Latest news with #Calvi
Times
19-05-2025
- Times
Why Corsica could be your surprising summer escape
With its fusion of Mediterranean cuisines, perfect beaches and historic towns – including Napoleon's birthplace – the French island is ripe for discovery Clear waters and shady pines make Palombaggia one of Corsica's must-see beaches Pearl-white sands lapped by turquoise seas, dramatic mountain and coastal scenery, and a host of historic sites dating back 8,000 years, all garnished with fine food and super hotels and holiday villas: it's no surprise the French call Corsica L 'Î le de Beauté (the Isle of Beauty). Although it is somewhat of an undiscovered gem for many British tourists, Corsica offers sun, culture and adventure without the crowds, and its 200 beaches are some of the Mediterranean's best. Whether it's Ostriconi's exquisite sunsets, Calvi's fashionable urban vibe in the north, or Rondinara's perfect scallop of grains and Palombaggia's pink-grey rocks and tall pines in the south, divine sandy shores and crystal-clear waters are a given. Prefer a cooling dip inland? The island is blessed with stunning natural pools. They might lie within Les Piscines Naturelle de Cava's sculptural volcanic stone, Fango Valley's waterfalls and colourful rocks, and on the Solenzara River beneath photogenic peaks. All promise a rejuvenating diversion from the summer heat. The shallow waters at Santa Giulia beach make it a perfect spot for snorkelling Corsica is also laced with wonderful hiking trails linking mountains and the Mediterranean – most famously the 180km GR20, but there are also shorter, equally spectacular routes. Walk to stunning Lake Nino, ascend 2,706m Monte Cinto – the island's highest point – or cross the Col de Bavella above red granite pinnacles. You could also explore Scandola Nature Reserve's mesmerising rocks and jagged peaks with sweeping bay views, visit epic glacier-moulded Restonica and Tavignano gorges or the Lavezzi Archipelago's secluded beaches and coves. Corsica's natural wonders are just the start. Its prolific historical sights include the capital Ajaccio, Napoleon's birthplace, with pastel-hued streets and gracious squares; medieval Bonifacio, rising seamlessly from vertiginous limestone cliffs; and Calvi's magnificent citadel. Genoese towers and forts abound, alongside prehistoric ruins that include Filitosa's tombs and standing stones. However, these are not the only man-made wonders. Corsica's food is a thing of beauty. Not just fish fresh off the boat but also local dishes featuring wild boar, slow-cooked lamb and chestnut-flour cheesecake. There are superb cafés and restaurants, with 43 Michelin Guide entrants, including two-star Casadelmar's Corsican-Italian menu. Corsican cuisine is an undoubted highlight of any trip to the island To fully appreciate this glorious island, book with the best. Corsican Places has years of experience, experts with first-hand knowledge of the destination for tailored advice and an English-speaking team on the ground. They're all essential ingredients in Corsican Places' ATOL–protected packages that include flights, car hire and transfers. Its extensive range of accommodation runs from adult-only apartments to hotels and family villas. In the northwest, Algajola's ancient fishing village is home to the intimate family-run Hôtel Santa Vittoria, with 15 rooms and a beautiful dining terrace with views across the sea and beach. Further south, the exclusive five-star Grand Hôtel Cala Rossa ups the ante in a private park overlooking the Gulf of Porto-Vecchio. Perfect for couples and honeymooners, its serene spa's therapies use wild botanicals and homegrown produce, and its celebrated restaurant serves seasonally inspired dishes. Poolside at La Citaj, a beautifully refurbished period villa near St-Florent that sleeps eight Corsican Places also offers superb family villas, pool towels and welcome pack that provides everything from wine and beer to snacks. Contemporary four-person Villa Kallisté has crisp modern interiors and French windows opening onto a large south-facing terrace and a pool overlooking the rugged southeast coastline. Beaches are just a short drive away, along with Propriano's bustling quayside. Alternatively, enjoy the tranquil eight-person Villa Rasello, which is superbly elevated in the southern hills, with an open-plan living area and kitchen ideal for families, and looking over a large private pool to the mountains. Its terrace is perfect for alfresco dining, while a few miles' drive takes you to Monacia d'Aullene with its traditional Corsican restaurant. Book your summer villa holiday before the end of May for Corsican Places' special offer where kids and school-age teenagers fly free from London Stansted to Calvi between May 18 and October 5, and from London Gatwick to Figari between June 29 and August 24. Accommodation includes stunning family villas such as the eight-person La Citaj near St-Florent, where