Italy
Maybe Pope Francis had a point about dog culture
Dennis is having a little holiday with a sitter in Kent because I’m in Italy, a meandering trip from Rome…
Why did my mother go mad?
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna My mother Joyce was a very beautiful woman who became what ‘normal’ people call ‘mad’. My question…
My remarkable friend and his passionate love for Ukraine
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I opened the WhatsApp message and read: ‘Massed missile and drone warning. About eighth since I’ve been…
The most shameful thing I’ve ever done
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It is raining at last, thank God, and the sound of thunder cascades across the heavens like…
Augustus’s plans for poverty
A Mr A.M. Burnham has introduced a clear blueprint and legislative goals intended to lift hundreds of thousands of children…
Why is Giorgia Meloni courting Emmanuel Macron?
Emmanuel Macron has lost a friend in Keir Starmer. The French President paid tribute to the outgoing British Prime Minister…
Family Tyrant: The Anniversary, by Andrea Bajani, reviewed
A middle-aged Italian contemplates his traumatic childhood, lived in constant fear of his abusive father
Italy’s doomed war on English
‘Italians are not inventing any new words,’ the head of the Italian language academy told the Telegraph. ‘They’re not creating…
Our local nudists are running wild
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It was midnight, more or less, and my middle daughter, Magdalena, 18, said with all the untroubled…
My heated argument about Italy’s birthrate
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna We were having dinner in the Osteria del Tempo Perso (The Hostelry of Lost Time). It is…
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…
