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The King of Italy, for One Night

March 23, 2009 2:07 PM

By ANN WISE, Producer, ABC News Rome

The man who won’t be king, Emanuele Filiberto Reza Rene Maria di Savoia, Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia for short, became the “principe ballerina” (or dancing prince) Sunday night when he won the Italian edition of “Dancing With the Stars.”

Emanuele Filiberto, grandson of the last Italian king, sashayed to a sweeping win on “Ballando con le Stelle,” with 75 percent of the popular vote (1 million phone calls in his favor) giving state-run RAI TV a 60 percent audience share.   

While his waltzing skills, given his royal training, were evident to all, one of the jurors classified him as a “piripicchio.” The only translation that I can think of, after searching dictionaries at length, is “jester.” The sound of the word, pronounced Pee-ree-PEE-kkio, gives you an idea.

But the public loved the tall, slim and elegant if slightly wooden prince, who reveled in the recognition.

“I had the chance to be myself,” he told the audience, “and that is the true victory for me.”

Born in exile in Switzerland, the titular prince of Venice and Piedmont, Emanuele Filiberto is the heir apparent to a crown that no longer exists. The male members of his family were exiled from Italy after World War II by a provision in the Italian constitution, and Emanuele Filiberto, an only child, was born and raised in Switzerland. 

He came to Italy for the first time at age 30, when the Italian state lifted the exile in 2002. A year later, he married French actress Clotilde Coutreau with much fanfare in the Rome church where his great-grandfather, King Victor Emmanuel III, was also married.

Since his return to Italy (he lives in Paris), he has participated in TV talk shows -- mostly on sports -- and commercials (he most famous is the one for olives), and even run for office with a small political party called Values and Future: He lost. 

Sunday night he thanked Italians from the “bottom of my heart” for this “absolutely unexpected” win.

Plans for the future? Well, fashion, with a line of clothing called Principe d’Italia (what else?), more TV and, perhaps, another attempt at politics as a candidate for the European parliament.

Milly Carlucci, the hostess of Ballando con le Stelle, said Emanuele Filiberto “was appreciated for being a young man like any other, without conceit.”

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March 23, 2009 in Ann Wise | Permalink | User Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Perugia: Journalists Take Their Place in Court – the Cage

January 20, 2009 12:49 PM

By ANN WISE, Producer, ABC News Rome

The  president of the Court of Perugia, Italy, expected a courtroom packed with jostling journalists on the opening day of Amanda Knox's murder trial, but did he expect to find them in cages?

Covering news events in Italy is almost always chaotic, but strangely (to an Anglo-Saxon at least), both the journalists and their subjects  actually seem to prefer it that way. A crazy pack of people pushing cameras and microphones in their faces makes them feel more important, I have been told. And perhaps the lack of rigid organization leaves those gaps that clever Italians love to slip through. Knox's trial in Perugia is a case in point.

The disturbing and puzzling murder of Meredith Kercher, found stabbed in the apartment she shared with Knox and two other women, on Nov. 2, 2007, has all the elements of an intriguing international story. A young beautiful British victim, and very unlikely suspects: Knox, a 21-year-old American student from Seattle, her proper Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and a Perugia-raised vagabond from the Ivory Coast. All  are accused of joining forces to kill Kercher in a sort of sex frenzy. 

The story has captivated media attention around the world from the first day -- the British tabloids, U.S.  television stations, as well as the Italian, German and Swiss press -- and Knox has become the star. The beautiful American coed who target='external'continues to profess her innocence has filled newspapers and TV screens since her arrest, alternately depicted as an angel and a fiend. One hundred forty journalists representing 80 media organizations were accredited for the first day of the trial on Jan. 16.

The Perugia court did its best to prepare for the onslaught.

By 7:30 a.m., alongside the dozen satellite trucks in front of the courtroom, there was a line of journalists waiting to get in. It was a  "line" only in the Italian sense, which, to the shock of British colleagues, is basically a pileup in front of a barrier guarded by a police  officer.  I shoved my way in with the second group allowed through and quickly descended the  15th-century stone stairs to the frescoed courtroom to grab a place.  A railing separated the press area from the courtroom.

The courtroom was still empty, and in a flash the barons of Italian print sized up the room, scooted around the railing and were comfortably seated in the two rows of seats reserved for lawyers and family members. Police officers told them they couldn’t sit there, and an argument ensued.  I grabbed a place, legs wide, in the front row behind the railing, as cameramen and photographers scurried in to stake their claims and place their ladders. 

