Heritage

The days of the old tradition of everyone in the extended family coming the grandparents’ home for Sunday dinner, every Sunday, might be gone, but through our stories they will never be far from our consciousness.   The front door …

Having discussed Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, and the traces these great navigators have left in Genoa and Venice, our tour of the “land of explorers” ends with a closer look at Amerigo Vespucci’s origins and presence in the city of …

Author’s note: This is the first installment of a serialized story that recounts my return to Italy and my grandfather’s journey to the U.S.    My grandparents poured into me all the Italy they couldn’t fit into their children.  To …

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 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 …

It’s easy to understand why, every year, there’s so much interest around UNESCO’s selection of new World Heritage entries – and the associated possibility to withdraw the honor from any of those  already on the list. It means finding and …

Whether you choose to drive through the heel of Italy, from Lecce to Otranto, or from the Ionian to the Adriatic coast, the breathtaking town of Poggiardo – delicately hued, simply yet uniquely elegant – is a pleasant stop for …

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 …

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 …

There was a time when the Italian Peninsula had yet to become the “Cradle of Western Civilization,” a distant era in which Roman and even Etruscan culture did not exist at all. But even in those far-away days, the land …