mariella radaelli

Giorgio Faletti was a multitalented artist: a gifted crime novelist, an inspired singer-songwriter, a stand-up comedian, and an actor who added dramatic dimensions to his onscreen persona.  The adventurous storyteller died of lung cancer in 2014 in Turin, at age …

Though fashion industry’s titan and alleged Nazi spy Coco Chanel dismissed her rival Elsa Schiaparelli as “that Italian who makes clothes,” later couturiers recognized the stylist as one of the most influential designers of the 20th century. Schiaparelli — also …

Life becomes a time warp in Cornello dei Tasso, a golden stone medieval hamlet of unusual beauty perched on a cliff in the Brembana Valley at 800 m above sea level. Only eight kilometers north of San Pellegrino Terme and …

It is a lovely day of spring, March 27, 1995, as the clocks strike 8.30 a.m. in Milan.   At that very moment, Maurizio Gucci enters a building at central Via Palestro 20 where his office is located. The 45-year …

In a small corner of Lunigiana, in the extreme north-western tip of Tuscany, lies a remarkable story bound up with the founding of a Wild West town in America. An area of outstanding natural beauty bordering the Apennines on the …

Goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg may have invented the movable-type printing press around 1450 in Meinz, Germany to create his monumental Bibles, but Venice is where the Printing Revolution began by giving the nascent industry a major push and changing men’s lives. …

Its advanced culture and economy during the Renaissance made the Italian peninsula such a desirable place that it also became an ongoing theater of war. Italian soil became a laboratory for a continental struggle that embroiled the numerous, divided Italian …

Would America have won the Revolutionary War without Benjamin Franklin’s uncanny knack for politics and persuasion? How would things have gone if the American polymath, the tenth son of a poor candle and soap maker originally from England, hadn’t learned …

There is a portrait of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli standing next to philosopher Marsilio Ficino, one of the foremost minds of the Italian Renaissance. In it, Toscanelli appears as a mysterious man. He wears a turban embroidered alla moresca — …

The undulating ridge of four peaks in the Bergamasque or Orobie Alps embraces the panoramic village of Oltre Il Colle in the Alta Val Serina Valley. Mount Menna, Mount Arena, Grem, and Alben stand in a range called MAGA. The …