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26/08/2026

100,000 candles. 17 performance points. No set route. Just a village in Lazio, lit from within.

This Saturday, August 29, Vallerano fills its lanes, squares, and gardens for the 19th edition of La Notte delle Candele, this year built around the theme of the four seasons. From 6 p.m. until late, visitors follow a voice, a light, or their own curiosity from one corner of the historic centre to the next.

The headline name is Eugenio Mastrandrea, known internationally from Netflix’s From Scratch opposite Zoe Saldaña and The Equalizer 3 with Denzel Washington, performing in Piazza Ospedale. Funk and blues, electronic psychedelia, world music played on instruments built from scrap, ska, disco, and a 10,000-candle tableau on Saint Francis fill the rest of the village.

An ice garden occupies the historic centre’s garden. A starry sky fills Via Cellari. The Dancing Seasons take shape in Via Guglielmo Marconi. Progetto SAI, Italy’s reception and integration network for refugees, is part of the programme.

“Events like this are wonderful and beneficial to everyone,” said Amy Siegal, a luxury travel advisor with VWT by Chase. “They benefit the town, introducing its traditions to new people, while keeping the rituals going.”

Tickets from 5 euro. Shuttle buses from outer car parks between 7 p.m. and 2 a.m.

Vallerano is in Tuscia, the Viterbo area north of Rome. For one night, the village itself is the stage.

By Hannah Brooks

Photo credits: ElisabettaCastiglioni

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25/08/2026

It opened in 1888. It closed on January 26 this year. On August 23, the town bought it back.

Bar Caffè Basile, the 138-year-old café on Piazza Cavour in Pietramontecorvino, Apulia, has reopened under a new name and a new model. Ce vedeme o’ cafè, a local dialect phrase meaning “we will see each other at the café,” is run not by a single owner but by a nonprofit association working with the municipality, on the model of France’s 1000 cafés initiative, created to fight social isolation by reopening bars in villages too small to attract a private buyer.

The marble counter stays. The wrought-iron chairs on the square stay. The shelves of secondhand books, the card tables, the Norman tower visible from the terrace. What changes is who signs the lease.

Pietramontecorvino sits on a rocky spur in the Monti Dauni, a medieval quarter cut into rock, listed among Italy’s most beautiful villages. It counts around 2,400 residents. Like hundreds of small Apulian towns, it has spent decades losing young people to Bari and Rome. A shuttered café rarely reopens once the last owner turns the key.

“The reopening goes far beyond simply reopening a historic bar,” said Maurizio Cortese, a Naples-based gastronomic consultant. “It demonstrates that a community can decide to take charge of a place it considers part of its identity.”

Events throughout September will include book presentations, concerts, screenings, and tastings in the square.

Whoever sits in those chairs first will not own the place. They will simply belong to it, which may be the harder thing to lose.

By

Photographs Parte dei Paesi association
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BorghiItalia

24/08/2026

For two years, he worked at a Verona firm making satellite control systems. Nobody except the owner knew he was a monk. Twenty years later, companies pay him to tell them what he saw.

Father Natale Brescianini, a Camaldolese Benedictine at the Eremo di Monte Giove in Fano, spoke at the Rimini Meeting this week on artificial intelligence and the human person, the day before Pope Leo XIV arrived. His argument was simple: the essential test of AI is not whether it speeds things up, but whether it protects the human being at the centre of the work.

Since 2006 he has built corporate training on the Rule of St Benedict, a guide to monastic life written in the 6th century that emphasises prayer, work, discipline, humility, and community. He uses the abbot as a leadership model, silence as a management skill, and the Rule’s instruction that a monk handle the monastery’s tools as carefully as the altar vessels.

“The Rule of St Benedict is one of the very few surviving documents about how to structure human work that was not written by someone trying to sell you software,” said Jekabs Musins, founder of Personify, a London company that builds AI clones of coaches.

“The genuine evaluation is not whether AI expedites tasks,” said Pratik Mahajan of JP Morgan. “Rather, it is whether it enhances decision-making without undermining human agency, trust, or responsibility.”

Since March 2026, Father Brescianini has co-hosted a monthly online conversation on artificial intelligence and conscience at work.

What the monastery offers is not a brake on technology. It is an older question about who the work is for.

By

Photo credits: Rimini Meeting

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24/08/2026

Five years ago, only two fragments of Gerace’s 17th-century maiolica tradition were known to survive. In September, the town begins building a museum around it.

The episcopal citadel of Gerace, the same Calabrian hill town spending 20 million euro on slow tourism, will start work on a museum of its tin-glazed earthenware, a craft that once made this hilltop a production centre and now survives in a single workshop, run by brothers Giovanni and Antonio Condò for the past 33 years.

The story goes back further. Beatrice Marzano, a licensed guide in Gerace, traces the potters to the Greek colonists of Locri Epizephyrii, who settled beside a seasonal watercourse and found clay next to it. When the coast was abandoned, the trade moved up the rock with the people. The local word for the master potters was argagnari.

The decline was not romantic. Glass and plastic proved more hygienic. The old shapes disappeared. A 1980s revival decorated domestic forms with Greek figures, painted by potters who could throw a pot but had never trained as draughtsmen.

Giovanni Condò is matter-of-fact about what remains. “We are outside the world,” he said. Clay comes from a multinational supplier inland. A brush has to be brought in specially. His vicolo, once crowded with neighbours, now houses him, his mother, and some cats.

“The idea is not simply to create a place to display objects,” said Mayor Rudi Lizzi, “but to recover and give value to a tradition, putting it in dialogue with contemporary craftsmanship, training, and the visitor experience.”

By Alina Trabattoni

Photo credits: Condò Ceramics / Marco Giovenco

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ItalianCeramics

24/08/2026

A building empty since 1990. A Dominican convent from 1480, then a Carabinieri barracks for over a century. And its first reopening, entrusted not to scaffolding but to theatre.

