The local newspapers in Italy’s smaller cities and towns advertise with eye-catching headline boards, designed to be as sensational as possible. Usually one board reports two headlines of the day or week, and sometimes the juxtaposition is unintentionally funny.
The headline above says: “Struck by a toilet seat thrown from the train – Priest collapses at mass!” (Okay, I cheated a bit – colpita is in the feminine form, so we know the victim of the flying toilet seat was female.)
Above:
- Too lively: the janitoress insults and threatens the children – Writings and drawings defame the principal of Grassi high school
- Mystery of the millionaire inheritance – Goodbye to a Lecchese pharmacist – Dies at 34 years, leaving four children
- Shootout at the cemetery and in Pescarenico: one wounded – From today and for six months the Post Office is at the former Piccola
Above:
- At the wedding lunch, [he] betrays his wife with his [male] friend.
- Fell in acid, Lecchese dies after three months.
- Terrible accident: a woman run over and killed in the crosswalk.
- Alarm on the Grigna (a local mountain) – six hikers lost.
- Alarm in the Business Piazza*
- Father dies while wrapping Christmas presents
- 30,000 Lecchesi (people of Lecco) forced to junk their cars (a new environmental law will forbid use of cars older than 1993, i.e. pre-catalytic).
- Investigation: ‘Ndrangheta and business – treasure hunt for the [riches] of the [crime] bosses
- In the car with a pistol – young person in handcuffs.
* As reader Marco Andreis points out, Piazza Affari is a real piazza in Milan, “just off via della Posta, a few blocks from Piazza Cordusio. Palazzo Mezzanotte, in Piazza Affari, was thei headquarters of the Borsa Valori di Milano, the Milan Stock Exchange. Nowadays, after privatisation, the Gruppo Borsa Italiana is located there.
So the name of the square was and is still used as a synonym of the Stock Exchange or, in a more general sense, of the Italian financial and business community. More or less as in the US, where Wall Street means the New York Stock Exchange.”
- Vandals raid the Resinelli [a tourist area on the mountain above Lecco]: the shocking photos [note that choc = shock, not chocolate]
- Tax fraud: troubles for Sergio Longoni
- Free gift: the volume “In dialect you say it this way”
These boards have been used since WWII (maybe more). Attachment to tradition, or lack of innovation?