Wikipedia pulls Italian version in protest at wiretapping laws

Wikipedia has taking its Italian language version down in protest at new privacy laws currently before Italy’s parliament. The draft law would oblige websites to amend content within 48 hours if the subject deems it harmful or biased. In a communication released on Tuesday, Wikipedia said their Italian version may be no longer able to continue. “As things stand, the page you want still exists and is only hidden, but the risk is that soon we will be forced by Law to actually delete it,” Wikipedia said. “The very pillars on which Wikipedia has been built - neutrality, freedom, and verifiability of its contents - are likely to be heavily compromised by paragraph 29 of a law proposal, also known as "DDL intercettazioni.”

The Italian Parliament is currently debating DDL intercettazioni which requires all websites to publish a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image within 48 hours of the request and without any comment. Wikipedia said the law does not require a third party evaluation of the claim and anyone offended by online content has the right for a correction to be shown, unaltered, on the page, regardless of the truth of the initial allegation. Wikipedia said this law would distort its principles and would bring to a paralysis of the "horizontal" method of access and editing, putting “an end to its existence as we have known until today”.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi introduced the draft bill in 2010 saying it was needed to protect the rights of private citizens. The bill restricts the right of police and prosecutors to plant bugs and record telephone conversations and also proposes fines for journalists publishing transcripts of recordings. Journalists across Italy went on strike in July 2010 in protest at the laws. Head of the Italian journalists union, Roberto Natale said the real objective was to prevent reporting of judicial cases with high political impact, “the ones that can generate, and have generated, embarrassment.”

Reporters Without Borders strongly condemned the law at the time. They said the laws went beyond just the national domain. “It would send a disastrous signal to other countries and would encourage dictatorships to use it as a model for restricting the investigative capacity of their local press with even more dramatic consequences,” RSB said. They said telephone taps were often the main evidence in support of stories about corruption and organised crime. “The sole practical aim of this bill is to prevent any investigative reporting.”

Berlusconi has been the victim of several wiretaps. Most recently judges released wiretaps at the conclusion of an investigation into Gianpaolo Tarantini, who paid women to sleep with the prime minister at his home. The wiretaps revealed a man with a large sexual appetite but whether this is something for the public domain is debatable. Berlusconi didn’t think so. “My private life is not a crime, my lifestyle may or may not please, it is personal, reserved and irreproachable,” he said.

His law is not totally without justification. Italy is the champion of the western world for wiretaps. In 2005 Italian mobile operator TIM issued a fax to all Italian public prosecutors they have already over-stretched their capacity from 5000 to 7000 simultaneously intercepted mobile phones and had now reached their limit. In 2004, Italy orders 172 judicial intercepts per 100,000 inhabitants.

After being bogged down for a year, debate on the bill resumed on Wednesday. Centre-right politician Giulia Bongiorno was responsible for carrying the law though parliament disowned it after Berlusconi's PDL party succeeded in adding an amendment that would see journalists jailed for between six months and three years if they published "irrelevant" wiretaps. Bongiorno said she no longer recognised anything in the text of the bill and blamed the changes on Berlusconi's direct intervention. The UK Independent now says the parties have reached compromise to see the law applied only to registered online news services and not to amateur blogs. That compromise was not good enough for Wikipedia.

Taliban’s Mullah Omar issues warning to West on Afghan war

The Taliban leader says the West lacks the will to fight in Afghanistan and he may be right. Mullah Omar has issued a statement from his hiding place in Pakistan warning of huge casualties and said the West does not have the stomach for the war. Omar said that the more forces the US deploys in the country, the more they will face “unequivocal defeat”. He referred to history when he described the country as a “graveyard for colonial troops”. His statement came as Taliban-linked rebels have intensified use of roadside bombs, particularly in the south. This year more than 350 foreign troops have been killed, making it the deadliest year since fighting began. (picture credit: daviza)

Italy is the latest western country to question its commitment to Afghanistan after six of its troops were killed alongside ten Afghan civilians in a Kabul bomb blast on Thursday. The European nation has 2,800 soldiers in Afghanistan and had already started bringing some home before the latest attack which brought its death toll to 20. Now Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is publicly questioning the mission. "We are all convinced it's best for everybody to get out soon," he said.

