Villa Necchi Campiglio is a stupendous piece of aristocratic architecture, a piece of pure bourgeois elegance in the heart of Milan. To understand how it was born, we need to go back a bit in time.
It was a cold winter evening in 1931, and the two Necchi sisters, Nedda and Gigina, together with Gigina’s young medic husband Angelo Campiglio, were returning to their hometown of Pavia after a night at La Scala. They got lost outside the old city walls, near Milan’s orchards, where they were awaiting the ...

On the night of San Silvestro, known to most of the world as New Year’s Eve, it’s an Italian tradition that the table spread includes oysters. And you might not know it, but these prized molluscs were not only known and loved back in prehistoric times; they have long been a fundamental element of the Mediterranean diet, and indeed of coastal diets the world over, in Asia especially.

The famous archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, known to the world as the unearther of Troy, found some enormous piles of ...

The name of Maranello is inextricably, inevitably bound up with the name (and the myth) of Enzo Ferrari and the Ferrari car company, which was founded almost a hundred years ago in 1929, and its symbol of the rampant horse.

From behind his intriguing and enigmatic dark glasses, Ferrari explained the origin of his company’s coat-of-arms: “In 1923 I won the first Savio circuit, which was run in Ravenna, and there I met Enrico Baracca, father of our hero Francesco. He introduced me to his wife, the ...

Gioacchino Rossini was a rock star before the term existed. As a composer, he was king of the hill in the early nineteenth century; the world lay at his feet. Then, after a couple of decades of frenetic activity, he more or less completely vanished from the scene.

This article isn’t really the place to discuss Rossini’s merits as a composer and an artist – I’m not musically qualified to do so. But the historical sources tell us that this young composer burst ...

Via del Corso – or more simply, “il corso” – is one of Florence’s oldest streets, dating back to the days of ancient Roman Florentia. It owes its name to a riderless horse race that was run around the mid-nineteenth century, between the stunning churches and palazzos that flank it on either side. One of the latter is Palazzo Portinari Salviati.

Having remained closed to the public for centuries, the Palazzo reopened in 2022, ...