Italy Not Diverse Enough, Laments NYT

[Ioannis]

Wouldn't the whole world be better off if Italy weren't so damn Italian? I mean, what has Italian culture ever contributed to anything? When will the Italians get with the program and adopt the Universal Globoculture? The New York Times wants to know!

Italy Gives Cultural Diversity a Lukewarm Embrace

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Europe, for all its diversity, can be remarkably provincial.

Ponder that for a moment.

Italian culture certainly isn’t diverse now. It subsists on an all-white, all-native, monoethnic diet of Italian game shows, Italian television mini-series, Italian advertisements on cable stations for improbable vibrating contraptions that promise to jiggle fat away, and Italian pop music. Even Roman schoolchildren no longer stray far from a spaghetti-with-ragú diet now that an intercultural city program to serve one international-themed lunch a month has been abandoned by the new center-right government, heeding some Italian mothers, who doubted the nutritional value of falafel and curry.

Italian children in Italy eat Italian food? The horror, the horror ...

And isn't it about time they tore down the Florence Cathedral and put up a Frank Gehry building made out of sheet metal? How come there's not a Hello Kitty logo anywhere on Michelangelo's "David"? Shouldn't La Scala dump Verdi and stage a tribute to the Spice Girls?

All across Europe attitudes are stiffening toward immigration, nowhere more so than here. …

Rome, an ancient magnet for foreigners, is naturally more integrated than most Italian cities and, unlike most of the country, it has taken at least a few steps in recent years to come to terms with its multicultural reality, among them instituting a public library program to reach immigrants and provide Romans with books and lectures about foreign cultures. The question now is whether such efforts will continue.

“We always thought of ourselves as a monoculture, but immigration is our present and future,” said Franco Pittau, an official of Caritas, a Roman Catholic social service and development association that, among other things, monitors immigration here.

Franca Eckert Coen echoed that remark. An Italian Jew in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city who lives in an apartment filled with Jewish art, she was in charge of multicultural policy under the former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. Ms. Coen recalled a year when Chinese celebrated their New Year with dragons around the Day of Epiphany.

“The newspapers said the Chinese were against Christianity,” she said. “So we held a public event on the Campidoglio about Chinese culture and the New Year celebration, and now we have a Chinese parade each year.”

“It was the same with the Sikhs,” she added. “We had a public event after 2001. We also organized tours of the Capitoline Museums for immigrants. Then we asked them to do something. The Poles, for example, had someone play Polish music at the museum.”

“Little things,” she called them. “They can overcome big fears. I saw all these immigrants become a little bit Italian citizens. Culture is crucial to give people here a chance to see that to be foreign is to bring a different ethnic life to the city, that diversity is a positive.”

Do you ever get the impression that Kevin MacDonald has secretly bought a controlling interest in the New York Times and is rewriting its articles to make them prove his theories correct?

Steve Sailer\'s iSteve Blog: NYT: Italy lagging lamentably on de-Italianification

[Strengthandhonour]

Interesting article even though that guy is a scum bag for not understanding why some cultures think its okay to preserve their cultural identity. Unfortunately, just like he states "diversity" is provincial in Europe, that also applies to Italy.
for example, visiting a town in Apulia or Calabria is not the same as visiting one in Lombardia. The town where my aunt lives has only one immigrant family and everyone in town knows them.

[Routasydän]

Do you ever get the impression that Kevin MacDonald has secretly bought a controlling interest in the New York Times and is rewriting its articles to make them prove his theories correct?

This is an interesting theory!

[Errigal]

Originally Posted by wilpuri

This is an interesting theory!

The theory would also have to involve Kevin MacDonald inventing a time machine to influence the New York Times for the last fifty years!

As for the topic itself, compare what diverse New York has given the world compared to Italy.

[Routasydän]

Originally Posted by Errigal

The theory would also have to involve Kevin MacDonald inventing a time machine to influence the New York Times for the last fifty years!

As for the topic itself, compare what diverse New York has given the world compared to Italy.

Surely Sex and the City is right up there with the work of Dante Alighieri.

[Llywarch Hen]

Originally Posted by Ioannis

Italian culture certainly isn’t diverse now.

Shouldn't they really be a bit more worried about, say, Angola or Bhutan? I can't believe they get away with saying stuff like this. Oh, but of course, his name ends in -man... He can do anything. He was born with the 'get out of jail free card'.