Italian customs, language, celebrations, daily life, nostalgia and timeless traditions.
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,…
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…
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…
In most Italian cities, Carnival means masks, confetti and elegant parades. At the Ivrea Carnival, the air fills with oranges. They fly across medieval squares, burst against wooden carts and cover the streets in a bright, fragrant carpet. At first…
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…
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…
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 Wheel of the Innocents tells one of Florence’s most moving and uncomfortable stories. It is not a tale of powerful bankers, ambitious princes or artists competing for eternal glory, but of mothers approaching a silent building at night, carrying…