Italy to Verdi: Drop Dead

This story, like all things having to do with the farce that is contemporary Italian “civilization,” may be nothing more than aria fritta (“fried air”), but Il fatto quotidiano reported on 24 July that the Italian national government would not invest a single Euro in the 2013 Verdi bicentennial celebrations.

Not one Euro for Giuseppe Verdi. Two years before the bicentennial of his birth, it seems that opera’s great Maestro is condemned to remain associated only with those thousand-lira banknotes on which his nineteenth-century pudding-face appeared. Berlusconi’s government, in fact, will not finance the manifestations in celebration of Verdi’s bicentennial in 2013. Giancarlo Galan, the cultural minister, has cancelled the bill, calling it along with the group leaders of the VII Commissione Cultura, in an informal meeting, a “tip” law favoring a handful of territories to the detriment of others. And to think that Galan himself had promised Parma a national committee, made up of prominent personalities, to organize celebrations “comparable to those for the 150th anniversary of Italian unity.”

More depressing still is the allegation that local funding for the celebrations is in danger because of factionalism, with the center-left region of Emilia-Romagna pit against the center-right city of Parma and vice-versa.

Is this really happening?

Updates if I can bear to follow this story.