New Roughguides for Italy

Roughguides.com and Penguin have just published two new guides to Italian holiday regions: Tuscany & Umbria and Naples and the Amalfi Coast.
Since both areas have recently become popular with British toursits, intelligent guidebooks are more than welcome.
Buy here and here.

Ancelotti goes to Chelsea

Chelsea have confirmed the appointment of Carlo Ancelotti as their new manager. The Italian has signed a three-year contract with the London club, continuing a tradition of Italian ties to The Blues.
Gianfranco Zola was one of the first Italians to join the Premier League when he was signed by Chelsea in 1996 and is considered by fans at the Bridge to be one of their greatest ever players. Claudio Ranieri also joined the club as manager in 2000 and went on to sign Frank Lampard. Swiss-Italian Robert Matteo also enjoyed success with Chelsea, among other things scoring the fastest goal in an FA Cup Final (43 seconds) in 1997 which Chelsea went on to win. Gianluca Vialli also had a chequered career at Stamford Bridge as both player and coach/manager, although he guided Chelsea to an FA Cup final triumph over Aston Villa in 2000.
Chelsea have just won this year's FA Cup at Wenbly beating Everton 2-1, although ironically Di Matteo's fastest goal record was broken by Everton.

Paul Potts-issimo

Winner of the 2007 edition of Britain's Got talent has published his new album 'Passione' .
The album contains 10 songs sung by Paul all in Italian including traditional lyrical pieces - E Lucevano le Stelle - Italian versions of popular songs - Piano (Memory from Cats), Senza Luce (A Whiter Shade of Pale), Un Giorno Per Noi (A Time For Us from the 1968 film version of Romeo & Juliet) and a brand new song Bellamore written for Paul by Matteo Saggese and Mino Vergnaghi.
The album was recorded over the space of a year in Prague and Stockholm.

PP official site
PP on youtube

Vauxhall jobs future still in the balance

from the Guardian:

The wrangling over the future of GeneralMotors took another twist this morning when FIAT said it would not attend today's negotiations over the sale of GM's European arm, Opel, which includes UK carmaker Vauxhall.

The Italian firm, one of two remaining bidders for GM Europe, said that it had been left "perplexed" by the last round of talks, which broke up without agreement on Thursday morning after GM apparently declared that it needed another €300m (£260m) of emergency funding.

Fiat chief executive Sergio Marchionne said his firm was still interested in "finding accord with GM", but would not attend the talks in the German capital, Berlin. He said Fiat had not been able to get full access to Opel's financial records, adding that it was unreasonable to expect the firm to provide funds to a group whose finances remained uncertain.

Free Metro newspaper to end its run

from Roy Greenslade's blog:

Metro International creators of the free newspaper distributed all over the world announced that it is planning to sell off its operations in Italy as well as in Portugal. The move is part of "a strategic update" in view of latest figures.

In Italy, Metros are distributed in Rome (270,000 copies), Milan (260,000), Turin (120,000), Florence and Bologna (both 60,000) and Genoa (45,000), a total of 815,000 a day.
On November 9th 2006, The Metro Newspaper gets listed into the "Guinness Book of World Records" for being the largest Global Newspaper with 70 editions worldwide and more than 18.5 million daily readers.

Read Italian Metros here

Champions in Rome

Thousands of Manchester United fans have gathered in a stifling hot Rome for tonight's Champions League final against Barcellona at the city's Stadio Olimpico.
United's manager Ronald Ferguson is looking to achieve a new record in the club's history making them first team to defend the Champions League title.

BBC news - Sport
RAI Sport Champions League

Stadio Olimpico - Wikipedia

The Guardian praises La Repubblica

Dual articles from La Repubblica and The Guardian where the latter praises its treatment of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the light of recent scandals involving a Neapolitan teenager, Noemi Letizia, who refers to Berlusconi as 'Papy' / "Daddy".
Berlusconi ha still not answered the Italian daily's 10 questions about the alleged affair