francesca bezzone

We all love it and eat it, and we may even be somehow knowledgeable about how to prepare some of its most representative dishes, but what do we really know about the history of food in Italy? Why does the …

History and art have a lot of things in common, of course. One of them is certainly the importance, nay, the essentiality of the concept of authenticity: an art piece is valuable and meaningful only when authentic, just as historical …

The idea itself of dialect may be difficult to grasp for non-Italians. It’s not a language, yet it’s not a variety of one either. It may sound like Italian here and there, yet it can also be extremely different and …

Piazza Navona: how beautiful it is. So beautiful one may even accept to pay an excruciatingly high price for a “granita al limone” and a coffee in one of its many cafés just to dwell in comfort for a few …

There isn’t a period in history as quintessentially Italian as the Renaissance. Even though it spread throughout Europe, with the notable exception of the British islands, it is in Italy that the rebirth of culture after the “dark ages” (which …

2018 will be a special year for Italy. 2018 will be the year of Italian food, as announced by Dario Franceschini, minister of Culture and Tourism, and Maurizio Martina, minister of Agriculture. The initiative has been received positively worldwide, with …

Little-known stories of the eternal city, of its artists and popes, families and colorfully clad armies. Through centuries of anecdotes, our short trip into the more curious and mysterious side of Roman history and art is about to end with …

In a world where the younger generations are less and less acquainted with pen and paper, and more and more in love with keyboards, talking about the pleasure of writing with a a good fountain pen may seem old fashioned. …

In Italy, Fernet Branca has always been an institution, especially among the older generation: both my grandmothers had a penchant for it and for those little, fernet-flavored sugar candies we, for some reason, call “dissetanti” (thirst quenching) in Italy. Maybe …

The coming of Summer brings to each and every one of us different emotions: for school kids, it is synonym with holidays and mornings spent in bed. For city dwellers, it brings about frightful images of blasting AC in the …