On Monday, October 31, Italian spirits group Campari reached an agreement to purchase a 70 percent stake in Wilderness Trail Distillery, a Kentucky-based producer of bourbon and rye whiskey. The stake was purchased for $420 million.
The golden age of Italian horror cinema was brief but revolutionary. The era is marked by giallo, (meaning yellow in English), a genre that encapsulated truly perverse, gory, and erotic themes that often pushed the envelope. This style developed in the mid-to-late 1960s and peaked in popularity in the 1970s. The term “giallo” was given to this era of cinema because the pages of popular 1950s psychological crime and thriller novels, whose plots became the backbone of Italian horror movies, were colored yellow.
Halloween is not celebrated in Italy as it is in the United States. The holiday is marked in the country and around Europe as Tutti I Santi, or All Saints Day, a Christian celebration that honors those who entered heaven as saints. However, the idea of Halloween is popular in the country, with supermarkets selling pumpkins and spooky decorations and bars and nightclubs hosting Halloween nights to mimic the ambiance found in the United States. Some markets and museums will also hold events for children to allow them to partake in dolcetto o scherzetto (trick or treating.)
On Monday, Matteo Salvini – Italy’s new infrastructure minister and leader of the right-wing populist party “La Lega”– announced his intentions to build a sprawling, multi-billion-euro bridge between Sicily and mainland Italy. The area he intends to build in has one the highest seismic risks in Europe.
The offer runs until May 2023In efforts to promote sustainable tourism, Friuli-Venezia Giulia – a region located in the far northeast of the country that borders Austria and Slovenia – is paying tourists to visit its lands. The new tourism scheme, launched on October 7 by the local tourism board, runs until May 31, 2023
Luxury Italian fashion house Prada made history this week by launching its first fine jewelry collection. Titled Eternal Gold, the line is composed of artisanal pieces made entirely from recycled gold. The collection aims to help drive change in sustainability and transparency practices across the fashion industry by guaranteeing that 100 percent of the gold used in their line is not only recycled but also responsibly sourced.
Netflix has announced the arrival of a new high-profile Italian original documentary series that will probe into a nearly 40-year-old cold case that shook Italian society and made headlines around the world. The series, called “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi,” will premiere globally on Netflix on October 20.
Russell Crowe, who won an Oscar for the role of Maximus Decimus Meridius in Ridley Scott’s wildly successful movie “Gladiator” in 2000, was honored in Rome on October 14. The 58-year-old actor was awarded a plaque and granted the title of “ambassador of Rome in the world” to acknowledge the ties he and the movie share with the Eternal City.