Luca Signorini

Everyone knows rice is a staple of Italian cuisine — hello risotto, timballo and arancini: versatile, cheap and filling, we often forget that Italy is a paese del riso, almost like some Far East countries. Rice, in Italy, is an …

Twenty-four hours: that’s how long it took to Mount Vesuvius to obliterate Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis from the face of the Earth. Twenty-four hours and two devastating phases: the first buried Pompeii under meters of ashes; the second, some …

While born in Italy, the habit of having aperitivo with friends to unwind after a day at work, or as a fun preamble to a good dinner in company, has become a worldwide custom. Similarly, what we Italians like to …

Even during the hardest times, there is something that never changes in Italy: we have plenty of pasta in the larder: it’s cheap, versatile, and makes everyone happy. When the country went into lockdown for the first time, in March …

If you’ve been to Tuscany, you had vin santo, the sweet, thick fragrant nectar often served with another Tuscan legend, cantucci cookies. To be fair, vin santo is typical of all regions of central Italy and some variants of it …

As many of you probably know, after more than 70 years of service, Alitalia is no more. Its last flight landed in Rome at 23,23 on the 15th of October, and it did feel like the end of an era. …

In one of his masterpieces, Oceano Mare  (Ocean Sea), Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco describes an artist who painted the sea with sea water. I remember thinking, after reading the book for the first time, that there couldn’t be anything more …

Venice and Florence are key players in Italy’s well honed tourism industry. But the past year has proven difficult beyond belief for them, too. While the end of the pandemic is far from being “around the corner,” the mayors of …

We all know ragù, the delicious meat and tomato sauce that goes perfectly with tagliatelle, or gnocchi. In the US, it’s largely associated with a dish, spaghetti bolognese, that in Italy doesn’t really exist: you’d be hardly pushed to find …

La Bocca della Verità: sounds rather ominous, don’t you think? If you look at it, all stone, stern eyes and wide, gaping mouth, the sense of dread is even stronger. The famous classical times’ “lie detector” was probably, in origin, …