14 Quotes by Beppe Severgnini

If you are the owner of a factory employing 500 people, on Monday you talk to any of them about soccer, and that's completely unifying. Italy doesn't have very much in terms of national culture like that. ... You have Hollywood and all the stars, we don't have anything remotely (like that). Soccer compensates.

Orson Welles used to say that Italy was full of actors – fifty million of them – almost all good. He claimed the few bad ones were on the stage, or the cinema screen.

Eppure la lentezza -a differenza dell’ozio, che richiede doti agonistiche- ha ancora il suo fascino.

La vostra Italy non e’ la nostra Italia. Italy e’ una droga leggera, spacciata in forme previdibili: colline al tramonto, olivi e limoni, vino bianco e ragazzi dai capelli neri. L’Italia, invece, e’ un labirinto.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It’s alluring, but complicated. It’s the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or in the course of ten minutes. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis.