Latest news with #Fabrizio
The Hill
10-04-2025
- Business
- The Hill
GOP pollster finds support for Trump tax proposals in most key Senate battlegrounds
An internal poll conducted by GOP pollster Fabrizio Ward found support for President Trump's tax proposals in most Senate battleground states ahead of the upcoming budget reconciliation battle in Congress, according to a source in the room when the data was shared Thursday with Senate chiefs of staff. The source said Fabrizio highlighted the need to continue engaging voters in the Trump coalition. 'The key takeaway is that we need to work together to deliver for voters,' Fabrizio said, according to the source in the room. The pollster said Republicans have the option of telling voters what Republicans did or telling them Democrats blocked it. 'One of those is a lot easier to win with than the other,' he said, according to the source. Georgia saw the broadest support for the tax proposals, including 85 percent support for the unpaid caregiver tax credit and 73 percent support for no federal taxes on Social Security. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they favored no taxes on tips, while 66 percent said they favored a car loan interest tax dedication. Sixty-two percent said they favored no federal taxes on overtime, and 61 percent said they favored a lower corporate manufacturing tax rate. Fifty-nine percent said they supported a continuation of Trump's 2017 cuts. The president's tax proposals were also broadly popular in North Carolina, where 85 percent of survey respondents said they favored unpaid caregiver tax credit and 67 percent showed support for no federal taxes on Social Security. Sixty-seven percent said they favored no taxes on tips, while 63 percent said they favored a car loan interest tax dedication. Fifty-nine percent said they favored no federal taxes on overtime, and 56 percent said they favored a lower corporate manufacturing tax rate. A continuation of Trump's tax cuts came in at 51 percent support. The proposals were notably popular in blue-leaning Minnesota. Eighty-seven percent of respondents were in favor of the unpaid caregiver tax credit and 76 percent supported no federal taxes on Social Security. Sixty-three percent said they favored no taxes on tips, while 63 percent also said they favored a car loan interest tax dedication. Sixty-two percent said they favored no federal taxes on overtime, and 58 percent said they favored a lower corporate manufacturing tax rate. Fifty-three percent said they supported a continuation of Trump's tax cuts. Battleground Michigan also saw popular support for the tax proposals, with 86 percent of respondents voicing support for the unpaid caregiver tax credit and 73 percent voicing support for no federal taxes on Social Security. Sixty-six percent said they favored no taxes on tips, while 70 percent said they favored a car loan interest tax dedication. Sixty-three percent said they favored no federal taxes on overtime, and 52 percent said they favored a lower corporate manufacturing tax rate. Fifty-two percent said they supported a continuation of Trump's 2017 cuts. The results were more mixed in New England's battleground Senate states. In New Hampshire, 88 percent of respondents said they favored the unpaid caregiver tax credit and 67 percent supported no federal taxes on Social Security. Fifty-seven percent said they favored no taxes on tips, while 63 percent said they favored a car loan interest tax dedication. Support for no federal tax on overtime was less popular at 48 percent support, while 53 percent said they favored a lower corporate manufacturing tax rate. Support was also lower for a continuation of Trump's tax cuts, coming in at 44 percent support. In Maine, 85 percent of respondents said they favored the unpaid caregiver tax credit and 71 percent indicated support for no federal taxes on Social Security. Fifty-eight percent said they favored no taxes on tips, while 57 percent said they favored a car loan interest tax dedication. Fifty-seven percent said they favored no federal taxes on overtime. However, support for a lower corporate tax manufacturing rate and a continuation of Trump's cuts were lower, at 47 percent and 48 percent, respectively. The findings come hours after House Republicans passed a budget blueprint that will be used to enact key parts of Trump's agenda, including an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Now Republicans in both chambers must put together a package that matches up with the levels laid out in the budget resolution and make decisions on a number of hot-button issues including spending cuts, how long the tax cuts will be extended for and the cap on the state and local tax deduction. The poll was conducted April 2-6 among 300 registered voters from each battleground state, a total of 1,800 registered voters. The margin of error for the 300 voters was 5.66 percentage points. Among the total 1,800 voters, the margin of error was 2.31 percentage points.