seven nights, including flights and car hire costs from £699pp. A superbly refurbished period home, La Citaj features exposed stonework, fireplaces and a large pool offering views towards the magnificent Cathédrale du Nebbio. Alternatively, the four-person Casa di L'Olivu is a rustic stone property in southern Corsica costing from £699pp for seven nights, including car hire and flights. Set between olive trees and vineyards, its open-plan living/dining area and two bedrooms are decorated in tasteful neutral tones. Bonifacio and Porto Vecchio are within a short drive. Corsican Places also offers great deals on adult-only accommodation. A Merula near Calvi is bookable from £799pp for seven nights, including flights and transfers. Set in immaculate grounds, the 25 two-person residences with kitchenettes are individually styled and overlook the gardens and shared pool from their balconies or terraces. Multiple bars and restaurants are close by. Nearby, Le Home's two-person apartments offer another adult-only break within tranquil grounds, from £699pp including flights. The view across the Gulf of St Florent from Corsican Places villa L'Ancre Bleue
Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Times Daily Quiz: Monday May 19, 2025
1 What is the capital city of Poland? 2 Used in Italian cookery, passata sauce is made from sieved what? 3 In which sci-fi TV show did Billie Piper play the companion Rose Tyler? 4 In our solar system, what is the only planet named after a female god? 5 Horatio Nelson lost the sight of his right eye at the 1794 Siege of Calvi on which French island? 6 In 1912, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly solo across which body of water? 7 Which Venetian artist painted St Paul's Cathedral (c 1754)? 8 Which 1985 film starred Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum and Lesley Ann Warren as Miss Scarlet? 9 In physics, which subdivision of mechanics deals with objects at rest?
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
World's Largest Pancake Breakfast in downtown Springfield being held May 17th
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) – The World's Largest Pancake Breakfast will line Main Street in Springfield on Saturday, May 17th. The World's Largest Pancake Breakfast is in honor of Springfield's birthday and has been an annual tradition since 1986. This event, which has been sponsored by MGM Springfield since 2013, will be held on May 17th from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. on Main Street from State Street to Bridge Street. Springfield Fire Commissioner B.J. Calvi is this year's Honorary Chair. He is being recognized for seven years of service to the city and the residents of Springfield, and has over 30 years of experience in fire and emergency services. Commissioner Calvi also manages 274 firefighters, 45 emergency communications personnel, and 14 civilian employees. Admission is free however, breakfast tickets are $3 for adults and $1 for children. The menu features a hot, hearty breakfast of pancakes, bacon, coffee, juice, milk, lots of entertainment and activities, and community spirit. For more information, visit WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The new leader of the Catholic Church will inherit a financial mess that Pope Francis spent much of his reign trying to fix
Even on his deathbed, Pope Francis didn't pause from pursuing a dogged campaign that distinguished his reign: reforming the Vatican's infamously troubled finances. On February 27, the pontiff's 13th day at Rome's Gemelli Hospital suffering from exhaustion and bronchitis, the pontiff unveiled the formation of a high-level commission assigned to raise donations for helping plug chronic budget deficits. Francis launched the fund-raising enterprise as a gambit aimed at blunting demands by top officials in the Curia, his vast administrative arm, that the leader of the world's 1.3 billion Catholics halt his drive for deep spending cuts. The bureaucrats bristled at the Pope's recent draconian moves: Since 2021, he'd slashed salaries for the Church's 250-odd cardinals three times. In 2023, he nixed the rich housing subsidies for elite staff, and last September for the first time in decades demanded that the Vatican set a rigorous timeline for achieving a 'zero deficit' regime. When Pope Francis passed away at age 88 on Easter Monday in his modest Vatican apartment, his brave campaign had made big strides, but stopped short of the promised land. This writer began covering the Pope's righteous charge right at the creation. In early 2014, I traveled to Rome for a firsthand view of all the new and historic financial guard rails and disciplines Francis was installing, as well as the influx of business experts he'd summoned across the globe to assist him. When Francis took office the previous year, just about everything that involved how the Vatican handled money needed fixing: the huge and