"...an unsuccessful operation, managed by incompetents, a small tiny brand that perfectly reflects today's Italy, presumptuous and without substance... The obsessive pursuit of consensus [which] generates mediocrity."
-- Oliviero Toscani

Like many, I commented the other day the design of the shameful cucumber-eggplant-zucchini new national italian logo.
Little I knew that the real shame was not much in that little logo -- although that logo cost an awful €100,000 -- as it is in the new national portal our falling nation seems now to have: italia.it.
This so called portal, inaugurated along with the mentioned logo and promoted by the same obscure agencies created by the late Berlusconi's government for "national development", has been payed by the italian taxpayers €45 millions.
Yes, you read it right, €45 millions for a website: and apparently almost €100 millions were originally meant to be invested on the project. Which is, I don't know, probably the price of more than one big e-commerce or news website that produces lots of new content everyday. The figure is so incredible one can't really see it.
How the money has been used? Well, not to create a decent, modern website, that's for sure. So it's anyone's guess what they made of the millions.

A good work has been done by many italian blogs and websites to demolish italia.it piece by piece and to show to the world how badly designed and conceived it is. And how humiliating it is, particularly for the many young talents who really believe in the importance of design, especially for a country like Italy. So much that some of them decided to promote a collective project to create an alternative, better portal.

Among the hundreds of posts unceasingly drumming across the italian blogland on the issue: the observations and useful links of qix.it, the many posts at Diarium Neiminis, in english the comments on this page. But certainly the most complete effort on the case (as far as I know) has been done by ti.ailati.www, a blog expressly dedicated to the portal and its absurd existence. On ti.ailati.www, which also comes with a partial english version, all sorts of depressing detailed informations about the operation italia.it can be read. Details which should really have (and never will have) serious, penal consequences for those who promoted and followed that project.

For example: how the website came 15 months late without anyone paying a penalty for this; how because of the delay --unless more millions are put into it-- on July 2007 all the editorial staff of the portal will be sent home after a regular service of only few months; how anyway the editorial staff has been hired with lousy temporary contracts; how €9 millions were allocated to develop a booking platform for the portal, that was never implemented (without even going into the absurd, useless, control-freak impossible idea of having a nation-wide booking service for tourists); how it took only half a day to a young talented web designer to pass --as a sort of challenge-- from the concept design of italia.it as he saw it on the page to a actual, correct implementation of it, when it took months to the actual designers of the portal to do it wrong; how as a matter of fact the design of the portal is technically incredibly bogus, unfinished, and full of classic outdated web design errors, like using tables instead of styles etcetera.

Just like with the cucumber-logo, the portal italia.it speaks very clearly of what Italy is, in what shape it really is -- but not for the reasons our politicians seem to believe.

-- in picture, above: quando venire in Italia? scarica adesso tecnologia assistiva! from: italia.it