Does Italy like a good loser?

“As is customary in all Western democracy, and as I feel it is right to do, I called the leader of the People of Freedom, Silvio Berlusconi, to acknowledge his victory and wish him good luck in his job,” Veltroni told reporters, bowing to the inevitable, even if final results were hours away.

Berlusconi has never admitted losing the 2006 election which he blamed on fraud and Veltroni’s noble gesture seemed to be the latest effort to imitate his much-admired counterparts in the Anglo-Saxon world where ‘fair play’ is, in theory, considered a virtue.

“I can’t deny that I think the 2006 elections were
irregular. The result we achieved today is proof of that,”
Berlusconi said.

Barack Obama, from whom Veltroni copied his “Yes we can” slogan “Si puo’ fare”, will be hoping he does not to have to make a phone call similar to Veltroni’s any time soon.

Italy’s far-left alliance of Communists and Greens may not conjure up images of glitz and New York steaks, but leader Fausto Bertinotti has nevertheless picked the Hard Rock Cafe on Rome’s fashionable Via Veneto to wait out the tally of election results on Monday evening.  Conveniently located next to the American Embassy, the Hard Rock promises everything from hickory smoked chicken wings to mac & cheese to help ease the long wait ahead for the leader of the Rainbow Left coalition.

 Other candidates have chosen more traditional venues for the evening: the centre-right’s Silvio Berlusconi will be waiting it out at his villa in Arcore near Milan, while centre-left rival Walter Veltroni will be standing by at his party’s offices in Rome dubbed the “Loft”.

Far-right leader Daniela Santanche says she won’t stray far from her home in Milan, while Northern League leader Umberto Bossi and centrist leader Pier Ferdinando Casini will both be holed up at their respective party headquarters.

The judicial problems in Italy of former Justice Minister Clemente Mastella’s wife Sandra signaled the start of the political crisis that forced Italians back to the ballot box on Sunday and Monday, and she was back in the news over a ringing cellphone as she cast her vote.

Italy’s interior ministry has banned Italians from carrying cellphones or any device that can take pictures or videos into the voting booth, over fears of corruption. Sandra Mastella caused a minor stir when her cell phone started ringing while she voted in the southern town of Ceppaloni on Sunday, prompting electoral workers to call in the police. It turns out her cell phone did not double as a camera, meaning she was not violating the law.

“It was a banal distraction, I had it in my pocket,” Mastella said.

There were minor hiccups at other polling stations as well. In the northern town of Sant’Orsola, the head of a local polling station showed up drunk, prompting colleagues to call in the police. The chief was fined and a new, sober polling booth chairman was instated.

As Italians began trickling to the polls to vote in the general election on Sunday, some protested to show their disillusionment with politics.

Angry at plans to build a landfill site nearby, one group of young Neapolitans  gathered 600 election identification cards and sent them to the Italian president instead of using them to vote.

“I’m not going to vote because I don’t feel represented by the institutions and because there is no-one that worries about preserving our rights,” group member Sebastian Perrone told the Ansa news agency. 

Another angry Neapolitan took an even more novel approach: he ate his ballot form at the polling booth.

Finally, motorists on the A14 highway in Italy were greeted on Sunday morning by two large banners spray painted with the words : “Enough with politics, We want colonels!” They were quickly taken down by police.

A popular “anti-politics” movement led by figures like comedian Beppe Grillo has swept up about 6 to 8 percent of voters, estimates the pollster Luigi Crespi. He estimates the number of blank ballots will nearly triple to about 1 million during the April 13-14 election from about 400,000 in the last parliamentary election two years ago.

With her striking good looks and stiletto heels, Italy’s far-right candidate Daniela Santanche has been turning heads on the campaign trail. But is centre-right candidate Silvio Berlusconi also among her admirers? 

“Berlusconi? He’s obsessed with me. But I won’t give it to him…,” Santanche said during a campaign stop this week.

Berlusconi initially responded by saying he would not get into a debate with someone who comes from a world of “yachts, caviar and champagne.” But he was willing to play ball a day later. 