ever-rising gap between revenues and expenses; the leadership dominated by clergy lacking expertise in accounting and investing; and a scandal-scarred reputation. The stain of corruption, or at least incompetence, lingered from the Banco Ambrosiano affair of the early 1980s, when financier Roberto Calvi scammed the Institute for Religious Works, a.k.a. the Vatican Bank, in a caper that cost the IOR $250 million and emptied a big portion of its reserves. Days after his institution collapsed, Calvi's body was found hanging under London's Blackfriars Bridge; the British courts couldn't determine whether the cause of death was suicide or murder. Calvi's schemes duped his 'buddy' who headed the IOR, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, whom in the mid-1980s I interviewed at the IOR's home in the ninth-century Gothic prison built by Pope Nicholas VI. The six-foot-eight Marcinkus, dubbed the Gorilla, had risen in the Vatican from a power base as Pope John Paul II's bodyguard. During our meeting, he chain-smoked Camels and pontificated for hours about how the IOR was the Vatican's biggest moneymaker courtesy of pocketing the 'spread' between the tiny interest it paid the Jesuits and other religious orders for their deposits, and the much higher rates it garnered re-channeling those funds to European banks. On Ambrosiano, Marcinkus insisted that charges he'd 'guaranteed' the bank's debts on behalf of the IOR was a bum rap, and that the Vatican only repaid the $250 million to safeguard its image. Shortly before, the Italian government had dropped an arrest warrant for Marcinkus that had exiled him for a year to the Vatican grounds, a liberation that perhaps explained his ebullient mood. 'I may be a lousy banker,' once told a close friend of his whom I interviewed for my story, 'but at least I'm not in jail.' Francis quickly showed that in money matters, he was a new kind of leader My sources were all business leaders newly appointed to aid in the Pope's offensive. On background, they related a dramatic meeting in the summer of 2013 where Francis first addressed a dimension of his domain that he deemed crucial—its chronically stumbling role as a commercial enterprise. The pontiff spun the globe to appoint a team of seven business leaders to a committee. Its task: pinpointing the problems and recommending specifics for a broad overhaul. They included the French executive heading asset management for U.S. mutual fund giant Invesco, the CEO of German insurer ERGO, the chief of Malta's largest bank, and the former prime minister of Singapore. Instead of holding the confab at the Apostolic Palace, the Renaissance showplace where pontiffs traditionally greeted visitors in high style, Francis ushered the distinguished guests into a nondescript conference room at the Casa Santa Marta, a five-story limestone guesthouse on the sub-luxury scale of a four-star hotel where the pontiff resided in a second-floor one-bedroom suite. No religious art or objects adorned the walls. Attired in a simple white cossack and metal cross, the Pope took the kind of highly managerial 'I'm the boss' approach his invitees might have recognized from addressing their own lieutenants. Speaking fluent Italian, pausing frequently so that a translator could repeat his words in English, the former cardinal of Buenos Aires stated that for his spiritual message to be credible, the Vatican's finances had to be credible as well. The Vatican hadn't overcome the practices formed by centuries of secrecy and intrigue to either manage its money efficiently, or issue a coherent accounting on where the funds came from and where they were spent. His primary mission, the new Pope stressed, was helping the poor and underprivileged. The Vatican budget careening from small surpluses to yawning deficits undermined that goal by inhibiting charity. 'When the administration's fat it's unhealthy,' he declared, adding that he wanted a far leaner and efficient organization that would prove 'self-sustaining.' Getting there would require strict rules and protocols. It particularly incensed the pontiff that the managers kept paying overruns on fixed price contracts, when the businesses should have eaten the excess billings. From now on, he admonished, when the Vatican gets a bill for a project where it's the contractor who is legally responsible for the extra costs: 'We don't pay!' Like a great CEO, the Pope charted a clear strategy. As one participant characterized the command: 'Let's make money for the poor.' Francis finished by intoning, 'I trust you. You're the experts. I want solutions to these problems.' Pope Francis wasn't a micromanager who'd study balance sheets, but he was a born leader expert at establishing clear objectives and choosing specialists needed to meet them—he'd rely on real bankers not amateurs in the Marcinkus mold. Then, without taking questions or extending pleasantries, he left the room. On finances, Pope Francis