It’s an image beloved of the sots and the dipsos, a story of being able to drink unlimited quantities of wine to your heart’s content. It’s a way of consuming wine that runs counter to the ethos of responsible drinking that we embrace and encourage. So why is it that the idea of wine gushing from a fountain still bewitches our collective imagination?

We can go back to the myths of abundance, to Boccaccio’s imaginary town of Bengodi or Collodi’s creation, the town of Balocchi. Italy has a ...

Luca is the new film from Disney-Pixar, released in June. It’s the work of Genoese director Enrico Casarosa, and the last thing it needs is more publicity. Some might sneer at the paragraphs that we’ve dedicated to it here.

But this wonderful animated cartoon touches on a theme very close to our hearts at “Vivere di Gusto”, and it does it with a charming poetic grace. It looks at us Italians and at a certain way of being through the eyes of someone apparently ...

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 ...