The sun is back out in Rome and I have been showing my family around the city. I hoped to share with them all the best things about Rome like Gelati at Giolitti near Piazza Colonna, the Trevi Fountain at night and the view from Villa Borghese over Piazza del Popolo. I think I have been successful so far. Tomorrow we are doing a day trip to Florence.

Some of the biggest news in Italy is the wave of soccer violence. Italians are wild about their "calcio." As play has begun for the Serie A championship, the last few matches have shown the extremes of their obsession. Sometimes the game gets applied to much broader issues. At a recent game here in Rome, between Lazio and Livorno, the opposing fans clashed. You would have thought it was something from 1920s Italy. Some Livorno fans carried hammer and sickle signs and chanted communist slogans while the Lazio fans were displaying neo-nazi signs and swastikas. The regions that each team hails from have traditionally been on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Both sides hurled objects at each other and taunted the police. I also read reports that Livorno fans trashed the San Pietro train station. There was violence in other places besides Rome. Matches in Palermo, Udine, Cava dei Tirreni and Perugia all reported conflict between the opposing sides. More recently, a flare was hurled at a goal keeper in a game between Inter-Milan and AC Milan. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said that something must be done.

The violence has really increased all of a sudden. Perhaps it is the intensity of the championship season. An even more troubling reason may be the results of the regional elections held the first week of April. The parties of the center-left coalition "massacred" the center-right coalition which is currently in power. These are the words of Francesco Storace, the right-wing candidate for Governor of Lazio. He predicted before the election that if he lost, which he did, the right would lose their majority come the national parliamentary elections. Right wing supporters must feel threatened by this possibility. The competition for power between the extreme right and extreme left has been very violent in Italy in the past. Hopefully these soccer matches do not foreshadow the future.