proved the greatest of all holy reformers. But the Vatican's budget woes persist to this day Following the meeting, that prestigious board helped design a radically new architecture directed not by the religious leaders who'd run the machine for centuries, but seasoned managers and consultants from around the world. The new regime hired KMPG to install internationally accepted accounting principles replacing the old crazy quilt of standards, EY to scrutinize the books of the tiny nation's stores and utilities, and Deloitte & Touche and Spencer Stuart to respectively audit the P&L and recruit fresh talent at the Vatican Bank. Pope Francis also established a new body called the Secretariat of the Economy that for the first time centralized all authority under a single agency and leader. Today, the top official is an MIT grad who has spent a long career in management positions for Catholic universities and prominent institutions of the church. Tighter oversight brought new discipline to runaway spending and boosted investment returns, but didn't end the Vatican's long history of headline-grabbing misdeeds. In 2014, the cardinal who served as second-ranking official in the Secretariat of State schemed with still another shady Italian magnate to purchase shares in a London building; the Secretariat subsequently took full control of the property for the highly inflated price of roughly $400 million, then sold it a few years later at a $150 million loss. An investigation launched in 2019 discovered that many millions of Euros disappeared in kickbacks and self-dealing. But this time, the authorities imposed tough justice. The Vatican courts sent eight people including the cardinal to jail, and levied fines on two others. Shortly after taking power, Pope Francis ordered a hiring freeze that remains in force to this day. Indeed, his strategy of shrinking the workforce through attrition has succeeded. But the Vatican is still haunted by the burden of the way-underfunded pension plans that he inherited. The Vatican's financial world is divided into two parts. The first is the City State, the 110-acre sovereign country that generally runs a budget on the scale of a midsize municipality, employs the ceremonial Swiss guards and 'gendarme' police force, and generally generates an operating surplus due to big revenues from the Vatican museum, the world's second most visited museum behind the Louvre, and the likes of sales of souvenir coins. The second is the Holy See or Curia, the Pope's sprawling bureaucracy that does everything from detective work to naming new saints to operating the equivalent of embassies in three dozen countries to operating nine cabinet-like 'congregations.' It's perpetually in deficit—once again, largely via what it owes its legions of retirees. In recent years, the Curia has been spending around $800 to $900 million a year, and running structural deficits of well over $50 million. And that's after allocating for operating expenses tens of millions of dollars in "Peter's Pence." That's money gathered in the collection baskets passed through church aisles in from Sydney to Warsaw on the Sunday marking the feasts of Saints Peter and Paul in late June. It's one time the world's faithful, rich and poor alike, send funds to the Vatican en masse. The late pontiff always wanted to steer Peter's Pence solely to its original purpose of supporting the impoverished. It was a goal he cherished but didn't live to achieve. Still, Pope Francis worked a near miracle bringing transparency, competence, and integrity to perhaps the most notoriously byzantine corner of the financial world. From his hospital bed in his final days, the pontiff kept fighting the Vatican establishment for reform that elevated sound money management as a tool for filling the role of his model and namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century Italian friar devoted to raising the downtrodden. Only if his successor shares Francis's rare knack for business strategy will the job be finished. This story was originally featured on
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The new leader of the Catholic Church will inherit a financial mess that Pope Francis spent much of his reign trying to fix
