The Italians often drink coffee.

Lots of Italians went to Australia.

Someone who is, as the Italians say, cagoots.

The Dutch are good also, but the Italians are good.

Immigrants tended to take the jobs native born Italians no longer wanted.

Greet all of your leaders and all the saints. The Italians greet you.

Greet all of your leaders and all the saints. The Italians greet you.

Only 18 percent of Italians and 15 percent of Greeks believe that their vote matters.

We're not very good at food in general. Italians do great food, but it's not very portable, generally.

So, last year the French and Italians announced they got together and they went ahead and they sequenced Pinot Noir.

Collective punishment also means not only a type of amnesia by Italians and Romanians about what happened under fascism, nazism, communism, but also for their own national histories. Italians, after all, migrated not only from Italy s south to its north, but also to other countries looking for a better life.

And of course, in Italy where I mean, Italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure they've launched an official Slow Sex movement.

For instance, I didn't know that the Spaniards invented the mop, but they were very proud so every Spaniard said la frego. And Italians did the pizza.

Similarly, the Paper proposes that the self employed should be admitted after an evaluation of their business plans. In Milan this year, more foreigners than Italians registered as self employed.

NEW YORK When too many Italians voted late last month for either a louche and discredited business tycoon or a comedian, European stock markets plummeted. With no public trust in the political class, Italy might become ungovernable.

But, either way, the bipolar political system to which Italians were getting accustomed is unlikely to survive unscathed. The left right divide will become easier for opportunistic politicians to cross, and perhaps a new centrist party will emerge.

A return to full proportionality would probably mean a return to rapid government turnover, which carries with it the risk that policy horizons will also become shorter. As Italians know all too well, government instability inevitably breeds financial volatility.

This vision of Europe is not idealistic it is simply concerned with how Europeanization can benefit Italians. And, like its nineteenth century precursor, it is vulnerable to severe backlashes, especially when it appears to bring only pain and suffering.

It is how Bavarians and Venetians in the 1860s, for example, became convinced that they were and had always been Germans or Italians. Likewise, only a new narrative a new Geist can persuade the British today that they are really Europeans.

This immigration is not an invasioni barbariche, as Italians refer to the Völkerwanderung, although the orders of magnitude are comparable. As migrants move between markets with well defined property rights, immigration in principle is beneficial for both the immigrants and the target country.

But even people who are relatively prosperous are frustrated by some features of globalization. They may oppose the use of their taxes to subsidize poorer people who do not share their identity, such as immigrants, French speaking Belgians, southern Italians, or Greeks.

Italy s armada of Guardia di Finanza boats would hardly forestall a massive exodus of wealth if Italians see a sizable wealth tax coming. Over and under invoicing of trade, for example, is a time tested way to spirit money out of a country.

Superior German economic performance has bid up the euro and European interest rates to levels that, while comfortable for the Germans, put pressure on the euro zone s laggards. The appropriate level of the euro for the Germans is too high for the French and Italians.

After five years of slow growth and rising unemployment, voters in other indebted countries, like Italians (and French voters before them), are likely to reject additional spending reductions, tax increases, and further painful deregulation. Europe must find more effective policies that reduce production costs toward German levels.

According to an alarming poll published recently by the leading Italian newspaper La Repubblica, more than 22 of Italians find no great differences between an authoritarian and a democratic system of government. Another 10 believe that an authoritarian regime is better and more effective than a democratic political system.

Nor are Italians reassured to learn that Berlusconi fielded a number of candidates during the recent European Parliament elections whose only discernible qualification was that they were pretty young girls who had possibly spent some time in the prime minister s company at his Sardinian Villa or Roman Palazzo.

The Middle East was supposed to be messy and unpredictable, unlike the new and modern Russia of Putin. The problem today is that for Ukrainians, Georgians, not to mention Italians, Christian oil and gas from Russia does not seem nearly as secure and as fail proof as Putin promised.

French history demonstrates that excessive presidential power is likely to create an almighty and, at times, politically feckless executive, alongside a weak parliament that chronically under represents a significant proportion of the population. Beyond the incantatory formulas, Italians should reflect carefully on the desirability of adopting such a system.

Italy is facing perhaps its most important elections since 1948, when voters confirmed the emergence of Italy s new republic from the wreckage of Mussolini s fascist regime. On April 9 10, Italians must choose between Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi s center right government and the center left bloc headed by Romano Prodi.

