South Korea win the women’s 3000m speed skating relay gold medal as Italy finish in second, meaning Arianna Fontana wins her 14th Olympic medal to become her country’s most decorated Olympian.
FOLLOW LIVE: Winter Olympics 2026 – day 12
Available to UK users only.
Captain Wayne Madsen dislocated his left shoulder in the fourth over of Italy’s debut match at the T20 World Cup.
The 42-year-old’s journey to leading Italy at their first World Cup has been one of the eye-catching stories in the build-up, having been a stalwart of county cricket with Derbyshire and a former South Africa hockey international.
But he was injured attempting a diving stop against Scotland in Kolkata and immediately left the field. The Scots posted 207-4 from their 20 overs.
He will be assessed again in 24 hours before any decision is made on his participation in the rest of the tournament.
“The physio managed to get it back in but he’ll have to go and get more scans to see how serious it is,” said Italy head coach John Davison.
“I think it’d be doubtful. I’m not going to say he’s out, but I think it’d be doubtful if you dislocate your shoulder.”
Italy play Nepal in Mumbai on Thursday before a game against England in Kolkata on 16 February.
Their final group match is against West Indies on 19 February, also in Kolkata.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni slams anti-Olympics protesters as ‘enemies of Italy and Italians’.
Published On 8 Feb 20268 Feb 2026
Share
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has condemned anti-Olympics protesters as “enemies of Italy and Italians” after violence on the fringes of rallies in Milan and the alleged sabotage of train infrastructure.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) also joined the criticism on Sunday, condemning violence linked to the protests in Milan on Saturday, stating such behaviour has no place at the Games.
list of 4 itemsend of list
The incidents happened on the first full day of competition in the Winter Games that Milan is hosting along with the Alpine town of Cortina d’Ampezzo.
Meloni praised thousands of Italians who are working to keep the Games running smoothly, many of whom are volunteers.
“Then there are those who are enemies of Italy and Italians. The protesters demonstrate ‘against the Olympics,’ causing these images to end up on televisions around the world. After others cut the railway cables to prevent the trains from leaving,” the prime minister wrote in a statement on Facebook on Sunday.
The Italian Transport Ministry said that an investigation into suspected “terrorism” had been launched after the railway sabotage near the city of Bologna on Saturday and that those responsible would face a multimillion-euro damages claim.
Thousands of people took to the streets in Milan on Saturday to protest against the Olympics’ environmental and social consequences, including concerns over excessive public spending and ecological damage.
The march, which began peacefully, turned tense when some protesters set off smoke bombs and firecrackers near Olympic venues. Milan police responded with tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowds, leading to clashes in areas close to the Olympic Village and a nearby highway.
International Olympic Committee spokesperson Mark Adams told reporters on Sunday that peaceful protest is legitimate, but “we draw a line at violence”, which “has no place at the Olympic Games”.
Separately, protesters have also rallied against Israel’s participation in the games and against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, which has deployed agents to provide security to the US delegation at the Games.
During Friday’s opening ceremony, Israel’s small delegation marched into Milan’s San Siro Stadium to a smattering of “boos” from the crowds. The four Israeli athletes, waving their national flag and smiling, saw the jeers quickly drowned out by the loud music and overall festive atmosphere.
United States Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance, received a similar hostile reception when they appeared on the stadium’s big screen.
From the ostentatious baroque square of Quattro Canti all the way up to the Teatro Massimo, Palermo’s Via Maqueda is thick with tourists. Pomegranate juice sellers are setting up pyramids of fruit on their carts at gaps in the crowd and waiters are trying to reel in passersby with happy hour prices for Aperol spritzes. Amid the noise and movement, it’s easy to walk straight past number 206, whose arched doorway features a stone cross stained black with dirt – a clue to the building’s former use.
