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The elections were held on Sunday and Monday in nearly 1,000 cities with 9.2 million eligible voters. While local issues dominated, the vote was closely watched as a bellwether of perceived impatience with traditional politics, and analysts concurred that the returns amounted to a strong protest vote.

Much of it was aimed squarely at Mr. Berlusconi’s party, the People of Liberty. After the first round of voting, whose final results were released on Tuesday, the party managed to hold on to only 2 of 17 principal cities it had governed. Although run-off elections in two weeks will ultimately determine the winners, the center-right clearly lagged in many major races.

The most striking result was the strong showing of the Five Star Movement, a grass-roots group that advocates exiting the euro and is led by Beppe Grillo, a comedian and self-proclaimed muckraker. His candidates ran campaigns that spoke directly to citizens.

“We want to give a strong signal to the entire country that you can be involved in politics without a structure, and without money, like we did,” Davide Bono, a Five Star Movement candidate, said Tuesday in an interview on Radio 24. “We believe that political structures are a brake to the expression of democracy.”

One of the movement’s candidates advanced to the run-off for mayor of Parma, one of Italy’s most industrious cities whose previous government was swept away by a scandal over kickbacks. Others more than held their own in many symbolic cities, winning, for instance, on the first ballot in Sarego, a town of 6,000 near Vicenza. The town is home to the self-proclaimed autonomous parliament of the Northern League, the federalist party whose leader, Umberto Bossi, resigned last month after scandals involving the misuse of party funds. The Northern League managed to retain power in Verona but lost votes in many other cities where it had been the dominant force for years.

Lower voter turnout — 66.88 percent, compared with 73.74 five years ago — was also seen as a sign of growing disaffection among the electorate.

“The vote gives reasons for reflection to political forces and citizens,” President Giorgio Napolitano said Tuesday.

Some analysts also saw the returns as a reaction to the austerity measures put in place by Prime Minister Mario Monti’s government, which replaced Mr. Berlusconi’s coalition last November. In trying to lower Italy’s huge public debt, the government has pushed through a series of pension changes and tax increases, and it is working to pass other equally unpopular measures, including a highly contested labor overhaul as well as a new property tax.

But even as the austerity measures have begun to sting citizens, political leaders have been reluctant to trim their own spending. This hesitancy has darkened the public mood toward Italy’s traditional political parties, which have been criticized as out of touch with the daily needs of citizens and outmatched by the challenge of fixing Europe’s economic crisis. A number of party scandals have also worn away voter confidence in the mainstream parties, which has polled as low as 4 percent.

Tellingly, in referendums in Sardinia held with the elections, voters overwhelmingly abolished four provincial administrative structures, and their lawmakers with them. They voted to reduce their regional representatives to 50 from 80 and to cut lawmakers’ wages.

Some members of Mr. Berlusconi’s party believed that they had lost popularity because the former prime minister, who has kept a low profile since leaving office, had not campaigned alongside the candidates.

“The less Berlusconi is involved, the more the party loses,” said Altero Matteoli, a lawmaker with the party.

The former prime minister, who was in Russia for the swearing-in ceremony of Vladimir V. Putin as president, said he had “expected worse,” according to Il Giornale, Mr. Berlusconi’s family’s newspaper.

Others said the party had lost its way.

“We were the party that wanted to change everything — now we are the party that should be changed,” said Giancarlo Galan, who was culture minister in Mr. Berlusconi’s last government.

The strong voter disenchantment suggested that the major parties would be unlikely to risk early general elections before Mr. Monti’s term ends in May 2013.

For the center-right, early elections “mean certain defeat,” and the center-left, which might be tempted by the polls, “wants to make changes to the electoral law,” before going to a vote, said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political science professor at Luiss Guido Carli University, Rome.

In the meantime, Mr. Monti has bigger issues to contend with, from battling unemployment to paying off public debts owed to private entrepreneurs.

