I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
Holy Cannoli, where Nutella really comes from
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I'm in Turin this month. Twenty minutes down the road sits Alba, a small town in the Langhe hills. Vineyards, fog, hazelnut trees. Nothing that looks like history. This is where Nutella was born. Not in a lab. In a pastry shop. After the war, cocoa was scarce and expensive. Most chocolatiers complained about what they had lost. Pietro Ferrero looked instead at what Piedmont still had under its nose: hazelnuts. Tons of them, growing in the hills outside his door. So he stretched the little cocoa he had with ground hazelnuts and made a loaf you could slice onto bread. He called it Giandujot. People bought it. His son made it spreadable. In 1964 it became Nutella. Here is the part I love. A man with no cocoa, in a foggy town no one had heard of, built something that now sits in kitchens on every continent. He never had more. He had hazelnuts and a problem. Why am I telling you this. Because the best of Italy was never about having more. It was about doing something true with what sits right in front of you. The hazelnut in the hill. The nonna's recipe. The town no one outside Italy can pronounce. Your Italy works the same way. Small, specific, yours. And it travels much further than you think. Un abbraccio, |
Fabiana Stringa
I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
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For a hundred years, the world had one dream with a passport. Arrive in America with nothing. Build everything. I think that dream has quietly retired. No farewell party, no gold watch. It just stopped showing up to work. And while everyone was looking west, something older kept humming in the background. In Turin, an entire hub of designers and makers is reinventing what a factory even means. The city that built cars for the world now builds ideas with the same hands. In Cremona, violin...