Convento dei Crociferi was abandoned for 30 years, until Sicilian power couple Andrea Bartoli and Florinda Saievi took over and transformed it into Palermo’s newest arts space, the Museum of World Cities, due to open at the end of February. Inside, a cloister with high, scalloped porticoes frames a verdant courtyard filled with palms and banana trees. Bartoli comes to meet me and enthusiastically pumps my hand before leading me up to the grand, marble-floored rooms on the first floor, which have been given over to a rather self-referential exhibition on urban change.
“Cities change because people make them change,” Bartoli tells me. This is the ethos behind their organisation Farm Cultural Park, which has rehabilitated four different urban sites across western Sicily, starting with the city of Favara in 2010. The former sulphur mining town suffered rapid depopulation when its mines closed after the second world war, and many buildings across the historical centre were abandoned by owners who emigrated abroad.
Bartoli and Saievi decided to transform a warren of empty, crumbling palazzos into a colourful casbah of art studios, exhibition spaces and hipster cafes. It had the effect of reviving the town, making it a destination for holidaymakers. One oft-repeated statistic is that before Bartoli and Saievi came along, there was only one six-room hotel in Favara – now the town has 600 tourist beds.
“What happened in Favara was a miracle. But you can’t just put art in a place and hope it solves all of the problems,” says Bartoli pragmatically. “Contemporary art can’t change Sicily. It can’t improve the healthcare system or education.” But it can be used as a tool to draw in visitors, generate employment and, potentially, lure back residents. Farm Cultural Park, along with other art foundations, gallery owners and artists, has seized on a moment of opportunity. Sicily’s depopulation crisis is occurring in tandem with a resurgence in the island’s cultural scene, and vacant churches, prisons and convents are being snapped up.
Close to Palermo harbour, another arts organisation, Fondazione RIV, has transformed the cavernous, dark interior of the deconsecrated San Mamiliano church into a contemporary art exhibition, plunging the church’s ornate frescoes and tapestries into darkness to better spotlight the artworks on display. Nearby, in the heart of the Vucciria district, Cristina Giarnecchia and Adriano La Licata have turned an unused storage space and former warehouse into All, a studio, exhibition venue and incubator for contemporary artists and curators.
The same creative energy can be found outside Palermo. Gibellina, the next stop on my contemporary art tour of western Sicily, has been an art hotspot for decades, but is only now getting wider recognition. Art is present even as you enter the town – in fact, you drive right through it. An enormous star, Stella d’ingresso al Belice by Pietro Consagra, built out of stainless steel, straddles the dual carriageway.
Gibellina was built from scratch after the original town was razed by an earthquake in 1968, and the then-mayor, Ludovico Corrao, invited artists and architects to reimagine the city, weaving art into the town’s fabric. His audacious post-disaster reconstruction plan turned Gibellina into a carousel of experimental postmodern buildings, sculptures and mosaics.
“The founding principle of Gibellina is that artists would live here and work with the community to create works of art they would then leave behind,” explains Ludovico Corrao’s daughter, Antonella Corrao, who runs local arts organisation Fondazione Orestiadi alongside her sister. “Gibellina has never been a place where art is commodified.”
In recognition of its heritage, the national government has just designated Gibellina the country’s first Italian Capital of Contemporary Art, hoping it will breathe life back into a town that has mostly dropped off the tourist map.
An old civic centre designed by Nanda Vigo has been emptied of debris after decades of disuse and repurposed for residencies for visiting artists, dance troupes and performers. Graffiti has been scrubbed from Francesco Venezia’s roofless, postmodern spiral Giardino Segreto I-II. Torre Civica, a concrete tower with colourful wings designed by architect Alessandro Mendini, was originally fitted with speakers that played regional folk songs several times a day. In 2026, the tower will once again play music.
When I asked Antonella whether the Capital of Contemporary Art designation was the culmination of her father’s vision for Gibellina, she was moved to tears, describing it not as an end point, but a new beginning for the town: “This is how a dream becomes reality – with art truly becoming an economic driver for the region.”
