If you proceed to the iTunes store, you will notice a travel guide app called What Country. And this travel guide app describes each country in the app and the way it depicted Italy was in the words: pizza, mafia, pasta, scooters. This description has earned the ire of an Italian politician and he has insisted no less than the removal of the said app from the iTunes store.
Michela Vittoria Brambilla, the Italian Minister of Tourism was not at all enamored by the apps way of summing up the Italian country and she has taken up the cudgels in the quest to have it removed by advising the country’s government lawyers to find any legal precedence for its removal.
In her country’s defense, she has sited that Italy has thousands of historical and cultural points of interests, in fact Italy has been one of the very few European beacon of style and culture and to describe it as a land of organized criminals is just not respectful at all. In her own words, she exclaims: "I cannot allow our country to be discredited by having it represented by a criminal organization."
The developers of the What Country app explains that the word included in one of the items to describe Italy was not put there to smear the country’s name or reputation. The makers argued that the description in the iTunes description was put there so that users will "explore and discover funny, strange and exciting peculiarities of various countries around the world" through phrases and photos. The image used to represent Italy is a street sign that reads "Mafia parking only." In fact it describes other countries as well in a funny way not to demean or undermine any nation but to find something fun in all of the countries in the world. For example, it sited Germany in the words: "beer, discipline, autobahns." And even the United Kingdom was not spared cousins with the description: “They're stuck with "tea, weird sense of humor, football hooligans and rain."
The way China was depicted was: "overpopulation, kung fu, Great Wall, Tibet and tea ceremony", while the most defining characteristics of the US are "melting pot, hamburger and the American dream".
Still, the Italian Minister, dubbed as lacking a sense of humor, has described the app as being offensive and its depiction of her country unacceptable and she still demands that the app be taken off the Apple store. Other people just shrugs their shoulders thinking that someone in Italy thinks it is illegal to crack a joke about the country.
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