Berlusconi’s statement will not be welcomed by the White House which provides two-thirds of the 100,000 troops in the Nato-led occupation force. With a new administration in the White House, the US has re-examined their motives for fighting the eight-year war. In March President Obama made a pledge to expand the US military presence in Afghanistan. But as the World Politics Review puts it, the essential question now is not whether the war is winnable, but whether the mission is vital to American national security interests. And from this perspective, says the review, the open-ended strategy fails.

The US administration has acknowledged the new policy raises the stakes by transforming the Afghan War from a limited intervention into a more ambitious and potentially risky counter-insurgency. The statement was made in a Senate Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations which was released last month. The report stressed the importance of a counter-narcotics policy in winning the war. For years commanders on the ground said that going after drug lords was not part of their mandate. But now the US has targeted drug traffickers who help finance the Taliban as a major priority. The report said tens of millions of drug dollars are helping the Taliban and other insurgent groups to “buy arms, build deadlier roadside bombs and pay fighters.”

Afghanistan’s opium industry supplies 90 percent of the world’s heroin and generates $3 billion in profits. But the UN says production is on the decline for the second year in a row. The Americans have targeted 50 of the major drug traffickers on a military hit list to be “killed or captured”. It has also set up an intelligence centre to analyse the flow of drug money to the Taliban and corrupt Afghan officials, and an international task force to pursue drug networks in southern Afghanistan. But stopping the flow of drug money will not be easy. Most transactions are conducted in cash and are concealed by an ancient and secretive money transfer system. The strategy acknowledges that counter-narcotics will not be enough to win the war. The other major aspect of the change of direction relates to the activities of farmers. The Obama administration has admitted a program to eradicate poppies is a failure and emphasis will now be on promoting legal alternative crops.

The report did not dodge two important questions that will impact the success of the change of direction. It asked whether the US Government has the capacity and the will to provide the hundreds more civilians to transform a poppy-dominated economy into one where legitimate agriculture can thrive. It also wondered whether Nato allies be counted on to step up their contributions on the military and civilian sides at a time when support is waning across the Western world. It also asks the questions that Obama’s team will need to honestly answer if the president is to avoid Afghanistan becoming his Vietnam: Does the American public understand and support the sacrifices that will be required to finish the job? And what is the job anyway? Obama and the other western leaders cannot use the hoary “terrorist safe havens” argument forever. And as Mullah Omar reminds us, forever is likely to be a very long time.

Beppe Grillo's V-day salute to Berlusconi

As predicted here two months ago, Silvio Berlusconi has comfortably won the weekend election in Italy to become Prime Minister for the third time. Berlusconi’s latest comeback was at the hands of the distinctly uncharismatic centre-left opponent Walter Veltroni. But with Italy’s deepening problems in the areas of faltering competitiveness, unsustainable fiscal deficits, broken governmental services, corruption and a bloated bureaucracy, Berlusconi’s most implacable opponent may turn out to be an almost sixty old comedian and actor who has the ear of many everyday Italians, and increasingly, a large worldwide audience.

That man is Beppo Grillo. Grillo is famous not for his comedy or his thespian abilities but for his blog. In it, his acerbic writings strikes at the heart of Italy’s biggest scourge: rampant political corruption. Grillo is no fan of fellow media tart Berlusconi. In his blog, he has called him the "psychotic dwarf" and "asphalt head”. The English language version of his blog can be viewed here. As of 16 April, Technorati ranks Grillo’s site as the 13th most popular in the blogosphere worldwide with over 9,000 incoming links in the last six months.

Guiseppe Piero Grillo was born 60 years ago in the small Ligurian town of Savignone. He was educated as an accountant and he became a comedian by chance improvising a monologue in an audition. He was discovered by television presenter Pippo Baudo and he began to appear on Italian TV shows. As his success rose, he launched his own show called Grillometro where his particular brand of satire began to offend Italian politicians. He condemned the then ruling Socialists for corruption. As he created more enemies, his appearances on television became rarer.

In Time magazine’s first annual blog index released last month, the Blog di Beppo Grillo was voted the most interesting political blog. Time noted Grillo’s popularity to the “international language of outrage”. Their nomination concluded that “America could use a political satirist fuelled by this sort of outrage, but for now, there's Beppe”.

