Imagine holding a book filled with carefully written symbols, strange botanical drawings and elaborate circular diagrams. You can examine every page, follow every line and study every illustration, yet the words remain beyond your understanding. The Voynich manuscript presents exactly…
Only five people could fit inside. The journey was barely 200 metres long. Yet this tiny cable car had a destination unlike most others: a sanctuary hidden among the wooded slopes of Piedmont, in northern Italy. In Casale Corte Cerro,…
In Bologna, the past is part of everyday life. Students walk beneath historic porticoes, cross busy squares and disappear through doorways on their way to lectures. Their books and devices belong to the present, but the act of coming to…
Some rivers cross countries. Others wind through great cities, shape valleys and travel for hundreds of miles before reaching their destination. In the Italian village of Cassone, on Lake Garda, the Aril completes its journey in approximately 175 metres —…
There are places in Italy where the passing of time has created something no architect could have planned. San Galgano is one of them. In the countryside near Chiusdino, in the province of Siena, the walls of a medieval abbey…
Imagine a chessboard large enough to walk across, with kings and queens who breathe, turn their heads and wait for the next move. Around them, a town square becomes a theatre. Costumes catch the light, banners rise above the crowd,…
There are places designed to help us find our way, and others created expressly to make us lose it. The Labirinto della Masone belongs proudly to the second category. Hidden in the countryside near Fontanellato, not far from Parma, this…
For one night every year, an illuminated tower almost thirty metres high appears to move through the medieval streets of Viterbo. It passes between ancient stone buildings, brushes visually against balconies crowded with spectators and advances above a hundred men…
The Italian tramezzino looks almost too simple to deserve a story of its own. Two slices of soft white bread, the crusts carefully removed, a generous but balanced filling and the unmistakable triangular cut. Yet behind this apparently modest sandwich…
The Italian breakfast ritual does not begin with a large plate of eggs, bacon or sausages. It begins with a sound: the gentle bubbling of a moka pot in a quiet kitchen or the hiss of an espresso machine inside…