ROME — ­ For women in particular, this has been Italy’s summer of violence. First, a Muslim girl was brutally murdered by her father and brother because, as her mother put it, “she was not a good Muslim.”

On August 18, some days after a Gay Pride event, an Italian Lesbian woman of 35 identified only as “Paola” was attacked and raped by two men at the Tuscan town of Torre del Lago. Meeting yesterday with journalists at the national gay and lesbian association ArciGay‘s headquarters in Florence, Paola, who was flanked by the national president of ArciLesbica, Titti de Simone (who is also a member of Parliament from Rifondazione Comunista) and by the president of ArciGay Tuscany, Alessi di Giorgi, said she was convinced that the two men had noticed her at a Gay Pride event and planned a punitive assault.

This is not the first incident this summer at Torre del Lago, the romantic lake-front Tuscan town where Puccini lived, and today a gay-friendly vacation spot near the Viareggio beach. Last month a young woman was attacked here but managed to escape, while in a restaurant with a gay clientele a fight broke out between customers and local neo-Fascists, who gave the restaurant chef a beating. Forza Nuova (New Force), the most extremist group in the Alternativa Sociale (Social Alternative) coalition of neo-fascist parties, passed out pamphlets inviting local citizens “to take action to be rid of the gay and lesbian tourist presence.”

The incident is being brought before Parliament in a formal protest, signed by the deputies Vladimir Luxuria (the first transgendered MP anywhere in Europe), Franco Grillini (who was also the president of ArciGay for a decade) and De Simone, against what they see as a dangerous escalation of homophobic violence. The goal is to make homophobic attacks a specific crime, as are crimes of ethnic violence. “The attack is aggravated by the fact that they wanted to harm a homosexual woman. We want a serious investigation. We have already complained that the extreme right is targeting the gay community. In general in Italy hate crimes are not given much importance.” ArciLesbica, the national lesbian association, is using its Florence branch’s website to track similar attacks.

Last week in Florence two young American women were assaulted in the space of three days. One, age 18, was raped at gunpoint; the second, age 29, escaped. The U.S. Consul there is warning American women to move about Florence by evening only “in a group.” Florentine police are making the rounds of foreign university institutes to advise young women to be on the alert.

Let’s face it, the end of summer was more amusing under Berlusconi than under the grayer shade of Prodi pale. There would always be something to laugh about: Silvio’s deep suntan setting off his whitened teeth, the pictures of him on his boat wearing his yachtsman’s cap, his smacking an obviously appalled Cheri Blair on the back in Sardinia, the bandanna covering his hair transplant, the face-lift surgery that didn’t quite work, his TV flack Emilio Fede bursting into tears of joy at a Berlusconi victory…

But the party for Berlusconi is really over, and however bland Prodi may appear, he has chalked up his first one hundred days with a rousing success in foreign policy and movement on the home front on the crucial issue of conflict of interest, an election promise which well-known blogger/comedian Beppe Grillo doubted would ever be kept.

Following his coalition’s narrow defeat in national general elections last spring and his loss of the presidency to Giorgio Napolitano, Berlusconi flailed about for a time, complaining that he had been cheated, but this came to nothing. Following this was a summer hiatus during which he saw his trio of allies in the Casa della Libertà (CDL, or House of Liberty) slip away from his control.

The charismatic and demagogic leader of the xenophobic Lega Nord (Northern League), Umberto Bossi, faded after a stroke and, although in better health, is momentarily weaker politically. The head of the fragmented “post-fascist” party Alleanza Nazionale, Gianfranco Fini, Berlusconi’s able former vice premier — Fini is a former fascist youth leader who built his party on the remains of the Mussolini-nostalgic Italian Social Movement, and who himself was still calling Mussolini a “great statesman” only a decade ago — has similarly lost clout.

Above all, the activist Catholic Pier Ferdinando Casini, member of the Union of Christian and Center Democrats (UDC) party and former president of the Chamber of Deputies, has pulled back from Berlusconi to strike out on his own. Lacking their support, speculation was rife that Berlusconi would withdraw from politics altogether.

