While many Italian gelaterias are closed for the winter, ice cream makers here are testing new flavors. What’s hot? If you believe the news coming from Sigep, the gelato, chocolate and bread fair in seaside resort Rimini, sweet is out. Salty is hot. Organizers of the fair are so convinced that people will want a [...]
Black Eve has all her pixels in the right place. This virtual Italian beauty, with cropped hair and cyberarms, was recently crowned Miss Digital. Her hobbies? Forget volunteering at the hospital and ballet: Eve is into martial arts, quantum computing and videogames. A jury of three experts and some 30,000 fans chose Eve over runner-up [...]
Next time someone tries to steal your man, pull a cord inside his jacket and send the interloper packing. Designed for increasingly paranoid city dwellers, it’s easy to imagine other uses for a stylish “Defence Jacket” presented at Italian fashion fair Pitti Immagine this week. This metrosexual-worthy waterproof silver number with a fur collar by [...]
A near-perfect copy of a precious funeral urn called the Cratere dei Niobidi sits in an Italian cafe close to the University of Palermo. Restorer Lorella Pellegrino spied it there one morning before meeting with professor Pietro Cosentino, a geophysicist, to analyze the actual fifth-century-B.C. artifact. They were examining the real urn to see if [...]
Centuries after his death, Antonio Stradivari’s violins still define excellence in the musical world. What about the instrument he never made? Sifting through some papers at the Stradivari museum in Cremona about three years ago, professor Andrea Mosconi came across the maestro’s sketches for a viol (aka viola da gamba), unlike any of the ones [...]
