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.
Italy doesn’t hold funerals for this
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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 in Italy as endangered. Not accents. Languages. Lombard. Romagnol. Piedmontese, the old language of the streets I now walk every day in Turin. Each one carries what standard Italian never bothered to write down. Proverbs. Lullabies. The private vocabulary of a trade, the words a cheesemaker or a weaver uses that exist nowhere else. When I say I’m la Capitana, people picture a beautiful year in Italy. And it is. But here’s the part I rarely say out loud. Every person I bring into Italian life is a vote. A vote for the woman who still weaves. For the man who still speaks Piedmontese to the people who walk into his shop. For the village that still has a reason to keep its door open. You’re not buying an experience. You’re keeping something alive by showing up, paying fairly, and listening. That’s the responsibility I carry. Every introduction I make carries that weight. Belonging works both ways. Italy makes room for you. You help Italy keep its rooms. Un abbraccio, Is there a word from your grandparents’ language that nobody in your family says anymore? |
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.
Look closely at yin and yang. Black and white, curled around each other. Most people stop there. But there’s a detail that changes everything: a small white dot inside the black half. A small black dot inside the white. Each one carries a trace of the other. Always. I call what I do Italian Taoism. I was born in Genoa, on the same Ligurian coast as Portofino and Cinque Terre. Then I spent a decade across three continents. None of those places erased Genoa. Genoa didn’t erase them either. They...
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...
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...