A thread about slavery 🧵

Do you know what is this?
It was given to me by the late historian Tonino Perrera.
It’s a report, printed in late sprint of 1590, listing the full names and city of residence of 130 ransomed slaves.

1/18 Giuseppe, Christina, Margarita, Febronia, .. all slaves.
In the kingdom of Sicily, as in all the component kingdoms of the Spanish empire, there were a number of organisations, all spawn by the Catholic Church, whose only aim was to ransom the slaves from Muslim countries.
2/18

I have to own up 🧵:

I first understood that Italy 🇮🇹 was headed for a disaster due the dynamics of the demographic structure in the 80s.

What it took me probably 20 years to understand was that this disaster was going to be demographically unmitigated.

1/11 Both my understanding and my not understanding were not original, but derived by my position in the Italian 🇮🇹 society.
I was a young student and a young professional who was naturally and unconsciously trying to break into the Italian elites – following on my war refugee immigrant dad’s footsteps.
2/11

Italy’s decline is in part a collateral damage of the Cold War.

A long 🧵:

Italian 🇮🇹 real wages are lower than in 1990.

In fact, as @heimbergecon noted recently, by 2023 inflation adjusted wages in Italy were -4.4% lower than in 1990.

x.com/heimbergecon/s…

1/19 x.com/maps_interlude… The Italian elites managed Italy very well from 1946 to 1964.

Capussela described this period so in 2018:

“Italy's convergence to the productivity frontier proceeded at the fastest pace in its history.”



2/19academic.oup.com/book/25689/cha…

When I tell this story, all Americans 🇺🇸 and most British 🇬🇧 don’t believe me.
Italy 🇮🇹 cannot have startups by design. This is due many items, starting with the untranslable “studio di settore”.
The 🇮🇹 tax authorities assume that given x company assets you MUST make a profit 1/5

https://twitter.com/michaelaarouet/status/1842802627521679624

Say you are a brilliant 🇮🇹 Italian who thinks they can create the new Ozempic in 10 years, and you manage to find the investors to back you up.
You buy computers, lab equipment, you hire people. The day after the 3rd year the🇮🇹 tax agency will knock at your door. 2/5

A small thread 🧵 about wealth and reproduction dynamics.
Back in the mid XVIII century in the parish of San Pietro – a terziere of Trapani in western Sicily – near the church lived 2 families: the Gianquinto and the D’Alì.

I am going to tell you some of their secrets 🤫 From the late XIII century to the start of the XVIII century Sicily has been under a Catalan or Spanish king. Italian historian write bad about the “Spanish domination”, but the truth the Sicilians generally felt that the queen of Aragona’s boys were their legitimate kings.

@mcrawford_trep @paulportesi @SwordGRC Ok, so, if you read carefully, I wrote “threats AND opportunities”, not “threats OR opportunities”. The ISO standard definition for risks actually uses “and/or”, but I tend to use only “and” because a lot of people find “or” more natural, and I feel the other way around. @mcrawford_trep @paulportesi @SwordGRC I was classically educated, first and foremost by my dad, who tried to make a proper Spartan of me, not very successfully I am afraid, then by my high school teachers. I grokked risk when I matched it with Ianus, the God we honour, perhaps unwittingly those days, in January.

Gian Filippo Ingrassia was the chief medical officer in Sicily in the middle of the XVI century. Sicily had not been plagued by a major epidemics in 100 years, so the Sicilian authorities were utterly unprepared to cope with that.
1/9 And yet, the Sicilians got lucky in having Dr Ingrassia at the helm. Quickly learning from his own mistakes, Dr Ingrassia convinced the authorities to take the necessary measures to suppress the epidemics. And he managed to do just that.
2/9

@lofioramonti jeri True Numbers ha pubblicato un grafico sulle imposte sui biglietti aerei.

1/6 L'Italia é il secondo paese più caro in Europa, in compagnia di paesi che aumentano le imposte di imbarco per cercare di scoraggiare la propensione ai viaggi all'estero dei loro cittadini (Gran Bretagna, Norvegia, Germania, Francia, Svezia) 2/6

Che @lofioramonti, Romano eletto per il M5S a Roma, se ne strafotta della sopravvivenza di piccoli aeroporti come Birgi, Crotone o Trieste, è anche comprensibile. 1\8 Un po’ meno che non lo zittiscano i suoi tanti colleghi eletti per il M5S in comunità che verrebbero violentemente penalizzate dalla tassa di scopo sugli aerei. 2/8