“What do you know about a field of wheat, a poem of profane love, or the fear of being taken by the hand. What do you know?” These wonderful lyrics from the song “Pensieri e parole”, crafted by the great wordsmiths Lucio Battisti and Mogol, paint us a tender, loving picture of the summer fields, yellow with wheat. Whatever the cereal being grown, arable fields are one of the defining features of the Italian countryside. The crops grow, ripen, are harvested and threshed (now, ...

We sometimes forget how recent a thing “modern” Italy is. We’re often so overwhelmed by the extraordinary inheritance of natural and cultural beauty that has come down to us, we forget that little more than fifty years ago Italy was what we would now call a “developing country”. And that only because political correctness frowns upon such discriminatory terms as the “Third World”. In the Italy of the 1950s, hunger, real hunger, was a common reality for a great ...