Toblino: lakes, legends, castles and wines
A small lake of Alpine waters, and an environment so unique that it is classed as a biotope, in need of protection at all costs. A medieval castle, bu...
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GUIDE TO ITALIAN LIVING
The boundless beauty of the trabocchi
They number among the most elusive mysteries of the sea. Besides the Leviathan, the Titanic and the Bermuda Triangle, we have the trabocchi. No o...
Loving the cherry plum
In the Casentino area between Arezzo and Florence there is a wide valley, dominated by the castle of Romena on one side and the castle of Poppi o...
Giant Fennel, Asphodel and Orchids
First of all, choose yourself a soundtrack. A waltz, with its lilting up-and-down motion, would be perfect. It might be Tchaikovsky’s Flower Wal...
Borders and borderlands: the magic of Livigno
Be it summer or be it winter, little changes. Going to Livigno is never a trip or vacation like any other. Of course, it’s easy to see...
Why Sanremo is Sanremo
It’s impossible to treat it with polite nods of the head and distant smiles. For 72 years, the Festival di Sanremo has provoked chat, ...
Christmas Markets
Doing the shopping is something far more complex than the mere purchase of products. It also involves conversation, however brief; it involves specula...
Captain, my captain: how one man moulded nature at Villa Taranto
It seems that Neil McEacharn, captain and knight of the Grand Cross, was enjoying a ride on the most literary of trains - the Orient Express, of ...
Lo Strachitunt: more than cheese
When you cut a wheel of Strachítunt, the round stracchino cheese from the Val Taleggio, near Bergamo, you find more than mere cheese....
Pieve di Sasso: hidden treasures
November 2021. We are on the Po valley floodplain. It’s dank and foggy, with a steel-grey sky; the horizons are lost in the mist. A clump of clo...
Music and balls at the Sferisterio
In the nineteenth-century, the so-called "pallonisti" earned higher wages than any other type of sportsman; and their game "bracciale", in all its var...
Castagno d’Andrea and marroni chestnuts
One rainy day in early November, we park the car beneath the church of Castagno d’Andrea. Other buildings are few: there’s a workshop, a s...
La Foresta Umbra: the ghosts in the Gargano
It was 29th June 2016. Puglia was suffocating under a heatwave, but on Mount Spigno, the third highest peak of the Gargano peninsular, the beech trees...
The Via Francigena: a journey through culture
A thousand years ago, the would-be pilgrim who wanted to spend a significant part of their probably brief life on a spiritual journey did not have Goo...
Bolgheri, and the other Maremmas
Very recently, we’ve talked about the Maremma and its red wines, and we’ve touched on the idea that the sharpest commentators se...
Grecìa Salentina
What defines Salento are the thousand and one parts to it. Each place brings a new atmosphere: broadly similar, yet somehow peculiar. Ever...
The Prince, the Ghost, and the Cook
The Bardi castle stands tall and proud on a ridge of the Apennines, to the south of Parma. It’s a paradise for view-seeking motorcyclists, ...
Cilento, art and life
Visiting the archaeological park of Paestum is a sublime experience. The ancient Greek polis of Poseidonia, later Romanized as Paestum, is,...
Ponza: the isle of isles
Even compared to the thousands of other jewels in Italy’s crown, the island of Ponza shines with a blazing light, and not only because of the st...
I’ll close your book and now undo my hair.
In the summer of 1916, a modern Orpheus and Eurydice were living one of the most extraordinary, powerful love-and-hate stories in history. They were &...
Urbex, the border beyond the gate
Abandoned places tend to exert a seductive, bewitching charm. They do so whether they once upon a time teemed with life and opulence, or whether they ...
The mysterious beauty of San Galgano
Step inside the roofless nave, do a complete turn, and you might think yourself in a monster movie, where the protagonists – who are probably de...
Rivers of wine: a dream that comes true
It’s an image beloved of the sots and the dipsos, a story of being able to drink unlimited quantities of wine to your heart’s content. It&...
Manifattura dei Marinati
The air that hangs between the canals seems thick, suspended between one row of houses and another, all of them doubled in the watery mirror below. Th...
The Uffizi
As a Florentine, I confess that I have always looked down my nose at the queues stretching outside the Uffizi. They represent what Florence means for...
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I’m sure that you all sang that word as you read it. It’s the chorus of a song that appears, alongsid...
Selinunte, the other side of Carthage
We baby boomers remember what happened in the Punic Wars because it was the first world issue that we tackled at primary school and because this bold ...
Florence’s wine holes
You can find them all over Tuscany. There’s almost 200 of them and there’s even one in Piedmont. Most of them are in Florence, especially ...
Venice in twenty-twenty
Perhaps it’s still not time for the Lagoon City to take stock. Some call it the most beautiful city in the world, before reaching for the famous...
Listòn in Verona: the piazza step by step
Walk through the arches that mark the end of the Corso Porta Nuova, and the street expands into a clearing that stretches the field of vision. Piazza ...
Scarperia and cutting blades
Scarperia hovers between past and present. It’s not unusual to be strolling along the paved, narrow streets, enclosed between stone walls, ...
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