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Move Over, Cybertruck, This Is How You Make an Exposed Metal Wedge Car
Check out the Peralta S: It's a new one-off supercar designed by GFG Style, the Italian design firm founded by designer Giorgetto Giugiaro and his son, Fabrizio. The Peralta is a mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive sports car, but more important, it's a hand-built wedge car made entirely out of mirror-polished aluminum. According to GFG, the design for the Peralta S was largely inspired by the that Giorgetto Giugiaro himself designed. Step aside, Tesla Cybertruck. This is how you build an exposed-metal wedge car. It's called the Peralta S, and it's built by GFG Style, the Italian design firm launched in 2015 by the famous designer Giorgetto Giugiaro and his son, Fabrizio. The body is made with hand-bent, mirror-polished aluminum that stretches across the length of a car in an unbroken arc. The only parts of the car that aren't made from aluminum are the side sills, front spoiler, and rear diffuser, which are all made from exposed carbon fiber. Rather than using traditional doors (boring), the Peralta S has a huge front-hinged canopy that extends upward, giving way to the car's cabin (cool). The out-there design doesn't stop there. Rather than use traditional windows, which would have broken the car's shape, the Peralta S has a huge gullwing-style window on each side. According to GFG Style, the Peralta draws inspiration for its styling from the 1972 Maserati Boomerang concept, which is fitting, given that Giorgetto Giugiaro designed that car too. The one-off was commissioned by the Mexican car collector Carlos Peralta and two sons, who gave the car its name. Under the crazy design, the Peralta S is based on the Maserati MC20. That means a mid-engine, rear-drive layout pushing out 621 horsepower and 538 pound-feet of torque from a twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6. You Might Also Like Car and Driver's 10 Best Cars through the Decades How to Buy or Lease a New Car Lightning Lap Legends: Chevrolet Camaro vs. Ford Mustang!
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Peeling 17th-Century Palazzo and the Man Who Was ‘Crazy Enough' to Buy It
WHEN RAFFAELE FABRIZIO was growing up, he lived in a small village close to Lake Como called Fino Mornasco that was near the headquarters of Dedar, the Italian fabric house that his parents, Nicola and Elda, founded in 1976. Fabrizio, 55, and his sister, Caterina, 56, have spent their careers at Dedar, bringing the firm into a new era by introducing novel combinations of color, pattern and texture, attracting clients like Hermès and the movie director Luca Guadagnino. As a younger man, though, Fabrizio had wanted to be an architect — he would study the field in college and practice in his 20s — since taking an interest in a desolate 17th-century villa around the corner from his family's home that had been occupied, and then deserted, by a countess who'd lost her fortune. 'It's always that same story,' he says, laughing a little, 'but I was fascinated by this forbidden place.' Most days after school, while his parents were running their company, he'd wriggle past the locked gate and wander through rooms decorated with faded frescoes. When friends came over, he forced them to visit 'this beautiful world,' as he describes it, 'hidden and abandoned.' He recalls this on a gray September afternoon while crossing a grassy courtyard in Valmorea, another village west of Como with its own haunted character. On the street, barren of the few thousand people who live here, a black cat creeps from under a bright yellow Mustang. When church bells toll the hour three minutes early, Fabrizio jokes that the lag is 'the right time to make a murder.' As he remembers his youth, he mentions the emotion required to create interesting textiles — not nostalgia, per se, but the 'feeling of something that was a memory … the atmosphere.' But given that he's now standing outside his own tumbledown 17th-century palace on seven acres that he purchased three years ago, and has since kept in glorious disarray, it's clear he's not just talking about work: As someone who's planning to move soon from his Milanese apartment (where he lives by himself) to be closer to the family business he helps oversee, he knows that his history is also his destiny. 'Your desires are formed when you're younger,' he says. 'And then we live to satisfy that ancient desire.' IF IT'S TRUE that all houses choose their owners, then this one has been discerning: In nearly 350 years, it has been passed between only four different hands, about once per century. Around 1690, some of the valley in which it sits was acquired by the Sala family, who, according to municipal records, combined a few extant buildings (a noble manor, a farmer's house) to create the structure's oldest, central core. In the early 20th century, the Sassi family bought it in several phases and purportedly rented part of the estate to a professor who'd tutored the children of the 19th-century painter Giovanni Segantini. The Sassi clan, descendants of two brothers who ran home-building companies in nearby Switzerland, divided the C-shaped property in half for their respective families, Fabrizio says, and decided to sell to him after the pandemic. There are more than 50 rooms, many of them with busted-through floors and ceilings that make traversing sections of the three levels treacherous. But Fabrizio was particularly drawn to the grandeur hidden behind the classic Lombardian facade, with its three-arched portico, yellow stone walls and green painted shutters. In finalizing the deal over two years, he told the sellers that they would never recruit someone else 'crazy enough' to undertake such a sprawling renovation. Parts of the 22,000-square-foot palazzo may have been built by the same family of architects, the Quadrios, who worked on Milan's Gothic duomo in the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet Fabrizio has found little historical documentation for the building, which was listed by the Italian cultural heritage commission only after its sale to him; while he has peeled back paint on wooden ceilings and excavated stone floors in the downstairs common areas and upstairs bedrooms, it's impossible to tell when something was added or removed — every room is its own palimpsest. The lower level's ballroom, for instance, has a cathedral ceiling with trompe l'oeil windows and coffers, painted at some point to balance out the symmetry of the architecture, above a swirly red-and-white terra-cotta floor that's likely original. Its walls are more than 20 feet high because in the 1700s art was displayed in vertical stacks. The home has no heat and needs new wiring and, so far, the only real furniture Fabrizio has added is a bed, a clothing rack and some tables with sawhorse legs in the few rooms he's 'colonized,' as he says, while he goes back and forth to the city and figures out what to do here. There's no rush, however: 'I want to keep this feeling of living in a place that doesn't belong to me.' Once he starts renovating, he knows, he'll forever change the ambience that first enticed him — not that he's aiming to restore the house to its 17th-century glory or any thereafter. Instead, he wants to add his own modern layer on top of all the period details; why not, for example, consider lacquered ceilings? For him — for any good designer, in fact — the project's true success won't rest in its physical manifestations but in the mood it provokes and the behavior it encourages. And this house, just as the countess's was, is somewhere he likes to come to be alone, to consider the world before and beyond him. Last summer, he was awakened one morning by a storm that had torn down 20 of his cypress trees. He'd never experienced such intense winds in Italy, nor was he aware that his country had small scorpions, which he's caught scurrying about the wide, empty halls. Fabrizio shares this fact while roaming from undone room to undone room, latching the shutters. 'I don't want the ghosts to get in,' he says. 'Sometimes there's a need to close the door — to keep everything out. This is the place to do that.'