Even on his deathbed, Pope Francis didn't pause from pursuing a dogged campaign that distinguished his reign: reforming the Vatican's infamously troubled finances. On February 27, the pontiff's 13th day at Rome's Gemelli Hospital suffering from exhaustion and bronchitis, the pontiff unveiled the formation of a high-level commission assigned to raise donations for helping plug chronic budget deficits. Francis launched the fund-raising enterprise as a gambit aimed at blunting demands by top officials in the Curia, his vast administrative arm, that the leader of the world's 1.3 billion Catholics halt his drive for deep spending cuts. The bureaucrats bristled at the Pope's recent draconian moves: Since 2021, he'd slashed salaries for the Church's 250-odd cardinals three times. In 2023, he nixed the rich housing subsidies for elite staff, and last September for the first time in decades demanded that the Vatican set a rigorous timeline for achieving a 'zero deficit' regime. When Pope Francis passed away at age 88 on Easter Monday in his modest Vatican apartment, his brave campaign had made big strides, but stopped short of the promised land. This writer began covering the Pope's righteous charge right at the creation. In early 2014, I traveled to Rome for a firsthand view of all the new and historic financial guard rails and disciplines Francis was installing, as well as the influx of business experts he'd summoned across the globe to assist him. When Francis took office the previous year, just about everything that involved how the Vatican handled money needed fixing: the huge and ever-rising gap between revenues and expenses; the leadership dominated by clergy lacking expertise in accounting and investing; and a scandal-scarred reputation. The stain of corruption, or at least incompetence, lingered from the Banco Ambrosiano affair of the early 1980s, when financier Roberto Calvi scammed the Institute for Religious Works, a.k.a. the Vatican Bank, in a caper that cost the IOR $250 million and emptied a big portion of its reserves. Days after his institution collapsed, Calvi's body was found hanging under London's Blackfriars Bridge; the British courts couldn't determine whether the cause of death was suicide or murder. Calvi's schemes duped his 'buddy' who headed the IOR, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, whom in the mid-1980s I interviewed at the IOR's home in the ninth-century Gothic prison built by Pope Nicholas VI. The six-foot-eight Marcinkus, dubbed the Gorilla, had risen in the Vatican from a power base as Pope John Paul II's bodyguard. During our meeting, he chain-smoked Camels and pontificated for hours about how the IOR was the Vatican's biggest moneymaker courtesy of pocketing the 'spread' between the tiny interest it paid the Jesuits and other religious orders for their deposits, and the much higher rates it garnered re-channeling those funds to European banks. On Ambrosiano, Marcinkus insisted that charges he'd 'guaranteed' the bank's debts on behalf of the IOR was a bum rap, and that the Vatican only repaid the $250 million to safeguard its image. Shortly before, the Italian government had dropped an arrest warrant for Marcinkus that had exiled him for a year to the Vatican grounds, a liberation that perhaps explained his ebullient mood. 'I may be a lousy banker,' he told me not-for-quotation; 'but at least I'm not in jail.' Francis quickly showed that in money matters, he was a new kind of leader My sources were all business leaders newly appointed to aid in the Pope's offensive. On background, they related a dramatic meeting in the summer of 2013 where Francis first addressed a dimension of his domain that he deemed crucial—its chronically stumbling role as a commercial enterprise. The pontiff had appointed a team of seven business leaders from around the world as a committee to pinpoint the problems and recommend specifics for a broad overhaul. They included the French executive heading asset management for U.S. mutual fund giant Invesco, the CEO of German insurer ERGO, the chief of Malta's largest bank, and the former prime minister of Singapore. Instead of holding the confab at the Apostolic Palace, the Renaissance showplace where pontiffs traditionally greeted visitors in high style, Francis ushered the distinguished guests into a nondescript conference room at the Casa Santa Marta, a five-story limestone guesthouse on the sub-luxury scale of a four-star hotel where the pontiff resided in a second-floor one-bedroom suite. No religious art or objects adorned the walls. Attired in a simple white cossack and metal cross, the Pope took the kind of highly managerial 'I'm the boss' approach his invitees might have recognized from addressing their own lieutenants. Speaking fluent Italian, pausing frequently so that a translator could repeat his words in English, the former cardinal of Buenos Aires stated that for his spiritual message to be credible, the Vatican's finances had to be credible as well. The Vatican hadn't overcome the practices formed by centuries of secrecy and intrigue to either manage its money efficiently, or issue a coherent accounting on where the money came from and where it was spent. His primary mission, the new Pope stressed, was helping the poor and underprivileged. The Vatican budget careening from small surpluses to yawning deficits undermined that goal by inhibiting charity. 'When the administration's fat it's unhealthy,' he declared, adding that he wanted a far leaner and efficient organization that would prove 'self-sustaining.' Getting there would require strict rules and protocols. It particularly incensed the pontiff that the managers kept paying overruns on fixed price contracts, when the businesses should have eaten the excess billings. From now on, he admonished, when the Vatican gets a bill for a project where it's the contractor who is legally responsible for the extra costs: 'We don't pay!' Like a great CEO, the Pope charted a clear strategy. As one participant characterized the command: 'Let's make money for the poor.' Francis finished by intoning, 'I trust you. You're the experts. I want solutions to these problems.' Pope Francis wasn't a micromanager who'd study balance sheets, but he was a born leader expert at establishing clear objectives and choosing specialists needed to meet them—he'd rely on real bankers not amateurs in the Marcinkus mold. Then, without taking questions or extending pleasantries, he left the room. On finances, Pope Francis proved the greatest of all holy reformers. But the Vatican's budget woes persist to this day Following the meeting, that prestigious board helped design a radically new architecture directed not by the religious leaders who'd run the machine for centuries, but seasoned managers and consultants from around the world. The new regime hired KMPG to install internationally accepted accounting principles replacing the old crazy quilt of standards, EY to scrutinize the books of the tiny nation's stores and utilities, and Deloitte & Touche and Spencer Stuart to respectively audit the P&L and recruit fresh talent at the Vatican Bank. Pope Francis also established a new body called the Secretariat of the Economy that for the first time centralized all authority under a single agency and leader. Today, the top official is an MIT grad who has spent a long career in management positions for Catholic universities and prominent institutions of the church. Tighter oversight brought new discipline to runaway spending and boosted investment returns, but didn't end the Vatican's long history of headline-grabbing misdeeds. In 2014, the cardinal who served as second-ranking official in the Secretariat of State schemed with still another shady Italian magnate to purchase shares in a London building; the Secretariat subsequently took full control of the property for the highly inflated price of roughly $400 million, then sold it a few years later at a $150 million loss. An investigation launched in 2019 discovered that many millions of Euros disappeared in kickbacks and self-dealing. But this time, the authorities imposed tough justice. The Vatican courts sent eight people including the cardinal to jail, and levied fines on two others. Shortly after taking power, Pope Francis ordered a hiring freeze that remains in force to this day. Indeed, his strategy of shrinking the workforce through attrition has succeeded. But the Vatican is still haunted by the burden of the way-underfunded pension plans that he inherited. The Vatican's financial world is divided into two parts. The first is the City State, the 110-acre sovereign country that generally runs a budget on the scale of a midsize municipality, employs the ceremonial Swiss guards and 'gendarme' police force, and generally generates an operating surplus due to big revenues from the Vatican museum, the world's second most visited museum behind the Louvre, and the likes of sales of souvenir coins. The second is the Holy See or Curia, the Pope's sprawling bureaucracy that does everything from detective work to naming new saints to operating the equivalent of embassies in three dozen countries to operating nine cabinet-like 'congregations.' It's perpetually in deficit—once again, largely via what it owes its legions of retirees. In recent years, the Curia has been spending around $800 to $900 million a year, and running structural deficits of well over $50 million. And that's after allocating for operating expenses tens of millions of dollars in "Peter's Pence." That's money gathered in the collection baskets passed through church aisles in from Sydney to Warsaw on the Sunday marking the feasts of Saints Peter and Paul in late June. It's one time the world's faithful, rich and poor alike, send funds to the Vatican en masse. The late pontiff always wanted to steer Peter's Pence solely to its original purpose of supporting the impoverished. It was a goal he cherished but didn't live to achieve. Still, Pope Francis worked a near miracle bringing transparency, competence, and integrity to perhaps the most notoriously byzantine corner of the financial world. From his hospital bed in his final days, the pontiff kept fighting the Vatican establishment for reform that elevated sound money management as a tool for filling the role of his model and namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century Italian friar devoted to raising the downtrodden. Only if his successor shares Francis's rare knack for business strategy will the job be finished. This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
