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Deirdre Pirro, author of Italian Sketches: The Faces of Modern Italy, Famous Expats in Italy and Royals in Florence, published by The Florentine Press, is an international lawyer who lives and works in Florence. Her writing focuses on modern Italy, its people, history and customs. Follow her on Twitter @dp_in_florence or contact her at ddpirro@gmail.com.
Relations between Florence and Ravenna have been somewhat strained for, believe it or not, seven centuries. The reason is because one of Florence’s most illustrious native sons, Dante Alighieri, is ...
The name “Latini” has long been synonymous with traditional Tuscan cooking in Florence. For more than a century, four generations of the Latini family have nurtured and championed the best ...
The rich and beautiful of Italy’s fashion world, including Diego Della Valle, Nina Testa Fuerstenberg, Matteo Marzotto and Lapo Elkann, attended the funeral of Vogue Italia editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani at ...
You are approaching the Russian church when you glimpse one central onion-shaped dome and four smaller ones with turquoise, green and white majolica.
Every year, on December 8, a holiday for the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, celebrations in piazza Duomo officially begin the festive season in Florence. The mayor, Dario Nardella, ...
Eminent Italian Renaissance scholar, author and professor of art history Frederick Hartt visited Florence many times during his life, but on two particular occasions he came to help the city ...
Opera tenor Andrea Bocelli is a global superstar who today would rank high up in any list of famous living Italians. As classical music’s top-selling artist, with over 80 million ...
Foppish dandy Eustace Tilley, with his exaggerated top hat, morning coat and high-collared shirt who scrutinises a pretty butterfly through his monocle, has been the mascot of The New Yorker ...
On June 2, 2016, Italy celebrates the birth of the Italian Republic seven decades ago. After 85 years under the Savoy monarchy, which had supported Mussolini’s fascist regime that led ...
If there is an incongruous monument anywhere in Florence, it is the grandiose and cloyingly ornate neoclassic arch that stands not quite in the middle of piazza della Libertà. Based ...
A short street named for Italian World War I patriot Cesare Battisti runs between two of the most important piazze in Florence, San Marco and Santissima Annunziata. Most of us ...
After four years in the fashion wilderness, designer John Galliano finally returned to the catwalks, first in London and then in Paris. Formerly head designer for Christian Dior, in 2011 ...
The clock above the main door inside the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, or the Duomo, as it is better known in Florence, is the only one of its ...
Every gem has its own history, but some have a fascinating story, often involving mystery and mayhem. This is certainly true of a diamond that found its way to Europe in the 15th century. Of Indian origin, the very large almond-shaped stone was pale yellow with hints of green.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bagni di Lucca, a spa town not far from Lucca, was much loved by foreigners, some of whom were passing through, while others settled there permanently. The English Cemetery there holds the remains of many interesting and illustrious expats. If you go, look
According to John Mason Neale’s Christmas hymn of 1853, when the good King Wenceslas rushed out with his servant to assist a poor man gathering fuel in the freezing winter weather, it was on the Feast of Stephen. In many continental European countries, including Italy, this holy figure
In May 2015, using the Italian verb rottamare (‘to scrap’)—a catchphrase that Matteo Renzi used in his election campaign to indicate it was time for the old guard of politicians to make way for the new—Oscar Farinetti, founder and owner of the up-market
There are few places in the world where you can drive, ride your bike or walk through what was once the sixteenth-century portal of a grand basilica, but you can in Florence. Coming on foot from the city centre, on nearing the end of borgo degli Albizi, you arrive
On July 20, 2015, 80-year-old Italian avant-garde fashion designer Elio Fiorucci died at his home in Milan. After a funeral at Milan’s basilica of San Carlo, a stone’s throw from his historic shop near piazza San Babila, his remains were interred at the
Tucked away in the heart of Florence, in the area once known as the Campuccio, running from via del Campuccio and piazza Tasso to via dei Serragli, is a wall that incorporates the remnants of the fortifications built by Cosimo I in 1544 to defend Florence against attack from Siena.
For German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Italian dream did not end in the way it should have. On June 8, 1768, while returning to Rome from a trip to Munich and Vienna, where the Empress Maria Theresa had honoured him, the 48-year-old stopped at
ph. Davide d’Amico Long considered by many consumers as, at best, cooking wine or grandma’s secret tipple, Marsala, the famous Sicilian fortified wine, is finally undergoing a ‘renaissance.’ Perfect for ...
If you have had the chance to pass through the Campo di Marte train station, you might have noticed an old factory nearby and wondered what’s made there and who’s behind it. The answer is Farmaceutica Menarini, the profits of which left Massimiliana Landini Aleotti and
For nearly 30 years, the block between piazza Ghiberti, via dell’Agnolo and via Ferdinando Paolieri in the heart of Florence’s Santa Croce quarter has been the site of a major centre of style and design: the architecture faculty of the University of Florence. Long known as