“And then,” Mr. D’Alimonte said, “his ability to rule depends more on what will happen in Europe than on the local elections. International variables are more important than domestic ones.”

Courtesy Newyourk Times

During his reign between 1444 and 1482, Federico da Montefeltro’s marvelous edifice played host to as much intellectual and artistic activity as entire cities many times Urbino’s size. And Alberti, along with Luciano Laurana, Piero della Francesca and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, at various stages contributed to the palace’s harmonious design and shape.

Urbino’s palace culture also gave rise to the first-ever painted images of utopian cities in the form of a trio of intriguing panels, all now known as “The Ideal City,” one of which remained in Urbino, the other two now being in Baltimore and Berlin.

The dream of the organizers of “The Ideal City: The Renaissance Utopia at Urbino between Piero della Francesca and Raphael,” to bring all three of these works together for this stimulating exhibition, curated by Alessandro Marchi and Maria Rosaria Valazzi, was thwarted by the fragile state of the Berlin version. But the one from the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore is here, along with more than 50 works from 40 collections, displayed in rooms round the beautiful first courtyard of Federico’s Ducal Palace.

There are a number of unsolved mysteries surrounding the “Ideal City” panels, all of which are now generally agreed to date to the 1480s. All three are carefully contrived perspective scenes, their rigorous mathematical construction emphasized by the converging lines of receding patterned marble pavings, flanked by palazzos with classical architectural features and more conventional urban houses reminiscent of those of Florence.

The Urbino version has at the center of its piazza a splendid Roman-inspired rotunda. The Baltimore version has a futuristic octagonal building of similar proportions, as well as a Colosseum-like amphitheater and a triumphal arch. In the Berlin version, illustrated in the catalog, the piazza is viewed through a pillared portico with a coffered ceiling, against a distant backdrop of a stretch of sea on which float ships with billowing sails.

The Urbino and Baltimore works offer glimpses of hilly countryside in gaps between the buildings furthest away. All three scenes are characterized by an atmosphere of serene, people-less silence under calm azure skies. (The few tiny figures in the Baltimore version, as the late Federico Zeri convincingly argued, were added at some later date.)

While the Baltimore and Berlin versions have one of two Roman and Florentine edifices that recall actual built structures, all three “Ideal Cities” are essentially works of the imagination, depicting cities that never existed and the like of which were never realized during the Renaissance or after, although there are some significant echoes in them of architectural features of Federico’s palace.

Who commissioned these works and what they were for is still unknown. Judging by their size and shape they were almost certainly decorative panels on pieces of furniture, most likely beds or divans of the contemporary type.

When the Urbino panel was first documented in the 18th century, it was thought to be by the locally born Donato Bramante. Other candidates for the various panels have been proposed since then, including Piero della Francesca, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Paolo Uccello and Sangallo and his circle. The first of the architects of Federico’s palace Luciano Laurana was mooted as the paintings’ author in 1902, an attribution that endured not least because no other suitable alternative could be found. But Laurana left Urbino in 1472 and died in 1479, several years before the works were executed according to today’s dating.

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“We are continually doing work on the house. It is never ending,” said Ms. Quartieri, an architect who specializes in renovations. “The heating, the courtyard, the facade — there is always something to do. This is a permanent workshop. It’s like having an old woman that you have to take care of and treat gently.”

The residence, located in this town of about 182,000 just north of Bologna, has its roots in the 15th century. It took its current shape in the early 18th century when ancestors of Mr. Rangoni Machiavelli bought and completely redid the building, which wraps around a large courtyard with a magnolia tree.

Mr. Rangoni Machiavelli, who owns 500 hectares, or 1,235 acres, of agricultural land in the area, was born in the house in 1953. (The Rangoni family traces its roots to at least the 12th century. The Machiavelli part of the surname was added in the 18th century when the last descendant of Niccolò Machiavelli, author of “The Prince,” bestowed it on a relative.)

