"God bless the milk your mother fed you at birth" was what a young man told me while passing by on a street in Rome. It was a beautiful summer day and that sentence was a joyful verse of poetry. I wasn't at all offended by it: it felt more...

Every year I go back to Italy to see my family in Bologna and my two best friends. One lives in Spain, the other one in Paris. After an 8-hour plane ride from the US, I generally don't take another plane, I drive to Barcelona. The trip is 11 hours,...

Once upon a time (my source indicates the end of the '90s), in a single medium-size clothing factory in Italy worked an average of 300 tailors.

Now in the entire region of Lombardy (whose main city is Milan, capital of Italian fashion) you can count only 400 of them...

How many times have you found yourself in a deserted Italian city between the hours of 1 and 4 pm? Store closed, silence all around, or maybe the vague noise of silverware coming from opened windows, in the summer... and Sunday? No way, you have to plan your grocery shopping...

I promised you a look into Italian habits. It will be the topic of my future posts: I don't write about Italian politics; but now I have to take a moment and comment on something that has been upsetting me for a week.

It was an unforgettable, wonderful night when...

Sometimes I wish I didn't come from such a recognizable country like Italy. I wish I were from one of those small central European countries like Liechtenstein. Nobody knows or thinks to know anything about Liechtenstein: if I introduced myself that way, I'd have a blank canvas to describe what...

Do you remember the beginning of the movie Pulp Fiction, when John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson talk about "those little differences" between the US and Europe? I don't know about the rest of Europe, but I was recently reminded about a difference between the US and Italy: we don't...

When you live away from your country, you start looking at it with different eyes. I lived my whole life in Italy and since moving to New York six years ago, I've learned new things about the place I thought I knew.

I made the most recent discovery while browsing...