More than two months after an inconclusive election, Italy at last has a new government, an essential first step on the road to political and economic recovery. Prime Minister Enrico Letta, confirmed by both houses of Parliament this week, is younger than most recent Italian leaders and has assembled an appealing and talented cabinet that includes seven female ministers and an African-Italian. For a country disgusted with its political parties, this infusion of new faces and new blood is a welcome change.

"In 2014 I will stop playing for the national team, and I think that the World Cup will be my last appointment with the blue shirt of Italy - space needs to be given to younger players," said the 33-year old at the presentation of his autobiography in Turin on Thursday.

The Italian government will stick to its European Union budget targets but push the bloc for more measures to relieve the region’s scourge of youth unemployment, Prime Minister Enrico Letta said Thursday during his first trip to Brussels since taking office.

Amanda Knox, the American college student who spent four years in an Italian prison, has been profiled this week by USA TODAY, People magazine and ABC's Diane Sawyer in interviews pegged to the publication Tuesday of her memoirs, Waiting to Be Heard. In the book, published by HarperCollins, she chronicles the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher; the trial that convicted Knox of the crime; and the appeal that freed her to return home.

 When Benedict XVI, the pope emeritus, returned to Vatican City on Thursday, two months after his retirement, he inaugurated a living arrangement as unusual as it may be unpredictable. Will Pope Francis head to Benedict’s new home, the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, located inside the Vatican walls, for heart-to-hearts with the one living man who understands the burdens of leading the world’s more than one billion Roman Catholics? 

 William Friedkin, the Academy Award-winning director of legendary films including The French Connection, will be awarded the Golden Lion lifetime achievement prize at the Venice Film Festival. The award was proposed by the director of the festival Alberto Barbera.

An comic who left his mark on Italian entertainment history with deadpan truisms on a cult 1980s TV show died Thursday aged 77. Massimo Catalano was one of a troupe of eccentrics recruited by showman Renzo Arbore for a short-lived and fondly remembered 1985 show, Quelli della Notte (The Night People). His banal one-liners, delivered as if they were nuggets of wisdom, included: "Its better to marry a rich, beautiful and clever woman than an ugly, poor and stupid woman".

 The 1950s are full of movies that were initially greeted, by critics and audiences, with indifference or derision, only to be hailed as masterpieces in hindsight. “Vertigo,” “The Searchers” and “The Sweet Smell of Success” are among the best-known examples of this kind of revisionism. Another, only slightly less famous, is Roberto Rossellini’s “Viaggio in Italia,” a film so maligned and neglected in 1955, the year of its American release, that it did not receive a review in The New York Times.

 The United States Department of Agriculture will relax a decades-long ban on the importation of many cured-pork products from some regions of Italy starting May 28, greatly increasing the number and variety of salumi in markets and restaurants here.
[...] This "could open up a new world of Italian salami to the United States,” said Joseph Bastianich, an owner of the Eataly grocery stores in the United States. “Americans have been eating bad salami forever, but now the end is near.”