I was reluctant to move on from Gibellina, as even after several days of wandering I still hadn’t seen every artwork or postmodern building in the town, but I wanted to go further south, to check out where this drive for urban revitalisation had begun.
My partner and I stayed at Sciabica Suite in Favara in the heart of Farm Cultural Park, a pocket of quiet luxury inside the riddle of the casbah. We were there on a blustery, rainy night in late November, so couldn’t take advantage of our beautiful suite’s roof terrace and hot tub, but were perfectly placed to explore the exhibitions just outside our front door. Favara is a good place to base yourself – from there, you can hop over to Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples or visit one of Farm Cultural Park’s newest additions, the former San Vito prison.
It was a monastery before it was a prison, and its different uses are layered through the building like geological strata: pinched, austere monks’ quarters with thick stone walls made ideal solitary cells, and now one-room art installations. Many local mafiosi served time in this prison until it closed in 1996, and the cells are like time capsules: walls are still decorated with football scores, pages from pornography magazines, and a poster of Robbie Williams sporting impressive sideburns.
I explored the exhibitions with Lorena Caruana, a local architect who works with Farm Cultural Park, and we walked around the prison’s perimeter as the sun set, watching murmurations of swallows ribbon through the sky. “There’s so much collective memory associated with this place,” she explained. “We don’t want to paint over it. The idea is not to transform the space entirely.”
It is a noble goal: art helping to revitalise Sicily’s ghost towns and deserted urban spaces without replacing or stifling the history of the place; the present sitting happily alongside the past.
Accommodation was provided by B&B Carella in Palermo (doubles from €80) and Sciabica Suite in Favara (suite from €110)
MILAN — History didn’t begin in Italy, but it made a number of significant advances there. The foundations for representative government, the 365-day Julian calendar, modern sanitation, newspapers, roads and the postal system were established in Rome.
Centuries later, the rest of the world is still doing as the Romans do.
But if Rome is Italy’s past, Milan is its present and future.
It is the country’s financial center, home to the Italian stock exchange. It’s the world’s fashion center, home to luxury brands including Prada, Versace, Armani and Dolce & Gabbana. And it has one of the largest concentrations of millionaires in the world, one for every 12 of the city 1.37 million residents.
“It’s a city that’s becoming more global and global,” said Giorgio Ricci, the chief revenue officer for Inter Milan, the city’s top soccer club. “Milano is now a real ambassador of that Italian culture, from lifestyle to design to food and whatever.”
And now, like Rome in the summer of 1960, it also has the Olympic Games.
The Milan-Cortina Games are the first Olympics officially shared between two host cities and the most logistically complex Winter Games ever, taking place over 8,500 square miles of northern Italy. And though most of the medals will be awarded in the surrounding mountains at Cortina d’Ampezzo, Valtellina and Val di Fiemme, Milan will be the beating heart of the Games, much as it is the beating heart of the country.
The main opening ceremony will take place at San Siro, the 75,000-seat stadium that is home to the city’s two first-division soccer teams, Inter Milan and AC Milan. Figure skating, speedskating and men’s and women’s hockey will also be held at four other venues across the city.
San Siro in Milan will host the opening ceremonies for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics.
And that will happen, organizers say, whether the venues are ready or not — and one of them is not. The 11,800-seat Unipol Dome, which will be known as Milano Rho Ice Hockey Arena during the Olympics, is one of just two competition venues that had to be constructed for the Games. It played host to the first games of the women’s hockey tournament Thursday despite the fact that construction crews were still administering the final touch-ups outside the building as Sweden was beating Germany in the opener.
“Do we have every area of that venue finished? No,” said Christophe Dubi, the International Olympic Committee‘s executive director for the Olympic Games said earlier this week. “Is it absolutely necessary for the Games? No. Everything that is public-facing, whether for media or athletes, will be first-class.”
Organizers certainly hope so because there’s a lot riding on these Games. If Milan can pull off an efficient, modern, sustainable and technologically “smart” event, it will reinforce the city’s status as one of the world’s top-tier global capitals, one with financial roots and a trendy multicultural image.
