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Welcome to The Local: news for a new Europe

James Savage
James Savage - [email protected]
Welcome to The Local: news for a new Europe
The Local: moving over the border from France into Italy. Photo: Almita Ayon.

Today The Local Italy pulls up the shutters, bringing readers in Italy and around the world a bright new mix of news and opinion from the land that brought us Ferraris, Fellini and Fibonacci - all in the global language.

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We’ll be picking apart the crises and combing through the corruption - but we’ll also be bringing stories from the other side of Italy: the entrepreneurs, the exporters and the expats who continue to build lives and careers here despite the country’s daunting problems.

The Local Italy is our seventh news site - we now have thirteen journalists covering Europe in English from the Arctic to the Apennines, from the Atlantic to the Adriatic. 

Since we founded our original Swedish site in 2004, a mixture of Euro-idealism and the euro crisis have pushed Europe’s nations closer together. Italy - and every other country - now receives annual instructions from Brussels on how to run its economy. Sometimes even the prime minister is effectively chosen abroad, as happened with Italy’s previous ‘technocratic’ prime minister, Mario Monti.

Yet as countries are pushed together, in the tumult of the economic crisis their citizens have rarely been further apart. 

Just 11 percent of Italians think Europe’s economic integration has strengthened the economy, compared to 54 percent of Germans. 

It’s easy to see why: youth unemployment in Italy is now a searing 40 percent. In Germany, with just 7.5 percent youth unemployment, ministers are desperately trying to attract skilled foreign workers. 

And it’s these people - people with the bravery, imagination and skill to seek out new opportunities in new countries - who might offer the best hope of closing this huge gulf.

And whether you’re a Portuguese games tester in Frankfurt, a Spanish architect in Stockholm, a Romanian HR consultant in Barcelona, a British quantity surveyor in Paris - or, indeed, an American teacher in Rome - The Local is there to help you get a grip on your new country. We’ll bring you the major news, opinion, career advice - and plenty of news from the lighter side of life.

We hope you enjoy it!

James Savage

Managing Editor

 

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