The most successful of Grillo’s stunts was his September 2007 rally across 300 Italian cities and towns for his “Il Giorno del Vaffanculo” (“Fuck Off Day” in English). Fuck Off Day was designed to encourage citizens to forcibly remove from office members of the Italian Parliament who have criminal convictions. Hundreds of thousands turned up for the rallies. The campaign was so successful he has arranged to follow it up with V2-Day on 25 April to protest against the subservience of the press. Grillo promoted the idea during his election tour of the country which attracted great crowds but was studiously ignored by the Berlusconi-dominated media.

While Grillo has not yet put himself forward as an electoral candidate, he has allowed the few candidates he likes to use his “Lista Grillo” (Grillo’s List) symbol as an endorsement. Grillo has publicly stated that no-one with a criminal record should be allowed to stand for office – that immediately rules himself out as he was convicted of manslaughter after a 1980 road accident in which three passengers died in a car with Grillo at the wheel. But Grillo prefers to be a catalyst rather a protagonist. The New Yorker magazine described Grillo accurately as a “distinctly Italian combination of Michael Moore and Stephen Colbert: an activist and vulgarian with a deft ear for political satire.”

The Knight rides again: Berlusconi likely to win Italian election

Silvio Berlusconi is poised to win his third term as Italian Prime Minister in the snap election called for April. The man known as Il Cavaliere, "The Knight", is riding high in opinion polls. Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition is at least 10 percentage points ahead of his opponents. This week he has kept out of the media spotlight as after his 97 year old mother died on Sunday. But he is expected to go on the attack once he comes out of mourning showing that the country’s wealthiest man remains a dominant force in Italian politics.

Berlusconi is seriously rich. In 2006, Forbes ranked Silvio Berlusconi as the 37th wealthiest person in the world with an estimated personal wealth of $11 billion. He is the owner of Fininvest investment company, which has interests in television, life insurance, movie production, magazines, news and the AC Milan football club. But Berlusconi was never satisfied by wealth alone. He formed his political party Forza Italia (named for a football chant) in 1993 and he became Prime Minister just one year later in coalition with neo-fascist Alleanza Nazionale and Northern League. That lasted one year but he returned to power in 2001. His subsequent five-year stint is a post-war record in Italy’s volatile political landscape.

His likely third win will be a remarkable turnaround in the fortunes of the 71 year old Berlusconi coming just 18 months after Italy exulted in removing him from office. While in power, he was heavily criticised for putting himself above the law and using his media empire to stifle criticism. He also raised eyebrows with his blunders, eccentricities, and apparent misogyny. No one was exactly sure what he and his party Forza Italia stood for, except perhaps for Berlusconi himself.

According to Bronwen Maddox writing in The Times, Berlusconi does not deserve another chance to become PM. Maddox cites his conflicts of interest with his media and business empire, his change of laws while in power to sidestep charges of false accounting and the fact that nothing in his record suggested he merited another shot at leadership. Maddox said Berlusconi’s most damaging legacy was his 2005 reform of the electoral law which replaced the first-past-the-post element with proportional representation. The first-past-the-post law had been introduced in 1993 and ended Italy’s decades of insecure governments.

Berlusconi’s law change ushered in the fragile nine-party coalition of Romani Prodi which resigned 12 months ago after a Senate defeat on Prodi’s decision to keep Italy’s 1,800 troops in Afghanistan. However Prodi cobbled together another administration, the 61st Italian government since World War II. However he found history repeating itself in January this year. This time the Senate passed another no confidence motion after a small centrist party pulled out of the coalition. This time there was no reprieve and Prodi was left with no alternative but to resign and call a snap election to be held 13-14 April.

Berlusconi was immediate ready to pounce calling for stability in the Senate. His centre-right coalition is now aiming to recruit the small centrist and Catholic party whose defection sank Prodi. Prodi has since stood aside and Berlusconi’s new rival will be Rome's 52-year-old mayor Walter Veltroni. Veltroni has been criticised on the left by Communist and Green groups for not forging a coalition with them. They urged him to rethink his solo strategy and avoid "handing Mr Berlusconi victory on a silver platter". Veltroni, a former Communist himself, has refused these entreaties saying he was open to parliamentary alliances later on with "the reform-minded left, but not the radical left”.

