Craco ghost town rises from the clay hills of Basilicata like the surviving fragment of a vanished civilisation. Its houses cling to a narrow ridge, their empty windows looking across the valley of the Cavone River, while a square medieval…
They kneel on stone pavements beneath the Italian sun, surrounded by boxes of colored chalk, broken pastels and clouds of pigment. Slowly, an empty square of road becomes a face, a fold of blue fabric, a golden halo or the…
At the beginning of the Posillipo coast, where the buildings of Naples appear to lean toward the sea, Palazzo Donn’Anna rises directly from the water like the surviving fragment of a forgotten kingdom. Its weathered walls, open arches and unfinished…
The Zanfretta case began on a freezing December night in 1978, on an isolated road in the mountains behind Genoa. Pier Fortunato Zanfretta, a young private security guard, was carrying out an ordinary patrol when he radioed his colleagues to…
Just beyond the ancient walls of Pompeii, where the crowded streets once gave way to gardens, vineyards and country estates, stands a Roman villa whose most famous room has resisted every attempt to explain it completely. Its walls are covered…
Every country has objects that become so familiar that people eventually stop seeing them. In Italy, the Bialetti Moka Express is one of those objects. It stands on kitchen shelves, waits beside the stove, travels inside suitcases and reappears every…
There are places that reveal themselves immediately, and others that seem to wait for the right distance, the right light and the right point of view. Lake Scanno belongs to the second kind. From its shores, it appears as a…
Rome changes its voice on Sunday morning. The traffic softens, metal shutters rise more slowly, and the aroma of coffee escapes from neighborhood bars where the first customers lean against the counter. Yet around Porta Portese, on the southern edge…
At the end of a long corridor beneath the Capuchin monastery of Palermo lies a small glass coffin. Inside rests Rosalia Lombardo, a Sicilian child who died in 1920, one week before her second birthday. Her hair still frames her…
On the afternoon of 22 June 1983, Rome was entering the long light of a summer evening. The streets around Piazza Navona, Corso del Rinascimento and the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare were crowded with students, workers, tourists and people waiting for…