BBC News
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'It tells us something about how elites seek to retain their power': How Lampedusa's The Leopard skewered the super-rich
Lampedusa's mid-20th-Century novel The Leopard became a bestseller, then a revered film – and is now a lavish Netflix series. Its withering takedown of society's flaws and hypocrisies still hits home today. "Dying for somebody or for something, that was perfectly normal, of course: but the person dying should know, or at least feel sure, that someone knows for whom or for what he is dying." These are some of the opening lines of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, published in 1958, only a year after the author died of cancer. These words are from the novel's protagonist, Prince Fabrizio, head of an aristocratic Sicilian family. He is recalling discovering the body of an unknown soldier under one of his paradisiacal villa's lemon trees. It's an image that sums up the novel's existential spirit: beneath beauty, there is rot. Lampedusa was never published during his lifetime. His sole novel charts the fortunes of the Salina family, set against the backdrop of the Risorgimento: a social and political movement for Italian unification that led to the creation of a new kingdom of Italy in 1861, during a period of wider European revolutions. As ideas about democracy, liberalism and socialism carried throughout the continent, workers raged against the land-owning gentry, which they held responsible for worsening working conditions and widespread poverty. The period concluded in 1870 with the annexation of parts of the Italian peninsula, the unification of Italy and the capture of Rome. In The Leopard, one such landowner, Fabrizio, strategises based on what he believes he stands to gain at this tumultuous time for the aristocracy. He orchestrates the marriage between his dashing nephew Tancredi Falconeri and the nouveau-riche Angelica Sedara – against the wishes of Fabrizio's own daughter Concetta, who is in love with Tancredi. Considered one of the most important works of Italian literature, The Leopard was described by the cultural historian Lucy Hughes-Hallett as "the most loved and admired novel ever written in Italian". The British author EM Forster, meanwhile, in his preface to the Italian author's unfinished memoir Places of My Infancy (1971), wrote: "Lampedusa has meant so much to me that I find it impossible to present him formally… Reading and rereading it has made me realise how many ways there are of being alive." Marking only the second adaptation of the novel – and the first serialised version – a new Netflix series makes a fresh case for The Leopard's relevance in the 21st Century, more than 60 years after Luchino Visconti's classic film. A runaway hit Despite its historical shrewdness and epic love story, Lampedusa's novel did not initially fare well with Italian publishers. Two major publishing houses, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore and Einaudi, swiftly rejected Lampedusa's 1956 manuscript. The influential modernist and editor Elio Vittorini claimed it was too "traditional" compared with the experimental avant-garde movement sweeping Italian literature at the time. "Conservatives didn't like it because it's very rude about the Church and it's fairly cynical about aristocrats," David Laven, a historical consultant on Netflix's adaptation, tells the BBC. "Left-wingers didn't like it because he doesn't portray a positive view of the ordinary working class." After Lampedusa's death, his book fell into the hands of literary agent Elena Croce and eventually landed on the desk of the publisher Feltrinelli. The novel had vocal detractors, including the aforementioned Vittorini and the anti-fascist author Alberto Moravia, who were both suspicious of what they believed was the novel's conservatism, a decade after the 1943 overthrowing of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini. As Rachel Donadio wrote in The New York Times in 2008, The Leopard "was at first seen as quaint and reactionary, a baroque throwback at the height of neorealism in cinema and class-consciousness in all the arts". When it was published, however, it became a runaway bestseller, cycling through a staggering 52 editions in fewer than six months. Perhaps it resonated with a disillusioned generation living well after the Risorgimento, but appreciating what the French Marxist author Louis Aragon described as a "merciless" and "left-wing" critique of the upper classes. Lampedusa was posthumously awarded the prestigious Strega Prize, and his reputation as a literary great would soon outstrip his contemporaries. Part of what made The Leopard difficult to stomach for so many was its scathing tone, evenly applied to all corners of Italian society. Lampedusa himself was born into the aristocracy in 1896, and lived in a grand palazzo much like the one in his novel – but that did not prevent him from lampooning his own. His biographer David Gilmour wrote in The Last Leopard (1988) that part of what prevented Lampedusa from writing until so late in life was what he believed to be the redundancy of his own class. More like this:• 10 of the best TV shows to watch this March• The mystery of why Jane Austen's letters were destroyed• The women-only gang that menaced Victorian London Within the novel's first few pages, Lampedusa