Green, white, and red - the colors of Italy's national flag, and the traditional Christmas colors as well. It may not be a surprise, then, that Christmas probably originated in ... Read More

Italkian, a Judeo-Italian dialect spoken mainly in urban areas in Rome and in central and northern Italy from the 10th to the 17th centuries in Italy, is on the verge ... Read More

"Era la notte prima di Natale e tutta la casa era in silenzio..." is the first line to the Christmas carol 'Twas the night before Christmas in Italian. Other popular Italian ... Read More

In La Fenice Set to Rise From the Ashes, the AP reports that Venice's famous opera theater, which burned to the ground eight years ago, has been rebuilt and is ... Read More

Christmas in Italy has many traditions, one of them being the crèche. Though now primarily used to denote the Nativity scene, "crèche" originally had the same limited meaning as "manger."

Forget Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarca. It seems as if those three literary artists of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance had nothing to do with the development of the ... Read More

More Italian vocabulary in the news dealing with wine, this time from the Italian Wine Merchants newsletter: "Le Pergole Torte was the first single vineyard Super-Tuscan to be made from 100% ... Read More

An interesting detail about James Joyce's daughter Lucia appears this week in a review of "Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake" by Carol Loeb Shloss in the New Yorker: "Although ... Read More