chiara dalessio

Alitalia and its iconic white, green and red planes will be no more,  starting on the 15th of October of this year. The Italian flagship carrier will  be replaced by a new company, ITA – Italia Trasporto Aereo. Alitalia was …

We all know that Italy has the largest number of UNESCO World Heritage sites in the world. From North to South, il Belpaese provided some of its most famous buildings, locations and traditions to the famous list, from the Tower …

I think we all agree on this: Palermo is one of Italy’s most beautiful cities. Crossroad between East and West, it is a melting pot of cultures, people, flavors and colors. It is reminiscent of the Middle East like no …

Before the pandemic, visiting a place like Florence could be quite an adventure: queues, online bookings – something Italians weren’t, back then, too fond of – school trips, crowds everywhere, people taking pictures at every corner. Honestly, if you wanted …

Especially in the past, visual arts weren’t only a matter of beauty, they had a didactic function: in the Middle Ages, for instance, famous pictorial works in churches aimed at teaching the tenets of the Gospels to people who were …

I wonder: how many people know that Venice has a bridge dedicated to fist fighting,  and that its story lies all in its very name, the Ponte dei Pugni, or the bridge of fists? Forget about the baroque grandeur of …

Twelve years have passed from that tragic night between the 5th and the 6th of April when  a catastrophic earthquake hit Abruzzo, bringing its regional capital, L’Aquila, and a number of other locales, to its knees. Three hundred and nine …

Dozza Imolese is a quaint village of about 6000, that quietly sits on the rolling pre-Apennine hills outside Bologna. One of FAI’s most beautiful borghi, its name may fail to evoke any memory of important works of art or historical …

Italy is blessed with a good climate all over. Even the colder North tends to have a good few weeks of enjoyable warmer weather in the summer,  and the presence of the sea on three out of four sides of …

Rome is holy, Turin is esoteric but Naples is the Italian city with the closest relationship with the Otherworld, in all its forms. It’s not because of what is there physically — although, we will see, there are some spots …