The family lives on the building’s middle floor, which covers 1,100 square meters, or 11,840 square feet. The ground floor is rented out as offices; the top floor contains the family archive and apartments they rent out. The building connects to another smaller one across the street that also is rented, income that helps pay for upkeep of the buildings.

Half of the family’s floor has kept its original 18th-century style. One of the seven large rooms is a ballroom with 10-meter, or 33-foot, ceilings. It was created in 1937 from a number of smaller rooms for the 18th birthday dance of Mr. Rangoni Machiavelli’s aunt.

During the winter months this part of the house is closed to protect the furnishings and to reduce the massive heating bill.

The family spends most of its time on the other side of the floor, which includes six rooms that were renovated during the 19th century. The rooms have frescoed ceilings ranging up to six meters high, wood floors and dozens of paintings on the walls. The furnishings range from some bronze statuettes done by Ms. Quartieri’s father to a television.

In 1961, Mr. Rangoni Machiavelli’s father fixed up a wing that juts off this side of the house, turning the rooms into offices with bathrooms. When the couple moved in after their marriage in 1984, they turned the wing into the “zona notte,” or night area. It now has four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a room that Ms. Quartieri uses as a study. Another modern wing has a kitchen, laundry room, bathroom and three rooms mostly used for storage.

“People find it hard to believe we live here, but this is a normal house,” Ms. Quartieri said. “Those are the wool blankets I use while watching television,” she said, indicating two blankets resting on a chair beneath an opulent 17th-century portrait. “My kids watch soccer games here.”

The couple’s two children — Gherardo, 23, a student at the University of Modena who lives at home, and Olimpia, 22, who lives and studies in Milan — were raised with a series of rules that included a strict prohibition on writing on the walls, most of which are covered with 200-year-old fabric.

Ms. Quartieri says she would have liked to make more changes than just adding a few lamps here and there, but Italian law requires that even minor adjustments to a historic home, like painting a wall, be approved by a commission not known for its speed.

But the Rangoni Machiavellis did manage to get approval a few years ago to squeeze an elevator into the space that once was used for the building’s well.

“The elevator can barely fit two people, but it’s good for suitcases when we return from a trip, and it will be important when we are older,” Mr. Rangoni Machiavelli said. “I was born here and hope to die here, as far into the future as possible, and sooner or later you’re going to need an elevator.”

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MOSCOW — Russia took another step on Wednesday in the race to pump oil from beneath the Arctic Ocean with an agreement between its state oil company and the Italian energy giant Eni to jointly explore several offshore sites, though actual drilling is still years away.

Once seen as ice-bound backwaters, the coastal seas north of Russia have become a focus of extraordinary attention from the international oil industry recently. Moscow has signaled it will open the region broadly for drilling.

The agreement came just two weeks after the Russian state oil company, Rosneft, completed a similar deal with Exxon Mobil, the largest U.S. oil company. That agreement covered fields in the Kara Sea, the body of water east of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago that is particularly challenging — and risky, conservationists say — for being covered by ice floes in the wintertime.

The deal with ENI covers two blocks mostly free of ice in the Barents Sea, the body of water above Norway and European Russia. The new areas opened for exploration lie near a field in the Norwegian sector, called Skrugard, that Eni discovered together with Statoil, the Norwegian oil company.

Under the agreement, Eni would also explore a potentially oil-rich area in the Black Sea. In exchange, Rosneft would take a stake in still-unspecified oil developments managed by Eni outside of Russia, according to a statement from Rosneft. Eni has large holdings in North Africa, including in Libya, another area of recent interest for oil companies.

A spokeswoman for Eni, who said company policy requires she not be identified by name, said the asset in Libya is not one Rosneft might join; ENI already negotiated a joint venture with another Russian company, Gazprom, for its Libyan field, called Elephant.

In exchange, Rosneft would take a stake in still unspecified oil developments managed by ENI outside of Russia, according to a statement about the agreement issued by Rosneft. Eni owns fields in North Africa, Europe and Alaska that could interest Rosneft, the spokeswoman said. She said the company expected to invest about $1 billion by the end of the decade; if the deal is completed, the first exploration well in the Arctic Ocean blocks would be drilled only in 2020.

Such geopolitical wheeling and dealing is one hallmark of Russia’s decision to open its offshore waters in the Arctic to international oil development, at a time when the U.S. and Canadian governments have moved slowly.

The Obama administration has signaled it intends to allow Shell to drill in the Chukchi Sea above Alaska this summer, though conservationists are expected to seek an injunction to prevent that from happening.

Though remote and beset with hazards, the Russian Arctic offshore oil fields are a prize for the industry. To gain access under the template established by Rosneft, foreign oil companies have offered Russia stakes in fields abroad, furthering Russia’s goal of creating international oil giants.

Exxon Mobil, for example, traded stakes in fields in the Gulf of Mexico and in shale oil wells in Texas.

Wednesday’s announcement was for an “agreement in principle.” If the deal is completed, the first exploration well in the Arctic Ocean blocks would be drilled only in 2020.

One such agreement fell apart. A lawsuit thwarted BP’s plans to form a joint venture with Rosneft to explore in the Kara Sea.

Eduard Khudainatov, Rosneft’s chief executive, cast the deal with Eni as a continuation of the strategy of forming joint ventures to open the Russian Arctic.

“Rosneft is committed to doing business with world-class majors that have offshore production expertise, cutting-edge technologies and are ready to invest in long-term, high-tech projects in Russia,” Mr. Khudainatov said in a statement.

Russian geologists estimate the blocks offered to Eni in Wednesday’s agreement hold about 36 billion barrels of oil or the equivalent in natural gas, though they have been only scantly explored.

Under the agreement, Eni will obtain a 33 percent interest in the joint venture but will finance most early seismic exploration. New tax incentives Russia formulated this year for Arctic offshore development make the deal feasible.

Mr. Khudainatov and Eni’s chief executive, Paolo Scaroni, signed the agreement in Moscow at a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin, who will become president in May, takes a keen personal interest in petroleum politics.

The Russian government relies on oil and natural gas taxes for about 60 percent of the federal budget. Russia and Saudi Arabia are now roughly tied in oil production, each pumping around 10 million barrels a day. To maintain this level, however, Russia will need to develop an offshore industry because its fields in Siberia are in decline.

Courtesy Newyourk Times

The Netherlands, which has a much higher credit rating, also held a debt auction, selling €2 billion, or $2.6 billion, of bonds and attracting solid demand even after its government resigned over its failure to approve its budget. And Italy paid at least a full percentage point more than a month ago to sell €3.44 billion of debt.

The Spanish Treasury sold €725 million of three-month bills and €1.2 billion of six-month bills. Yields spiked from the last time the bills were sold, in March. The average yield on the three-month bill was 0.634 percent, up from 0.381 percent, while it was 1.580 percent on the six-month bill compared with 0.836 percent a month ago.

“The pick-up in yields is a clear negative headline for Spain,” said Jo Tomkins, an analyst at 4Cast, a consulting firm. “The country is facing a double-whammy of low growth and tough austerity, and doubts that it will be able to hit already optimistic deficit targets.”

Spain is in the favorable position of having already sold half of its planned medium- and long-term debt issuance for 2012.

Steady demand allowed Italy to sell €3.5 billion of two-year bonds and inflation-linked paper. The Italian Treasury paid 3.36 percent on its two-year, zero-coupon bond, up from 2.35 percent a month ago, reflecting growing nervousness about Italy and Spain’s finances and the commitment of the euro zone’s core economies to budget austerity.

These levels compare with a euro era high of 7.8 percent for the zero-coupon paper at the height of the crisis in November, when Italy’s debt pile was threatening to spiral out of control.

