Mario Matassa visits Volterra, a medieval hilltop town in Tuscany, where he discovers the alabaster caves and workshops for which the area is famous The chalky white alabaster from Volterra is considered the finest in Europe because of its characteristic compactness, transparency, veining, softness and smoothness. Although the etymology of the word remains disputed, the […]
Mario Matassa welcomed an exciting new development in Castell’Arquato, Emilia Romagna a couple of years ago – a milk machine that certainly seems to have moo-ved many of the locals to a fever pitch of excitement A few years ago the credit crunch – or crisi in Italian–was hitting hard. Italians hardly need an excuse […]
Lake Como is the the backdrop for the dramatic story of a herd of Haflinger horses and their struggle for survival. It’s a story – that without the help of some very special people – could so easily have ended in tragedy. Jan Mazzoni reports on The Horses of Bisbino… It’s early morning in the […]
A Vespa is, of course, a motorcycle – but it’s also a wasp. Vespa – Wasp It’s obvious, when you think about it, why they called the scooter the ‘wasp’. It sounds like one – and the yellow ones even look like one. The Italian word is clearly very closely related to the English word, and is […]
Every August the people of Messina draw a 40-foot statue through their streets, and they have been doing this for 600 years. The edifice represents the final resting place of the Virgin Mary… The still photograph doesn’t do it justice. Giuseppe Pitre, the revered Sicilian writer, who died 100 years ago this year, witnessed the […]
We take a trip back to Leanne Casellas’s trip along the Amalfi Coast. Now, it may not be action packed, but sailing off the Amalfi Coast provides plenty of relaxation and glamorous locations. When you’re thinking of hitting the high seas, billowing sails and a decent, salty wake Italy may not be the first destination […]
Discover what lies under the streets of Rome, get a book with enough recipes to host an al fresco Italian tea party and be beautiful while you do it, with the best of Italy this July… Back to Cool When the time comes for the kids to go back to school, you can be sure […]
Think of transport in Venice and you think of the gondola, but this is a relationship that has been developed in large part by the city’s tourism industry. As a working boat, there are better options. Though it is now recognized the world over as the typical boat of Venice, the gondola is in fact […]
As an exhibition of some of his surviving works is shown in London, Carolyn Lyons explains why this Venetian artist was so influential, and how little we know about what he actually painted… Giorgione – ‘Big George’, he was born Giorgio Barbarelli – lived in Venice at the turn of the 16th century and is […]
The term Grotesque derives from the caves, or grotte, where Renaissance builders unearthed this ancient form The Grotesque style was all the rage during the 1500s for both interiors and exteriors all over Italy. It continued to be so for the following two centuries. Nowadays, when the word is mentioned, negative images of unfortunate distorted […]