Italy

Venice is a video game

How the smart-city dream collides with the lagoon’s unruly, ungovernable heart In this essay for Domani, Stefano Dealessandri explores a Venice that is no longer just a city, but a playable...

How the right’s obsession with the maranza was born

How a once-playful slang term became Italy’s newest racialised public enemy In this sharp, deeply reported piece for Internazionale, journalist Leonardo Bianchi traces the transformation of the term maranza, a once-benign descriptor...

Why the right has taken the “Family in the Woods” to heart

How a custody case in rural Abruzzo became a vehicle for nostalgia, anti-modernism, and a political war on the judiciary In this sharp and unsettling piece from Il Post, the...

The invisible borderland

Fifty years after a treaty to draw the border between Italy and Yugoslavia, a local newspaper investigates Translator was recently in northeastern Italy in the town of Gorizia – fifty...

“All that glitters is not gold”

A new wave of luxury resorts backed by state subsidies are monopolising water in the already drought-prone Italian South, leaving local communities and farmers to deal with the consequences When...

Curtains on risk: Italy’s public theatre faces cuts and conformity

Italy’s summer theatre season should be a celebration, but this year it’s overshadowed by cuts that punish risk and reward conformity. Graziano Graziani reveals how public theatre is being steered...

And so it flows

Sophia Smith Galer looks at an article, and a doctoral thesis, about the Venetian-origin dialect once prevalent in the city of Fiume/Rijeka, now ever more endangered Cities where many languages...

The Delirious Mythology of Italian Brainrot

How AI chimeras, absurd nursery rhymes, and Gen Z humour has birthed a chaotic new online aesthetic Even in a world overrun by online content, the viral surge of so-called...

Quiet Guardians of Venice’s Living Waters

In this intimate portrait of the sandolo and the boatmen who preserve Venice’s oldest waterborne tradition, Carola Cappellari and Lavinia Nocelli explore its fading yet resilient legacy of craft, rhythm...

Body control

An Italian journalist takes a critical look at the ambient religious and political culture around “natural” methodologies of fertility management. On its website, the secular sounding Italian Confederation of Centres...

The Medium and the Message

In the Jubilee year 2025, an Italian journalist explores how the Vatican is using digital tools and AI to proselytise anew The gap between earth below and heaven above, between...

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