Chi Ha Studiato Poco: Rome's Class Feud, and a Feast Season's Handoff to San Gennaro's Centennial

Italy Today

• Studiato poco, votato bene? Democratic Party president Stefano Bonaccini said last week that Italians who vote for the right — for Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini’s League — tend to be people who “have studied little” and are worse off economically; today Meloni fired back, accusing the left of treating right-wing voters as ignorant while insisting her government asks voters for no credentials, only offers them respect, and Bonaccini walked the line back, saying it was lifted out of a broader argument about building a more popular left.

• Update: the eighth extension turned out to be the last of its kind. Rome’s Council of Ministers settled what we flagged as pending Monday: the 17-cent diesel excise cut is extended through September 5, and after eight rounds since March, the government says what comes next is income-targeted support — sostegni selettivi sulla base del reddito — rather than a ninth blanket cut.

• The South is cooking, literally. Campania’s Civil Protection agency issued a heat alert running through Sunday as temperatures hit 41°C in Benevento and 35°C in Naples, and Naples’ Cardarelli hospital logged over 1,500 ER visits in a week — an average of 217 a day, mostly elderly patients — the kind of late-August heat that sent half of Bensonhurst’s grandparents packing for Brooklyn in the first place.

Brooklyn Dispatch

• One feast closes, a bigger one turns 100. As Bensonhurst’s Feast of Santa Rosalia builds toward Sunday’s grand procession on 18th Avenue, Manhattan is warming up for the main event of the season: the Feast of San Gennaro, which began as a one-day block party thrown by Neapolitan immigrants in 1926, marks its 100th year this September 17–27, with the Grand Procession set for September 26 — a full century of Mulberry Street outlasting every prediction that Little Italy would dissolve into Chinatown and NYU housing.

• Carroll Gardens keeps insisting “Italian food” isn’t one thing. Cremini’s on Court Street is still the only restaurant in the city built entirely around the cuisine of Le Marche — Italy’s Adriatic side, not Sicily or Campania — serving olive all’ascolana to a neighborhood whose cooking usually gets flattened into red-sauce shorthand.

Arts & Culture

• Five days to the Lido. The 83rd Mostra opens September 2 with Danny Boyle’s “Ink”, and the jury deciding who takes the Golden Lion this year answers to Maggie Gyllenhaal — last on the Lido in 2021 as the director of “The Lost Daughter,” her Elena Ferrante adaptation that won Venice’s best-screenplay prize — now grading twenty competing films instead of submitting one.

• Milan is already rehearsing for its September close-up. Fashion Week runs September 22–28, opening with Prada and closing with Armani on the 27th, with Moschino’s new creative duo debuting and Gucci returning to the calendar — proof that even in a country that shuts down every August, somebody in an atelier has clearly been working.

Parola del Giorno

Parola: scivolone (noun, m.) — a slip, a skid; a political gaffe. From scivolare, “to slide” or “to skid.” This week: Il Giornale’s headline branded Bonaccini’s “chi ha studiato poco” line “lo scivolone di Bonaccini” — a gaffe, literally, is a skid on ice you didn’t see coming. Usage: “Un altro scivolone per la sinistra.”

Takeaway