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 …

What a beautiful day to write. Despite being the first month that truly brings cold to the country – September seems to be every year more summery – October still has some spectacularly bright days, with colors and scents so …

When we talk about archaeology, we don’t necessarily think about food. Anyone who is passionate about history, however, knows that there are plenty of sources that, across the centuries, detailed the evolution and recipes of the culinary world of our …

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 …

Some things are definitely best left in the past, like shoulder pads. Well, this is my opinion, at least. But there are others we still think of fondly: mixed tapes, rotary phones, buying a CD in a store, or the …

Tutte le strade portano a Roma,  we say in Italian, “all roads lead to Rome.” Of course, that was the case in ancient Roman times, when the capital was the heart of the known world. Having a well-conceived, well-built road …

Just like panettone, torrone is a classic of Italy at Christmas, that you’ll find in every household. But while panettone is almost a synonym of Milan, torrone is more ubiquitous, even if many associates it especially with Cremona. As we …

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 …

The past year and a half changed our lives in more ways than one and now that — let us hope — we are on the way back to some sort of normality, it’s perhaps the right moment to look …

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 …