Posts about culture in Italy. Festivals, religion, etiquette, language, and more.
Discovering new or new-to-me music has always been one of my favorite things about traveling and living abroad. So I plan to use this space to bring you some of the songs that I’m listening to in Italy. Some of the music will be bubbly pop, some hip hop, some…I don’t know what. But most, if…
Sed primum a me accipe selfie
Watch the trailers of “Peninsula” and “Bella Vita,” two documentaries on surfing in Italy.
In the late winter/early spring of 1948, American playwright Tennessee Williams arrived in Rome in need of a change of scenery. Williams, of course, is known for his writing set in the American South, including “A Streetcar Named Desire” (written in 1947) and “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” (1955), both of which earned him Pulitzer…
Inspiration always seems to find me when I’m not looking and that is exactly what happened as I settled in to watch a few minutes of television last night. Lucky for me, I clicked over to Kenny Mayne’s Wider World of Sports, a show on ESPN that puts sports into a cultural context. One of…
About an hour and a half south of Rome lies Montecassino, an enormous Benedictine monastery whose environs witnessed a very costly battle of World War II.
Marble, either as a substance or a style, runs through three different artisan crafts that are famous in Italy.
The potato is a vegetable that no one really associates with Italy but it features in two dishes that some consider comfort fo
CulturaItalia, a website operated by the Italian Culture Ministry, is seeking your help in its efforts to document the Jewish contributions to Italian society over the past 150 years. As one of its many initiatives to mark the anniversary of 150 years of Italian Unity, CulturaItalia has teamed up with with Judaica Europeana, a Europe-wide…
Cooking school teacher and chef Angela Schiavina shows off the culinary riches of Ravenna in this “My City” video from The Guardian.
Although Venice has been sinking into the Adriatic sea for centuries, visitors, as well as many residents, pay little mind to this fact other than keeping close watch on the acqua alta forecasts. Few of the millions of people that tread on Venice’s cobblestones and stroll over its storied canals know how the city manages to…
Disclaimer: This post was written before I had the chance to fully appreciate driving (and parking) in Italy. While the below information still applies, I have much more experience driving in Italy, inside cities like Rome and Florence, as well as on highways and the A-1 autostrada. Read my updated post about driving in Italy….
![Improve Your Italian with These Useful Hand Gestures [Video]](https://www.italofile.com/wp-content/uploads/video-italian-hand-gestures.jpg)
These fun videos teaches you some basic hand gestures to complement your Italian language learning.
For more than 20 years, ADSI (Associazione Dimore Storiche Italiane), aka the Historic Home Association of Italy, has been working in conjunction with the owners of the country’s estates and villas to bring to the public a program called Cortili Aperti, or “Open Courtyards.” The annual open courtyard event, also called Giornate ADSI, usually takes…
Florence, Rome, Venice – you already know the names of the cities you must add to your Italy travel itinerary. But, do you know which cities in Italy are the best places to live? Each year, the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore publishes the Italy Quality of Life Survey, which calculates factors such as…
Eat fish in Venice…but don’t touch that lemon!
If you know me, you’ll know that I am nuts about religious relics. And if you know David Farley’s book “An Irreverent Curiosity,” you’ll know immediately why that first line is a wee bit funny. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Farley in Manhattan to discuss his book, which has the tag…
Rome is city of obelisks. Here is information on five obelisks that you’ll definitely see while visiting the Eternal City.