Back in 1588, a young girl who had recently become sixteen, named Dorina, met a beautiful girl on the street, completely dressed in white, who passed her without saying a word; Dorina remained paralyzed as she contemplated her beauty. This very strange fact occurred again two more times, while she was returning home. The fourth time something different happened: the woman in white spoke to her. "Say, little Dorina, wouldn't you like to become beautiful like me?". Dorina was s

He was born in Vicenza in 1842. In his youth he lived first in Turin , where he graduated in law, then in Milan, where he came into contact with the exponents of the scapigliatura, but already in 1869 he returned to Vicenza, where, abandoned the profession of lawyer, he devoted himself exclusively to literature until his death in 1911. Fogazzaro was a restless soul, eager to free himself from the fetters of an oppressive bourgeois conformism, but also unable to formulate in c

Few people know that 25 million Italians, of which almost 5 million were Venetian s, left their country after the unification of Italy to seek work and fortune in distant lands. There are currently 147 circles of Venetians' descendants in different continents - a page of history that has been forgotten or ignored for too long, and which must be known in all its details in order to understand Italian contemporaneity, that is, the causes and repercussions, the similarities and

The Scrovegni Chapel has surely a certain Dantean character, but... is it true that Dante joined his compatriot Giotto here in Padua ? Before Padua: a Florentine friendship that never stops moving In the early fourteenth century, Florence is more than a city: it is a living workshop . Dante and Giotto share the same air — one made of workshops, schools, and ideas that spill beyond medieval boundaries. Within this climate Dante makes a deliberate gesture: he revives the word

The potato grown in the lagoon areas of the Veneto , as well as in the mountain areas or the Vicenza plateau , also has its own history, crucial for the subsistence of the people of Veneto. Daughter of the hunger that so affected the peninsula and Europe in the aftermath of the fall of the Serenissima, it became a mass product among the poor people . Therefore, this tuber was the only food able to make up for the lack of cereals. And precisely in the islands off the coast of

In 1805: Da Ponte leaves for New York to... escape his London creditors. In fact he goes to America to try to start again, with his wife and children already gone to the New Continent, a life that is now impossible to pursue in Vienna, where he has been involved in many daring affairs. He tried to make a living in the tobacco and alcohol trade, grocery store and bookstore before becoming a professor of Italian language and literature at Columbia College in New York. It wa

On October 7, 1571 , the sea was covered with fire and blood , while corpses and debris of galleys were carried away by the swell, at the entrance of the Gulf of Patras, near the Greek city of Lepanto , the current Naupacte. Under the standard of Christ on the cross, that of the Holy League, the Christian West confronted the Muslim East , which flew the flag of the prophet. Lepanto is considered one of the most important naval battles since Actium. If this one, by putting a

Dante lived in Verona during his exile with the Della Scala family between 1312 and 1320 . The Della Scala family, also known as the Scaligeri family , was one of the noble families that ruled the city of Verona for 125 years, from 1262 to 1387. The Scaligeri also imposed their influence on the city of Vicenza. At their peak, the Della Scala family was unrivaled in power and wealth. But let us return to Dante in Verona. This city was the first stop of his exile , his fir

The relations between Republic of Venice and Turin during the Italian Risorgimento . More than one hundred and fifty years ago, on February 18, 1861 , the first Italian parliament met in Turin, capital of a new state: Italy. The movement had been launched in the twenties of the nineteenth century by writers , artists and politicians anxious to unify the mosaic of states that had emerged from the irruption of Napoleon's armies in this geographical space. The democratic revolu