mariella radaelli

Taste of salt, taste of sea, That you have on your skin, You have on your lips, When you step off the water, you come and lay by me, by me  With these iconic lyrics, Italian songwriter Gino Paoli was …

It was the eve of a fervent celebration planned for the Feast Day of Saint Joseph in 1906 when an earthquake struck the island of Ustica some 72 kilometers north of Palermo, Sicily, in the Tyrrhenian Sea.  On that unsettling …

The Italians enter the Christmas spirit with a fragrant, yeasty slice of panettone — Christmas isn’t Christmas without it on our festive tables. We can never get enough of it, especially for us who are Milanese. We have a near-cultish …

I met Andrea Camilleri twice in Milan at the Hotel Manin in the late ’90s. The Sicilian literary phenomenon was not a kid at the time. He was already in his seventies when he created Inspector Salvo Montalbano, the main …

Brimming with cultural vigor, strength and resilience, Caltagirone is the heart of the authentic, wild southeastern Sicily. The scenic town is a small slice of heaven just 40 miles from Catania that proudly acknowledges its multi-layered past. It remains a …

When in late October 1929 Wall Street collapsed, contributing to the Great Depression of the 1930s, a rural village of Piedmont started to thrive. In 1929, a picturesque land of plenty called Alba opened the first edition of the international …

“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you,” Simon and Garfunkel sang in their 1960s song Mrs. Robinson.  Baseball legend Joe DiMaggio was a cultural icon in the ’50s and ’60s, a time when …

I will never forget how Franco Zeffirelli made me feel welcome that spring-like day on March 20, 2013 when he invited me to lunch at his Roman villa on the gently undulating Via Appia Antica, its wide green verges shaded …

Before pasta, there was Lady Salad. Today we can taste all kinds of spectacular insalatone or large salads, yet the first to prepare raw leafy vegetables drizzled with olive oil and seasoned with salt and cumin were the Ancient Romans. The root …

Though ancient, the aerie of Ferrazzano has survived unspoiled into the 21st century. The medieval village of Samnite origin also gave birth to actor Robert De Niro’s great grandparents, Giovanni Di Niro and Angelina Mercurio, who left in search of their US …