Across the top of the Italian boot, from Torino in the west to Trieste in the east, where the Alps meet the plain, runs one of Europe's most prosperous economic engines: Italy's high-tech, high-design, precision manufacturing industry. It's a mind-boggling network of small businesses that line the A4 motorway like an unending strip mall. Further south lie the mighty Po River, then farm country punctuated by the jeweled art cities of Parma, Bologia, Ferrara, and Ravenna. Across the Apennines: the dreamworld of Tuscany and Umbria.

But it's the high-tech manufacturing corridor that's in the news this week. Boeing has just announced that the horizontal tail of its 787-9 Dreamliner will be manufactured not in Seattle (where the development work has been going on) but in Salt Lake City and (later in the full-production cycle) at a factory owned by a subsidiary of Italy's giant Finmeccanica known as AleniaAermacchi. Alenia (a species of skipper butterfly in Latin) already makes the horizontal tails for the 787-8 (the version of the Dreamliner that's currently under construction), but those parts, according to Seattle Times aerospace reporter Dominic Gates, produced "many quality issues and resulted in significant delays to the program."