Underbelly

Tyler rolls his eyes at an NYT account of prodigal misspending at the Italian Tourist Board, particularly in respect to the South and Sic...

David Gilmour is the author of one of my favorite short biographies (of Giuseppe di Lampadusa, author of  The  Leopard ) and of several oth...

Before this weekend, I knew enough about European history to know that Italy was/is "a geographical expression,"--a cut-and-paste...

Everyone agrees that Venice is different from anywhere else. Visitors immediately see that it has no hills and that its streets are full o...

Mr. and Mrs. Buce enjoyed a Netflix screening last night of Fellini's Amarcord -- "I Remember" in the dialect of Rimini, Fel...

I'll bet we see them both in Arts and Letters Daily : two densely detailed obituaries of Giulio Andreotti, who apparently did not mind ...

Between 1950 and 2005 the Italian countryside lost to asphalt and concrete a total of 3.66 million hectares, a figure larger than the co...

The New York Times is all in a twist over whether it is really “Italian” food in Italy if the chef is from North Africa ( link ). Isn’...

In Gerrmany, they say, the law is a command to be obeyed. In Italy, it's a problem to be solved ( link ): ...

Revere at Effect Measure undertakes to defend Public TB Case No. 1 ( link ): According to him -- and he says he has it on tape -- he was ...

Yesterday I linked (via Michael Froomkin) to this wonderful story about the long-forgotten time when France thought it a cool idea to merg...