In a country where seasonal foods are venerated on Italian tables as if beatified saints, one could say that the sagra, or food festival, is a sort of gastronomical religious holiday. Throughout Italy, every month of every season has something new to table, and summer is perhaps the sagra's
It's been said time and time again: Florence is changing. Whether or not it be with the times, modernity is beginning to replace museum visits with Google street views, gelato with Ben & Jerry's, and, sadly, artisanal handicrafts with cost-friendlier, foreign-made goods. Luckily, there is an
On March 21, the British Embassy in Rome announced that the British Consulate in Florence, after a presence in the city lasting over half a millennium, will close. Effective on December 31, 2011, British consular services for Northern Italy, including Florence, will be available through the British Consulate General in
The ‘angry young men' on exhibit at Palazzo Strozzi might just have easily been called the ‘troubled young men,' for each had his share of eccentricities and issues. Mirò often resorted to anorexia for inspiration. He would lie in bed for days, without eating, sketching the shapes
Who were the key figures in forging unity Italy 150 years ago? Some of them were widely known in the Risorgimento, but the roles that others played have emerged over time. Women hid rebels, nursed wounds, and raised funds for the cause. Here, meet some of the men and women
Florence has over a thousand tabernacles, more than any other city in Europe. Of course, locating them all is a daunting task. To get you started, we have put together this (very) short list of major tabernacles in Florence's historic center. If organized tours are not your thing, meander
We know you've been wondering. And, until a short telephone call ago, we, too, had been feeling eerily connected to Hitchcock's film, The Birds. There's just something about animals in mass that gives us the heebie-jeebies. One mouse? Marketable. A million mice? Massive cardiac infarction. So,
The TF staff was recently discussing some of the most common truisms about Italy, Tuscany and Florence. After five years of print, we've pretty much heard and said it all. However, there are a few things about Italy and Tuscany that never seem to get old. And that started
Happy New Year, readers! If you don’t already have a resolution for 2011, a good one would be to hit the town more often. And to make it easier to ...
‘Tis the season, so they say. Deck the halls! It’s likely that whoever called for Christmas cheer and trimmings in the English carols had never seen an Italian Christmas. If ...
He is a familiar face in a bustling, well-to-do area of Florence; the original ‘angel of beauty' who, without the support of any institutional construct, ‘adopted' the passageway under the train tracks and expelled the drug dealers and criminals who had long ruled the underground alley.
“Three years ago, I lugged a suitcase the size of a Fiat 500 up three flights of stone stairs to move into my host family’s apartment; it was the ...
Federico Frediani can best be described as an art diplomat. A Florentine lawyer by profession, counting the Italian Consulate in Los Angeles and a selection of American universities in Florence among his clients, his interests and passion for both his hometown and Southern California have led him to hold many
Born in the United States, Monsignor Timothy Verdon has no single job description. He is an art historian with a Ph.D. from Yale University, a priest in Florence, director of the Diocesan Office for Catechesis Through Art, the author of books and articles on sacred art, was a consultant
His iconic homes took the U.S. architectural world by storm in the early twentieth century. Considered the ‘best American Architect of all time' by the American Institute of Architects, Frank Lloyd Wright is the original ‘household name,' known worldwide for the stunning, uniquely organic design he pioneered.
The connection between an image and the unconscious, the evocation of emotions and the very essence of being through symbolic form: these are the aims of metaphysical art, the great impetus to the ‘Copernican revolution' in the contemporary art of the twentieth century. And while surrealism and Dada had