A reform halfway through, an all-female Lion

We open with the electoral reform, not out of routine but because it is the only story today that changes the rules by which Italians will choose who governs them. The Senate approved it with 113 votes in favour, but the text must return to the Chamber: this is not a closed story, it is a passage. The provision requiring parties to name their candidate for prime minister, under penalty of the exclusion of their lists, deserves attention also because it touches an institutional nerve — the relationship between the electoral law and the form of government — without touching the Constitution. We will follow it until the vote in Montecitorio expected from 28 September.

In Strasbourg, von der Leyen’s State of the Union address comes as three weighty dossiers move in parallel: the negotiation on the 2028-2034 multiannual budget, the Democracy Shield just approved with 420 votes, and the extension of CBAM, against a backdrop of 159 abstentions signalling how divisive the coal-aluminium-steel issue remains even within a broad majority.

On Gaza, we choose to report the new raids in the northern Strip without flattening the two narratives — military targets on one side, strikes on displaced people on the other — and to give the overall toll since the ceasefire, between 1,372 and 1,375 dead, as a figure that goes beyond the single episode.

We give equal prominence to two stories that risk fading into the background: the moderate risk for mpox confirmed by the WHO, with community transmission certified also in Italy, and the twentieth round table in three years on the former Ilva, which today reaches the unions with the proposal of a decree on redundancy funds and the supply chain — a measure of the length of an industrial crisis, not its solution.

In Venice, the Golden Lion and the Volpi Cup both went to the same film, Woman Unknown by Danish director May el-Toukhy: a concentration of awards that is newsworthy in itself.

Two stories today come from a single source and we state this without mincing words: the early Christian excavation in Oderzo, reported only by Artribune, and Zverev’s overtaking of Sinner in the ATP Race, reported only by SuperTennis. Neither has, at present, independent confirmation.

Today’s Controluce compares two headlines — ANSA and il Giornale — on the same diplomatic clash between Rome and Madrid over border controls: an exercise in reading, not a trial of the outlets.

No section is left uncovered in this edition.