The people, events, places and cultural heritage that shaped Italy through the centuries.
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Circus Maximus was not simply the largest stadium in ancient Rome. It was the place where an entire civilization gathered to celebrate, gamble, worship, argue and lose itself in the speed of horses. Between the Palatine and Aventine hills,…
Three Paintings That Changed Art Forever Caravaggio at San Luigi dei Francesi is not merely one of the great encounters offered by Rome. It is the place where a young, controversial and still relatively unknown painter changed the course of…
The Morning Two Italian Cities Disappeared At 5:20 on the morning of December 28, 1908, most of the people living along the Strait of Messina were asleep. Christmas had passed only three days earlier, and the final Monday of the…
On the night of July 25, 1956, the North Atlantic was wrapped in a wall of fog. Somewhere south of Nantucket, less than a day from New York, the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria was approaching the triumphant end of…
Hidden among the green hills of Umbria, in the tiny medieval village of Monte Castello di Vibio, there is a theatre so small that entering it feels almost like stepping inside an exquisitely crafted music box. It has a stage,…