Italy

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

No, I’m not a British spy

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The youngest of our six children, Giuseppe, nine, received the Eucharist for the first time on Sunday. He and the other 12 new communicants looked angelic in their white robes. They all had impressive wooden crosses hanging from their necks and the five girls had wreaths of tiny flowers in their jet-black hair. Once Don Mauro had finished dispensing the Body of Christ, the bells peeled as if a wedding had taken place. There followed a pleasant open-air lunch by the sea and I wondered: ‘Is it better to live in Italy or Britain?’ Certainly, society is less fractured here. The weather is more helpful to both body and soul and the food is effortlessly superior, despite all the delusional British bragging about the amazing results of fancy fusion.

Tuesday

Nicholas Farrell

How Giorgia Meloni became Donald Trump’s EU whisperer

From our US edition

Henry Kissinger once complained: “Who do I call when I want to speak to Europe?” Today the answer would be Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female Prime Minister, who has emerged as the most important leader in the European Union. No Italian leader has filled this unofficial role before: it is usually reserved for the heads of the bloc’s two largest economies, Germany and France. Yet Meloni has capitalized on the weakness of their leadership. French President Emmanuel Macron may delude himself that he is Napoleon or Jupiter, but in reality he is the deeply unpopular head of a lame-duck government. To borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, he doesn’t “have the cards.” Meanwhile, Germany’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, heads up a flimsy coalition.

Meloni
authentic
Margaret Mitchell

Why I’m ditching ‘authentic’ travel

From our US edition

I’ve always heard Americans describe the food in Rome as “authentic,” though maybe that’s only relative to our three square meals of Little Debbies, reconstituted meat and freeze-dried astronaut food. The things we eat are not authentic food. But abroad, authenticity means anything sourced locally and served by a very small old woman with limited English. If a nonna told me she’d fished anchovies out of the Trevi Fountain and plucked chicory from cracks in the sidewalk, I’d swoon and think: they really know how to do it right in Europe. Authenticity, to me, also means a little discomfort. Bones in your rabbit stew. Lugging a suitcase up a dirt road. Getting pickpocketed.

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

The loveliness of Ligurian wine

We were talking about Italy: where and when to sojourn. I confessed to so many gaps. It is years since I visited Genoa and I know that the Ligurian coast has innumerable hidden treasures. There are the well-publicised places, such as Portofino and San Remo, which I am sure are pleasant enough out of season. But for many months they are likely to resemble an eastern extension of Monaco. Small is the key word. We are not dealing with the mighty names from Piedmont. In Liguria many of the local wine producers have tiny plots, sometimes only a couple of acres. They will supply the local restaurants which also draw on local ingredients and recipes: just as nonna made it. Visitors are welcomed. These people are confident in their own way of life.

Tuesday

Lisa Hilton

‘I secreted a venom which spurted out indiscriminately’ – Muriel Spark

In 1995, Dame Muriel Spark, then one of Britain’s most distinguished living writers, was interviewed for a BBC documentary. During filming, the show’s editor commented that ‘her biographer must be the most depressed man in England’. Three years earlier, Spark had personally anointed Martin Stannard as the writer of what she intended to be the authorised version of her life, presenting him with the vast archive of documentation – spanning 50 years and 50 metres – gathered at her home in Arezzo. ‘Treat me as if I were dead,’ she instructed him. Stannard understood this to mean that he should proceed as a traditional historian; by the time his hag-ridden book was published 17 years later he had learned his mistake.

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

How much hope did Trump offer Meloni?

From our US edition

In early March Donald Trump said Elon Musk was doing “an amazing job.” Last week he said Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan was doing an “excellent job.” On Thursday it was the turn of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni during her meeting at the White House. Trump declared that she was “doing a fantastic job.”  What Trump found so fantastic was never specified, but he tossed a variety of bouquets in Meloni’s direction. Not least was his vow that “there will be a trade deal, 100 percent” with the European Union. It was qualified, however, by Trump’s claim that he’s in no rush to strike a deal with Ursula “the West no longer exists as we knew it no longer exists” von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.

meloni
John Rutter

The world reveres British music

I have just returned from the lovely Italian city of Rimini, where 300 local singers had gathered for a weekend of choral music under my direction, culminating in a concert in the grand Teatro. As they sang amid the chandeliers, gilded cherubs and plush velvet, I reflected that in all the recent discussion about tariffs, no one has yet highlighted the importance of music as a British export. As a representative of our choral tradition, I was treated with something like the reverence that would be accorded to a Brazilian footballer or a Russian chess player. My host, the regional choral supremo, knew all about our British choirs. His CD collection was filled with British choral recordings and he had just hosted the Tallis Scholars for a packed-out concert.

