francesca bezzone

To me, history is like morning coffee, I need it to function. I always loved it, since I was a child, and I’ve ended up making it the subject of my master’s degree and of my doctorate. No wonder, then, …

A handful of days ago British company Tiziana Life acquired some very important Italian stuff: genes. Let me explain you better: Tiziana Life bought a genetic databank containing DNA samples of 13.000 inhabitants of the Ogliastra region, in the South …

Always a favorite during the Summer, gelato has come a long way since its beginning in the – or so historians think – exotic lands of the Chinese emperors, more than 3000 years ago Whether you are an Italian “gelato” …

Admittedly, the times of Machiavelli were very different from today’s, and his own take on how to lead successfully a country would be now considered extreme by some and plainly unacceptable by most. However, this polyhedral figure of Italian history …

Even if the passion for java is common to most countries in the world, with some (I am looking at you, Finland) even consuming more of it per capita than Italy itself, the relationship we Italians have with our favourite …

A quintessential figure of Italo-american culture, Puzo was, and still remains today almost twenty years after his death, the iconic symbol of how Italian and American heritage have merged together to create some of the most defining art of the …

To an Italian, Dante is croce e delizia, pleasure and pain: forcefully immersed in the study of his heavenly works during the rebellious years of adolescence, we usually begin our relationship with the Dantean world with the wrong foot. But …

Everyone knows Mount Rushmore, with its iconic representations of four of the most important presidents of US history: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, F.D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. As a child, I remember being fascinated by their stoney, gigantic faces and …

I know, today we mostly associate travelling by train to filthy seats, noise and running out of a station in a rush, trying desperately to get to wherever we need to be on time. If you think of it for …

Think of Milan during the months of the Expo. Think of the incredible amount of food produced and consumed on its premises. Think also of the equally large amount of food wasted: if you made some extra cash working the …