"The Independent"s topp 15-liste for italienske kulturelle eksportvarer

En liste som vel sier noe om både Italia og engelskmenn...
Fast cars to Latin lovers: Italy's top 15 cultural exports
This beguiling peninsula has produced an incredible wealth of cultural exports.
By John Walsh
1. Claudia Cardinale
Some might say Loren, some Lollobrigida, some Bellucci, but of all the Italian screen goddesses who dominated post-war western cinema, it was Ms Cardinale who took the Garibaldi...
2. Il dolce far niente
Or "the sweet doing nothing." Pleasant and carefree idleness. Delicious laziness...
3. Cars
How do they do it? What is the mystical connection between Italian engineers and the automobile?...
4. Gondoliers
Straw-hatted, stripy-vested, red-kerchiefed and indefinably louche, the Venetian hybrid of taxi driver and ad hoc crooner has proved irresistible to visitors for 900 years...
5. The sonnet
The 14-line, strictly rhyming poem so loved by Shakespeare derives from a 14th-century scholar called Francesco Petrarca, aka Petrarch. He laid down iron rules...
6. Gelato
Everyone knows Italian ice cream is better than any other...
7. Caruso
Before Pavarotti, before Bocelli, before Gigli, the extraordinary Enrico Caruso set the template for the massive-lunged, cavern-throated, fat-but-romantic Italian operatic tenor that became a 20th-century archetype...
8. Federico Fellini
Sensuous, lascivious, perverse, voluptuous, bawdy, childish and fixated by the grotesque, Fellini stands out among the great Italian directors for his embodiment of appetite...
9. Latin
Amo, amas, amat. Amor vincit omnia. Veni, vidi, vici. Lacrimae rerum. Alea iacta est. Timor mortis conturbat me. Annus mirabilis. Annus horribilis. Lingua franca. Ne plus ultra. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. In media res. In flagrante delicta....
10. Mafia
Italy didn't invent gangsters, but it engendered the concept of the criminal family.
11. Ancient Rome
It dominated western Europe for 1,200 years, starting as a collection of settlements around the river Tiber, and growing into an empire that stretched from Britannia in the west to Egypt and Syria in the east and comprised a Greater Europe from Constantinople to Africa...
12. Casanova
His name translates prosaically as "Jack Newhouse", but Giacomo Girolamo Casanova is a byword for heartless womanising...
13. Dante
The "father of the Italian language" was born Durante degli Alighieri, but his nickname is enough to harrow the ears of hearers...
14. Leonardo da Vinci
Perhaps the most diversely talented person who ever lived, Leonardo has a CV like nobody else's...
15. Roberto Baggio
Known as The Divine Ponytail and feted almost as much for his satanic good looks as his magical footwork, Baggio was the finest embodiment of the golden age of Italian football in the 1990s...