"ITALY’S interior minister has launched a bizarre attack on France’s World Cup champions, boasting “our wine is better” and declaring Sardinia is “a lot prettier” than Corsica.
Matteo Salvini, one of French President Emmanuel Macron’s most vocal critics, also slammed the French team, brushing off their World Cup victory by saying that the Italian winners of a relay race were more deserving than the young footballers.
Hours after the final whistle, Mr Salvini posted a picture on his Twitter account of the four runners with the caption: “The real champions of the day!”.
“And Italian wine is better than French wine, as is Italian cinema and music. And Sardinia is a lot prettier than Corsica,” he said in reference to the two Mediterranean islands.
Two days before the World Cup final, Mr Salvini said he would “jinx” France and hoped it would lose against Croatia, because he didn’t want to see Mr Macron “jump up and down with joy,” according to the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Italian football fans have also tried to cast a shadow over France’s victory, its second in 20 years.
A picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa clad in the French football shirt posted on the Louvre’s official Twitter account triggered a social media storm on Sunday, after Italian supporters accused the world-famous Paris museum of cultural appropriation.
“Mona Lisa is the work of Leonardo da Vinci. She was born in Italy, and was created by an Italian. This has always been the case and will always be the case,” one Twitter user said.
“To celebrate you use an Italian painting. You should hide in shame,” another Italy fan tweeted.
The Louvre responded to the backlash with humour – and in Italian –, saying that the famous artist had sold the work of art to France’s King Francis I.
Recent disagreements over the fate of migrants rescued at sea have soured relations between France and Italy.
Last month, Mr Macron accused Italy’s new populist government of “cynicism and irresponsibility” for refusing to take in a ship carrying more than 600 migrants, exposing deep divisions between the two neighbours on migration and deeply angering Mr Salvini, who has repeatedly asked France to take in more refugees.
A popular French daily has accused an Italian newspaper of trying to take credit for France’s World Cup victory after it implied that the team’s head coach Didier Deschamps had honed his football skills in Italy, and not in France.
Italy’s far-right leader openly derided the French, saying that Italy’s wines were superior to France’s.
France’s Le Monde called out Rome’s Corriere dello Sport after it claimed in an article published after France’s stunning 4-2 win against Croatia on Sunday that Mr Deschamps – himself a world champion – had perfected “the Italian art of defence and tactics” during his five-season spell with the Turin-based Juventus football club.
Four-time world champions Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1958 after a play-off defeat against Sweden in November 2017, a defeat widely seen as one of the biggest embarrassments in the country’s history. "