Palazzo Portinari Salviati
Via del Corso – or more simply, “il corso” – is one of Florence’s oldest streets, dating back to the days of ancient Rom...
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GUIDE TO ITALIAN LIVING
Volumnia: the good and the beautiful of Piacenza
The total complex of the Basilica di Sant’Agostino, in Piacenza, is pretty impressive. The physical body of the church itself, which d...
Art and the Senses: the Mart and Senso
“Conceived as more of a cultural hub than a traditional museum, the Mart is a true ‘contemporary landscape’.” It is with this ...
The Ferrari Museum, Maranello
The name of Maranello is inextricably, inevitably bound up with the name (and the myth) of Enzo Ferrari and the Ferrari car company, which was fo...
Villa Necchi Campiglio, Milan
Villa Necchi Campiglio is a stupendous piece of aristocratic architecture, a piece of pure bourgeois elegance in the heart of Milan. To understand how...
Valenza: a precious history
If you take the B-road 494, which bisects the most northerly corner of Lombardy, you will find yourself driving over the river Po and emerging in a di...
Isola del Giglio
Yep, I felt like one of those teenagers on a school trip. Impatient to leave, itching to set foot on Giglio again after more than thirty years. My com...
The Ponte Vecchio in Bassano
In the Italian tongue, everything has a gender, either masculine or feminine. And it’s often the case that, when it comes to determining what&rs...
Caporetto and Hiša Franko: equilibrium found
Borderlands always exert a special charm over the traveller. They pique our curiosity; they make us want to understand the historical reasons behind t...
Cortina: past and present
Many things happened in 1905. Las Vegas was founded, the Transiberian Express opened, and Albert Einstein published the first fruits of his Theory of ...
Alta Val Tidone
Piacenza is the most inland province of Emilia, and ever since the time of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus it has ushered the Via Emilia down to the Rive...
Villa d’Este
At Tivoli, the ancient Romans must have been very happy indeed. A modest altitude and the fresh waters of the Aniene river made it a place of deliciou...
Montefiore Conca
A few miles from the coast of Romagna, there lies a truly enchanting place. If you leave the glimmering shoreline and venture a little way inlan...
Rome in summer
Were it not for the subtropical heat and the bright colours blaring in the sunlight, Rome in summer reminds you of the sea in winter. It’s &ldqu...
Celebrating the Fourth of July in Tuscany
Every July 4, Americans, wherever they are, celebrate the anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. 246 years ago, 56 brave ...
Punta Aderci, the Vasto Reserve
Vasto marks a bump in the Adriatic coastline, almost a foreshadowing of the cliffs of the Gargano peninsular, further south. It’s a place that w...
Lago d'Orta
How do we define a place as ‘special’? If it has a special beauty, certainly, but also if it has a special atmosphere. Some would cite the...
The park, the sea, the cliff edge: the magic of Focara
Around Misano, the Via Aemilia – once a pilgrimage route, now a busy motorway – veers inland, its seaside trajectory blocked by the...
Conero: infinite beauty
We sometimes forget how recent a thing “modern” Italy is. We’re often so overwhelmed by the extraordinary inheritance of natural and...
Senigallia: square and the city
Here ends Gaul: the tribe of the Senones marked its final frontier. This is where linguistic scholars draw the line between the Italo-gallic tongues a...
Procida, Italian city of culture 2022
Procida is the Italian Capital of Culture 2022.It’s always welcome news when Italy’s hidden corners are brought to light and pro...
The Tremiti Islands
From a penal colony to the crown of Apulian tourism, Tremiti hasn’t had the chance to become a slick crowd-pleaser. Instead it has retained...
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...
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, ...
Taormina: the beauty and the goodness
Myriad are the legends and stories behind the origins of this magnificent Sicilian town, legends that are all the more intriguing for the volcanic &nd...
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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