The revenge of the tulips
Once upon a time, roses were the Italians’ most beloved flowers, the failsafe choice for every occasion. A birthday, an anniversary, for somethi...
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GUIDE TO ITALIAN LIVING
Faba or fava: that is the question
Fabaceae or leguminosae are enormously widespread, stretching to the remotest corners of every continent, even Greenland. The word faba...
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...
White as snow, red as…cherry
Bright, unmistakable, red as blood: when the two most common cultivars of the Vignola Cherry reach peak ripeness, they rival a Burgundy for ...
Mandorla or mennula: that is the question
“La mennulara”, the debut novel by Simonetta Agnello Hornby (Feltrinelli 2002), tells the tale of a Sicilian almond picker. For ...
The meaning of the violet
“Ricordi sbocciavan le viole / con le nostre parole / non ci lasceremo mai / mai e poi mai", sang Fabrizio De Andrè in his sublime &ldquo...
Che cavolo!
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...
Olionovo
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"
“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...
When tomatoes are green
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 ...
The jujube: a good luck charm
An old gentleman who lives near me always says that the jujube – or the red date – brings good luck. “Let’s hope,&rd...
Bizzarria
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...
Summer: at last!
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...
Vegetable gardens within the walls
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...
The poppies grow...
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...
Iris, the flower of Florence
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...
Time of the Wild Tulip
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...
Practicing beauty
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...
Discovering lost citrus
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 Autumn Table
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...
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