The Caserma Creativa project in Lentini, southeastern Sicily, staged its first public activity inside the derelict building this week, a special edition of I Giganti di Leontinoi, a walking performance by Angelo D’Agosta recovering the story of Leontinoi, the Greek colony on whose site the town stands.

“We wanted the first reopening of the barracks to be entrusted to culture,” said Giorgio Franco, president of the cooperative Badia Lost & Found.

The site is roughly 3,000 square metres on Lentini’s main square. In June 2024 the cooperative signed the first special public-private partnership of its kind between a Sicilian province and a private partner, taking on clearance, restoration, and management for around 50 years while the building stays publicly owned. Plans include a conference hall, co-working spaces, and exhibition rooms. The full restoration is expected to take four years, run as a cantiere aperto, a worksite the public can visit throughout.

“A building can be physically restored, but a place comes back to life when it starts producing knowledge, relationships, and imagination,” Franco said.

“It turns an abandoned building into a shared story,” said Mirna Huhoja-Dóczy of consultancy Bits of Brand, “but it will only be meaningful if that openness continues throughout the four year restoration and does not end as a one night moment of publicity.”

What the barracks showed this week is simpler. A building written off for a generation can still hold an audience.

Credits: Italy Now
By Alina Trabattoni
Photography: Badia Lost & Found
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24/08/2026

The first pope to attend the Rimini Meeting since John Paul II in 1982 put his prepared text aside and spoke directly to 60,000 young people about freedom, not obedience.

Pope Leo XIV arrived at the 47th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples this weekend, walking the halls, stopping at an exhibition on Saint Augustine, meeting families at the children’s area, and then taking the microphone to a roar that fell into silence across the pavilions.

His argument turned on freedom. “Truth is met only in freedom,” he said, warning that there is no love in coercion, indoctrination, or manipulation. He asked the crowd to widen their friendships beyond narrow belonging and to treat their movement as a springboard into the whole of reality rather than a shelter from it. The Church, he said, grows by attraction and not by proselytism.

“If we want to change the world, Saint Augustine said, we must change ourselves, and our heart must never be closed.”

“Presenting faith as a free encounter with truth, rather than simply an identity one belongs to, speaks to a generation that wants to choose what it believes rather than simply inherit it,” said Ty Armstrong Sr, founder of SloppBoxx Video Entertainment.

Leo later met sick and disabled people at the cathedral before Mass at the port, where 40,000 gathered on the same shoreline where John Paul II celebrated 44 years ago.

The Meeting runs until August 26. To the generation in front of him, the ask was not loyalty but the nerve to stay open.

Credits: Italy Now

By Peter Srinivasan

Credits: Peter Srinivasan

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EmiliaRomagna

22/08/2026

Tomorrow, artists set up easels in the stone alleys and panoramic terraces of a Ligurian village of 530 people, 740 metres above sea level. It is the fourteenth time they have done this.

Scorci di Crocefieschi e dintorni, the free open-air painting competition organised by the village Pro Loco, takes place on August 22, capping a summer that has placed culture firmly at the centre of village life. Earlier in August, a two-day book festival dedicated to local writer Carlo Mereta drew visitors for readings, children’s workshops, and author talks. No sagra this year. Literature and visual art instead.

“In these years we have tried to build a calendar that tells the story of the kind of village we want to be,” said Mayor Filippo Bassignana. “A small inland village can and should offer quality culture capable of bringing new people here and putting our territory on the map.”

The village sits in Liguria’s Antola hills on a two-day Salt Roads cycling route running until October. Fibre broadband has arrived. House prices are well below the coast. Genoa is a reasonable distance away. “This peace no longer means being cut off,” said Giuseppe Franceschelli, honorary ambassador of Genoa to the world. “It is a genuine place to work remotely, or to build a data and AI company at a window full of mountains.”

The village also has a sporting legend. Roberto Pruzzo, born here on April 1, 1955, won the 1983 Serie A title with Roma. The terraces called him O Rey di Crocefieschi. The King of Crocefieschi.

“Depopulation is not fought with a slogan,” Bassignana said. “It is fought by creating the conditions for someone to genuinely choose to come or return to live here.”

By Hannah Brooks

Photography:

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22/08/2026

The Etruscans invented the technique of training vines up trees to improve airflow and ripen grapes more evenly. Winemakers still use it today. This week, their descendants are pouring the results in the shadow of their tombs.

DiVino Etrusco opens its 20th edition in Tarquinia, a medieval hill town an hour north of Rome, running until August 29. 54 Italian wineries, more than 100 labels, and for the first time, wines from Sicily and Calabria alongside those of ancient Etruria. Around 60,000 visitors are expected across two weekends.

Born in 2007 as a small gathering of producers from the original 12 Etruscan towns, the event has grown into a full cultural programme: guided tours of Tarquinia’s UNESCO World Heritage Etruscan tombs, slow food stands, art exhibitions, cooking classes, dance exhibitions, and concerts. Each wine stand pairs a sommelier with the producer, one explaining the wine, one explaining how it was made.

“Wine is not just food anymore but a cultural phenomenon,” said Mayor Francesco Sposetti.

The festival has also reached Volterra in Tuscany, where the terrain poses its own challenges. “It’s up to us to turn this heritage into an opportunity,” said Volterra Mayor Giacomo Santi, “connecting the region’s finest products with what the Etruscan civilisation left us as a gift.”

Twenty editions in, the oldest winemaking tradition in Italy is still pouring.

By

Photography: DiVino Etrusco
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ItalianWine Lazio Tuscany Toscana WineFestival EtruscanHistory UNESCO WineTasting ItalyTravel SlowFood AncientWin

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