Fair enough. On an only vaguely related note, I've recently been watching La Reine Margot for the so-manieth time, and was reminded yet again how awesome Italian accents in French are.

Also, if by "the Savoy dialect" you mean what they speak in the Val d'Aosta, then yeah, definitely, I wouldn't consider that Italian anymore, as I believe it's considerably closer to French than to Italian.

I'm aware about Venice not being that impressive on land - and about their inward turn towards a much greater focus on their Italian land empire in later centuries going hand in hand with their general decline. Prowess on the seas is still military prowess, though; and Genoa too had quite a bit of that (to say nothing of the lesser naval powers like Pisa, Ancona, Livorno). I discovered just the other day that one of the early Grimaldi's, prior to their establishment at Monaco, led a Franco-Genoese fleet to a major victory as far away as the Netherlands, in a war between the king of France and his vassal the Duke of Flanders.

Anyhow, none of that really contradicts your points about condottiere and the Italian national armies. As mentioned, I have reason to think their performance in WW1 wasn't remotely as bad as you suggest, but I don't have the background knowledge to actually back that up, nor does it rank very high on my priority list.

Oh lord, don't get me started on Hollande. Or France in general. I just had to spend a considerable part of the weekend listening to French news radio (during an otherwise quite fun mini-trip to France, I can recommend the Jules Verne Museum if you should ever find yourself near Amiens), and that soured me even more on French politics, French society and the whole rotten French establishment than I already was. Ugh. It's a gorgeous country with a glorious history, fantastic art, fantastic food, and outside Paris the people tend to be very nice, but their politics and politico-economic establishment are godawful. Today's UMP is nearly as sad as the Socialists, I get the impression, and evidently not nearly ready to do without Sarkozy.

Er, to get away from that rant and back to what you said, I have no trouble believing that. He'll never be free from the taint of his association with Hitler or his participation, however half-hearted, in the Holocaust, but I'm not a big fan of viewing everyone involved in that in morally absolute terms, and there's certainly a lot more to Mussolini than that.

Another topic that seems to be too complex for me to seriously debate you on it without a lot more effort than I'm inclined to put into it. But I have to say those suggestions of Palestinian, more specifically PFLP, involvement seem highly unlikely to me - it would be quite unlike the normal actions and modi operandi (does a gerund even HAVE a plural?) of those groups.

I don't think the conspiracy theories that actually see the active participation of the CIA in these events through Gladio make much sense, needless to say. It does seem like people who had links to Gladio and got their arms through Gladio may have been involved in political violence in Italy and possibly in Belgium, though (if you can call the Belgian events "political" violence).

He's certainly not the only problem, or even really the main problem. It's more that he's such a manifest and obvious illustration of many of those larger problems - corruption and backroom dealings, clandestine ties between politics and business, massive hypocrisy, and so on. Then there is the fact that his dominance in Italian commercial television created a dangerous situation in terms of press freedom that is unique in the democratic West, further exacerbated when it began to look like he was also trying to influence the political line of the public TV channels. And then above and beyond that, it's that for at least the last decade, if not longer, his main priorities have been his own political survival, his sex life and his business empire, in varying order, but the proper government of Italy never seems to have done better than fourth place. Of course Italy needs a strong Right, which is precisely why Berlusconi has been so harmful - because he has gained votes for the Right, yes, but then squandered his political capital on just doing what was good for Silvio (or even merely what Silvio felt like doing at the time, in the case of some of his more painful public pronouncements that certainly weren't good for Silvio any more than they were good for Italy).

It's not a coincidence that the Economist has been so vehemently anti-Berlusconi for so long, and has tended to hold its nose and endorse the left in Italian elections. You could say that they (or I) shouldn't let that one person, however corrupt and revolting, throw our vote to the other side, but when that one person goes out of his way to make everything about him and enslaves the Right to serve his personal affairs, it becomes fairly unavoidable. That's why I had such high hopes for Fini and his party, and who cares about his fascist past, but those don't seem to have led to much.

If you want to talk about the future of the European Right, Sarkozy deserves to be in the conversation for sure, Cameron and Osborne, Tusk, Erdogan if you count him as "European", perhaps Rajoy though he's never impressed me much, and of course last but not least Merkel. But Berlusconi? Let's be serious.