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ITALY

Top Gear Italy to launch next year

Good news for Italian car fans. An Italian version of the BBC car show Top Gear is set to hit TV screens in Italy from March 2016.

Top Gear Italy to launch next year
Top Gear Italy presenter, Joe Bastianich. Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images North America/AFP

The Italian version of the show, called Top Gear Italia, will be produced by Sky Italia and will be broadcast on the pay TV channel, Sky Uno.

The show will be presented by Italian motoring journalist Guido Meda, alongside the Italian-American restaurant entrepreneur and car enthusiast, Joe Bastianich.

Bastianich is already a well known face on Italian TV screens, being a presenter on both the Italian and American versions of popular cooking show, Masterchef.

Top Gear is currently broadcast in 212 territories around the world, but Italy will become only the sixth country to make its own version of the show following France, China, South Korea, Russia and Australia.

Top Gear is one of the most profitable shows produced by the BBC, and earns around €€70 million a year for BBC Worldwide, the main commercial arm of the BBC.

Both the original BBC version of the show and the magazine are already highly popular in Italy.

The executive vice-president of western Europe for BBC Worldwide, Tobi di Graaff, said that he hoped the new Italian show could build on that success.

““Adding a local version to the mix in a country steeped in motoring history will be great for Italian audiences,”” he told The Guardian.

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ACCIDENT

German tourists among 13 dead in Italy cable car accident

Thirteen people, including German tourists, have been killed after a cable car disconnected and fell near the summit of the Mottarone mountain near Lake Maggiore in northern Italy.

German tourists among 13 dead in Italy cable car accident
The local emergency services published this photograph of the wreckage. Photo: Vigili del Fuoco

The accident was announced by Italy’s national fire and rescue service, Vigili del Fuoco, at 13.50 on Sunday, with the agency saying over Twitter that a helicopter from the nearby town of Varese was on the scene. 

Italy’s National Alpine and Speleological Rescue Corps confirmed that there were 13 victims and two seriously injured people.

Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported that German tourists were among the 13 victims.

According to their report, there were 15 passengers inside the car — which can hold 35 people — at the time a cable snapped, sending it tumbling into the forest below. Two seriously injured children, aged nine and five, were airlifted to hospital in Turin. 

The cable car takes tourists and locals from Stresa, a resort town on Lake Maggiore up to a panoramic peak on the Mottarone mountain, reaching some 1,500m above sea level. 

According to the newspaper, the car had been on its way from the lake to the mountain when the accident happened, with rescue operations complicated by the remote forest location where the car landed. 

The cable car had reopened on April 24th after the end of the second lockdown, and had undergone extensive renovations and refurbishments in 2016, which involved the cable undergoing magnetic particle inspection (MPI) to search for any defects. 

Prime Minister Mario Draghi said on Twitter that he expressed his “condolences to the families of the victims, with special thoughts for the seriously injured children and their families”.

Infrastructure Minister Enrico Giovannini told Italy’s Tg1 a commission of inquiry would be established, according to Corriere della Sera: “Our thoughts go out to those involved. The Ministry has initiated procedures to set up a commission and initiate checks on the controls carried out on the infrastructure.”

“Tomorrow morning I will be in Stresa on Lake Maggiore to meet the prefect and other authorities to decide what to do,” he said.

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