Day: September 23, 2022

The words, meant to assure women of their safety, have become tragically ironic. Last week, inside the restroom, a young woman who worked at the station was brutally murdered. The man suspected of killing her had been stalking her for years. The wall underneath the plaque has since become a shrine of messages left as notes, with women and men of all ages coming to express their fury, fear, and sorrow. "I want to be alive at the end of my workday," reads one. "Is it too much to ask, to be safe to reject people I don't like?" reads another. The mother of a teenage girl cries as she scans the messages. "Where have we gone so wrong?" she asks, now questioning whether to allow her daughter to travel to school alone. Shocking murder The detail...

Those who cannot afford breakfast, pop into their local bar to eat and drink - thanks to the bar owner, plus the kind soul who earlier purchased the sospeso, or "suspended coffee". The sospeso initiative is said to have started more than 200 years ago in Naples and is now spreading across Italy, where an eye-wateringly strong coffee and accompanying croissant are viewed as a basic human right of a morning. Italians, like many others in Europe, are feeling the pinch. Spiralling energy bills compound already existing economic difficulties - hangovers from Covid lockdown measures and the euro crisis. "Italians feel abandoned. Especially here in the south," Pino de Stasio told me. His family have owned Bar Settebello in downtown Naples for decades. ...