Last autumn the town of Norcia in Umbria suffered a devastating blow after an earthquake hit. Hannah Frances went back to see how the town fought back. Autumn is a great time to see Norcia, says Hannah Frances. Fractured by last October’s earthquake, the determined and resilient town in the heart of Umbria is coming […]
Ferrara was Europe’s first modern city, and plans laid here have been copied across the continent. Sara Scarpa visits the often overlooked city of the Este family… One evening earlier this year, I watched a television programme about the Signorie, the governing bodies of old Italy, and was fascinated by the stories of these famous […]
The influence Carlo Goldoni had on Italian theatre is immeasurable, and his museum is not to be missed. The palazzo is hard to find. The land entrance is in an alley so narrow that you must consider the width of your umbrella before venturing there in the rain. The water entrance is easier to locate, […]
An unusual clock tower overlooks the land surrounding a small town in the province of Ravenna… What is now the Torre dell’Orologio of Brisighella was originally built in 1290 under the orders of the condottiero Maghinardo Pagani as part of the town’s (nominally) defensive fortifications. Damaged and reconstructed several times, the tower we see today […]
We endured another terrible summer in the UK, and they did in Italy too, but for quite the opposite reasons. Tom Alberto Bull on the drought and heat that affected the peninsula… Rain dance So another British summer has passed, and not without the usual complaints about the inconsistent (and often miserable) weather. During these […]
An art installation by Lorenzo Quinn on Venice’s Grand Canal symbolises the threat to the city from rising waters caused by climate change… Opposite the Rialto fish market, two giant hands emerge from the waters and touch against the Ca’ Sagredo. Are they bracing the hotel, or reaching up to destroy it? The intervention is […]
The official name is the Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti but we know them as the Spanish Steps, for the embassy once located here… After our visit to the Vatican Museums last month, we thought it unlikely that you would want to go straight to the Galleria Borghese (where we will be going next month), […]
The Vatican Museums are by far the most visited art galleries in Italy. And so they should be. There are more than 20,000 items on display at any one time – and sometimes it feels as if there are just as many people seeing them. The Museums house the collections of five centuries’ worth of […]
“Go and catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root…”. This begins John Donne’s poem, and another writer created another literary work a century before, that dealt with a virtuous woman, and with the magical mandrake plant. So begins John Donne’s Song, a poem that was probably written early in the 17th century. The poem lists […]
Acclaimed author Emylia Hall set her novel, The Thousand Lights Hotel, on Elba. She tells us about the favourite places and characteristics of the island that inspired her. Elba, the largest of the islands in the Tuscan Archipelago, is a place that defies expectation. Once a mining centre, it was repurposed in the 1950s as […]