Italy
The Epstein Files, the naked communist, and me
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was parked up in the Land Rover Defender on the narrow road that runs alongside the…
Toni Servillo’s face cannot bore: La Grazia reviewed
Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia is about an ageing Italian president who is coming to the end of his seven-year term,…
Americans are erasing European culture
Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was…
Ghastly middle-class materialism: The Quantity Theory of Morality, by Will Self, reviewed
Self’s latest satire suggests that a world where the avaricious prosper, and the meek inherit the debts of the unscrupulous, contains a limited amount of morality
The lost world of the pinball machine
In a touchingly Proustian memoir, Andreas Bernard hymns a youth spent flipping small steel balls in bars and resort arcades throughout Europe and America
My family is divided on the meaning of ‘genocide’
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna We were en route to the junk shop in search of a pair of robust tongs for…
Glamour and intrigue: The Silver Book, by Olivia Laing, reviewed
A rigorously researched novel mingles fact and fiction in retelling the events that led up to the murder of the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini on 2 November 1975
One of the joys of wine is the people who make it
Towards the end of the war, a young Guards officer met some Italian aristocrats. They had much in common. Robert…
The simple flatbread that conquered the world
Luca Cesari describes pizza’s journey from the poor man’s staple of 18th-century Naples to today’s global favourite, worth billions
My Italian family believe Meloni is complicit in genocide
I would like to ask readers for help. My Italian wife and our six children, aged 10 to 22, believe…
Was Serbia the real birthplace of the Renaissance?
Where did the Renaissance begin? There has been an official answer to that question since 1550, the date that Giorgio…
Hiding from the Nazis in wartime Italy
Malcolm Gaskill vividly recreates his uncle’s experience as an escaped PoW, and the courage of the peasant families who risked their lives to shelter him
My husband first and last – by Lalla Romano
In a touching memoir, Romano describes a shared intellectual life with Innocenzo Monti, from their first meeting in the Piedmont mountains to their final months together
Giorgia Meloni’s Italian renaissance
Rome Last weekend, Rome hosted nearly a million young pilgrims to celebrate the Papal Jubilee of Youth. Part Woodstock festival,…
To rehydrate, drink beer
‘The nuisance of the tropics is/the sheer necessity of fizz.’ Over the past few days, during which England endured sub-tropical…
My daring escape from the Italian police
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I often feel as if I know what it was like to be a member of La…
The wolf as symbol of European anxieties
This ‘amoral outcast’ and its thieving trickery is now widely equated with the economic migrant, slipping across borders unnoticed and threatening the status quo
Venice deserves Jeff Bezos
Venetians are once again revolting. Not, this time, against cruise ships, wheeled luggage, over-tourism or rule from mainland Mestre. No…
The lure of St James’s
Procrastination may be the thief of time, but in the right circumstances, it can be fun. The other day, I…
The past is another country: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss, reviewed
The voice of teenage Edith caring for her pregnant sister in Italy alternates with that of her elderly self in contemporary Ireland in a story of identity, belonging and consent
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.…
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 secreted a venom which spurted out indiscriminately’ – Muriel Spark
Frances Wilson’s mesmerising biography of one of the past century’s most singular writers is especially enlightening on the ‘domestic savagery’ often required of a great artist
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…
Vindictive to the last: a Nazi atrocity in Tuscany
Even in retreat in August 1944, a German posse carried out a particularly brutal triple murder at a hillside farm outside Florence in a vendetta against the Einstein family
