Milan designer Anna Lodi has crafted a tortellini-shaped jewelry line. She made the pasta-shaped earrings and pins from glass mosaic — interestingly called “pasta vetro” in Italian. Lodi says each piece is made by hand in the same way the tortellini that ends up on your plate does, so all are unique. While Lodi’s [...]
To combat food fraud, Italians have developed new laser techniques to determine whether that extra virgin olive oil is really as pure as the label says. Researchers at Florence’s Institute of Applied Physics teamed up with the photonics researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel to devise a series of high-tech tools that can also be applied [...]
Police in Italy arrested a 60-year-old Naples man for a concoction he made out of marijuana. They called his invention “marjiuancello,” in honor of the lemon liqueur limoncello commonly found there. Manlio Chianchiano had a home cannabis garden of 10 plants that he grew with the idea of turning his home distillery into something special. [...]
25 years ago, Italian families ate more meat, drank more wine but put less fish and pasta on the table. La famiglia also usually shopped in small local stores — there were five times fewer supermarkets — and 85% of the time ate at home. These are some of the changes tracked in a study [...]
Top-notch Italian wine maker Allegrini will offer a bottle of wine (to be drunk at a later date) to the driver offering to get friends who have imbibed home. The designated driver promotion doesn’t include the vineyard’s most expensive wines, but the Allegrini red called Palazzo della Torre (a “baby Amarone“), a well-respected nectar of [...]
Just got the first shipment from Cascina Cornale, a farmer’s coop based in Piedmont that delivers weekly to northern Italian regions, including Val d’Aosta, Piedmont, Lombardy and parts of Liguria, Tuscany and the Veneto. A friend of mine swears by it, otherwise it was the kind of good idea that given Italian execution would’ve stayed [...]
Times may change but over half of all Italians still break bread together on long, big Sunday lunches. Though brunch has made headway in Italy recently, especially in cities and among young people, 52% of the 1,834 families polled by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina (Academy of Italian Cuisine) still follow the Sunday lunch tradition. [...]
Italian researchers nosing around have discovered traces of DNA from Chinese truffles mingled with prestigious, costly local black truffles. The trouble with truffle intermingling? Scientists say it is one reason, along with environmental changes, that the prized tuber has become even more scarce in recent seasons. Truffle cousins from Asia sprung up in European markets [...]
Italian scientists are now defending the national dish, plagued by price hikes and cut by those counting calories, as a mood improver. “Pasta contains tryptophan, an amino acid that turns into serotonin, the so-called hormone of happiness,” said Mauro Defendente Febbrari, an expert in metabolic diseases. “That is why eating pasta gives you a feeling [...]
Not to be outdone by New York, a restaurant in Italy’s fashion capital has opted to equip the menu with calorie counts. The American initiative, already weighed down by an appeal, would only cover restaurant chains. But the Ristorante Romani, which voluntarily decided to list just how many calories the risotto alla milanese packs is [...]
