Sometimes, when you leave Amalfi, you’re groggy from the place’s mesmerizing beauty. It’s a beauty that fills you, delights you, almost overflows you as you drive west towards the end of the Sorrento peninsular, turning the steering wheel through what seems like thousands of bends. And you’re not ready to see something still more astonishing, something so intoxicating that there’s nothing to do save surrender and look at it.

You reach a bridge, standing 100 feet high, the launchpad for ...

In the run up to the 23rd Olympic Games, the sports pages were awash with material that had little to do with sport itself. The pandemic, infection rates, the costs involved, the tepidness of its Japanese hosts, and the fact that the Games are taking place behind closed doors. Nevertheless, the event presents a vision of a planet in which few if any nations are unwelcome. There are so many layers to the Olympics, the most emotive being the competition of human beings pushed to their limits. But there are also vast economic ...

When Giacomo Leopardi and his friend Antonio Ranieri (whom he had met in Florence) arrived in Naples in 1833, Leopardi was a prematurely-aged, 35-year-old hunchback, half blind and blighted by constant physical ailments. One of modern medicine’s most credited theories is that the poet from Recanati suffered from ankylosing spondylitis at a young age: this serious degenerative disease began to manifest itself when he was around 16, in the middle of his years of “feverish, desperate study”. His family palazzo ...

Step inside the roofless nave, do a complete turn, and you might think yourself in a monster movie, where the protagonists – who are probably developing feelings for each other – find themselves in the skeletal belly of a vast prehistoric creature, its ribs and spine plunging into the ground. That’s what the Abbey of San Galgano is like, one of the most frequently photographed monuments in Italy, and indeed in the world. Yet even without the cameras, it’s one of the most vivid images in our collective ...

Italy is a country that has invented more than its fair share of culinary traditions, both genuine and bowdlerized. It could hardly be otherwise, when you consider its enormously rich, broad and popular spread. The endless local idiosyncrasies are capable of stirring fervent loyalty and bitter arguments; they also mean that one is always treading on shaky ground, where inherited romantic certainties about food are guaranteed to crumble in the face of actual historical probing.

Take pizza, for instance. We can ...