Time has just published my essay on Italy’s dysfunctional political scene.

It says something about Italian politics that the most potent political figure to enter the arena since scandal-ridden former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a frizzy-haired bombastic comedian named Beppe Grillo, best known for organizing nationwide protests against government corruption called “Go F Yourself” days. And what it says is this: that as a desire for change sweeps the European electorate, Italians are feeling starved for choice. Indeed, with the exception of Grillo, Italy doesn’t have a single national leader who wasn’t already in politics in 1994, the year Berlusconi first came to power

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My piece on Italy’s No TAV movement has just been published by Businessweek.

On a day in late winter in a valley in the Italian Alps, about a hundred people set off on a walk. Their path took them by steeply terraced vineyards, through a small village, and over the crest of a hill to where the riot police were waiting for them. The officers stood in small knots, behind a fence topped with razor wire, spread out across a patch of cleared land where the government plans to break ground on an €8.2 billion ($10.8 billion) project to connect Italy and France by high-speed rail. Soldiers clustered nearby. A camouflage-painted Lince—Italy’s answer to a Humvee—moved in a lazy patrol. A medic’s jeep squatted under a concrete overpass.

The protesters had come to this part of the Val di Susa to make sure the project never gets off the ground. As part of a two-decade battle to impede the construction of a new train tunnel through the Alps, they have at times walked the roads of the valley in thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands. The No TAV movement (named for the Italian initials for high-speed train) has invaded construction sites, blocked highways, and battled police. “Our objective is to let them know we’re here,” says Alberto Perino, the movement’s longtime leader. “And that we plan to keep on coming.”

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Time has just published my story on “How Corporations Want to Help Italy’s Crumbling Treasures — For a Price.”

When famed polish movie director Roman Polanski signed up to make the film Pompeii in 2007 — a now stalled big-budget epic about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 — Italy, home of the Pompeii ruins, was his first choice for shooting. But the production ended up moving to Spain, since tough-minded Italian officials typically object to film crews’ trampling over the archaeological site and the Spanish government beat out Italy with a cheaper offer.

In today’s feeble economy, Italian officials might have tried harder to cut a deal. As the euro-zone crisis..

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Time has just published my story on Italy’s fight against fast-driving tax evaders.

A fast car is supposed to be a means of escape. In Italy, it’s become one of the best ways to get caught. The land of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati is getting tough on tax evaders, and police have taken to stopping drivers of high-end SUVs and luxury cars and forwarding their information to the tax authorities to make sure the income they’ve declared (and paid taxes on) matches their expenditures. “It’s become invasive,” says Alessandro Zaffarani, a Rome resident. While driving his wife’s car — a BMW SUV — in December, he was pulled over twice in the course of half an hour. “They can stop you at any moment, not to ask you for the documents of the car, but for yours, as a person,” he says.

According to Zaffarani, who runs a Chevrolet dealership in Rome, the scrutiny has also cut into business. Faced with a new tax on cars with powerful engines, a still stumbling economy and some of the highest gas prices in the world, buyers were already more reluctant to enter the lot. Now tax evaders don’t want to risk getting caught either. And honest car buyers often don’t want the hassle of additional attention. “At this moment, the market is paralyzed,” says Zaffarani. In January, he suspended a promotion for the Chevy Camaro when demand dried up.

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Time has just published my piece about the Italian government’s effort to clarify the Catholic Church’s tax status.

Much of the coverage of a controversial new law winding its way through the Italian Parliament has portrayed the measure as a Nixon-to-China moment. It takes somebody like Prime Minister Mario Monti, the thinking goes, who is not only a practicing Catholic but also a graduate of a Jesuit school, to take on the Catholic Church in Italy and make it pay taxes on its commercial property.

In truth, however, the proposed law would do very little to change the existing legal situation. While the current legislation is muddled in many ways, one thing is clear: religious organizations have been required to pay taxes on property used for commercial purposes since at least 2005, when the country’s high court issued a ruling to that effect. The problem is that with the law currently on the books, it’s not always clear what is and what isn’t a commercial property. Monti’s proposal doesn’t upend the status quo — it merely reinforces it, cleaning up the legislative language and eliminating gray areas. “It’s not a new law,” says Marco Tarquinio, the editor of Avvenire, a daily newspaper owned by the Catholics Bishop’s Conference. “It’s a clarification of law that already existed.”

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My piece on the latest in Berlusconi’s trials has just been published by Time.

For those hoping to watch another nail driven into Silvio Berlusconi’s coffin, the decision last weekend by a Milan court to cut short his corruption trial must have come as a disappointment. “Everybody was waiting for the verdict to knock him out,” says Paolo Guzzanti, an independent member of Parliament and a onetime ally of the former Prime Minister. “But now, because the trial is finished, he’s going to still feel very much in the game.”

