Italy
Pure Puccini: an opera lover’s melodramatic family history
Flamboyant theatrics were part of Michael Volpe’s life as CEO of Opera Holland Park. But those of his feuding Italian relatives rival anything seen on stage
Admit it – Italian food is rubbish
Every year I’m summoned to a gathering which I strive to avoid. My first cousin, who loves a boozy party,…
Giorgia Meloni’s opponents are becoming hysterical
Like drowning men clutching at straws, Giorgia Meloni’s opponents are trying ever more hopelessly to justify their claim that she is a…
My life of genteel poverty
Every year at the beginning of April, I tell myself I must top up my Isa before the 5 April…
Under the Italian sun, the insects are stirring
The sun was setting on the first day of spring and I felt unusually happy as I fed the donkey.…
Dangerous secrets: Verdigris, by Michele Mari, reviewed
A lonely teenager on holiday in Italy befriends his grandparents’ elderly gardener and slowly coaxes out his painful memories of betrayals and reprisals during the war
Lessons from Lampedusa
It is eight years now since The Spectator sent me to Lampedusa to see the boats coming in. That was…
Burgundian beneficence
Paris has enough great restaurants to maintain its claim to be the world capital of gastronomy. That said, Parisian residents…
A slice of Calabria – in London
The Romans wrote the history, or at least the myths. But long before Romulus murdered Remus, the Mediterranean – the…
Shell shock
Italy is under attack from a foreign crab
Tuscan favours
Some subjects invite an eternal recurrence. One such is Tuscany. The other day, I wrote about that glorious region: its…
Super Tuscans
In Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the hopes embodied in the title dissolve into grimness and black irony. It was all…
Tuscan chiaroscuro
A trio of formidable British women are enjoying peaceful retirement in Italy – until their idyll is disrupted by a series of unforeseen events
An eye for the absurd
Come for the satire, stay for the one-liners, and take succour from the hope Walter finds in a world where everyone needs an angel from time to time
Georgia Meloni’s first 100 days have proved her critics wrong
Macho Italy’s first woman prime minister Giorgia Meloni has now governed for 100 days and I cannot help but notice…
Portrait of the week
Home Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented a far-reaching ‘fiscal event’ (ineligible to be called a Budget), said…
Giorgia Meloni can’t afford to fight the EU
Ravenna, Italy The victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy with ahuge majority of seats in parliament has prompted the expected…
Will Meloni be able to govern Italy?
Mario Draghi’s national unity government lost badly in yesterday’s Italian election – worse even than the polls predicted. Fratelli d’Italia,…
Second chances
To reject ‘in rainy middle age the poignant emotions that belonged to youth and Italy’ is the lesson learned by…
