Not a list of the ten most beautiful places. Things about Italy that explain how it works โ usually starting from one detail nobody told you.
Emilia-Romagna ยท 6 min read
The dish you grew up with isn't served in the city it's named after. What Bologna eats instead, and the 1972 document that fixed the width of a noodle to a tenth of a millimetre.
Read it โLazio ยท 5 min read
Rome has around 2,500 free drinking fountains running day and night, and some of them are fed by a channel Agrippa finished two thousand years ago. How to use them, and why the water never stops.
Read it โVeneto ยท 6 min read
The city isn't built on rock or on islands in the way you'd assume. It's built on millions of alder trunks driven into the mud โ and the reason they've held for a thousand years is that they never rotted.
Read it โ