The next time I looked, they were caged!

Most Italian penal courts have cages where particularly risky defendants sit  --  and this one is no exception.  The journalists up front had decided to occupy the defendants’ cage! 

We were all wondering, in fact, whether they would put Knox and Sollecito in the cages.  “If they do, I have my headline,” we all thought.

But no, the journalists had taken center stage, so to speak. Perfectly happy, and indifferent to any possible insinuations, there they stayed until the judge arrived and deemed the arrangement “inappropriate.”  He invited them to leave the cages and cameras to leave the courtroom before the trial could begin.

The journalists filed out, but the camera operators resisted until they were finally forced out.  The problem was, the still cameras were allowed to stay  --  and get the shot everyone wanted: Amanda and Raffaele in court, she smiling and relaxed, he thin and tense.

When the court recessed to decide whether the trial should be open to the press or not, the television crews went on the attack. They called over police  officers, investigators and prosecutors and demanded at least 10  minutes, without the still photographers, to film the defendants in court.  It wasn’t fair that the still photographers could  stay  and they couldn’t, they argued.

So, in typical Italian fashion, the authorities present in the room at that moment (not the judge) took it upon themselves to allow cameras in  --  not only in  the press area, but into the courtroom itself.  The beast was unleashed as a dozen cameras plus the still photographers swarmed around the defendants. It took all of the police forces in the room, including the penitentiary police, to restore order.

And while that was going on, the deans of print quietly crept back up front, and took what they felt were their rightful seats.

When the jury returned, it announced it had decided to keep the trial open to the public but to keep still and video cameras out of the courtroom for the duration, so those hard-fought and chaotic moments of video are the only ones we will see of Knox and Sollecito in court, until perhaps the verdict, many months away.

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January 20, 2009 in Ann Wise | Permalink | User Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Italy’s Living Dead: Doctors Paid For Patients Who Have Died

November 17, 2008 12:27 PM

By ANN WISE, ABC News Rome

Public health doctors in Sicily are suspected of claiming state money for some 50,000 patients, despite the fact that they were dead.

An investigation by the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s national Financial Police, found that the state had been paying Sicilian doctors for patients who in some cases had been dead for as long as 20 years.  The cost to the state is estimated at 14 million euros ($18 million).

However, even though the doctors continued to collect up to $100/year per dead patient, it isn’t clear that they did so intentionally or even knowingly.  It is more likely  that the fault lies with Italy’s notoriously slow and disorganized bureaucracy.

Primary health care  -- checkups with the family doctor  --  are free in Italy.  The general physicians who work in the public health sector are paid between 70 and 80 euros ($90-$100) a year per patient on their list, depending on the region they work in, and doctors can have anywhere from 1,500 to 1,800 patients.

By law, when a person dies, the local registry office must be notified within 48 hours.  That office is supposed to automatically alert the public health office, which in turn should remove the person’s name from the doctors list. 

Doctors are not responsible for taking dead patients off their lists, but then again, they  don’t seem in a hurry to alert authorities, either.  After all, you would hope they would know if  patients  in their care had passed on.

It isn’t the first time doctors in Italy have been accused  of  caring for the dead or taking money for services not rendered. Nineteen doctors in the southern city of Bari were accused in October of providing services for 450 departed souls.  And another family physician in the same area  was claiming 26 euros ($33) per house call for dozens of calls he never made.

There have been cases in which doctors are asked to give the money back, or have had it taken from their pay, but the Federation of Family Doctors says the fault is not always the doctors’.

“The responsibility is absolutely not ours,” the secretary of the Federation, Giacomo Millillo told the Italian daily Il Messaggero.  “The sole responsibility is with the Health Agency. Cases like this do nothing but damage us, because we receive payment in good faith, that we then have to give back.”

Stories abound in Italy of sluggish (to say the least) bureaucracy, with notifications of all kinds getting lost in the meanders of Italy’s public offices. There are still cases of letters turning up at doorsteps 30 or 40 years after they were mailed  --  or 60 - year-olds being called up for mandatory military service (when it still existed) because their draft letters had gotten sidelined.

This latest bureaucratic failure, however, is less than amusing. It is a huge drain on an already-precarious local public health service that cannot afford it.

In Sicily the Guardia di Finanza has informed judicial authorities of the results of its investigation, and now it is up to the courts to decide whether the findings amount to fraud or not.

November 17, 2008 in Ann Wise | Permalink | User Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)