Herod's not dead 14th giugno 2011

Herod's not dead 14th giugno 2011

On the 12th and 13th June this year there was a referendum in Italy. There were four areas of voting including nuclear, water, and wind power. The event was extremely well publicised with posters all over the towns, in especial areas for at least the last month. Further it was on several mainstream TV channels with extended debates about the issues involved. For me this was great as the speakers on the political TV shows spoke very clearly and slowly and I was able to understand the whole lot, if not every single word, and this is a huge change to normal TV, where I can just about understand a few words of MTV.it but anything on RAI Uno or RAI Due is a mystery!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13741105

With the issues that have been seen worldwide following the Japanese Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster after the tsunami in March 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13017282 the issue of nuclear power has become of extremely high interest in many European countries. Silvio Berlusconi strongly supported the "nucleare si" but the vote went against him - "nucleare no". Turnout was 57% - pretty impressive (compared to 42% for the recent referendum on AV in the UK) and interestingly it seems that 96% were against Berlusconi for this issue, a clear indication of public feeling. Berlusconi seems to have taken it on the chin, and has said that the Italian people have made their opinion "clear" and that the government must now "respond fully" (I've lifted those statements from the BBC site - although I don't really understand how they can put such things in speech marks when they are not written in english.

The one thing that has really struck me was the fact that each person had to return to their home town to vote, which makes the turnout much more impressive. Now, from my limited experience, Italians are notoriously averse to travel, to leaving the safe hands of their mommas and nonnas, so this would be no great hardship to most Italians who will not have moved far from where they were born, however, to me this seemed like something from biblical times and I though immediately of King Herod, and the massacre of the innocents. Well, all my timelines and locations are wrong, but, when in Rome :)