“Well! If she continues to come on to me….,” the media tycoon told reporters when they prodded him on Santanche’s comments again. 

Santanche and Berlusconi have been trading barbs throughout the election campaign, with the 47-year old businesswoman’s La Destra party expected to steal  votes on the right away from the 71-year old media tycoon looking to return to power for the third time.

Santanche — conscious of the small splash she has made by becoming one of the few women prime minister candidates in Italy – has reserved some of her sharpest rebukes for Berlusconi, urging Italian women not to vote for him and calling his views outdated and sexist.  

“Berlusconi better be careful, because on April 13-14, Italian women will be the ones to cook his goose,” Santanche told Reuters last week.

When I told my wife that I was going to meet porn star Milly D’Abbraccio at her apartment the other day, during office hours, with a camera crew, she had the same reaction that my boss did: sounds like a great story. That’s because D’Abbraccio is running for public office, just like Cicciolina did decades ago.

If Cicciolina was known for her impromptu striptease, then D’Abbraccio’s calling card must be her bottom — which she plastered on campaign posters gracing the walls of the Eternal City (see below). Her campaign poster complains that Italians are tired of the same old faces in politics, and uses the Italian swear word for backside to describe what their faces look like.

It’s hard to find the right balance as a journalist when interviewing a porn star for a political story. There was an uncomfortable moment when, cameras rolling, D’Abbraccio started listing her favourite films, which include ”Professoressa di lingue” or Professor of languages (and tongues). I admit, I had to fight very hard to stop from laughing out loud.

A long-time Reuters correspondent who has tossed questions at everyone from Hugo Chavez to Hamid Karzai, I’m used to being deadly serious. But was that same attitude necessary or even helpful in this interview? Did I need to nearly give myself a seizure to prevent myself from laughing? I’m assuming the name of that film was supposed to be amusing.

If you read the Reuters story, you’ll see that D’Abbraccio knows how to have fun when answering stale questions from “serious” correspondents. We’ll see if that skill is enough to get her elected to city hall.

Berlusconi says the new casual look he has adopted for this election was not dictated by a style advisor.

Instead the open-necked shirts are all about safety, he told Il Giornale daily.

“The enthusiasm of the crowd is overwhelming. They greet me like a rock star. You know why I decided to stop wearing a tie?

“Because one day I almost got hurt. The enthusiasm around me became so great that they accidentally grabbed me by the tie.”

After being dragged along by overly-affectionate supporters, Berlusconi decided: “I need to dress differently when I’m in the piazza, I need to be comfortable, like when I’m at home.”

The image conscious Berlusconi, who has admitted the odd nip-and-tuck and hair implants, makes his own style decisions, he says. “I obviously do not have an image consultant … I decide what I wear.”

Veltroni can sometimes be spotted on the campaign trail without a tie. He has yet to say whether that is for safety reasons or style.

The issue of tackling organised crime has not been especially prominent in the Italian election campaign but to ex-pat Italian residents of Duisburg in north-western Germany, it’s an emotive topic. The industrial city in the Ruhr valley made international headlines last summer when six Italians were gunned down outside a pizzeria in an apparent feud between members of the Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta.

On a recent trip to Duisburg, Reuters correspondent Iain Rogers visited the sight of the shootings.

A stone’s throw from the central station on the ground floor of an ugly tower block, the restaurant is now an empty shell. It’s dark inside and eerily quiet. The sign above the door set back from the busy road has been ripped down, wires hang from the ceiling and dust-covered chairs are strewn across the floor. Old menus and photographs of Italian dishes litter the area near the entrance. A couple of hundred metres down the road, Italian-born Renato Venier runs an ice cream cafe.

Venier, 41, hails from the north-eastern Italian town of Codroipo in the Friuli-Venezia Guilia region and has lived in Germany for 28 years. Sitting at a corner table, he reflects that organised crime is a big problem in Germany, which he blames on an influx of southern Italians.

