Meredith’s Perugia #31: Spectacular Dolomites World Heritage Playground In Northeast

Tweet This Post

Comments

Thank you for the pics. I just had a holiday at Madonna di Campiglio and it was marvellous. The Dolomites are beautiful.

Italy is really a very small country not like the USA or Australia. I once did a 15hour drive from north Queensland the Great Barrier Reef Islands to Brisbane and I was still in the same state of Queensland.

In Italy 15hours would get you from top to toe. Hometown of the Captain of the Costa Concordia is in another beautiful part of Italy I see- right on the Bay of Naples.

Everywhere you go the scenery is beautiful and the church bells ring. Am living my dream here.

Thank you for posting these gorgeous photos and clips of Italy. Breathtaking!

Nice tourism photos/article but any news about the filing of the appeal document by the prosecution?

Hi Believing. That “but” made me smile! Actually it isn’t an either/or situation - and half of all our main posters started out by sending in a post or an idea for a post unasked, out of the blue, and we will always welcome more. Hint, hint!

Our various Italy series go to show what a spectacular country Meredith chose to make her favorite, and far from the medieval “third world” enclave in Europe that the Italy bashers on the other side like to paint it. You will know that the carefully maintained old facades in Rome and Perugia and Venice and Florence often have stunningly contemporary decors on the inside.

There is lots on Meredith’s case coming up.

The appeal or appeals are right now a stealth operation and we think nothing major will leak much before 18 February. The prosecution don’t want the PR operation and the manipulation of and by the American Ambassador to start up again based on mere rumors. There is a solid case for Sollecito and Knox to spend time in prison for killing Meredith and this is the prosecution’s last and best shot. Hopefully the playing field will be level this time. It was not, the last time around.

Also we will have the Hellman sentencing report in English when the great translators on PMF are happy with it. The appeal arguments will also be translated.

John Kercher’s much awaited book “Meredith” will be released in March. He wrote this several years ago and it will fundamentally dwell on Meredith growing up rather than her cruel fate and subsequent events in Perugia.

Also in March there will be the trials for the Knox and Sollecito families, and at future dates the trial of Amanda Knox for calunnia and the Knox and Sollecito civil suits against the Lifetime movie. Mr Mignini’s personal case may resume in Turin or Genoa, although we seriously doubt it; the charges were always trumped up. The defense witnesses Alessi and Aviello may face perjury trials.

Only another five years for it to all play out?! For the sake of Meredith’s poor family, we sure hope not.

Thanks Peter.  Any other news on the Melania case?  That was a shocking story as well.

I do enjoy the debates on this website including the trade of ideas on cultures.  It is good for people to air their opinions and to have some international discussions.  I hope that will continue in a friendly and open manner.  Having lived half my life in Europe and half in the USA, and being American but having studied international relations, international business, French, German etc.  I am torn between the two but my loyalties lie with the USA as my home country and the country of my side of the family.  I have many such discussions while in Europe, i.e. the impression that every American has a gun in a holster belt or fires them out of their front windows.  Unfortunately, yes it does happen but it is not nearly as visible as the average European thinks.  Likewise, I grew to understand that Europe is not nearly as safe as I thought it was at one point in my life.  I lived there many years and some appalling things happened, including rapes, suicides, murders of prostitutes, headless corpses found in woods, hit and runs, heroine deaths and addictions, knivings at ATM machines, beatings.  All this in tiny old-fashioned Luxembourg, where everyone kept telling me how safe it was.  I lived there 20 years and read many stories and was told that most of it didn’t even make the newspapers as the press wanted to keep the news clean.  I also lived in France for awhile so know something of that country too.  My sister lived in Germany for while and my husband’s family came from Latvia.  Unfortunately, I do think that human nature is human nature all over the world and that violence can happen anywhere.  There was an American girl teaching English in Japan a few years ago who went to a Japanese man’s apartment to teach and was killed soon afterwards, in a country known for its low murder rate.  I don’t think mental illness has a country.

Mental illness certainly knows no borders. It makes sense to me that it should be more prevalent in large cities because of the crowding of so many into high rise dwellings (less contact with the earth). Each individual has less chance to be heard and noticed,if they become disoriented. The availability of drugs (including prescribed antidepressants) doesn’t seem to be helping.
I just read an article in the China Daily that felt somewhat revelatory: the admission that 1 in 13 Chinese suffers from some form of mental illness. Even in a ‘perfect’ society, the human psyche remains subject to fragility. This article told of a treatment facility near a public park. Locals were wary of bringing their children to the park, for fear that the mentally ill outpatients might terrify them. They didn’t specify what the nature of treatment might be, but it sounds like progress.
A second article featured a judge who went 1 to 1 with juvenile offenders, offering them encouragement for getting their lives back in a good direction following their release from detention.
The 17 year old boy mentioned had stabbed and seriously wounded a schoolmate who had tried to steal his girlfriend. He was sentenced to a year’s detention. The judge’s motto is that no young person cannot be turned around. I would like to believe that she is right.

Two beautiful little boys were just burned to death in a murder-suicide, in Washington State. Their father, Josh Powell, was the only person of interest in the disappearance of their mother a couple of years ago. He was denied custody because of suspicious materials found on his hard-drive (his own father is in prison because of child pornography found in his possession).
The two boys had just been delivered to his home from their maternal grandparents for a supervised visit, but he must have known that known that an ordered “psych-sexual evaluation” would not go in his favour. He locked the child-protection worker outside the house and blew it up.
Mentally ill? Psychopathic? We’ll never know. But why take the babies with you?

Where next:

Or to next entry Meredith’s Perugia #32: Why Italy Is so Attractive To So Many Smart Students Like Meredith

Or to previous entry How Meredith’s London Typically Celebrates Its New Year’s Eve