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.
You’ve known these four Italians since you were a kid
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Four "men". The first painted a smile so quietly haunting that people still line up by the thousands, every single day, just to stand in front of it for ninety seconds. The second carved a block of flawed marble, the one every other sculptor in Florence had rejected into a 17-foot man so perfect that grown adults weep when they round the corner and see him. The third taught bronze how to breathe. He made a boy with a slingshot look like he might actually turn his head and speak to you. The fourth painted rooms inside the Vatican with such grace that five centuries of artists have measured themselves against him and quietly lost. Leonardo. Michelangelo. Donatello. Raffaello. The titans of the Renaissance. The men whose hands rewired what human beings believed they were capable of. And you’ve known all four of them since you were six years old, sitting too close to the TV in your pajamas, eating cereal straight from the box on a Saturday morning. Holy Cannoli. Yes, I’m talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In 1984, two broke comic-book guys in New Hampshire needed four names for four turtles who knew karate and loved pizza. They could’ve called them anything. Mike, Joe, Steve, and Carl. They reached for the Italians. Not because it was funny (okay, partly because it was funny) but because some part of them knew those four names carry something. Mastery. Beauty. Genius. Fire. You hand a kid the name Leonardo and you’ve handed him five hundred years of “the best who ever did it,” whether he can spell it or not. That’s the strange and beautiful thing about Italian blood. It doesn’t stay put. It leaks into everything. Into cartoons and cereal commercials and the name on a pizza box and the name, maybe, somewhere a few branches up your own family tree. You don’t have to “earn” the Renaissance to belong to it. Some of you were born into it and just never got the keys. That’s the door I hold open. More on that soon. For now, go watch a Turtles rerun with zero guilt. You’re studying art history. Tell them La Capitana said so. A presto, Fabiana |
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.
I was in the supermarket last week, somewhere between the rice and the canned tomatoes. A man with a beard the size of a small forest stared back at me from a can of black beans. Bud Spencer. If you grew up anywhere near a television in the seventies, you know the face. Big hands. Slow walk. One flat punch on top of somebody's head and the fight was over. His real name was Carlo Pedersoli. Before the movies he was a swimmer, the first Italian to cover 100 meters freestyle in under a minute....
A few days ago I walked twice into the National Automobile Museum in Torino and lost six hours of my life. Zero regrets. Rows of cars lit like paintings. A Formula 1 car sitting at eye level, close enough that I could see the scratches on the nose cone. And there, smaller than you'd expect, a Vespa. The scooter that put a bankrupt postwar country back on two wheels because a plane engineer named Corradino D'Ascanio hated motorcycles and designed something a woman in a skirt could actually...
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...