Veltroni says he is avoiding alliances in order to give his Democratic Party a strong identity. This is likely to be a longer term gamble to strengthen his bid to win future elections. He has achieved some success as mayor of Rome, being at the helm when the city achieved 6.4 per cent of the national GDP growing faster than any other part of Italy. Given his relative youth and Italy’s unstable parliamentary system, an election win may not be too far in the future. For now however his uncompromising attitude has left the door wide open for "Il Cavaliere" Berlusconi to ride to a comfortable victory in April.

Mafia acquitted of killing God's Banker

A court in Rome has acquitted five people accused of murdering Italian financier Roberto Calvi due to insufficient evidence. Calvi was known as “God’s Banker” due to his work on behalf of the Vatican’s bank. The decision comes almost 25 years to the day of his death. In 1982 his body was found hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge with rocks and $15,000 in cash stuffed into his suit. London police initially ruled it suicide but Italian prosecutors eventually brought murder charges in 2003 after pressure from Calvi’s family. The five cleared this week are Giuseppe "Pippo" Calo, a mafia money launderer, businessmen Ernesto Diotallevi and Flavio Carboni, Calvi's driver and bodyguard Silvano Vittor, and Carboni's Austrian ex-girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig.

While the acquittal of Kleinszig was not unexpected (the prosecution had asked for her charges to be dropped due to insufficient evidence), the release of the four others after a 20 month trial was a shock. Prosecutors had asked for life sentences for all four. One of the detectives involved in the case, Geoff Katz, said he was surprised by the verdict. "It'll be a tremendous disappointment for the families and also the Italian magistrates who have spent so much time on this case," he said. But one of Calo's lawyers, Massimo Amoroso, said the evidence was weak. The judges have yet to release their reasoning for the verdict.

The acquittals leave a sense of continuing uncertainty over how Calvi met his death. Roberto Calvi was 62 years old when he was found hanging from a rope attached to scaffolding under the bridge. He had come to the UK on bail after having been convicted of corruption in Italy. During the trial, prosecutors alleged Calvi was taken to the bridge by boat and was probably still alive but unconscious when a noose was placed around his neck.

The Milan-born Calvi was chairman of Banco Ambrosiano which collapsed shortly before he died. The bank was founded in 1896 as a Catholic bank and named for St Ambrose, the fourth century archbishop of Milan. The bank’s purpose was to act as a counter-balance to Italy’s secular banks. Calvi joined Ambrosiano in 1947 and worked his way up to become chairman by 1975. Calvi created a number of off-shore companies in the Bahamas and South America and also bought Italy’s premier newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Meanwhile the bank’s major shareholder was now the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), the official name of the Vatican bank. In 1971 Pope Paul VI appointed Chicago-born Archbishop Paul Marcinkus chairman of the IOR. The burly Marcinkus was a papal bodyguard known as “the Pope’s gorilla”. He saved the pontiff’s life after he knocked a knife out of the hands of a deranged Bolivian painter who lunged at the Pope in the Philippines. The bank job was his reward. Marcinkus was a practical man when it came to financial affairs and his dictum was “you can’t run the church on Hail Marys”. He knew the unworldly Vatican needed a commercial banking partner and in 1974 he chose Banco Ambrosiano.

Calvi was a compulsive operator and used a complex network of overseas banks and finance companies to move money out of Italy, inflate share prices, and secure massive unsecured loans. By 1978 the bank was in deep trouble. The bank of Italy issued a report that found Banco Ambrosiano had made illegal exports of several billion lire. In 1981 Calvi was put on trial and given a four year suspended sentence and a $20 million fine for taking $26.4 million out of the country in violation of Italian currency laws. Incredibly Calvi kept his job at the bank.

While investigating Calvi, police uncovered a link to financier Licio Gelli. Both men were freemasons and Gelli was the leader of a covert Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due (P2). This lodge was extremely powerful and its members were journalists, parliamentarians, industrialists, and military leaders and the heads of the three Italian intelligence services. When police searched Gelli’s house they found a document called the Democratic Rebirth Plan which was a plan to steer Italy towards a more autocratic government. Its existence scandalised Italy. Gelli fled the country, but the affair brought down the government of Arnaldo Forlani.

A year later Banco Ambrosiano was on the verge of collapse with debts of $1.4 billion. It was revealed that Calvi had given the money in questionable loans to three of Banco Ambrosiano’s Latin American subsidiaries. The bank was accused of money laundering for P2 and the mafia. Archbishop Marcinkus and the Vatican bank were implicated. The IOR owned ten of the overseas dummy companies in the Bahamas and South America to which Ambrosiano lent the money.

