Olympic ideal not burning bright in Italy
Editor’s note: CNN’s global network of affiliates will be providing dispatches from their countries on the Olympics. In this report, Mediaset report from Italy.
(CNN) — The debate about the Olympics in China hasn’t had much impact in Italy.
Hot themes such as boycotting the Games never really made it to the front pages here, and there were no protests or episodes of violence that were seen on the streets of Paris and London when the Olympic torch came through those cities.
It is true that this time the Olympic torch didn’t touch Italian soil as it did before Athens 2004 but still the main feeling here is of a general disinterest.
This may be because Italians are interested in football more than in any other sport, and the other big event of the summer, Euro 2008, is much more relevant from a media’s point of view than the Olympic Games.
Mediaset will be there in Beijing of course with four journalists in the field, but at the moment we’re not particularly pushing them with battage or any other preliminary coverage.
In Italy, China is still perceived as a very far away place and there is a quite blurred idea of what the Olympics may mean to the Chinese people.
It is hard to predict the effect the Games will have over the commercial relations and geo-political equilibrium between western countries and the Celestial Empire.