Wednesday

Clare Mulley

Vindictive to the last: a Nazi atrocity in Tuscany

Late one evening in 1994, an Italian magistrate walked into a storage room at the military prosecutor’s offices in Rome. There his eye was caught by a 6ft-high wooden cupboard, curiously positioned so that it faced the wall. His interest piqued, he pulled the cupboard around and opened its doors. Inside were stacks of documents dating from the mid-1940s. In all, there were 695 long-lost war crime investigation files, detailing more than 2,000 incidents that had taken place in Italy during the fascist period. Picking up the story, the Italian media dubbed the cupboard the ‘wardrobe of shame’ – which quickly became a metaphor for what Thomas Harding calls ‘Italy’s general amnesia about the fascist past’.

amanda knox
Laura Allsop

Amanda Knox’s new memoir asks what lies next

From our US edition

The question at the heart of Amanda Knox’s latest memoir Free: My Search For Meaning is a simple one: what are the life prospects for an exoneree? It follows 2013’s Waiting to be Heard, which detailed the Seattle student’s imprisonment in Italy before and after a wrongful murder conviction, and her fight for justice. For anyone who was asleep under a boulder at the time, Knox is the gauche American student who became the target of a media firestorm following the brutal murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. She was convicted of the crime alongside her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in 2009 and freed on appeal in 2011. (Kercher’s actual murderer, Rudy Guede, was convicted in a fast-track trial in 2008, and released in 2021.

prodi italian europeans
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Why are Europeans so untroubled by their ignorance of America?

From our US edition

Laramie, Wyoming Americans are infamous on the eastern side of the Atlantic for knowing little or nothing about European culture, history and politics – and for being proud of the fact, as Richard Hofstadter, the late Columbia historian, described in them in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1964. Much less widely recognized is how little Europeans know about America, Americans and their own civilization – an ignorance that troubles them not at all, perhaps because they seem to be unaware of the fact.

Thursday

Ross Anderson

The Versaces have left Versace

From our US edition

Donatella Versace was never supposed to be a fashion designer. She had no formal fashion education and was happy working on the business and styling of Versace as her brother, Gianni, built his house into Milan’s most opulent. But, in 1997, a madman brutally murdered him — and someone had to keep his legacy and brand alive. And so Donatella did. Over the almost 30 years that followed — struggling through grief, business troubles and addiction — she has released more than 100 collections, grown the brand into a multi-billion-dollar giant and did so aggressively, without selling out its style or quality. Her recent Fall /Winter 2025 collection was an eccentric, fabulous celebration of those decades, pulling exuberantly from the Versace archives.

donatella versace

Monday

Owen Matthews

Rome is ready for its close-up

From our US edition

Rome Like a Parioli matron shedding her curlers, pins and hairnet in anticipation of a major family celebration, Rome’s monuments are emerging from shrouds of cladding and scaffolding ready for their close-up. The angels and river gods of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and the Piazza Navona shine as blinding white as the day they emerged from Bernini’s workshop. The ancient granite basins of the Piazza Farnese fountains shimmer with an ethereal bluish light. The big occasion is the Papal Jubilee year of 2025, expected to draw a whopping 32 million visitors. That’s more than ten times Rome’s population, and half as many visitors again as in a normal year. If you’re planning a visit, do it soon before the city is entirely swallowed by crowds.

Rome
Venice
Nicholas Opfermann

An escape from Venice

From our US edition

Those who have visited Venice in the summertime will have witnessed the masses who descend into the heart of the labyrinthine islands, clogging their historic stone arteries and beautiful atria in a gormless and sclerotic trance. Meandering along the canals can always lead to some duomo or piazza that merits a standstill and an upward gawp. If you’re at all like me, after sweating through those tight streets with other tourists, one day certainly feels like enough. So it went on my recent visit. After popping my head in for as much of the Biennale that was still on display, a Bellini at Harry’s, lunch at Staffa and an inspiring visit to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, I decided to get in the car and leave.

Tuesday

Ian Sansom

In search of Pico della Mirandola, the quintessential Renaissance Man

Edward Wilson-Lee writes rather chin-strokey, erudite books for the half-educated general reader with a strong taste for big ideas and the ever-so-slightly weird –which is to say people exactly like me and very possibly like you. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library (2018); A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History (2022): autodidact catnip. He’s a gifted chronicler of the odd, the interesting and the esoteric. Think non-fiction Umberto Eco.

