Ciao Pittsburgh

A brief introduction into the greatest sporting event on planet earth. Hint It’s not the Super Bowl.

By Anthony Manero

Forget the World Series, The Olympics, The Daytona 500, The Stanley Cup, America’s Cup and the Indy 500, in fact, forget everything that you thought you knew about sports. When 100 million of us sit up to watch (hopefully the Steelers) play the Super Bowl, 1 billion are up all hours on all continents (depending on time zones) to watch (hopefully Italy and the United States) play the biggest sporting event in the world, ‘The World Cup’. That’s 1 in 8 people on planet earth are watching this tournament.

They are watching it in every continent, in every time zone, in every conceivable way. People have parties, fill out town squares and squeeze into venues in the hope of their country winning the biggest prize in sport. That’s right, the biggest sporting event in the world is ‘The World Cup of Football’ or Soccer as it has come to be known.

210 teams started qualifying on the 12th March way back in 2015. The teams played a combined total of 872 matches and scored 2.454 goals in the hope of qualifying for the biggest tournament on planet earth. From that process, the top teams from various divisions go through to the finals tournament held in a different host city each year. [Read more…]

By Anthony Manero

Isabella Rossellini is the essence of European beauty. We have seen her live so many lives, the screen siren, the sultry seductress, the pained and crying eyes that could envelope the embers of history and fan the flames of hope. The ambassador of Lancome, the respected mother for a jewelry brand, the sensual actress, the Mediterranean goddess photographed by people named Helmut and Leibovtiz and draped across the pages of Vogue. We have seen her vulnerability in Blue Velvet. We have seen her immortalized fame rolled out like a red carpet to support network darlings like 30 Rock, Friends and Seinfeld. We have seen her blue label flesh posing for Madonna’s ‘Sex” and ‘Erotica’ and felt so transposed that we dare not ask ourselves if it was indeed as a part of a book or a video.

Rossellini once said that the reason of her life is ‘not to be the most beautiful woman in the world’ as if it is a difficult and daring undertaking that she will take a lifetime to not be able to accomplish.

On the eve of her 66th Birthday, we step back from the woman who cut her teeth in Rome and New York, bearing both Italian and American citizenship and recognize that her legend does not just belong to her and her immense body of work, be it artisan or the philanthropic. The ex-wife of Martin Scorsese and David Lynch has had an even greater director in her life, the father of Neo Realist cinema and the father of one Isabella Rossellini, Roberto Rossellini. The woman who would be such a sentinel for love and sex came from parents who were embroiled in affairs of the heart their whole lives, off screen as much as on. [Read more…]