In memory and honor of my old friend Nini Vaccarella who passed away on 23 September 2021. In 2015, in May, I was in Palermo to meet a few friends and organise a shipment from the Madonie. I invited my friends to dinner in Porticello, an old fishing village near Bagheria, and we met at […]
I went to Libya several times, but the first time was in the late seventies. King Idris Al Senussi, dethroned by a coup d’état of Captain Gaddafi about ten years earlier, was living in exile in Cairo, the Italians were driven away and the country was in a rather delicate social and political status. But […]
18 July 1935 Despite the weather, the rain and the grey skies – almost as a bad omen – were the backdrop of the upcoming German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring. More than 300,000 spectators and the highest authorities of the Reich, including the Führer, crowded the grandstands and edges of the racetrack under thousands […]
I travelled here and there; sette paia di scarpe ho consumate, di tutto ferro per voi ritrovare (Carducci, “I Cipressi”). Yes, I traveled all over and searched here and there; among an infinite number of shops and Brocante wineries everywhere, amid dust and dirt, risking all sorts of infection more than flea bites; I searched […]
Ah! … randomly looking at old photographs. Sometimes, in a moment, you find yourself in a past that was not forgotten, but set aside and far away, yet able to awaken smiles and enthusiasm again. Thirty-four years have passed, I just counted them. One morning, Mimmo Magro, a dear friend who was then Director of […]
The watercolour paintings of Roesler Franz tell the story of a nineteenth-century Rome, ancient, romantic and certainly disappeared, “memories of a passing era”, evidence of what it “was” and that preceded the great radical changes imposed by a new urban structure, rational, social and modern. In 1870, in addition to Raffaele Cadorna’s Bersaglieri and Second […]
In the fifties, the world was re-emerging from the senseless and horrendous conflict that almost destroyed it and life resumed with enthusiasm but above all with tenacity and will not only thanks to the Marshall Plan but also to regained freedom and renewed optimism. Construction sites in Italy popped up everywhere. The bulldozers worked day […]
About 40 years ago, in the middle of the Tuscan countryside near Montalcino, the birth-town of the magnificent Brunello wine, I ended up by chance in a cave of sorts with a sign in front that said “workshop”. Inside, in the midst of filth, there was a little bit of everything: a disassembled old tractor, […]
More than 20 years ago, I spent an entire afternoon in what in the past was defined as the “Italian Eastern Africa”. Except I was not in Asmara or Addis Ababa but I was in Milan, near Piazza Cinque Giornate. I went to meet Gian Battista Guidotti, the true and only, Nuvolari’s co-pilot in the […]
(ANSA) – ROME, 26 JAN 2018 – Driving a sports car is good for one’s health because it gives drivers an adrenaline rush and ultimately rewards you emotionally just like it happens when riding a roller coaster. A Ford’s sponsored researched revealed this unexpected link between driving and theme parks. The study – the European […]