Many Italians, including it seemed Berlusconi himself, expected the court to hand down a conviction on charges that he bribed a British attorney to provide false testimony in an earlier case, thereby landing the ex-Prime Minister a politically painful blow. Instead, the court ruled the statute of limitations had expired. In Italy, the time limit is usually 10 years. In this case, the wrongdoing was alleged to have taken place in 1999, but the charges were only filed in 2006. In the meantime, several postponements in the process took place. The prosecutor apparently believed he had a few months left; the judge decided otherwise.

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The Atlantic has just published my profile of the celebrity chef who designed a burger for McDonald’s.

One brisk autumn day in Milan, I walked into Il Marchesino—an upscale eatery inside La Scala opera house—carrying a brown-paper takeaway bag from McDonald’s. My lunchtime companion that day, the Italian chef Gualtiero Marchesi, was waiting at a small table against a wall. He was dressed in a well-tailored dark-blue suit, his silver hair swept back. On his lapel, he wore a coin-size replica of his most famous dish: a saffron risotto topped with a square leaf of edible gold.

Marchesi, a cherubic 81, managed to seem pleased, surprised, and embarrassed by my offering. With a giggle, he took the bag and set it down on the floor beside his chair. Marchesi is widely credited with elevating Italian food from home cooking to haute cuisine. He earned his first Michelin star in 1977 and eight years later became the first non-French chef to receive three. But I had come to see him about another, more recent, first. In 2011, Marchesi became the first celebrity chef to design a hamburger for McDonald’s—two of them, in fact, and a dessert to go with them. What I had brought in the brown-paper bag was Marchesi’s own creation.

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Time has just published my piece on the Mediterranean diet, and why it’s under threat.

In the fall of 1957, a Minnesota doctor named Ancel Keys traveled from Naples to the southern Italian town of Nicotera. The road was long and dusty, winding for hours into the mountainous toe of the Italian boot. But the trip was worth it. Keys, a physiologist who had spent World War II developing combat food rations, was searching for the answer to one of the great questions of healthy living: Why did heart attacks plague some groups of people (say, Minnesota businessmen) while leaving others (southern Italian farmers, for instance) nearly untouched?

Keys spent his stay in Nicotera measuring body-fat and cholesterol levels, gathering the first data for a global comparison of eating habits that enshrined the mediterranean diet as the gold standard for a healthy menu. in subsequent visits, Keys and his colleagues weighed the villagers’ meals and recorded their contents, showing up unannounced to ensure that what the locals were eating when the scientists arrived was what they normally ate. “Without asking permission, they would open the door and walk into the kitchen,” recalls pasquale Barbalace, 76, a resident of Nicotera who participated in the study as a young man

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Time has just published my piece on what Italians are calling Vatileaks.

Maybe the Vatican is not so good at keeping secrets after all. In the past few weeks, the Holy See has sprung a series of leaks. Their contents range from allegations of corruption and cronyism in Rome, to internal criticism of a Vatican effort to tackle money laundering, to a bizarre letter speculating about an assassination attempt on Pope Benedict XVI.

Each leak would be embarrassing enough on its own. Together, they add up to a picture of disarray at the top tiers of the Catholic Church, even as the Vatican admitted 22 more clerics to the College of Cardinals on Saturday, expanding the ranks of those who could one day become pope. “The real news isn’t the content of these documents,” says Andrea Tornielli, a long-time Vatican watcher. “It’s the fact that all these documents are coming out at the same time.”

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Businessweek has just published a story I’ve long wanted to do: on why Starbucks has never come to Italy.

If it weren’t for Italy, Starbucks might not exist. After all, it was on a business trip to Milan in 1983 that Howard Schultz had the revelation on which he built his global empire. At the time, Starbucks was a coffee roaster—it didn’t own a single cafe—and Schultz was its marketing director. In a book published after the company had become an international behemoth, Schultz described how he set out one morning, sipping espressos at the cafes near his hotel. By afternoon he had sampled his way to the Piazza del Duomo, home to Milan’s famous Gothic cathedral. The large square was “almost literally lined” with coffee shops, he wrote. The air was alive with the sound of opera and the smell of roasting chestnuts. Schultz noted “the light banter of political debate and the chatter of kids in school uniforms” and watched as retirees and mothers with children made small talk with the baristas behind the counters.

It was at this point that Schultz, no doubt heavily caffeinated, was seized by inspiration. Most Americans were still drinking their coffee at diners, in restaurants, or at the kitchen table; Italians had made cafes part of their community. Coffee didn’t have to be just a drink, he realized. It could be an experience. The opportunity was enormous, and Starbucks, by limiting itself to roasting, was in danger of missing it. “It was like an epiphany,” Schultz recalled in his book. “It was so immediate and physical that I was shaking.”

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