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There have been so many complaints about Bill De Blasio’s inauguration in the right-wing (di destra) mass media and apologies in the left-wing (di sinistra) mass media that I thought I should take a look/listen at his speech.

Local administrative elections this past Sunday and Monday in Rome and other key cities throughout Italy caught observers by surprise. The turnout was 20% lower than the last round five years ago, as nearly half those entitled to vote in the cities, which included Rome, Ferrara and Siena, stayed home or abstained. Whereas the left-leaning Partito Democratico (PD) made a surprisingly good showing. Berlusconi's Partito della Liberta' (PdL) slumped behind the PD, and Beppe Grillo's Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S, or Five-Star Movement) just dropped a few stars. For them, no one had predicted a debacle on this level.

The famous Ides of March of ancient Rome fell on March 15, the day when the tyrannical Julius Caesar was assassinated in the building where the Senate was meeting. His assassin was Brutus, acting on behalf of a group of conspirators known as the "Liberators." By coincidence, Italy's neo-deputies and senators take their seats in Parliament and the Senate on that very day. Among them, the largest single political party - 109 members of the Chamber of Deputies (25.5%) and 50 Senators (23% ) - is led by Beppe Grillo, whose weapon of choice in trying to liberate the system from itself is rhetoric.

As Leonardo Sciascia once said, it is easy to manage wealth, but hard to manage misery. These are tough times for Italy as elsewhere, and the sight of shops shutting down and factory closures is the elephant in the room of the national general elections just three weeks away. All this is serious enough, but is further aggravated by the daily revelations of the financial shenanigans at the world's oldest bank, the Monte di Paschi (MPS) of Siena, where huge losses were craftily concealed while managers are under investigation for allegedly enriching themselves (the scandals refer to the previous, not the present management, in office just one year).