'Italy' - tagged features

Many people would say they hear a lot of garbage from politicians during election campaigns, but in Italy garbage is one of the hot issues in this election campaign - especially in the southern Campania region. Although the streets of Naples have finally been cleared of their huge piles of rubbish, the problem is as bad as ever on the city's outskirts. But what's even worse is the problem of toxic industrial waste, dumped in huge quantities by the local mafia - the comorra. Locals are falling ill, animals and crops are being poisoned - and yet no-one is being held accountable. 

Rome wasn't built in a day and seeing it in 24 hours is nearly impossible…unless you run. Well, lace up your sneakers and run, tourist, run. Guides from a company called Sightjogging will provide you with a tour that’s sprinkled with sweat and historical details. The tours are attracting fitness friends while baffling Romans who prefer a slower-paced life. Our reporter Nancy Greenleese went the extra mile to bring us this story. 

Romania joined the European Union on January the 1st 2007. Initially the West feared a massive wave of immigration from Romania and Bulgaria. It wasn’t really like that. Romanians have continued to go to work in Italy and Spain as they used to do before Romania’s entry in the EU. But in recent months, Italian and Spanish newspapers have abounded in rather unflattering articles about the Romanian community there, which is the biggest foreign community in Italy, numbering according to official figures half a million Romanians. 

The piece of paper that got Europe started, the Treaty of Rome, is about to turn 50. Germany currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU and so Berlin's hosting a big birthday celebration. It will also see the signing of a grand new piece of paper called the Berlin Declaration. Network Europe's Brussels correspondant Stephen Castle told us the German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to mark this date in style. 

At Network Europe we like to get to the bottom of things and when we decided to shift our focus to European's relationships to mark the upcoming celebration of St Valentine, our first question was who exactly was Valentine - Why is he a saint.? And what on earth made him so amorous?   St. Valentine is actually San Valentino, the patron saint of the city of Terni, a city in the Italian region of Umbria, about 100 kilometres from one of Europe's self proclaimed "capitals of romance" - Rome.   Each year, the Terni locals organize not just a single day, (like the rest of the world) but also a whole month of celebrations: from exhibitions to concerts to poetry readings…all on the theme of love, of course. So, how did St. Valentine become the international symbol for amore? Radio Netherlands, Dany Mitzman had the enviable job of finding out. 

Although the Sicilian Mafia have stopped the high-profile murders and bloody gang warfare of the 1990s, the organisation still controls large parts of the southern Italian island. But an EU-funded project aims to break the culture, of depending on the mafia for work, by providing legal jobs in the mafia heartlands, south of Palermo. And they are fighting the bosses with their own weapons - by using land confiscated from imprisoned mafia gangsters. Deutsche Welle’s Kate Hairsine reports from Sicily.