francesca bezzone

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 …

“Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli Italiani,” famously said Massimo D’Azeglio shortly after the unification of Italy. And he was right: in those faithful last decades of the 19th century, when Risorgimento reached its apogee and political ideas of unity and …

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 …

The first memories I have of Fabriano paper are of the A5 notebooks we used in elementary school: each page was heavier and thicker than average, making it perfect for the daily wear and tear imposed by the hands – …

There is no peace to Italy’s most famous cheese: Parmigiano Reggiano. If counterfeit varieties of it were not enough to alarm producers, in the past couple of years they also had to face the presence of a criminal ring specialized …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …