Wonder if everything here works the right way.

Hi there! Here's Luca writing, directly and straightly from Rome! Just came back from a very cold walk in the city centre with my girlfriend. I went to see a very nice exhibition at Scuderie del Quirinale about the nineteenth century art in Italy, exspecially Hayez (The Kiss, A malinconic thought - Il bacio, Un pensiero malinconico) and late century painters, such as "Macchiaioli" (Giovanni Fattori) and Italian impressionists (De Nittis). Well done, indeed. I suggest everyone who's going to visit Rome in the next couple of months to see it, for it is worth the ten euro price, and the view from inside the Scuderie is really wonderful (even if, unluckily, it is quite hard to take pictures due to a very dirty glass).

I am following with quite much interest the events happening in this period about the BeiJing olympics in July. I will personally not follow them - but I have been saying this for more than two years - for my thought is that very important and representative issues like the Olympic games shouldn't be allowed in countries where a great amount of civil rights are completely not respected. It's not just about Tibet - a history of violence and prevarication that has been going on for more than 50 years - but about basic civil liberties, such as freedom of thought, press and cooperation, which are practically unexisting. I can't really understand how a country with such a great history and culture like China can tolerate and accept such a cruel and bloody dictature, which, ironically, was born to protect the right of workers, and claims to be "socialist" and "popular".

Unluckily, like most of the tragedies of our time, newspapers and press will speak about this just for some months. Then, the China matter will disappear, like Darfur, or the bangladesh tsunami.

To be updated