When Digital Television is not Digital

For a long time I thought we were lucky enough to have the new fangled, all singing and dancing, much vaunted digital television.  No silly little set top box for us, or so I thought.

I was wrong.  Just after Christmas our digital television provider Fastweb stopped transmitting Italy’s state RAI television channels.  The transmission ceased in readiness for the completion of the transition from analogue to digital television in Italy, I learned.

This was the point when I realized that the digital television service we had watched for a good few years was not as digital as I thought it was.

Losing RAI was bad news, as the only other half-decent television channels which remained were something called channel 7, which rarely shows anything worth watching, and Berlusconi’s free-to-air three: Rete 4, Italia 1 and Channel 5.

We wanted RAI back, and, thankfully, we got our way.

So why wasn’t our supposedly digital television not actually digital?  If you are curious, read on.

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Sold Out, the First Edition of New Italian Newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano

Il Fatto Quotidiano is a new newspaper which hit Italy’s news-stands today.  By Italian standards, this newspaper is quite a bit different from others to be found in Italy.

In a way, Italy’s newest national newspaper got off to a good start today, in that I could not find a copy at my local news-stand.

There must have been quite a lot of  interest, because the same news-stand bore a hand-written note announcing the fact that copies of Il Fatto Quotidiano had sold out.  I was told that only a few copies had arrived, and from what I’ve understood via Facebook, others have been unable to obtain a copy of what has already come to be known a ‘Il fatto’.

I’ve asked my news-stand to reserve a copy of tomorrow’s edition of Il Fatto Quotidiano for me, by the way.

Why all this interest in a newspaper in Italy?  Well, Il Fatto Quotidiano is run by the Italian equivalents of Woodward and Bernstein, for a start. But there’s more.

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Abruzzo – Castles and Controversy

Onna in Abruzzo was one of the many places virtually raised to the ground by the earthquake which hit the Italian region of Abruzzo back in April of this year.  Yesterday, and to much fanfare, ninety four new dwellings were handed over to around 300 people who lost their homes in the earthquake.

The small village of Onna, which was utterly destroyed by the earthquake, has come to symbolise the plight of the people of Abruzzo, and this is why the first new homes were completed in this part of the earthquake struck area.

In England there is an old saying which goes, ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’, as some may know.  Being English, as I am, I suppose the 47 new houses are the new ‘castles’ for the Abruzzo people.  These castles are made of wood and cost between 30,000 and 60,000 Euros a piece.  The units themselves were built in northern Italy by the Trentino local authority, and then taken to Abruzzo where they were assembled.  While not permanent, these new homes will allow a few of the 36,000 people displaced by the quake to begin rebuilding their lives.

Around 11,000 people are still living in tent cities in the Abruzzo region, whereas 25,000 continue to be put up in hotels along the Abruzzo cost.  Progress has been made, and in Italian terms, it has been made in record time too, even if one or two comments I read on Facebook yesterday suggested that incentives in the form of backhanders may have speeded the construction of the new homes.  If things move too fast in Italy, people become suspicious.

Aside from suspicions of corruption, the inauguration of the first new castles in Abruzzo was accompanied by a few healthy doses of controversy.

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