Italy

The Economist recently did a Special Report on Italy which had an undertone of criticism of the way Italy is 

currently managed......here is a letter from from one of the readers:

SIR – I refer you to some apt lines uttered by Orson Welles in "The Third Man": "In Italy for 30 years under the

 Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci

 and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace,

 and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Mathias Koenig-Archibugi
London