The other day I was waiting at a red light in Turin. Impatient. Counting the seconds. And I remembered something I’d read about The Italian Job. Not the 2003 remake. The original, 1969. Michael Caine, three Mini Coopers, and a gold heist in the middle of Turin. The screenwriter, Troy Kennedy Martin, moved the story here for one reason. At the time, Turin had one of the most advanced computerized traffic systems in Europe. Traffic lights run by a computer. In 1969, that sounded like science...
1 day ago • 1 min read
Late 1980s. A young Italian at university, Francesco Cirillo, can’t focus. He sits down with his books, and every few minutes his mind wanders off. So he grabs a kitchen timer. Shaped like a tomato. Un pomodoro. He sets it and makes himself one promise: until it rings, I do only this. Twenty-five minutes of attention. A short break. Repeat. After four rounds, a longer break. The Pomodoro Technique. It works because it doesn’t ask for willpower. It asks for a small, honest container. Your...
3 days ago • 1 min read
I like to think of myself as a chef. A good chef doesn’t start with the recipe. She starts with what’s on the counter. She picks it up. Smells it. Presses it with her thumb. A tomato in July and a tomato in November are not the same tomato, and pretending they are is how you ruin dinner. Italians have a phrase for this obsession: la materia prima. The raw material. Get that right and you barely need to do anything. Get it wrong and no sauce will save you. When a person sits in front of me, or...
6 days ago • 1 min read
“Leave that. It’s just a hobby. It won’t pay the bills.” Maybe you heard it at eight. Maybe at fifteen. You were drawing, or taking a radio apart, or singing into a hairbrush, or building whole cities out of cardboard. And you put it down. Today I’d like to destroy that sentence. Because in Italy, “just a hobby” is how a huge part of our heritage survived. Lace. Ceramics. Carved wood. Hand-bound books. Nobody protected them with a law first. Someone protected them with their hands, on a...
6 days ago • 1 min read
Italy doesn’t lose things with a funeral. It loses them on a Tuesday. A workshop doesn’t reopen after the summer. A nonna stops using a word because nobody around her understands it anymore. A recipe stays in a head instead of a notebook. Nobody announces it. One day it’s just gone. In 2014, Italy had about 1.77 million artisans. By 2024, 1.37 million. Four hundred thousand pairs of hands, gone in ten years. And then there are the words. World Heritage monitors count around thirty languages...
7 days ago • 1 min read
At the end of September, Turin turned its own center into a map of Italy. Terra Madre Salone del Gusto. Slow Food’s great gathering. After many years, it moved into the heart of the old city: Piazza San Carlo, Piazza Castello, Via Roma. And it was laid out by region. You could walk from Piedmont to Sardinia in twenty steps. Turn a corner, and you were in Calabria. That’s where I stopped. I bought an onion in agrodolce. Sweet, sour, and stubborn. It’s in my kitchen now and I use it with meat....
8 days ago • 1 min read
For twelve years I have been the one asking the questions. What did you notice. What made you laugh. What would you say differently tomorrow. My whole work lives inside the right question, asked to the right person, at the right moment. Last month the microphone turned around. My first podcast. Ever. And the host was eleven years old. His name is Leo. He has done more than a hundred and fifty interviews: founders, authors, billionaires, cancer survivors. His father rebuilt an entire company...
11 days ago • 1 min read
Italy will tax you at seven percent. Seven. For ten years. On everything that arrives from outside the country: your pension, your dividends, the rent from a house you kept. There are conditions. The pension has to come from abroad. You cannot have been a tax resident here in the last five years. And the town has to be in the south, in one of eight regions, and it has to be small. Until April the limit was twenty thousand people. Now it is thirty thousand, which quietly opened about eighty...
15 days ago • 1 min read
My friend Colleen sent me a video yesterday. I spilled my coffee laughing at the kitchen table. It is a sketch with Adam Sandler. He plays a guy from New Jersey (Romano Tours) who takes Americans to Italy. He looks into the camera and delivers the absolute truth about arriving in Italy. ll quote a few lines so you can laugh with me. If you are sad now, and get on a plane to Italy, then the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before. Just in a new place. We can provide you with a wine...
20 days ago • 1 min read