Wednesday

Julie Bindel

I can’t stand Stanley Tucci

From our US edition

I love Italian food, and I love food writing and TV shows, so you might think I’d love Stanley Tucci. And yet I find him creepy and his recipes are rubbish. I can’t be the only one. The actor, who I first saw in the brilliant film Big Night, about a Jersey Shore Italian-American restaurant, is probably best known for The Devil Wears Prada, a film I adore. His character in that film did wind me up, but it took a while before Tucci himself got on my nerves. I suppose it began with him coming over all chef, like he’s the new Anthony Bourdain. I kept being told to watch his TV series where he travels around Italy, but the sight of his smug face on my screen turned out to be more than I could bear.

Stanley Tucci

Tuesday

Julie Bindel

I can’t stand Stanley Tucci

I love Italian food, and I love food writing and TV programmes, so you might think I’d love Stanley Tucci. And yet I find him creepy and his recipes are rubbish. I can’t be the only one. The actor, who I first saw in the brilliant film Big Night, about a Jersey Shore Italian-American restaurant, is probably best known for The Devil Wears Prada, a film I adore. His character in that film did wind me up, but it took a while before Tucci himself got on my nerves. I suppose it began with him coming over all cheffy, like he’s the new Anthony Bourdain. Who cares what Colin Firth eats when he’s round at the Tucci gaff? I kept being told to watch his TV series where he travels around Italy, but the sight of his smug face on my screen turned out to be more than I could bear.

Monday

Nicholas Farrell

If Meloni is ‘far right’, why are neo-Nazis trying to kill her?

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Italian police have arrested 12 alleged terrorists who are accused of plotting a Day of the Jackal style sniper assassination of Giorgia Meloni. Many more remain under formal investigation. According to investigators, the plotters aimed to install the sniper in a room in the Albergo Nazionale, opposite the Italian Camera dei Deputati (House of Commons) in Rome. Given that much of the global media continues to call Italy’s first female prime minister 'far' or 'hard' right, and 'the heir to Mussolini', you might assume that those arrested are far-left radicals. But you could not be more mistaken. They are fascists.

Thursday

Roger Kimball

The secrets of Super Tuscans

From our US edition

I suspect that most readers, asked to name the most important red-wine grapes of Italy, would focus mainly on Nebbiolo, Barbera and Sangiovese, the most widely planted grape in Italy. Lovers of Sicily might also mention Nerello Mascalese and Nero D’Avola. What if I told you that some of the most spectacular wines in Italy were made from the Cabernets (Sauvignon and Franc) and Merlot? Have I gotten lost in the Médoc? No, I am in Tuscany, ancient home of the Etruscans, northwest of Rome. To be specific, I am in Bolgheri, a few miles from the Ligurian coast. On a clear day, if you cast your eyes south, you might just see Napoleon padding around the island of Elba plotting his escape. Everyone has heard of “Super Tuscans.” Not everyone knows the story of their origin.

Tuscans

Thursday

Amy Rose Everett

Sustainable splendor: skiing the Italian Alps

From our US edition

“Wow.” My younger brother stopped still on the runway as we disembarked our plane at Innsbruck. In every direction, snow-capped mountains shot up to the sky. I found myself rubbing my eyes like a cartoon character, while he picked his jaw up off the floor. Delivering us across the border to Brunico, our cab driver felt moved to score the scene. “All this untz, untz, untz music, I can’t do! Phil Collins OK?” The Alps looming majestically on both sides of the road, “In The Air Tonight” blasting comically loud, the journey fast became a core family memory. It felt stupendous, exciting; like your first time seeing Manhattan sparkle in the distance from JFK. “This is the Brenner Pass... and now, Italy. Welcome in Italy!

italian
Susan Hill

The medicinal powers of a good book

‘And they lived happily ever after. The end.’ ‘Again.’ My poor father, bidden to read the story of the moment over and over again. Long after I could read perfectly well for myself, at bedtime I needed to hear his quiet monotone that never failed to send me to sleep, just as, though my taste in books was always adventurous, I had a narrow range of preferred stories at night, or if I was unwell. When the shadows thrown by the lamp form themselves into monsters, familiar comforts are required. Alice in Wonderland was read until the words must surely have faded on the page, and if he missed a line I was on to it.