“Demand is holding up but at an increasingly hefty price for the Treasury,” said Nicholas Spiro of Spiro Sovereign Strategy.

Italy will offer up to €6.25 billion of bonds on Friday, including 5- and 10-year debt, after a sale of €8.5 billion in six-month Treasury bills on Thursday.

Italy has virtually no medium- and long-term maturities in May and June, giving it some latitude at a time of rising market tension.

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The Campania region of southern Italy is known for its sunny skies, fresh mozzarella and organized crime, but it has a different kind of cottage industry that accounts for more than half of the 550,000 to 800,000 fake euro notes pulled from circulation annually by European central banks.

Italy appears to have a particular artisanal flair for the printing arts, even though the authorities have also found illicit euro operations in France, Spain, Eastern Europe and South America. Its most accomplished practitioners can be found in and around Giugliano, where concrete-block apartments abut orchards and car dealerships, and young African prostitutes stand amid the rushes on unkempt roads.

“In Italy, there’s a great, ancient and august tradition: Here, they make fake money, done well,” said Col. Alessandro Gentili, the head of the Italian Carabinieri’s Currency Anti-Counterfeiting Unit in Rome. “Giugliano is still the capital. It has the best professionals.”

Quite a number of them, as it turns out. When the police rolled up some of the counterfeiting operations around Giugliano as well as in the Calabria region farther south in January 2009, they raided 162 locations and arrested 109 people, seizing a mountain of illicit materials.

Despite that raid, the biggest in years, Colonel Gentili says the counterfeiting continues, a tradition that — like winemaking, pottery, fabrics and other fine arts for which Italy is justly famous — is often passed from father to son.

This month, the police in the southern Apulia region, also known as Puglia, arrested two men on charges of counterfeiting and said that organized crime groups around the city of Foggia had teamed up with those from the Campania region to produce a swarm of fake euros.

While Campania is dominated by the Camorra, the notoriously violent organized crime network, the authorities here say counterfeiting is actually a peripheral line for the gangsters, who prefer to focus on more lucrative businesses like toxic waste dumping, drug trafficking and illegal garment workshops.

“Organized crime certainly obtains a cut from this activity, and it can intervene to regulate its use in the market because it has economic interests in the area,” said Raffaele Cantone, a Supreme Court justice who as a magistrate earlier in his career conducted wide-reaching investigations into the Camorra.

Colonel Gentili, who displays a clear respect for the wily counterfeiters he spends his days chasing, said proudly that his unit, founded in 1992, was the first anti-counterfeiting unit in Europe, owing to Italy’s gift for fakery. Before the euro, Italian presses, especially in the Naples area, specialized in fake lire, dollars and French and Swiss francs, he said.

On his office wall, he displayed a counterfeit “A.M. lira,” a currency circulated after the Allied landing in Italy, which was printed in Leonforte, Sicily, in 1946.

To the untrained eye, the counterfeit euros made by groups active in this area are reasonably convincing. But they look slightly off: They are printed on paper without a watermark, and their silver holograms catch the light differently from those on real euros.

Authorities found the first fake euros within days of the currency’s introduction in January 2002, and they made their first big counterfeiting raids six months later. Since then, the euro has become a global currency, and counterfeit euros have followed the currents of international drug trafficking and immigration.

In recent years, the authorities have found fake euros in Bulgaria, Colombia, Russia, Turkey, Iran and Iraq, countries with large cash economies, where it is often easier to spend fake euros because bank and shop clerks are not so familiar with the real thing. Sometimes immigrants from Africa and Latin America knowingly buy fake euros in Europe and try to use them back home to buy property, Colonel Gentili said.

The euro — particularly the 500-euro note, worth about $660 — has become the currency of choice for drug dealers worldwide, and fake euros have become part of their operations. Last month, the authorities in Bogotá, Colombia, dismantled a counterfeit press and seized half a million counterfeit euro notes.

