Many things happened in 1905. Las Vegas was founded, the Transiberian Express opened, and Albert Einstein published the first fruits of his Theory of Relativity. And in its small way, something epic also happened in Cortina: four young men launched some strange, sled-like vehicles down the road towards Pocol, thus writing the first known page in the history of winter sports in Cortina d’Ampezza, and possibly in all Italy.

Thanks to the torturous history of the place, and the ...

Pioppi, Pollica. Not far from Paestum, Velia, Palinuro and Salerno. It was late August 2010, the end of a hot but not oppressively hot summer, which like every year was sparkling with the miraculous blue of the Cilento sea. Tourists swam with locals, and never too many, for here tourism has always taken its most civilized, unobtrusive form. Local shops sell strips of buffalo mozzarella, wrapped in myrtle leaves; crateloads of flaming Piennolo tomatoes, and bottles of Pisciotto olive oil. ...

There’s an Italian saying, del maiale non si butta via niente – “throw away no part of the pig”. But anyone passing through Mortara might be forgiven for thinking that the proverb actually talks about not the pig but the goose; for here, as in many other parts of Italy, the webbed foot is almost as highly prized as the cleft hoof. History teaches us that every part of the pig can be eaten; nothing, after the slaughter, should go to waste. If we’re going to kill it, we ...

Borderlands always exert a special charm over the traveller. They pique our curiosity; they make us want to understand the historical reasons behind the present divisions, which are often the concrete results of circumstances very different in colour, but usually all savouring of a similar thing.

Straddling our own borders, in a West-East Berlin kind of way, is Gorizia. There is very little that’s consistent across the urban landscape here, only the names on the street signs and ...

In the Italian tongue, everything has a gender, either masculine or feminine. And it’s often the case that, when it comes to determining what’s masculine and what’s feminine, the codified national language tends to follow the local dialects whence it sprang. The river Brenta, for example, is usually identified as the feminine "la Brenta", even though fiume (river) is masculine. So for the sake of custom, we’ll stick to "la" rather than “il” Brenta, as we follow its ...