Our favorite things in Florence and the rest of Italy.
If you or your friends and family are going to Italy this year. Or if you want to do some armchair traveling, you should pick up Italian Food Rules and Italian Life Rules that I wrote after living in Florence for fifteen years. I broke every one of the “rules” before I learned to live […]
Many visitors to Florence will either learn for the first time or will remember the Great Flood of Florence, which occurred on November 3, 1966, fifty years ago. Both the nonfiction and fiction lists are sure to include books about the flood and the response of the world to the catastrophe. Tuscan traveler has chosen
With so many of your friends and family planning to travel to Italy in 2016, this holiday season is the perfect time for the gift of a book or two that will enrich their experience. Or, perhaps, these suggestions will serve as a reminder that you meant to catch up on a little reading yourself
Florence’s cathedral museum, known officially as Museo dell’ Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore (Museum of the Works of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore), hosts the world’s largest collection of Florentine Medieval and Renaissance sculpture. It reopened to the public on October 29, just in time for Pope Francis’s visit, after an expansion
14,000 masterpieces were lost in Florence’s devastating 1966 Flood. 40 women artists, known as the “Flood Ladies”, answered the city’s call for new art. Their dream was to create a “modern-day Uffizi” and catapult Florence into the twentieth-century… This did not happen. Florence still lives in the past and the artworks displayed in the city
Susan Van Allen probably never sleeps. She has written three interesting books that are must-reads especially women traveling to Italy. Her travel stories have been published in many media outlets, including National Public Radio, Town & Country, AFAR, Chicago Daily Herald, several Travelers Tales anthologies, and CNN.com. She makes presentations about Italian travel at such venues
The best bookstore for visitors to Florence, the Paperback Exchange, just got a fascinating new book. The title tells it all—My Life as a Street Painter in Florence, Italy by Kelly Borsheim—and for any visitor to the Renaissance City it sheds light on a little-known artistic lifestyle, that of the madonnari, those who work with
Pittura per l’eternità (painting for eternity”) is what painter Domenico Ghirlandaio deemed the art of Pietre Dure in the 15th century. Polychrome hardstone inlay uses delicately thin slices of highly polished colored stones that are cut and fitted together to create images; assembled so precisely that the contact between each section is practically invisible. Semi-precious stones
My friend Nancy tries to get to Florence each year. While there she haunts the museums and the churches. When she goes home, does she take fine leather, golden bracelets, and marbleized paper? No, she carries a few tubes of toothpaste, a couple of bars of soap and a bag of Mattei brutti ma buoni.
The Book British-born John Hooper took on the almost impossible task of explaining to the outside world what makes the Italians so unique. Hooper was not living under the Tuscan sun for the last fifteen years, but was reporting from Rome, so his new book, simply entitled The Italians, isn’t a view full of good