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

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But the locomotives — dubbed Italo — finally started speeding around 186 miles per hour on Saturday, opening a new chapter in European rail travel and seeking to compete against state-run service with an emphasis on style and luxury.

“My grandchild had never taken a train before,” said Miriam Fallerini, 67, sipping an espresso in first class, her 6-year-old grandson by her side. “I promised him yesterday, I am taking you not only on a train, but on the most beautiful train that there is in Italy.”

The train company, Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori, is the first to compete with the state-run Trenitalia on high-speed domestic service. As passengers boarded in Rome on its first run to Milan from Naples, they were met by smiling hostesses and stewards in dark red livery and boarded sleek, modern trains with blue leather seats and white interiors.

The company’s president is Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the chairman of Ferrari. Other developers include the luxury fashion businessman Diego Della Valle, the French railway company, Italy’s largest retail bank and the country’s largest insurer.

“We have brought an end to one of the longest monopolies in the history of our country,” said Mr. Cordero di Montezemolo during a press trip to Naples from Rome this month. “Finally, Italian travelers and tourists can choose.”

By the end of the year, the company plans to have 25 trains connecting nine Italian cities, and its goal is a 20-to-25 percent market share by 2014, with eight million to nine million passengers a year, which would allow the company to break even.

The battleground will be over high-end services, pricing and food.

The Italo trains provide their 450 passengers with free Wi-Fi, satellite television, a 39-seat cinema carriage, leather seats manufactured by the luxury furniture maker Poltrona Frau, and assistance and welcome points in the main stations designed by the team of the Italian architect Stefano Boeri. A third of all tickets will be available at a lower cost, if booked early and for off-peak times.

The trains do not rely on locomotive cars but have engines underneath each of the 11 carriages that are intended to increase capacity and safety.

“The risk NTV is taking is certainly very high, amplified by Italy’s current economic crisis and the improvement of the Italian infrastructure that is still lagging behind,” said Oliviero Baccelli, vice director at the Center for Research on Regional Economics, Transport and Tourism at the Milan-based Bocconi University. “But high-speed in Italy has very, very significant development margins.”

As of 2009, Italians took high-speed trains considerably less than French or German rail passengers, as only 22 percent of passengers used them in Italy, compared with nearly 27 percent in Germany and 60 percent in France. However, since then, high-speed trains started darting between Rome and Milan in only three hours, and Trenitalia’s market share increased to 55 percent from 32 percent on this route, while airline travel decreased to 32 percent from 52 percent.

Italy is being seen as a test case for Europe. Since 2004, European legislation has liberalized international and domestic rail travel for freight and passengers, but there still is no obligation under European Union law to open domestic services to market competition as Italy did.

And it might go further, as the Italian government has recently passed a law requiring local authorities to hold bids for train services.

Trenitalia has also sought to compete in the high-end market, recently revamping some of its high-speed trains with leather interiors, a business carriage and first-class dining menus by the Umbrian chef Gianfranco Vissani.

“Often, dirty bathrooms and prices aside, there is little to complain now about the service on Trenitalia, too,” said Elisa Rossetti, 34, who was planning to watch a movie in the cinema carriage with her husband and their 5-year-old daughter. “I just hope that the market principles apply and competition cuts ticket prices, not like it happened with cellphone companies, where it has not happened yet.”

Some share Ms. Rossetti’s fears, but many on the Italo on Saturday were impressed.

“You feel like you are traveling on an airline, a bit like the train from Boston to New York,” said Antonio Squillace, 56, an entrepreneur headed to Milan for a long weekend with his wife. “And just the very fact of having an alternative feels almost miraculous.”

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Back in the early 1970s, three Milanese architects, Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino and Paolo Lomazzi, were so intrigued by Sciangai, as the game is called in Italian, that they chose it as the basis of a useful object, the type of thing that they and their friends might use every day. By enlarging eight sticks and binding them together with a central hinge, they devised an ingenious wooden contraption, which opens up at the top and bottom to resemble a twisted wooden bundle. It functions as a coat rack, when hats and coats are hung on the tips of the sticks. The Sciangai coat rack has been manufactured by the Italian company Zanotta since 1973 and is still a familiar sight in homes and offices.