Moreover, if Italians held all Italian public debt, any increase in the risk premium would be less burdensome. Even if the risk premium doubled, to 500 basis points, the Italian government s debt service costs would rise, but the money would be paid to Italian investors (whose higher incomes could then be taxed away).

Similarly, northern Italians don t like their tax money being used to help the south, but at least they still have a language more or less in common, as well as TV stars, a national soccer team, and Silvio Berlusconi. The Belgians only have a king, who is descended, like most European monarchs, from Germans.

NEW YORK Some of the more hysterical German newspapers blamed Germany s defeat against Italy in the semi finals of the European championship on the fact that few players bothered to sing the national anthem. Contrast that with the Italian players, all of whom belted out the words of Il Canto degli Italiani (The Song of the Italians).

Most Italians breathed a collective sigh of relief that three time Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is being replaced by a technocrat par excellence, former European Commissioner Mario Monti, a respected economist. Greece, too, is turning over the reigns of government to an unelected, and supposedly apolitical, technocrat, Lucas Papademos, a former vice president of the European Central Bank.

There had been no census in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war and there do not exist reliable indicators on the number of national minorities, but according to the census in 1991, within the framework of the law the following are mentioned Albanians, Montenegrins, Czechs, Italians, Jews, Macedonians, Germans, Pollacks, Russians, Roma, Romanians, Resins, Slovaks, Slovenians, Turks, Ukrainians.

Italians already shoulder heavy taxes an individual taxpayer with annual income of 50,000 pays 15,000 in income tax with two children, that total drops by only 1,000. By contrast, a French taxpayer with the same income pays only 9,000 with two children, the tax bill plummets to 3,000, and a 1.5 million fortune would mean an additional wealth tax of only 4,230.

Some Italians responded violently some Italian and Romanian politicians, eager to offer quick and tough solutions, made scandalous statements that echoed the xenophobic and totalitarian slogans of the past. We are encountering, not without irony, a kind of grotesque reverse of the national pride seen when cultural and sporting stars are appropriated by the state and presented as part of the collective patrimony.

But, for many Italians, the French political system s most attractive feature is that the president is the true head of the executive and, since the presidential and legislative terms were aligned in 2000, that authority has run for five years at a time. To Italian lawmakers, mired in stalemate and indecision, the French executive s considerable influence over the parliament is appealing.

If these bonds were acquired by Italian investors (who would have to sell an equivalent amount of low yielding foreign assets), Italians would save the equivalent of 0.73 of their country s GDP. Any risk premium that the Italian government might still have to pay would no longer go to foreigners, but to Italian savers, whose incomes would increase a net gain for the country.

The same night that Germany was thrashed by the Italians in the championship s semi finals, German Chancellor Angela Merkel ran up against the limits of her own powers at the eurozone leaders summit in Brussels. Germany s political course since the beginning of the euro crisis two years ago had left it isolated, and she was no match for an alliance of Italy, Spain, and France.

But the Italians had no chance in the final against Spain, the best team in the world, none of whose players opened their mouths during the Spanish anthem, Marcha Real which stands to reason, given that the Royal March nbsp has no lyrics. And, besides, the Catalonian players feel uncomfortable with the national anthem, which was much promoted under the late dictator Francisco Franco, who hated Catalan nationalism.

The Italians and Spaniards are right the principal reason for the size of the spread between the periphery and Germany is convertibility risk. Investors are demanding a hefty premium to insure against the chance that Italy and Spain are ultimately forced out of the eurozone thus bringing that day closer by weakening countries fiscal positions and raising their private sector borrowing costs (which are set by government bond yields).

Berlusconi claims that statistics are unreliable, for they conceal a much rosier reality for today s well off Italians. Other members of the government admit more soberly that Italy faces serious problems, but they lay the blame on factors beyond their control a series of global economic shocks, a slow down in continental Europe, the admission of China to the World Trade Organization, and the role of the euro.

MILAN Italians and other Europeans have serious problems addressing their own national debts, public and private, so it may seem immodest for a European to discuss America s growing and grave debt problem. But the fiscal realities on both sides of the Atlantic nowadays are very similar, and only lingering trust in the promise of America keeps alive the expectation among some Europeans that some grand American coup de théâtrewill resolve the country s dire debt situation.

If European integration shifts into reverse, the outcome will not be a series of happy and prosperous nation states, living in a sort of replica of the 1950 s or 1960 s. Southern Germans would wonder whether they were not transferring too much to the north s old industrial rustbelt northern Italians who support the anti EU Lega Nord in the self styled unit of Padania would want to escape from the rule of Rome and the south.