Life in Italy, Real Estate in Italy, Move to Italy
In the first part of our trekking specials about the Mont Blanc, we have proposed a handful of easy-on-the-feet walks along some of the dama bianca’s most charming paths. Today, we will continue with four trekking tours that share one characteristic: they will all lead you to a rifugio, a mountain hut. Now, if you […]
Is coffee healthy? Or to be exact, is black coffee healthy? Well, let’s start with this: Thank you, America! I mean, there’re plenty of things to thank you for, like peanut butter cups, Edgar Allan Poe, Nirvana, and root beer… But I’m talking about something else today, I’m talking about […]
If, certainly, the most famous of all pilgrim routes is the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, we should refrain from thinking it is the only one worth undertaking. Italy itself offers a number of them, the most famous of all being the Via Francigena, with other notable examples being the […]
When, in 1954, Hemingway stood in the baroque haughtiness of Piazza Galimberti, in Cuneo, he was already a famous personality in Italy and everywhere else in the world. His permanence in this algid north western piedmontese city, shaped by the Romans (it has the typical urban structure of a castrum, the […]
If you’re a keen web surfer, you may have come across a popular meme with the picture of a girl eagerly washing her hands in a bidet, its caption highlighting her question about why Europeans have such low sinks in their bathrooms… This is just a funny example of the […]
San Galgano: the saint, the king and the sword This is the story of the knight Galgano and how a vision made him renounce to wealth, war and women in name of a life of meditation and prayer. This is a story where faith, legend, history and literature merge in one intriguing tale, to the dénouement of which, in […]
Italian wild plants and herbs Nothing evokes the coming of Spring more than the scent of wild flowers and plants. About a year ago, I happened to drive to my grandparents’ village for the first time during Spring in decades. Here, in the lovely, mellow rolling hills of the Alessandria province, […]
A few years ago, when we first wrote about it, Sammezzano Castle had not only attracted us for its moorish beauty and outlandish style, but also because it was about to go under the hammer for 20 million euro (around 22.3 million dollars). If sold, we wrote, visits may have become impossible or at least […]
We can thank history for it Once upon a time, starting from the Romans up to the glorious days of the Repubbliche Marinare, Italy was a world-dominating country: it was its culture, of course, and its flair for artistic expression and beauty, but it was also its economical and political power. Roman […]
Think of the quaint Umbrian countryside: cookie-cutter-perfect and almost painfully stereotypical of what rural Italy is supposed to look like. Not a criticism, mind, just a matter-of-fact statement to remind ourselves sometimes too much exposure can, indeed, be detrimental. Yes, because we often become guilty of trivializing beauty when we […]