Picking a mundane object, seemingly at random, and transforming it by exaggerating its size was a recurrent theme in the work of the Radical Design movement, which dominated avant garde Italian design and architecture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mr. De Pas, Mr. D’Urbino and Mr. Lomazzi, who were part of the movement, applied the same strategy to assorted objects over the years, including Lego bricks and a baseball glove: turning the first into shelving and the second into an armchair.

Those pieces, together with colorful inflatable chairs and their futuristic architectural projects, are exhibited in a retrospective of their work running through June 17 at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. Like its contents, the exhibition has a joyful spirit that reflects the characters of the three men, who were close friends as well as professional colleagues.

“To my mind, of all of the Italian designers of the 1960s and 1970s, they were the ones who were able to marry Radical Design with real life — and with commerce,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who grew up in Milan and remembers the designers and their work from her childhood.

De Pas, D’Urbino Lomazzi, as their practice was called, was formed in 1966, when the three co-founders were in their early 30s. They worked together for 35 years, mostly in a building on via Rossini, which had housed so many artists’ studios that it was known locally as “Ca di Pittur” or the “Painter’s House,” until Mr. De Pas died in 1991. Ms. Antonelli remembers him as “the nicest instructor” at the club in Sardinia where she learned to sail as a child. Like his colleagues, he was obsessed by sailing. Mr. D’Urbino and Mr. Lomazzi have continued to collaborate since his death.

Despite being less well known, especially outside Italy, than some of their contemporaries — including Joe Colombo, Ettore Sottsass and the Castiglioni brothers — De Pas, D’Urbino Lomazzi produced several objects that are recognizable even to people who have never heard their names. The Sciangai is among them, as is Blow, an inflatable chair, and Joe, the armchair they designed as a giant replica of a leather baseball glove and named after Joe DiMaggio, the star center fielder for the New York Yankees from 1936 to 1951.

Both Blow and Joe are imbued with elements of parody and kitsch, which were typical of Radical Design. Conceived as a protest against both the tasteful restraint of the post-war “good design” movement and the excess of mid-1960s consumerism, Radical Design was also characterized by cynicism and anger. De Pas, D’Urbino Lomazzi ignored its dark side by producing pieces, which were unfailingly cheerful and affectionate, without seeming overly sentimental: qualities that undoubtedly contributed to their popularity.

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The voyage, 800 kilometers, or 500 miles, each way across the Mediterranean, costs thousands of dollars. The boat’s engines are so thirsty that the captain must stop twice each way, in Corsica and Sardinia, to refill the tanks.

But the trips are worth every cent: Without them, the owner would be liable for value-added tax, a form of purchase tax, at 20 percent of the boat’s million-dollar value, according to the captain, who spoke on condition that neither the boat nor its owner be identified.

By leaving the European Union temporarily, the yacht sails into a decade-old legal loophole intended to allow foreign boats to cruise the Mediterranean from E.U. ports for as much as a year and a half.

As Europe’s indebted nations search for new revenues, however, this marine maneuver, known as “resetting the clock,” is facing heightened scrutiny. New taxes are being levied, and the tax authorities are getting more aggressive in policing and collecting old ones, backed by a public mood expressed by Carlo Galli, a tax attorney from Milan, at a recent London superyachting conference: The public view is that the “filthy rich having fun should pay taxes,” Mr. Galli said.

The Italian fiscal police, the Guardia di Finanza, sent its patrol boats into southern Italian marinas this month in search of tax cheats. In a check of 963 yachts, agents found that nearly one in three belonged to Italians who had reported little or no income. The owner of one yacht worth €1.2 million, or $1.6 million, had never declared any income, according to the government.