disdains Fabrizio's wife and seven children and describes his arduous audiences with King Francis I (King of the Two Sicilies) as coming face to face with: "this monarchy which bore the marks of death upon its face". Far from believing this makes him a cut above the rest, however, the jaded Fabrizio is just as flawed: unscrupulous, forsaking his own family. A tale of disenchantment and fear of obsolescence amid a crumbling dynasty, The Leopard skewers the flaws and hypocrisies present throughout all Italian society. "The great myth of Italian unification is that it was a bottom-up movement, that Italians suddenly woke up in the morning and really wanted to overthrow the regimes they were living in," says Laven. "If you think about Sicily, civilians were used to regime change." Sicily had been ruled by the kings of Spain, before conquests by the Italian House of Savoy and Austrian Habsburgs. The French Bourbons had taken over by the time Naples and Sicily were merged in 1816. They were, in turn, overthrown in 1848, before returning to power 16 months later. In Lampedusa's novel, though the revolutionaries have high hopes of radical change, the protagonist insists the middle classes will simply replace the upper classes, while on the face of things everything remains the same. Despite these societal shifts, the status quo was upheld, as captured by one of the novel's most enduring lines: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." "It's not only something that's going on in Italy but across Europe in the 19th Century," says Laven. "Bismarck doesn't really want German unification. He's trying to defend the interests of the Prussian Junkers [nobility], and he's prepared to make compromises. Lots of British aristocrats don't like the way the world is going, but they realise they must accommodate themselves with a changing world in order to retain their status. [The Leopard] tells us something about the way in which elites seek to retain their power." According to Laven, although The Leopard contains small historical inaccuracies, Lampedusa really captured the essence of the time. Unlike the work of historical fiction giants such as Leo Tolstoy or Victor Hugo, the author navigates Fabrizio's lofty world with thrift and virtuosic wit. "[When you think of historical fiction], you tend to think of these great slabs of books," says Laven. "What you have [here] is this incredible ability to capture a moment almost 100 years before he's writing with such economy of style." Legacy of The Leopard Five years after publication, The Leopard's status as a landmark of Italian literature was cemented by an acclaimed film adaptation, directed by Visconti, a Marxist who, like Lampedusa, hailed from a noble family. It starred Burt Lancaster as the titular leopard, Fabrizio, and Alain Delon as his nephew Tancredi. Visconti's opulent film held the same searingly cynical and yet elegiac view on the upper echelons of Italian society, according to Arabella Cifani, books editor of the Giornale dell'Arte. "Visconti understood it profoundly," she tells the BBC. "One would say that the book was connatural to the worldview held by Visconti, who was also a prince and whose ancestors had ruled Milan for over 100 years." Famously, the film contains a lavish 25-minute ballroom scene. According to the Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus, the waltz "competes for [the] most beautiful sequence committed to film". But amid this splendour, Lancaster's Fabrizio has a cloying sense of his own mortality, musing on what his own death will be like. The American star was not Visconti's first choice for the role, but he embarked on in-depth research, spending time with Lampedusa's widow, adopted son and members of the Sicilian nobility. Though it won the Palme d'Or in its year of release (1963), the critic David Weir claimed Visconti's film was less appreciated by audiences than Federico Fellini's 8 ½ from the same year: "The Leopard was part of the story of the early 1960s that saw movie audiences gravitating away from big-budget fiascos". Its ensuing influence on major directors has been undeniable, however, with resonances of it in the grandiose work of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who has cited it as one of his favourite films, saying: "I live with this movie every day of my life". For the creators of Netflix's new series, the way The Leopard speaks to a collapsing epoch was at the core of its appeal. "We were going through the throes of Brexit when I first read it, and it seemed to me that there was a sort of Risorgimento in reverse happening," its writer and creator Richard Warlow tells the BBC, referring to new divisions being created in Europe as opposed to unifications. "It did get me thinking about ideas of nationhood, what it is to be an island, the ingrained nature of our lives and what it's like to suddenly change that." Undoubtedly, the lavishness of the novel was another draw for the showrunners, with some already comparing it to hugely successful Netflix series like The Crown or Bridgerton. Although the Risorgimento – and the novel's events – took place more than 150 years ago, the ramifications are still deeply felt in Italian society, according to Laven, especially against an increasingly political and economic split between north and south. "It's quite clear that for them it's still very meaningful," he says. And how much this revolutionary period of history changed anything – besides the creation of a centrally governed region of Italy – is open to debate. Cifani adds that the novel's famous line: "if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change" continues to be used as a political slogan. It's a sentiment that seems, like Lampedusa's novel, timeless. The Leopard is released on Netflix on 5 March. -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Leopard review – this sultry Italian drama will leave you swooning
