francesca bezzone

Islands: is there anything concocting more perfectly together thoughts of wilderness, mystery and beauty? An island is a world apart, secluded from the rest of humanity by an endless sky-like expanse of water. Land surrounded by water than looks like …

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. …

Tourism is one of the main motors of Italian economy, but something has been going awry in the past few years. Senseless mass tourism hasn’t really done all that good to Italy’s small economy: our “botteghe” and small restaurants have …

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 …

Scientific innovation or inventions may not be the first thing coming to mind in relation to the Bel Paese. No offense to the many Italian scientists, from Trotula to Galileo, all the way to Rita Levi Montalcini, Margherita Hack, and …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …