There is a running joke in Italy that the region of Molise simply does not exist. One of Italy’s smallest, poorest, and arguably least known regions, Molise has always lived on the fringes of Italian consciousness. It is merely a blip in international circles. While travel writers obsess over the rest of Italy, this land of livestock and valleys, the proverbial Wild West of Italy, rarely even comes up in travel magazines. For the past few years, the idea of a nonexistent Molise has been immortalized through the banalest of things – a hashtag. The hashtag, #ilmolisenonesiste (Molise doesn’t exist), has been used more than 14,000 times on Instagram alone.
Thanksgiving is not a recognized holiday in Italy, nor is it celebrated by Italians in the country. Nonetheless, the holiday plays an obscure yet important role in the history of Italian immigration to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These early immigrants, despite pressures to discard the cooking of their home country, melded their culinary traditions with those of their host culture to forge something unique – Italian-American Thanksgiving.
Rome is set to establish its first public veterinary hospital that is slated to open to the public in 2024. The project, which will be the first in Italy, is part of a €6 million expansion and redevelopment of the municipal Muratella kennels in the Magliana neighborhood of Rome. Last week, the city announced that the hospital will offer free medical treatment to pets and will feature a 24-hour emergency room complete with an infirmary and washing room.
Art restorers in Florence have embarked on a six-month project to digitally unveil what was once a 17th century nude painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian Baroque artist and one of the most prominent female artists in the history of Italian art. The Allegory of Inclination, painted in 1616, originally portrayed a life-sized nude female figure before the nudity was painted over with veils and drapery some 70 years later by a male painter striving to uphold the rigid moral sensibilities of the male-dominated art world, according to NPR.
On Wednesday morning, an earthquake of magnitude 5.7 struck off Rimini, an Italian resort town on the Adriatic Coast. No serious damages or injuries were reported. The earthquake was felt as far as Rome in the west and Bologna in the northeast, as well as across the Adriatic Sea in parts of the Balkans, including Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to the BBC.
Ferrara’s Bakery, located at 195 Grand Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy, has not changed much since it first opened at the turn of the 19th century. The intergenerational bakery’s decades-old maroon and white checkered marble floor tiles, worn wooden walls and vintage light fixtures immediately recall a sense of nostalgia. These details, intentionally preserved over the years, are meant to remind visitors that Ferrara’s Bakery is the oldest coffee shop in New York City.
While many are aware of the United States’ internment of roughly 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, few know that more than 600,000 Italian-Americans were branded “enemy aliens” and similarly experienced restrictions of their freedoms during this dark period of American history. When the Japanese attacked the United States’ naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, many Americans, including President Franklin Roosevelt, were convinced that “fifth columnists” or “aliens” – particularly immigrants from Germany, Italy and Japan, aggressor countries referred to as the Axis powers during World War II – posed the greatest threat to U.S. national security.
With 4.2 million followers across Instagram and TikTok, Nadia Caterina Munno, perhaps better known as the internet’s beloved Pasta Queen, is a viral Italian sensation. In 2020, at the height of the global COVID-19 induced lockdowns, she captured the hearts, and stomachs, of millions of viewers through her mouthwatering, easy-to-follow pasta recipes, eccentric Italian flair and signature catchphrase – “ I am pasta, I am drama, I am Italiana.”