Calvi was devastated by the discovery of the loans. On 5 June 1982, he wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II in which he pleaded for help. The letter started: “I have thought a lot, Holiness, and have concluded that you are my last hope.” Calvi went on to warn the pope that the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano would “provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage”. He also claimed the IOR were hiding the facts about the Vatican’s financial irregularities from the pope.

Five days later Calvi left Rome, presumably without an answer from the pontiff. He obtained a false passport and flew to London. The prosecution in the court case alleged he was lured to London so he could be killed for embezzling Mafia funds as well as stop him from revealing what he knew about the Vatican Bank and P2. After being missing for seven days, he was officially sacked from the bank. On the morning after a mail-room clerk of the Daily Express, walking to his job on Fleet Street, found Calvi swinging from Blackfriars bridge in London’s financial district.

An initial autopsy judged the death as suicide. But a second autopsy a year later gave an open verdict. In 1984 the Vatican Bank agreed to pay US$224 million to the 120 creditors of the failed Banco Ambrosiano as a “recognition of moral involvement” in the bank's collapse. In 1987 Milan judges investigating the Ambrosiano affair issued a warrant for Archbishop Marcinkus’s arrest for being accessories to the fraudulent bankruptcy of the bank. But because the Vatican enjoyed protected borders under the 1929 Lateran Treaty, the Italian police could not arrest him. The Pope accused the Italians of a “brutal cover-up” and refused to extradite him. Marcinkus was quietly retired to Phoenix, Arizona.

Calvi's family continually maintained that his death had been a murder. His body was exhumed in 1998 and a forensic report four years later concluded he had been murdered. The case was re-opened in 2003. The ringleader of the five people charged was Pippo Calo, a Mafia gangster already serving a long prison sentence. Prosecutors said they believed Calvi was murdered by the Sicilian Mafia and mainland Italian mobsters, the Camorra, as punishment for pocketing money they had asked him to launder. The prosecution presented forensic evidence that he was strangled and his suicide staged in a manner suggesting Mafia or Masonic ritual.

But after this week’s verdict, his family are in anguish again. Calvi's son Carlo who now lives in Canada never believed that his father's death was a suicide. He said he was disappointed but not surprised. "I never thought this was going to end today," he said. "But these are the individuals I consider responsible for organizing his journey to London and his murder on the behalf of others."

Forza Italia

Finito. Sepp Blatter’s bloated festival of football is over. Italy have won their 4th world cup having beaten France in the final at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. The final score was 1-1 after 120 minutes and the Italians buried their shootout hoodoo with a 5-3 win on penalties.

Marco Materazzi headed an 19th minute equaliser after Zidane’s 5th minute penalty recalled both Holland’s 1974 start and Geoff Hurst’s bounced-over-the-line goal in 1966. Zidane wrote himself into the history books joining Hurst and the Brazilians Vava and Pele as the only players to score three goals in world cup finals. Alas he ruined his final appearance by a head-butt which landed on the chest of the Italian goalscorer Materazzi. The world awaits the verdict on what the Italian said to motivate this extraordinary action. One can assume that it wasn't an invite to come around for an evening of mah-jong. Whatever he said, the incident was missed by the referee and linesman but picked up on the video by the fourth official. Zidane had to make do with the Player of the Tournament award instead. The Italians hit a flawless set of five penalties. Trezuguet missed his and Fabian Grosso had the honour of scoring the winning penalty to send his country into raptures.

Some highlights of the tournament:

Graham “Three Cards” Poll. Poll was the only English referee in the cup. He was in charge of the powder keg Australia v Croatia game. With a few minutes to go he booked the Croatia no 3 Josip Simunic. Unfortunately in the heat of the moment he wrote down no 3 Craig Moore, his opposite Australian number. So when he booked him again a few minutes later Simunic was about to walk off the field when he noticed that Poll wasn’t going to brandish the red. But just for good measure Simunic transgressed again at the very end and got his third yellow and first red. Croatia went home into the bargain. Poll’s fellow referee, Russian Valentin Ivanov also gets a special mention for hectic 16 yellows and four reds in the 2nd round game between Portugal v Holland.

