Stabilicum Eve: Taranto Strikes While Rome Counts Votes

Italy Today

• Update: the “reserved judgment” is over, and Taranto just found out what it means in practice. Milan’s Court of Appeal confirmed on September 11 that ex-Ilva’s hot area must shut by October 28, rejecting Acciaierie d’Italia’s suspension request outright — and today the indotto supply-chain firms resumed the collective layoff procedures they’d only paused two weeks ago. Roughly 2,500 contractor jobs are on the line again. Fiom, Fim, Uilm and Usb answered with a 24-hour strike and a highway blockade, and Fiom’s Francesco Brigati wants the government to block the dismissals and extend asbestos-linked pension protections to supply-chain workers who never got them.

• Rome’s new electoral law gets its verdict tomorrow, not today. The Senate resumes debate today on the “Stabilicum,” with the final vote and statements scheduled for 10 a.m. Tuesday, September 15, after 696 amendments were filed and the bill went to the floor senza mandato — without its own rapporteur’s binding endorsement. The centrodestra held together on September 10 to beat back an opposition push on preference voting, but the 42% majority-bonus threshold survives intact. If it passes, the bill moves to the Chamber for a third reading starting September 28.

• The diesel discount is now on its third short leash. What began as a cut expiring September 5 has been extended twice more — first to September 10, now to September 17, holding the 17-cent-per-liter excise discount in place for one more week rather than the broader October relief the government had floated. Gasoline still gets nothing.

Brooklyn Dispatch

• Update: San Gennaro’s 100th finally starts showing up on the calendar, not just the press release. The Feast opens Thursday, September 17, and runs eleven days through the 27th, with Solemn High Mass and a procession at the Shrine Church of the Most Precious Blood on the saint’s actual feast day, September 19. The centennial adds a Napoli Expo concert closing out the weekend of the 26th — Naples sending its own gift back across the Atlantic to the neighborhood that’s kept its saint’s name on Mulberry Street for a hundred years.

  Unverified

  Event listings disagree on which date carries the festival’s largest “Grand Procession” — some name September 19, others September 26 — and could not be corroborated against each other.

Arts & Culture

• Venice handed its top prize to a film nobody had circled, and its acting prize to a guy who plays a dad. May el-Toukhy’s Danish Woman Unknown took the Leone d’Oro, while Riccardo Scamarcio won the Orizzonti prize for best actor in I figli della scimmia and dedicated it, fittingly, “to all the fathers of the world, and to mine.”

• Serie A closes out matchday four tonight with the game everyone’s actually been waiting for. Inter hosts Udinese at 8:45 p.m. after Sassuolo stunned Juventus 3-2 on Sunday and Milan came from behind to beat Lazio Saturday — four games in, and last year’s runners-up Napoli are already chasing Inter’s pace.

  Review

  “Milan came from behind to beat Lazio Saturday” — multiple sources confirm Lazio-Milan ended 2-2 (Milan came back from 2-0 down but did not win) — “beat” misstates the result — fix (e.g. “came from two goals down to draw with Lazio”).

Parola del Giorno

Parola: Stabilicum (proper noun, neologism) — the nickname for Italy’s pending electoral law, coined by fusing stabilità (“stability”) with the Latin -icum suffix that named past reforms like the Mattarellum and Porcellum. This week: the bill gets its make-or-break Senate vote Tuesday. Usage: “Lo Stabilicum arriva in Aula senza mandato, ma con l’obiettivo dichiarato di dare stabilità a chi governa.”

Takeaway