First the Americans came for British period drama. Now the Brits are getting their mitts on Italy's heritage. In 2020, the US producer Shonda Rhimes sexed-up Regency England with lusty intrigue, soapy storylines and orchestral covers of pop hits to create Netflix's smash-hit Bridgerton. This year, British screenwriters Benji Walters and Richard Worlow (The Serpent) and director Tom Shankland (SAS Rogue Heroes) are collaborating with the streamer on a bit of pop cultural colonisation of their own. You can see why they would want to: The Leopard – the trio's adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's seminal 1860s novel, set in Sicily – is sumptuous, sensuous, emotionally tempestuous and full of nice food; all qualities our homegrown costume drama tends to lack. But this sweaty, steamy series is far more than a treat for the senses. Behind the frills and the romantic thrills – at the centre of the action is a captivating young love triangle – is a socio-historically insightful tale of an elite clan's descent into obsolescence. The eponymous Leopard is Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, who got his nickname from the big cat on his family crest. Played by a whiskered Kim Rossi Stuart (the cast is Italian and the show is subtitled), the prince must reluctantly adapt to survive after Garibaldi's redshirt army wrests control of Sicily from the House of Bourbon (try not to think about biscuits) as part of their quest to unify Italy. Fabrizio is – obviously – against the revolution; he fears for the safety of his family and the erosion of his wealth and influence. Yet his beloved nephew Tancredi isn't so shortsighted. He joins the redshirts, not just because he's a daredevil – he can see which way the wind is blowing. 'If we want everything to stay as it is,' he tells his baffled uncle, 'then everything must change.' The Leopard is a meditation on mortality. Fabrizio realises he is ageing out of relevance just as his way of life is becoming a thing of the past. The regime change does not spell annihilation for the nobility, but does require them to learn a different kind of dance: collaboration with the new proletarian overlords and the burgeoning middle class. Until now, our protagonist has been the last word in male, moneyed privilege. His entitlement means he thinks little of having his priest accompany him on a trip to visit his lover (challenged on his infidelity, his excuse is that he has never seen his pious wife's navel) but all of a sudden he has to sweet talk some upstart colonel in order to visit his country pile. The crumbling of status and power is one of fiction's most compelling archetypes, and The Leopard elicits its hypnotic combination of schadenfreude and sympathy. That country pile is the site of the show's other major storyline. Tancredi has been kind-of courting his cousin Concetta, Fabrizio's wholesome and besotted daughter. But soon there is a rival for his affections in the form of the newly wealthy mayor's daughter, Angelica (Deva Cassel, daughter of Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel), who seems to have been bred for the task of seducing him. Before The Leopard was a six-part Netflix show, it was a three-hour film starring Burt Lancaster, released five years after the novel was posthumously published in 1958. On paper, the two are not that different; there are many overlaps between dialogue and scenes. Rossi Stuart's prince is colder but less cruel, funny and pervy than Lancaster's, while Saul Nanni's Tancredi somehow rivals Alain Delon for renegade heart-throb status. In fact, this cast has a notable advantage: Rossi Stuart and Nanni are both Italian; in what must have been a confusing shoot, Lancaster spoke his lines in English while Delon spoke French, then both were dubbed in Italian. Yet Luchino Visconti's movie was also steeped in a magical strangeness: a gothic gloom, a frenzy to the family's Catholicism and a dangerously febrile feeling courses through every scene. The film's stunning arrangement of bodies is a sight to behold, whether on Palermo's city centre turned battlefield or the dancefloor in its famous 45-minute ballroom scene. Despite all its aesthetic loveliness, this new Leopard feels visually prosaic in comparison; a pretty streaming series rather than a veritable work of art. The advantage is that this version is more coherent and watchable, without ever being sugary or simplistic. The great story is intact, posing its evergreen questions – when it comes to tradition, where is the line between evolution and extinction? When it comes to power, where does pragmatism bleed into surrender? – for a new audience. The Leopard's sultry good looks will make you swoon, but this beady-eyed examination of how the ruling classes navigate regime change has plenty of substance too. The Leopard is on Netflix now.