On June 27, an Islamist group in southern India have complained that many youths in the region have "gone mad" over football during the World Cup Finals. They have and are trying to dissuade them from watching matches. "Wherever you go, you see (youths) wearing jerseys of various teams. It's like idol worship which our religion doesn't promote in any form," said Sattar Pathallur, secretary of the Sunni Students Federation in Malappuram district of Kerala state.

The reason England were rubbish at the world cup: because of the WAGS (Wives and Girlfriends). This group of women led by Victoria Beckham were all holed up in the same five star hotel in Baden-Baden 20 miles from their partners. They proceeded to spend big in the town. They grabbed the headlines with drunken antics and phone calls to husbands at 4am. By day, the wags hunted in packs for designer gear. By night, their behaviour they danced on tables and ran up huge bar bills. The world cup made stars of Frank Lampard's partner Elen Rives and Joe Cole's personal trainer girlfriend Carly Zucker. If only England’s players had performed this well. Brazilian newspaper Gazeta Esportiva put it best, 'the WAGs are anorexics addicted to shopping with hollow lobotomised heads.’

The Vatican meanwhile lamented the flood of prostitutes into Germany for the World Cup, saying it cheapened the dignity of women, "who cost less than a ticket to a soccer game." How do they know how much it costs? A U.S. congressman estimated that as many as 40,000 women could be brought into Germany as sex workers, although some German officials have questioned those numbers. Prostitution is legal in Germany, and some 400,000 registered sex workers pay taxes and receive social benefits. In the end, the predicted industry boom failed to materialise. Hundreds of Czech, Russian and Spanish prostitutes left Germany before the quarter-finals due lack of demand. 'We saw it all so differently,' said a Colombian. 'I just sat in my brothel alone.'

The lonely ladies were not the only ones to see it differently. To Angola goes the award for the best named players in this tournament: Goliath, Akwa, Loco, Freddy, Love, Rats.

Loco Freddy love rats indeed! Roll on South Africa 2010.

The Michelangelus

'Portrait of Michelangelo',
Marcello Venusti, 1535.
Casa Buonarroti, Florence.

Michelangelo Buonarroti is unique. He is in a category of one to have achieved immortality in all three visual arts fields: painting, sculpture and architecture. His name is synonymous with “masterpiece”.

Michelangelo was born of minor nobility. His father was the podesta (chief magistrate) in Caprese, Tuscany. The second of five brothers, he was born 6 March 1475. His father noted in what could have been his blog "Today, a child of the male sex has been born to me and I have named him Michelangelo. He was born on Monday between 4 and 5 in the morning”. Despite his birthplace, Michelangelo always considered himself a "son and citizen of Florence.” Florence was where Michelangelo grew up.

His mother was too sick to nurse him so he was placed with a wet nurse in a family of stone cutters. In his own words he “sucked in the craft of hammer and chisel with my foster mother's milk”. His real mother died when he was six years old.

At age 13, he was apprenticed to Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio who was renowned for his chiaroscuro and perspective techniques. Michelangelo also learnt to sculpt and his early talent got him an invite into the school of design (and eventually the household) of Lorenzo de Medici, the ruler of Florence. Lorenzo was known as Il Magnifico and a great patron of the arts as well as an astute politician. His support for Ghirlandaio, Leonardo, Botticelli, del Verocchio as well as Michelangelo made Florence the centre of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century. Michelangelo lived and dined with the Medici family. Here he created his earliest known reliefs, the Madonna of the Steps and Battle of the Centaurs.

Lorenzo died in 1492 when Michelangelo was 17 years old. With his death, the centre of the Renaissance switched to Rome and the ambitions of the popes. The Medici family were expelled from Florence in 1494 by the Dominican priest Savonarola who turned the city into a theocracy. His followers carried out the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497, burning artwork, cosmetics, mirrors and books. He went too far and was hanged and burned that same year after an excommunication order from the pope.

Florence under Savonarola was no safe place for a radical artist. Michelangelo fled to Venice and then to Bologna before landing in Rome in 1497. There he made his marble sculpture the Pietà which now adorns its own chapel in St Peter’s Basilica. The Pietà is a masterpiece of classical harmony, beauty and restraint. It is the only work with his signature. Enraged that someone thought it a fake, he carved MICHAELA[N]GELUS BONAROTUS FLORENTIN[US] FACIEBAT (Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this) on the sash running across Mary's breast. It was the only work he ever signed. He later regretted his petulance and swore never to sign another.

