hit €2.185/liter — the highest since March 2022, closing in on the €2.229 record set after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — pushing the Council of Ministers to convene at 5:30 p.m. today for an emergency “bridge” decree, with a second move on mobile excise taxes expected once July’s VAT numbers are in.

• Update: the Fakir case moved from Bologna’s piazze to its streets, and got worse. Days after our July 24 brief covered a scheduled assembly, roughly 2,000 marched through the Pilastro neighborhood Sunday night chanting “giustizia per Fakir.” The march turned violent — cars burned, 11 injured — and Mayor Matteo Lepore has since been assigned a police escort after threats.

  Review

  This appears to conflate two separate events: the July 26 Pilastro march (~2,000 people) is independently reported as peaceful, while the cars-burned/injuries described in the linked BolognaToday piece belong to an earlier, separate clash in Bologna’s city center around July 20 — suggested action: split into two correctly dated/located items, or correct this one to reflect the Pilastro march was peaceful.

• The government’s answer to street violence: lower the age minors are presumed to know right from wrong. The Cabinet approved the “ddl anti-maranza” on July 23, presuming anyone 14 or older understood the law when they broke it, rebuttable only by the defense. By today the alarm had reportedly reached the water, with boat robberies along the Liguria coast blamed on maranza crews.

  Unverified

  The “maranza at sea” framing comes from a single outlet (Il Tempo); treat as unconfirmed pending corroboration.

Brooklyn Dispatch

• Court Street keeps trading one Italian institution for another’s ghost. Caputo’s Bake Shop closed this spring after 124 years — not rent, not competition, but an Italian-made deck oven that failed beyond repair inside the building’s foundation. A few blocks over, the century-old Ferdinando’s Focacceria space reopened as Bar Ferdinando, the Cafe Spaghetti team’s Sicilian bar borrowing its predecessor’s name and panelle recipe, if not its walls.

• The Third Avenue strolls keep coming. Bay Ridge’s Summer Stroll, caught by our July 24 brief on opening night, returns Friday along 68th-to-82nd Street — the second of four nights through mid-August.

Arts & Culture

• The federation picked a coach, then had to un-pick him — twice in four days. Guardiola turned down the Nazionale job on July 24 (“onorato, ma non me la sento”), so Paolo Maldini pivoted fast: by the weekend Andrea Pirlo had a four-year deal all but signed. Then it collapsed again this morning — Pirlo’s paid ambassador role for Russian betting company Fonbet set off a firestorm hours before Tuesday’s federal council vote, and Maldini and Leonardo are reportedly weighing resignation rather than inherit a coach they didn’t pick.

• Rome remembers when it dressed the world. “Moda in Luce 1955–1975” opened June 26 at the Centrale Montemartini, tracing the two decades when Rome’s ateliers and Cinecittà built the “Made in Italy” myth together — 150 photographs, archival film, and 27 original garments from the Archivio Luce, on view through Nov. 15.

Parola del Giorno

Parola: maranza (noun, m./f.) — a young person running in loud street crews, flashy streetwear, quick temper; disputed etymology. The Crusca’s favored theory traces it to a southern dialect word for “eggplant,” though rival theories (a blend of “marocchino” and “zanza,” or a corruption of “tamarro”) compete for the title. Treccani only made it official in 2025, despite a first recorded use in a 1988 Jovanotti song. This week it’s the word behind a bill lowering the presumed age of criminal responsibility — proof a slang word can outlive its street cred and land in a penal-code footnote. Usage: “Il ddl anti-maranza fa discutere anche i linguisti.”

Takeaway