Italian bravery

[W.G.Ewald]

Raising the Costa Concordia | Reuters.com

Engineering teams on the Italian island of Giglio began lifting the wrecked Costa Concordia liner upright on Monday in one of the most complex and costly maritime salvage operations ever attempted.

The vast hulk of the 114,500-tonne cruise liner has lain on its side for more than 20 months, dominating the tiny port in the Tuscan holiday island where it ran aground and capsized on January 13, 2012, killing 32 people.

 

[angeldude13]

well we can expect this from the italians.
i mean they are so coward that they shot two innocent fisherman without even challenging them.
i bet those marines would have sh8t bricks if them somalian pirates would have attacked them

 

[Decklander]

Italians like the ships rats are the first ones to jump the ship in case of danger.
You may have heard that famous joke about Italian Tanks of world war that they had five gears, one forward and four backwards. The forward gear was for "just in case".

 

[W.G.Ewald]

The blond dancer who shared a romantic meal with the married captain on the Costa Concordia just before it crashed and capsized took the stand at his manslaughter trial Tuesday — and finally admitted they were having an affair.

"When you are somebody's lover, they don't ask for a ticket," a bashful Domnica Cemortan, 26, told an Italian court as she explained how she got a free ride on the 110,000-ton cruise ship.

Cemortan, who had repeatedly denied a relationship with Captain Francesco Schettino, 53, refused three times on the witness stand to admit it. But she changed her tune when the judge threatened her with criminal charges.

"You must answer," he said.

"Yes, I had a liaison with him," she replied.

The Moldovan entertainer, who worked on another ship but was vacationing on the Costa Concordia, said she and Schettino dined as the ship sailed off the Italian coast on the fatal January 2012 night. Prosecutors said Schettino ordered the ship dangerously close to the island of Giglio as a "salute" to residents.

"Schettino joked that they had to slow the ship down so I could finish my dessert," Cemortan said.

She said she later joined Schettino on the bridge just before chaos erupted.

"I didn't feel the crash but I saw the alarm lights go on," she said.

The 950-foot-long ship had run aground and began to list starboard, trapping passengers and crew.

Dancer on Costa Concordia bridge: I was captain's lover | New York Post

 

[Tolaha]

My favorite Italian is Guglielmo Marconi.

Even when you consider that the invention that he is widely credited for was actually invented by Tesla years earlier? And the reasons for Marconi getting the patent might only have been due to the team of the most powerful financier (Morgan) and the most renowned genius of those times (Edison), who didn't like Tesla so much?

Also, Marconi was a member of the Fascist party, defended fascist actions and to add to all that, had one fella named Mussolini as his best man at his second wedding!

Just trying to be a smartass Sir, that's all!

 

[doremon]

Well i guess Italians never miss an opportunity to live up to their reputation as cowards.

dont blame a nation or region due to acts of few bad people infact italians are best fighters,few months ago bunch of bsf men abandoned his crew when their helicopter crashed due to firing from maoists does that make we indians cowards..

 

[W.G.Ewald]

Even when you consider that the invention that he is widely credited for was actually invented by Tesla years earlier? And the reasons for Marconi getting the patent might only have been due to the team of the most powerful financier (Morgan) and the most renowned genius of those times (Edison), who didn't like Tesla so much?

Also, Marconi was a member of the Fascist party, defended fascist actions and to add to all that, had one fella named Mussolini as his best man at his second wedding!

Just trying to be a smartass Sir, that's all!

I like Ezra Pound, too.

 

[Tolaha]

I like Ezra Pound, too.

Okay, no clue who this is.

Google to the rescue! From wiki:

Ezra Pound - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American expatriate poet and critic of the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement that called for a return to more Classical values, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language, and had an interest in verse forms such as the Japanese Haiku. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–1969).[1]

Working in London and Paris in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the publication in 1915 of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and for the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."[2]

Outraged by the loss of life during the First World War, he lost faith in England, blaming the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, where throughout the 1930s and 1940s, to his friends' dismay, he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler and wrote for publications owned by Oswald Mosley. The Italian government paid him during the Second World War to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, as a result of which he was arrested for treason by American forces in Italy in 1945. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including 25 days in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown, "when the raft broke and the waters went over me." Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.[3]