Roberto Calderoli, ‘honourable’ exponent of the Lega Nord, spent his week dreaming up ways to stop a proposed Mosque being built in Bologna.

The mosque has already been the subject of hot debate, given its proposed size (a six thousand metre squared building, on land roughly 52 thousand metres squared) – which is apparently much greater than is needed for the Muslim population of Bologna. A sensible attitude, linking the metre squared to worshiper, which would have deprived us of much of the Renaissance’s architectural marvels, but let’s not dwell on that.

Calderoli came up with, what seemed to him a genius solution, to discourage the building of the Mosque. Rather than get caught up in tedious communal debates on the proposed building, he plans to bring his pet pig to trample over the grounds for the Mosque, thus at a stroke making the land impure and unfit for worship. Like much of the Lega’s ‘politics’ it sounds like a sick joke, but is apparently in earnest (remeber their proposals to take Italy out of the Euro and create a new currency linked to the dollar…).

There’s one snag about Calderoli’s plan, aside from the fact that it’s highly offensive – run the litmus test – imagine he were talking about a proposed synagogue here -it seems it’s as well researched and thought out as most of the Lega’s proposals. Yasin Gentile, an Imam from Napoli remarked that even where Calderoli to come with 50 urinating pigs, it wouldn’t change the suitability of the site. It would be enough, apparently, to wash the ground.

Calderoli’s ‘initiative’ has been dubbed (by himself), in a weak attempt to evoke and ridicule Beppe Grillo’s recent V-Day, Maiale Day – or Pig Day. The best comment, thus far on it all has come from Beppe Severgnini, a popular columnist with the Corriere della Sera. When told that Calderoli’s protest would be called Pig Day, Severgnini responded ‘Egomaniac’.