Rosalia Lombardo
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…
Alessia
Emanuela Orlandi
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…
The Fiat Topolino and the Dream of an Italy on Wheels
The Fiat Topolino was born in a country where the automobile was still a distant object for most families. In the Italy of the early 1930s, a car belonged to industrialists, doctors, wealthy professionals, government officials and the fortunate few…
Murano Glass: The Fire, Secrets and Human Genius Behind an Italian Legend
Murano Glass and the Island Forged by Fire Murano glass is often described as magical, and the word is understandable. Inside a furnace, a nearly shapeless mass is taken from temperatures exceeding one thousand degrees Celsius and transformed into something…
The Mummies of Venzone: The Natural Mystery Beneath a Medieval Town
Meta description: Beneath medieval Venzone in Friuli, naturally preserved human bodies have survived for centuries, an earthquake and an enduring scientific mystery. Excerpt: In the small fortified town of Venzone, at the foot of the Friulian Alps, a group of…
The Rooftop Track of Fiat Lingotto: Turin’s Factory in the Sky
In the history of automobile manufacturing, factories usually end with a gate. At Fiat’s Lingotto plant in Turin, they ended in the sky. A completed car travelled upward through five floors of workshops, reached the roof and emerged onto an…
Sant’Angelo di Roccalvecce: Italy’s Fairy-Tale Village Reborn Through Art
There are villages in Italy that survive because they stand beside a famous monument, others because they are surrounded by vineyards, beaches or mountains, and a few because someone decided that surrendering to abandonment was not the only possible ending.…
The Cloistered Nuns of Italy: A Life of Silence, Work and Prayer
Behind the walls of ancient monasteries scattered across Italy, from the green hills of Umbria to the crowded streets of Rome, from Tuscan villages to the historic centres of Sicily, communities of women continue to live according to rhythms that…
Childhood Games in 1950s Italy: When the Street Was the Greatest Playground
Childhood games in 1950s Italy belonged to a world in transition. The war had ended only a few years earlier, many families still lived with very little, and the economic miracle that would transform the country had not yet reached…
The Vampire of Venice: A Brick, a Plague Grave and an Archaeological Mystery
Beneath the quiet landscape of the Venetian Lagoon, far from the crowded bridges and illuminated palaces familiar to millions of visitors, archaeologists uncovered a mystery that seemed to belong to a Gothic novel. In a mass grave associated with the…