To celebrate the mushrooming number of bed and breakfast acommodations in Italy, thousands of B&B owners are offering a free one-night stay on March 3.
It’s called B&B Day but guests get a to spend the night gratis at establishments throughout the Bel Paese, from Florence to Lipari.
One catch: you do have to book at least one other night but the celebration falls on a Saturday, so think of it as a half-price weekend.
For more info: http://www.bbday.it/english/
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 cool lick of savory gelato they held a contest for the best new flavors. Seven international teams – Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain and the U.S. — participated in this piquant cook-out. Continue reading
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 Kyra, a Lara Croft lookalike. Her creator, artist Mario Calamita, takes home €5,000 and various sponsorships. The digital babes are also available in a calendar.
The third edition of Miss Digital featured contestants — many of them designed by women — from Germany, Australia, Israel, Canda, the U.S, Poland and Norway.
Continue reading
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 Ivy Oxford features a “parachute cord” to pull in case of emergency.
It sets off 130-decibel alarm, one notch above the world’s loudest screamer and the threshold for pain. If that’s not enough to get rid of any annoyance that comes your way, the jacket also comes equipped with pepper spray in a hidden pocket. Consider yourself warned.
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 it was healthy enough to loan for an exhibit in Beijing when Cosentino stumbled on the idea of using “sonic fingerprinting” to help end Italy’s ongoing problem with faked and stolen artwork.
“We started joking about how (the urn) might come back from China cloned,” said Pellegrino, who works with the former seismologist much as a physician might with an X-ray expert. “That was when Cosentino realized the analysis could serve another purpose.” Full story at wired.
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 Stradivari crafted. Continue reading
Five small letters are all you need, according to a poll on the favorite words of Italians. “Amore” or love ranked ranked top for 22% of Bel Paese residents, nearly three times as popular as “mamma” followed by “pace” (peace) and “libertà” (freedom). Full results of the poll from think-tank Eurisko, commissioned by the Dante Aligheri society, have not yet been released.
Victor, a British transplant here in Milan, was recently ordered by his Italian dentist to buy a “bocchino.”
You’re not sure what that is? Well, you’re not alone: he wasn’t sure either. (It’s a good thing, too, because the word is also slang for “blow job.”)
Prescribed fabulousness.
After a grueling cleaning session with a material that smelled and tasted suspiciously like lemon Ajax, the dentist had no doubts. Victor must get himself this “bocchino” immediately. Slightly alarmed, he asked the dentist where to buy one.
“Oh, right. Just go to any tobacconist,” il dentista replied. “Shouldn’t cost you more than five euro.”
Completely baffled, Victor stopped at a café with the “T” symbol front and inquired about this mystery tooth-saving device.
“The guy looked at me for a second,” Victor recounted. “Then put a few cigarette holders on the counter. I went for a black-and-gold one. ”
Makes perfect sense. Victor is a smoker. His dentist understands that it is unlikely that Victor will actually stop smoking, so he orders him to use a cigarette holder that will stain his teeth less.
Victor, amused at what he describes as “prescribed fabulousness,” is perhaps puffing a bit less these days, if only because huddling outside for a ciggy break at work it is just, uh, slightly affected – when you use a holder.
This reminds me of the first dentist I ever went to in Italy. Limping by on a stolen bike trade and a sporadic gig selling leather backpacks at the San Lorenzo market in Florence, my dentist visits lagged behind the prescribed every six months. (I’d done better with writing semi-regular aerograms to my grandmother – you can’t manage everything.)
Expecting the worst, I was surprised when the dentist said there was nothing to worry about, it was likely that I’d make it to my 80s with the original set.
His only recommendation? Floss once a week.
“Once a week? You mean, once every SEVEN days?” This went against every law of good American dentistry. Maybe I hadn’t heard right.
“Once a week, yes,” was the somewhat impatient reply.
“Isn’t that supposed to be once every 24 hours?” I insisted.
“Sure, except you’ll never floss every single day. But you’ll remember to do it once a week, right?”
He may just be the wisest man to ever probe a molar. Dentists (and doctors, too, at least in my experience) are a lot more laid back in Italy. They don’t pronounce diktats you’re unlikely to follow and then feel guilty about. Sensitive gauges of human nature, they offer advice that you’re likely to take. They’re on your side. The tell it like it is.
Sure, Italians aren’t exactly known for sporting brilliant pearly whites, but the general philosophy must work or Italians wouldn’t live to be one of the oldest populations on the planet.
Anyway, it’s a lot less hypocritical than ending dental check-ups with a lolly.
Trains in Italy still don’t run on time, but at least passengers have real-time information about how late they are.Now the nation’s rail and telecommunications providers are hoping to rival that trick — not by making the trains actually run on time, but by telling frustrated travelers how late they will be.
Via internet, cell phone or handheld, a new service from the state railways called ViaggiaTreno (“train trip”) lets travelers check delays on their routes.
“Even if the system were perfect, things happen and we want to provide passengers the most accurate information possible,” said Paolo Russo, a Trenitalia representative. Read the full story by Nicole Martinelli on wired.
Sooner or later, it had to happen: a reality show on a Catholic TV network.
In Italy’s “The Mooch” (lo scroccone), the host gets himself invited to a family dinner.
The moocher in question is Danny Milano, a DJ with a Pee-Wee Herman flattop and nose stud, who created the program. Now in its third season, this new kind of dinner theater airs on Telechiara, a 15-year-old network run by the Bishop’s office of the Triveneto region, the Northeast of Italy. Continue reading
