The Great Watermelon
For Linus Van Pelt, the most hotly awaited moment of the year is “the advent of the Great Watermelon”. This is a subtle modification: in t...
For Linus Van Pelt, the most hotly awaited moment of the year is “the advent of the Great Watermelon”. This is a subtle modification: in t...
In July the days are long and very hot, the mosquitos rule supreme, and we need to take on more and more liquids. Every passing day erodes the high sp...
"I may be shy, but Love gives me the courage to tell you that, ever since the day I first saw you, it’s always been May, and in May the world is...
Once upon a time, roses were the Italians’ most beloved flowers, the failsafe choice for every occasion. A birthday, an anniversary, for somethi...
Fabaceae or leguminosae are enormously widespread, stretching to the remotest corners of every continent, even Greenland. The word faba...
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...
Bright, unmistakable, red as blood: when the two most common cultivars of the Vignola Cherry reach peak ripeness, they rival a Burgundy for ...
“La mennulara”, the debut novel by Simonetta Agnello Hornby (Feltrinelli 2002), tells the tale of a Sicilian almond picker. For ...
“Ricordi sbocciavan le viole / con le nostre parole / non ci lasceremo mai / mai e poi mai", sang Fabrizio De Andrè in his sublime &ldquo...
Who doesn’t think back to childhood and remember the wonderful smells of simmering cabbage? And the bitter taste in the mouth when we realised...
The calendar tells us that autumn starts on 21 September, but in the Tuscan countryside it really kicks off a few weeks later, when the last grap...
“A good flowerbed leaves a good man dead” may be an old country saying, but it’s more true and relevant now than ever before. Becaus...
October shades into November, and one day is warm and the next cold. The sky might be bright blue, before it starts threatening rain. The table might ...
An old gentleman who lives near me always says that the jujube – or the red date – brings good luck. “Let’s hope,&rd...
The fruit known as the Bizzaria has a truly extraordinary story, and it’s worth taking the time to tell it. Among the rarest of...
The hills swim with light and ripple with ears of wheat. With a constant, incantatory murmur, the yellows of straw and hay wave in the breeze beneat...
Obviously, a garden and a vegetable garden are different things, even if the Latin word “hortus”, meaning a fenced-in area used for the cu...
In Tuscany, May is the month of poppies. Perfect goblets of scarlet, silky petals; flowers at their most essential, with no secrets inside. They begin...
The morning air is full of scents, and the pollen is dancing through it. I rub my eyes and start sneezing. Good to see that my allergy has arrived ri...
As I write, new colors are bursting up around Poggio Casciano: the bright green grass that carpets the entire landscape, the countless shades of sprin...
I’m not a big fan of Roberto Vecchioni’s music, but I find a disconcerting beauty in the few songs of his that I do like. I don’t su...
Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s reputation far exceeds the breadth, and perhaps also the depth, of his artistic output. The artist from Lombardy is one of...
The fall is a time of countless poetic definitions and romantic expressions, often associated with a pregnant pause in the happiness of the summer. Ce...