Opera, therefore, is one of Italy's key avenues of soft power. It has spread around the world, and leading singers come from everywhere, great performances are sung from New York to Beijing. But opera's soul is still in Italy.

While culinary border crossing bestows pleasure on the plate, it also often spreads virtue. Globalization, the two-edged sword that disseminates Big Macs, makes widely available the “bright flavors from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia to Latin America,” wrote Greg Drescher of the Culinary Institute of America in a 2013 CNN Eatocracy blog post. 

Bob Geldof’s Live Aid pioneered a new wave of stars’ involvement in the developing world that has produced mixed results. [...] Yet, as American journalist David Rieff has noted, Live Aid’s donations to NGOs such as Oxfam and Save the Children also facilitated the displacement of 600,000 people by the autocratic Mengistu regime, resulting in an estimated 100,000 deaths.

The Expo 2015 world's fair showed potential as a backdrop for serious diplomacy as it opened Friday for a six-month run, even as it also served as a lightning rod for anti-globalization protests.(...) Not all of the diplomatic signals around Expo have been positive. India, in a drawn-out dispute with Italy over its determination to put two Italian sailors on trial for the shooting deaths at sea of two fishermen, skipped the global event due to the tensions, Expo organizers said.