Culture

When I used to live in Liguria, there was a place I loved particularly. It wasn’t a beach, nor a promenade, as you may expect, perhaps, in a region known for its seaside beauty. It was a convent. In Loano, …

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 …

Italians and Americans have plenty of things in common, but there is one they don’t share: Father’s Day.  To be truthful, it’s not only the US and Italy that celebrate their dads on different times of the year, because Father’s …

“If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter,” said the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, “the whole face of the earth would have been different.” The same thought struck me at a reception held for the young Egyptian queen in November 46 BC …

We call them coriandoli, the rest of the world calls them “confetti,” but they are the same thing: those little colorful paper disks that cheerfully fill the air and the streets at Carnevale time in Italy, and in every festive …

In the outskirts of Capannori, a quaint village in the Tuscan countryside not far from Lucca, in the beautiful park surrounding Villa Carrara, there is a 600 years old oak, so famous and so distinctive that it is officially recognized …

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 …

Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore are thou Romeo? Who doesn’t know these heartfelt, love-filled words and the person who spoke them? It’s Juliet, of course, perhaps the most well known of all Shakespearian heroines, unfortunate lover and misunderstood child.  Her relationship …

Delightful mandolino is a symbol of Neapolitan culture and music that, outside of Italy, came to symbolize the Bel Paese as a whole. Almost two centuries of migration towards all corners of the world, especially of people coming from the …

Who doesn’t love pizza? Yes, of course, Italian cuisine is much more varied, but there are certain times when you can’t beat a good slice: a Saturday night out and about with friends, an evening in front of the TV …