BY MAX WALLER If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” – Tancredi Pleasantly surprised by the quality of the new television series The Leopard (Netflix), which has had to contend with comparisons to the aristocratic perfection of the original Visconti movie starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale, I am currently musing on 19th-century Italy—specifically the Risorgimento movement … Continue reading Risorgimento
BY ALEX STORY Sicily, Goethe once wrote, is the key to everything. Italy, then, is the door which that key opens. The country is peppered with towns and cities filled with historic treasures. Amazingly, given her tumultuous history, much of Italy’s inheritance, artistic, architectural and civic, lives and breathes. In Trieste a two-millennium old theatre sits comfortably next to a Mussolini era municipal building. Turn … Continue reading Travelling in Italy
BY ROGER WATSON The screams of swifts echo off the buildings as they swoop down from great heights to gorge on insects flying just about twenty feet overhead. The evening is balmy, and diners are beginning to gather at the finest trattoria in Boccadasse, the exquisite fishing village at the end of Corso Italia in Genoa. My wife and I find ourselves at Osvaldo, where … Continue reading Osvaldo
BY ROGER WATSON The waiter suggested that I might want to try another restaurant as they had a sixteenth birthday party taking place that evening. He indicated a long table set for about twenty people but, as I had already been seated and had a panoramic view of the Boccadasse harbour in Genoa, I was reluctant to move. Then my heart sank. In walked twenty … Continue reading Eataly*
BY ROGER WATSON I have just spent one of several weeks this year working in Italy. As with most countries I visit regularly, after initial impressions are over about similarities and differences, once you get to know more people and to know them in depth, you appreciate more of the differences and begin to understand at least part of what makes Italians the way they … Continue reading Have We Lost Our Link to the Land?