That seems unlikely, since he likes the limelight and, as the richest man in Italy, can afford to pay for it, but Berlusconi now faces another sobering reality check. On Sept. 15 the center-left government of Premier Roman Prodi will begin a debate in Parliament on a conflict of interest bill which, if passed, would curb Berlusconi’s financial clout should he ever be returned to political leadership. The details of the bill are as yet not in the public domain, but Berlusconi’s backers are already complaining that he is being persecuted. Without waiting to read it, Berlusconi’s official spokesman Paolo Bonaiuti has called the proposed bill “an illiberal attempt to keep Berlusconi from leading the opposition at the moment and, more in general, from being in politics.” Pro-government politicians immediately issued denials, while Piero Fassino, the lackluster secretary-general of the progressive Democrazia di Sinistra (DS, or Democratic Left) party, said bluntly that Berlusconi “still isn’t used to the idea that he lost an election and that he has to find an opposition strategy that’s not declamatory.”

Secondly, the new Prodi center-left government is reorganizing the Italian national broadcasting company, RAI, and replacing the Berlusconi appointees with individuals considered less tainted. Since Berlusconi is nothing if not a media magnate, the content of the conflict of interest bill will of necessity regard control of the media. While premier for five years he directly or indirectly controlled 90% of Italian TV: the stations which he owned outright occupied 45% of the market, while another 45% was occupied by the government-controlled RAI. He made good use of that power over TV — studies of news programming show that, of all sound bites, Berlusconi’s were 40%. A corollary of this was that the opposition was reluctant to purchase advertising space as a waste of time. And at the same Berlusconi removed TV journalists who disagreed with him, including such outstanding as the elderly, authoritative commentator Enzo Biagi and the genial anchorman Michele Santoro.

Under these circumstances, media specialists might give some future thought as to just how Berlusconi managed to lose the election. To mix a few metaphors, it is consoling to think that, at least sometimes when big brother is talking, people do listen to the beat of a different drummer.

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As of this writing twenty Italian soldiers have actually set foot on Lebanese soil, and another 2,500 are on the way, having left Italy last Tuesday in a three-ship convoy. Romano Prodi can take legitimate pride in his foreign policy negotiations. With the skillful help of Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema, himself an ex-premier and former head of the Democratic Left party, it was Prodi who helped to bring the French back on board to share peace-keeping responsibilities in Lebanon; the Italians take over the command of UNIFIL, the United Nations forces there, in February. Indeed, Le Monde lauded Italian diplomacy, with a banner headline reading, “Vive l’Italie, Monsieur!” Berlusconi’s sour grapes reaction was that the Italian contingent was unnecessarily large because Italy constitutes only 7% of NATO forces.

Simultaneously, Prodi relaunched a joint foreign policy initiative for a European Union still smarting from the defeat of its proposed Constitution in referenda in France and the Netherlands, in which voters killed it for, among other things, being too pro-corporate and mandating privatization of public utilities (a quarrel over adding to the text a tribute to the continent’s Judeo-Christian heritage didn’t help either.)

In a visit to Pope Benedict XVI last week at the papal summer retreat of Castel Gandolfo, an hour east of Rome, Germany’s conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel relaunched that religious debate by insisting that any proposed EuroConstitution should explicitly endorse “Christian values,” which is likely to sink whatever feeble chances existed for a new draft Constituion while, at the same time, constituting a slap in the face of the Turkish candidacy for full EU membership (which Merkel has long opposed.)

The pontiff, meanwhile, preparing for his tour of his native Germany next week, is meeting this weekend in an end-of-summer thinkfest at Castel Gandolfo with forty of his former theology students to debate nothing less than Darwinism and the creation, a meeting that presages a major shift in official Vatican doctrine and an embrace of the anti-evolution, “intelligent design” concept of the universe so dear to the U.S. Christian right. The pontiff is already on record as waving this troglodyte banner, so don’t expect Darwin to come out ahead of the Creationists at the Pope’s little gab session. Benedict is on record as saying, in unscripted remarks last November during an audience at the Vatican, that the universe was made as an “intelligent project” — moreover, in the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, the former Cardinal Ratzinger proclaimed, “We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution.” With this weekend’s Castel Gandolfo conference, the Church appears about to once again officially reject science’s explanation of the origins of the world. Back to the future, one might say…

This is the latest in a series of Letters from Rome on the politics of Italy from DIRELAND’s correspondent in Italy, Judy Harris — a veteran expat journalist and former Italy staffer for the Wall Street Journal and TIME magazine. DIRELAND (where this article appeared on Sept. 2, 2006) is the blog of Doug Ireland, a longtime radical journalist and media critic.

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