Beginning May 1, Italy will start charging Italian-owned boats just to float in its waters, whether at anchor or dock, no matter what nation’s flag they carry. Under the new berthing tax, a 60-meter, or 200-foot, yacht could be charged €521 per day.

This and similar actions in other countries are driving boats out of European cruising grounds in search of more tranquil regulatory waters.

Riccardo Illy, head of the Illy coffee company in Trieste, at the northern tip of the Adriatic, is one who recently sold his yacht in frustration. “Too many taxes,” he said in the marine news media. “All these initiatives have made me lose interest in the boat.”

But, fighting back, the yachting industry is trying to protect thousands of jobs and lucrative franchises in the most popular cruising waters in the world.

The new Italian tax law, part of Prime Minister Mario Monti’s austerity budget to deal with a €1.9 trillion fiscal deficit, was introduced on all boats in December 2011. Following protests by Italian marina associations, however, it was amended this month to exempt foreign boat owners. The marinas warned that the law could drive away as many as 30,000 boats, at a time when they were building, or planning, 50,000 new berths around the country.

In Spain, where the fiscal situation is also dire, the yachting industry is fighting a 12 percent “matriculation,” or compulsory registration tax, that in recent years has emptied marinas of as many as 100,000 yachts, according to Graham Hutt, author of British boat-cruising guides to the Balearic islands and North Africa. The tax has existed for decades, but since 2009, the authorities have tightened up on collection, to catch both expatriates living on their boats in the myriad marinas dotting the length of the Spanish coast and the Spanish owners of yachts who register them under foreign flags as charter vessels, even though they never put them out to charter.

Such practices were common in Spain to avoid a 30 percent tax take on a boat’s value — 18 percent value-added tax plus the 12 percent registration tax, said Pat Bullock, founder of Altius, a yacht management company in Palma de Mallorca.

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ROME — Prime Minister Mario Monti on Wednesday pushed back Italy’s balanced budget target by a year, amid a deepening recession that economists say has been worsened by new austerity measures.

A steady drumbeat of bad economic news has sharpened a debate between Europe’s fiscal hawks, particularly in Germany, and a growing number of economists who stress the need for pro-growth policies, possibly in conjunction with long-term deficit reduction.

The Italian government had pledged to balance its budget in 2013, but it now expects a shortfall of 0.5 percent of gross domestic product next year, the cabinet said in a statement. It added that the deficit of 0.1 percent previously estimated for 2013 would not be reached until 2014, while a balanced budget would be reached only in 2015.

“While much progress has been achieved, there’s still a long way to go,” the statement said.

Italy now forecasts that its economy will shrink 1.2 percent this year, before returning to growth of 0.5 percent in 2013.

But on Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund gave even less optimistic projections, saying it believed the Italian economy would contract by 1.9 percent in 2012.

It added that Italy would miss its budget deficit targets both in 2012 and 2013 and would not be able to balance its budget until at least 2017.

Financial experts said the government’s announcement on Wednesday was a sign of realism, not weakness, but that its real problem was not its deficit, already among the lowest in the euro zone, but its anemic growth rate over the last 20 years.

“The country is not used to growing anymore,” said Giorgio di Giorgio, director of the Department of Economics and Finance at Luiss University in Rome. “To do so, it needs important structural reforms that make the system more flexible. In my opinion, the government so far has been studying them, not implementing them.”

After taking office last November, Mr. Monti pushed through about $40 billion in austerity measures — chief among them raising taxes and pushing up the retirement age.

He has also pursued pro-growth policies, struggling without notable success to push through labor market reforms that would correct a two-tiered labor market that protects older workers while the young live on low-paying temporary contracts with little job security.

“We are a short-term government called on to make enduring changes,” Mr. Monti said at a news conference on Wednesday.

“What we are doing is only the beginning of an operation that will last for many years, but that doesn’t mean there will be many years without growth. Everything, everything, everything that we are doing now goes in the direction of spurring growth.”

Courtesy Newyourk Times