He’s voting for Silvio Berlusconi in the election but he doesn’t believe either the conservative former prime minister or his rival on the left, Walter Veltroni, has what it takes to tackle organised crime.

“It operates above politics and the rule of law. There is too much money and power involved,” he says.

Both main candidates broached the mafia issue at the weekend, after 12 convicted mobsters were released from prison in Sicily because of a technicality ahead of an appeal. Berlusconi declared his political group “incompatible” with organised crime, while Veltroni spoke out against the mafia and an Italian justice system plagued by delays.

In Duisburg, Venier is unconvinced.

“As long as the same people are running the country there’ll never be a solution,” he says. “They don’t want to solve it as it suits them the way things are.”

It sounds like a joke headline, but it’s not.

The Italian election could be delayed because of a man called Giuseppe Pizza.

With less than two weeks until polling day, he succeeded in getting a court to overturn a decision to ban his Christian Democrat (DC) party from running. He had initially been banned from the election because the symbol of his tiny party - which appears on ballot papers - looked too similar to that of the larger Union of Christian Democrat (UDC) party.

The government hopes a higher court will overturn the appeal early next week. If it does not, the election could be delayed, Interior Minister Giuliano Amato has said. Both main contenders, Silvio Berlusconi and Walter Veltroni, want the vote to take place on schedule.

While the blip in proceedings has frustrated the main parties, it has injected a note of curiosity into what had been a strikingly dull campaign. And the fact the protagonist is named after Italy’s most famous food proved irresistible to journalists.

“Pizza’s Italy is a capricciosa (capricious one), poorly raised and badly baked — it lands on your stomach and stays there blocking everything,” said La Republicca, saying it was obligatory to play with the metaphor.

Il Messaggero punned on the word “bufala”, which is Italian for the best buffalo mozzarella used on pizza but is also slang for a blunder. It compared the electorally puny DC to an anchovy, whereas the mighty Christian Democratic party which dominated post-war Italy unill the early 1990s was known as the White Whale.

The only shame was that the Margherita party no longer exists. The centre-left party - whose name was meant to refer to a daisy rather than a cheese and tomato pizza - merged with an ally shortly before the election to produce the Democratic Party headed by Veltroni.

If you believe the latest poster from the Northern League, Italians face the same fate as Native Americans if they do not keep illegal immigration in check.

The poster, plastered across Milan, located in the northern heartland of this populist party, shows a picture a man wearing the traditional feathered headgear of a tribal chief.

“They also were subjected to immigration and now they live on reserves!” reads the text in bold black letters. “Think about it!”

Getting rid of illegal immigrants has long been a rallying cry for the party, which styles itself as the defender of northern Italy under siege by foreigners and Roman politicians.

Italy is not only a major transit point for thousands arriving by boat from around the world, but also a place offering hope of a better life for eastern Europeans including Albanians and Romanians.

The most vivid images are usually those of Africans arriving at one of Italy’s islands, suffering from thirst, hunger and overexposure.

The Northern League’s leader, Umberto Bossi (pictured below), has never been shy of expressing his contempt for immigrants.

A minister in former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government, he once described them as “bingo bongos” and on another occasion called on the coastguard to blow them out of the water whenever they drifted near Italy’s shores.

The appearance of Roma or gypsy camps on the outskirts of their cities has also raised concern among Italians about crime and other problems blamed on illegal immigration.

Nicoletta Maggi, a party spokeswoman who spoke of “savage immigration” sweeping across the country, told Reuters the poster should not be taken to the letter.

“The idea is conceptual rather than literal,” she said.

Maggi said Bossi borrowed the idea from a poster for the Lega Dei Ticinesi, a small Swiss party with a similar policy against illegal immigrants.

The issue has not been discussed much by candidates ahead of the April 13-14 election, however.

Immigration came in sixth on a list of voters’ concerns in a poll in left-leaning La Repubblica daily. The top three issues were all economic: raising salaries and pensions, controlling inflation and reducing tax.