Italy Blog

Custom Teaser:  Turin’s National Museum of Cinema is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Fellini’s masterpiece with a special exhibition that recreates the spirit both the film and the times, prompting Claire Provost to reflect on the emptiness that lay behind the sensuous Roman nights Words by Carla Passino Like every masterpiece, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (“The Sweet Life”) is the ongoing subject of critique, praise, study, and obsession. But unlike most, La Dolce Vita is also an enduring centrepiece in the world’s imagination of Italy at its best and its worst, its most central and its most fleeting

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Fifty years of La Dolce Vita

Custom Teaser:  Luisa Pastore tracks down the truth behind the world’s most popular saint Words and Pictures by Luisa Pastore Type “Saint Valentine” into any internet search engine, and amongst the thousands of websites selling flowers, chocolates and greetings cards, you’ll find just a handful dedicated to the saint himself.

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San Valentino

The Mayor of Verona , Flavio Tosi , has given up his campaign to keep the Casa di Giulietta [Juliet’s House] supposedly the home of the Capulets in Shakespeare’s most famous love tragedy, free of graffiti.

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Love Art

The staff at Pompeii pulled out all the stops when Leonardo DiCaprio arrived there at midday on Sunday with his mother, girlfriend Bar Refaeli, about eight other friends and his bodyguards.

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Lenny up Pompeii

The video game “ Dante’s Inferno ” [Electronic Arts] which has already generated 10,000 web pages and has a following of 20,000 fans on facebook, has been released in Italy. “Blood and gore, intense violence, nudity and sexual content”, warns the game’s website encouragingly.

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The hell of a game

If you have ever visited Siena , you may have wondered why the city has so many fountains.

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New water museum in Siena

Italy has witnessed a fair number of gender scandals lately and now the name of its greatest artist may be added to the statistics.

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Does Da Vinci have the last laugh?

The oldest working opera house in Europe, the San Carlo Theatre in Naples , is to reopen on Wednesday following a two-year restoration project involving three hundred workers and an expenditure of 67 million euros [£58 m / $94.5 m].

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The San Carlo – the hope of a city

If you are in Florence or Milan this week, you still have a chance to catch these.

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Two unusual exhibitions

In this photo: Augustus of Prima Porta, statue of the emperor Augustus in Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican, Rome.

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Priceless statue found on Naples housing estate