Italy’s top story on Tuesday:

Italy recorded a turnout of 49.69 percent in the EU elections over the weekend, the first time less than half of the electorate exercised their right to vote in a European parliamentary election, according to news agency Ansa.

Italy has seen a steady decline in voter turnout for European elections in recent years, with just 54.5 percent going to the polls in 2019, versus 71.7 percent in 2004, EU data showed.

The turnout for local elections, by contrast, which were held across a number of Italian towns and cities at the same time as the EU elections, remained broadly the same as in previous years at just over 62 percent.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose far-right Brothers of Italy party secured 29 percent of the vote, told Rtl radio on Monday the lack of interest in the European elections showed that Brussels was perceived by many as “distant” and that it needed to be “better at listening to citizens.”

Poll worker charged with abandoning post

A 24-year-old poll worker was written up by Carabinieri police in Naples on Sunday for abandoning her station during the European elections, according to Ansa.

The official reportedly left the building on Saturday evening and didn’t return the next day, eventually admitting she’d abandoned her post because the pay too low to make it worth her while.

This wasn’t an isolated incident: the phenomenon of voting officials pulling out shortly before an election due to low pay has become a widespread problem in Italy, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper.

In the Pugliese capital of Bari, 200 of the 345 ballot supervisors appointed quit before the European elections, while 900 of Florence’s 1470 poll workers pulled out in advance of the vote – in both cases, in time for replacements to be found, the newspaper reported.

Italian university releases youth slang dictionary

Palloso (‘boring’), ciaone (a sarcastic ‘bye then!’), and W8 (wait) are some of the words that have made their way into Italian youth speak in recent years, according to a booklet of juvenile slang published by Rome’s LUMSA University.

Now in its third edition, ‘Bella ci: Small glossary of a language off its head’, compiled by students in the university’s communications sciences department, adds new vocabulary introduced via TikTok as well as regional slang words, reports Ansa.

Some of the words will be instantly recognisable to anglophones, from postare (to post online) and ghostare (to ghost) to glitch and bro.

Others, such as drip (US youth slang for ‘cool/stylish’), blastare (emotionally destroy), and gufare (to bring bad luck) will likely be less familiar.

Milan’s trains brought to a halt by rail system outage

Rail passengers in Milan experienced hours-long delays and cancellations on Monday afternoon thanks to a traffic management system failure that left the city “paralysed”, Italian media reported.

Although technicians resolved the issue relatively quickly, many passengers travelling to or from Milan were rerouted and saw their journey times increase by up to three hours.

The cause of the fault, which resulted from the hub’s traffic management system becoming temporarily disconnected, was still under investigation as of Monday afternoon, Skytg24 reported.