Michelangelo returned to Florence after the fall of Savonarola and was commissioned by the Wool Guild to do a colossal statue of David as a symbol of Florentine freedom, to be placed in the Piazza della Signoria. Arguably his greatest sculpture, David took three years to complete, and was finished in 1504. It was unique among representations of the biblical David in that it shows him tensed and ready for combat rather than victorious and standing over Goliath as in most other depictions. The sculpture was moved indoors in 1873 to preserve it from the weather and a replica now stands in the Piazza.

On completion, Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome by the new pope Julius II. Known as “the Warrior Pope”, Julius took the papacy out of the shackles of the Borgias and had great plans to rebuild the Vatican. He laid the foundation stone of the new St Peter's in 1506. Michelangelo was commissioned to design the Pope’s tomb. Due to constant interruptions, this took the next 40 years and was never finished.

One such interruption was the request to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This was a great fresco work which took four years. Fresco means fresh in Italian and artists race against time to paint before it dries on freshly laid plaster. Michelangelo worked with the greatest fresco artists of the day to complete the painting. The detail on the ceiling is astonishing. There are nine scenes from the book of Genesis. These are surrounded by a vast cast of prophets, sibyls and the ancestors of Christ. Immediately celebrated, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, with its innumerable figures in complex, twisting poses and its exuberant use of colour, became the chief source of inspiration for the style that became known as Mannerism. In this period, he also found time to sculpt his magnificently muscular Moses which was meant for the Vatican but is now the pride and joy of the otherwise modest church of San Pietro in Vincoli (St Peter in Chains).

Michelangelo returned to Florence in the 1520s where he received his first great commission as an architect for the facade of the Church of San Lorenzo. But his life was about to be complicated by European politics. In 1527 Rome was sacked in the War of the League of Cognac by the Spanish emperor Charles V. Charles formed an unholy alliance between Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (which confusingly was nowhere near Rome) to defeat France and the Italian city states including those of Pope Clement VII.

In response to these turbulent times, the republic of Florence was created. The city was besieged by the Medici (now working for Charles V) for two years. Michelangelo was a passionate supporter of the republic and helped to build the city fortifications. They held out for two years. When the Medici reign was restored in 1530, Michelangelo left the city, disillusioned by the great family that succoured his youth but was now just another repressive regime. He went back to Rome to work on the fresco of the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel before designing the dome for the new St Peter’s basilica.

The Last Judgement was condemned for its nudity and Michelangelo was called the "inventor delle porcherie" (the inventor of porky things, the twee local word for obscenities.) But it is a truly remarkable work well beyond the euphemisms of scandalised friars. It depicts an awesome event. We are taken to the end of the world, and Christ the God stands in the centre dispensing his favours. With an out-raised arm, he directs the traffic. Those on the left are condemned downwards to the Hells of Charon and Minos while he subtly blesses the chosen ones on the right with his lower arm. For this work Michelangelo did not choose one set point from which it should be viewed and it has a multitude of foregrounds and backgrounds. He got his revenge on the purveyors of porcherie by portraying the Pope's Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena (who was the chief complainant of blasphemy), as Minos. Minos was the judge who, according to Dante’s Inferno, guarded the entrance to the second circle of Hell.

When Michelangelo was appointed chief architect for St Peter’s, he was into his seventies but showed no let-up in his workload. He sacked the fraudulent suppliers and contractors fiddling the Vatican's books. He changed the previous design of the extravagantly titled Antonio da Sangallo The Younger. He was responsible for the altar end of the building on the exterior and also for the final form of its dome, the single-most dominant feature of Rome's remarkable landscape.

Michelangelo Buonarroti died on February 18th, 1564, just shy of his 89th year, after what his doctors called a "slow fever." In his will, he left "his soul to God, his body to the earth, and his material possessions to his nearest relations." He was buried in Rome but his nephew Lionardo Buonarotti stole the corpse (concealed in a bale of hay) and took it back to Florence for re-interral. The Florentines came out in great numbers to venerate their illustrious fellow citizen, the "father and master of all the arts".

A genius of the highest order, he left an astonishing body of artistic work the like of which is incomparable before or since.

References
"Last judgement"
"Biography of Michelangelo"
and many,many pages in Wikipedia.