Fail in any one of those categories and Milan could suffer significant financial and reputational damage.
A singer busks late at night in Piazza del Doumo in Milan ahead of the Winter Olympic Games.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
The competition is expected to draw 2.5 million people to Milan — many of them first-time visitors — while generating more than $7 billion in economic activity. Much of that spending went to upgrade the city’s and regional rail lines, which are expected to be overwhelmed given the spread-out nature of the Games.
Days before the Olympic torch was lit at San Siro, Milan’s Piazza del Duomo, which fronts the city’s elaborate Gothic cathedral, was packed with Olympic visitors, many wearing sweatshirts and jackets bearing the flags of their homelands. NBC will anchor its 700 hours of linear TV coverage from a temporary studio tower built in the square, with the iconic church as its backdrop.
Around the corner along the Via Orefici, which dates to the Middle Ages, many of the neighborhood’s trendy boutiques have hung neon signs with the Games logo, proclaiming themselves proud sponsors of the Olympics. At night, a singer who calls herself Anna Soprano performs a solo street opera.
However many locals have failed to catch Olympic fever with high ticket prices and fears about traffic, security measures and crowded Metro trains dampening enthusiasm.
An opera singer performs in Milan ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Buried beneath Milan’s rush to the modern from the Middle Ages — just beyond the Duomo Cathedral, which was begun in 1386, is the massive 15th Century Sforza Castle — lies a more recent history the city would just as soon forget. Milan was Italy’s Munich, the birthplace of Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement.
Yet it later became the center of anti-fascist resistance, with partisans seizing control of the city in the final days of World War II and executing Mussolini, hanging his corpse from the roof of an Esso station in the Piazzale Loreto. Milan marked that day by naming a prominent square in the city’s center April 25 Plaza for the day the uprising that liberated Milan began.
If Milan is modern Europe, some of the competition clusters outside the city, spread from Valtellina on the Swiss border in the north to Cortina d’Ampezzo, 27 miles south of the Austrian border, represent both the rustic and gentrifying Italy.
The scenic Fiemme Valley, site of cross-country skiing, ski jumping, and Nordic combined , is made up primarily of three small villages — Carano, Daiano and Varena — in the Dolomites mountain range. Despite a history of human activity that dates back more than 6,000 years, the area wasn’t officially established as the municipality of Val di Fiemme until the three townships merged in January 2020.
Today it is a major outdoor-sports destination, having played host to the FIS Nordic World Ski championship numerous times; in the summer it is a favored destination of hikers.
Valtellina, a 75-mile-long valley that runs along the Swiss border, will be the site of Alpine skiing, snowboarding, freestyle skiing and the debut sport of ski mountaineering. The region is known as the heart of the Alps and is a premier Alpine wine area, famous for the elegant reds that come from grapes grown on steep, terraced vineyards.
Cortina d’Ampezzo in northern Italy will host multiple events during the 2026 Olympics.
Cortina d’Ampezzo, meanwhile, is a breathtakingly beautiful ski resort and outdoor sports paradise about 35 miles from the Austrian border. Unlike Valtellina and Val di Fiemme, which are rustic and traditional, Cortina is one of Europe’s most expensive ski towns, its streets lined with high-end stores, luxury hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants. For year-round residents, property prices are the highest in the Italian Alps.
It was scheduled to host the 1944 Winter Olympics before World War II intervened, delaying the its arrival until 1956, when 32 nations — the largest to attend a Winter Games at the time — competed in four sports and 24 events. This month it will be the site of the biathlon, Alpine skiing, curling and sliding sports (bobsled, luge and skeleton).
The new $140-million Cortina Sliding Centre, the second Olympic venue whose construction fell well behind schedule, was completed days before the opening ceremony but a cable car intended to carry spectators to the women’s ski events was not expected to be finished in time. That could lead to traffic jams since visitors will have to take their cars more than a mile up the mountain.