fviviano — giornale di barganews

Complete list of articles By: fviviano

Frank Viviano is the author or co-author of seven books, including the critically-acclaimed Blood Washes Blood, Dispatches From the Pacific Century and In the Balkans (with Magnum photographer Nikos Economopoulos).

07/09/2012 11:05 am

Music in Tuscany: music conquers all on a summer’s eve

At 10pm last night, a pall of suffocating heat hung in the nearly airless Carradini lecture hall at the Istituto Superiore d’Istruzione. A fair part of the audience was made up of fidgety pre-adolescents, on holiday in Barga with their families. The omens were not good – and they didn’t even take...

05/25/2012 4:24 pm

A Trial Tests Sicily’s Dark Soul

Ceremonies in Italy have been marking 20 years since the murder of anti-Mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone. Prime Minister Mario Monti joined thousands gathered in Palermo, Falcone’s birthplace, capital of the autonomous region of Sicily, and the centre of his fight against organised crime. The anniversary...

01/22/2012 11:12 pm

The American dream has emigrated to Europe

To anyone who grew up in the Cold War, the rhetoric of the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidates is strangely familiar. The United States, they warn, is threatened by an alien ideology. What’s startling is that the bogeyman this time around is not resurgent and increasingly hostile Russia,...

10/14/2011 10:03 pm

The unfinished legacy of 2010

Take a close and objective look at the angry demonstrators now gathered on Wall Street, and at similar protest encampments from San Francisco to Madrid. What you see is not simply a vast expression of rage at the crisis enveloping the world of democracy. The demonstrations also frame a fundamental contradiction...

10/07/2011 4:07 pm

The Walls of Barga – exhibition by Keane

Barga, its fondest promoters love to say, is a “classic example of a Tuscan hilltown.” But what exactly defines the classic appearance of Barga – or for that matter, Tuscany? The answer, says an exhibition in the entrance hall of Palazzo Pancrazi, home of Barga’s municipal government, is not...

09/27/2011 10:28 pm

In Saudi Arabia, a new era for women

When King Abdullah’s speech was released by the Saudi Press Service on Sunday, my first reaction was stunned amazement. The second was to think of Dr. Aisha, a physician I’d met in Riyadh eight years ago. “Women will be allowed to participate in the Shoura Council as members from the...

09/27/2011 12:43 pm

Fifteen Lire’s worth of mystery in Piazza Salvi

Vestiges of a turbulent passage in Italian history may have come to light on Monday (September 26), in the form of three silver coins unearthed beneath the venerable pavimenti of Piazza Salvo Salvi. How they made their way to Barga, and were eventually covered by paving stones, is unknown. The coins...

09/23/2011 9:49 am

The Model for Palestine 2011 – Israel in 1949

Global stability is held hostage to years of savage terrorism and de facto war in a small corner of the Middle East. The crisis leads to a tense vote before the United Nations, over whether a new member-state should be recognized in the region, with a formal mandate to defend its interests and negotiate...

09/19/2011 3:36 pm

The Invasion of Paris, Then and Now

PARIS — Viewed from the airless heights where statisticians crunch numbers, the story of the woman I’ll call Lilly Tan is simple. She is an immigrant in France, a single digit among millions for the statisticians, a warning flag to wave at rallies for the xenophobic political parties that grow...

09/09/2011 10:48 pm

A Decade After 9/11: Turkey Redefines Political Islam

In 1995, the city of Gaziantep, on the southeastern edge of Turkey’s Anatolian plain, was under siege. Its crumbling medieval centre was swamped with refugees from a civil war between insurgent Kurds and the Turkish Army that eventually left 40,000 dead and 3,000,000 people homeless. Along the borderlands...

07/25/2011 2:10 am

Norway sounds alarm bells in Europe

Barga, Italy – The news from Oslo and Utoya Island shocked Italians. The horrifying carnage was all that anyone talked about this weekend at Caffe Aristo, Barga’s de facto social center, where calcio – soccer – and the latest sexual capers of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi usually...

07/06/2011 11:35 am

It’s time to leave Afghanistan – or is it?

BARGA, Italy–My head tells me it’s time to leave. But my heart, for reasons grounded in personal experience, is profoundly wary. Like almost everyone who has watched, in growing dismay, (article from August last year here) as the war in Afghanistan has dragged mercilessly on, I agree with President...

06/18/2011 1:24 am

Ground Zero in Guatemala’s drug nightmare

“Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging,” the saying goes. In my case, focus came with the sharp edge of a machete held to my throat and a pistol aimed at my head. Early this spring, the van I was travelling in while on assignment in Guatemala was forced into the jungle by four hooded men. My fellow...

05/24/2011 8:00 pm

Europe, Arizona and my plumber

The State of Arizona, for many Americans, has come to symbolize anti-immigrant hysteria codified into full-fledged statutory law. Under its highly controversial terms, anyone who simply “appears” to be foreign can be stopped by police and ordered to prove that they are U.S. citizens or legal residents. In...

05/02/2011 9:59 pm

“Obama crushes Osama” — the war on terrorism is not a pep rally

It might have been a big night at the Olympics, a U.S. hockey team taking home the gold, or, less probably, a victory in the most-watched television event on the planet, soccer’s World Cup. “USA! USA!” shouted the crowds in New York’s Times Square and outside the White House gates in Washington....

11/02/2010 2:49 pm

Cave Canem exhibition in Barga

When 73 artists join forces to present nearly 100 paintings, sculptures, videos and poems on a single theme, the result can’t really be called something as limited as a mostra (“exhibition”). It’s more in the nature of an encyclopaedic survey. In the case of Cave Canem, the event that opened...

09/16/2010 10:05 am

Sunset on a 2000-year-old-dream

Numbers are the last thing that come to mind when thoughts turn to Tuscany. Paradise is not quantifiable, and few corners of the planet are more suggestive of an earthly paradise than the village-dotted hills that stretch across central Italy from Siena and Florence to the azure Tirrennian Sea. Yet numbers...

09/07/2010 4:33 pm

Some reflections on Invisible Cities

andrea guzzoletti outside his studio in Barga this morning pointing to his new QR code ceramic tile linking him to the new iBarga information system Andrea Guzzoletti’s tour of “Invisible Cities” borrows its title and its thematic structure from the brilliant prose-poem of the late Italo Calvino,...

08/23/2010 4:32 pm

Inconvenient Truths in Afghanistan

The Taliban control much of the countryside and dozens of key towns. Casualties among U.S. troops and civilians are soaring. The commanding general of NATO and American forces has been forced to resign. Government corruption is rife. There is little doubt that the situation in Afghanistan is unravelling....

08/05/2010 1:45 am

The Shattered Fact Machine

One way to view the new Internet universe opening around us today is an immense cornucopia, pouring out a endless stream of facts and findings. A revolutionary democratization of knowledge is underway, the cyber pundits proclaim, making more information accessible to more people than at any moment in...