A few miles from the coast of Romagna, there lies a truly enchanting place.
 
If you leave the glimmering shoreline and venture a little way inland, in the direction of Montefeltro, a thousand surprises await you. Crests and drops, tight bends, often challengingly steep slopes, and woodland that alternates with the arable and villages. We are up in the Conca valley, which starts between the coastal towns of Cattolica and Misano and runs to the ancient walls of the Montefiore fortress, an immense structure that ...

At Tivoli, the ancient Romans must have been very happy indeed. A modest altitude and the fresh waters of the Aniene river made it a place of delicious tranquillity. And today, people visit Tivoli primarily to see the work of one of the greatest Roman emperors – one of the harshest when the need arose, but also one of the most cultured, sensitive, emotional and inspired. 

Hadrian essentially intended Tivoli as a love nest, as we know from Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), which ranks ...

It goes back a thousand years, Finale Emilia, and it has been a bordertown for every one of them. Today it divides the province of Modena from the province of Ferrara, and the local accent – with consonants slightly jagged and abuzz – reflects the influence of both neighbours. In centuries past, it marked the boundary between the Papal States and the Duchy of Modena, though this political iron curtain was belied by the open, sprawling landscape.
With three canals and eight bridges, ...

Without a doubt, pigeon is one of those animals that provokes the fiercest culinary debate. Some love it, some hate it; some do it rare, some well done. There isn’t a single young chef who doesn’t serve it in little parcels, which in the end adds up to about 50 grams of actual meat. But it does have a firm foothold in the more “traditional” restaurants and the old-school cooking methods: spit-roasted, stewed, casseroled, or even in clay pots. Anyway, you get the point. The pigeon question is a serious ...

There’s always someone who has discovered some long-forgotten cheese recipe; someone else who has ground a type of grain that no one has grown for decades; someone else who is making wine along ancient techniques. Tradition or innovation? Ah, give me a break. These are just today’s little culinary curiosities which, for better or worse, keep us bound to the past. But “in with the old” doesn’t always work: what our ancestors enjoyed isn’t guaranteed to please our ...