Buondì. If you saw Monday’s free Summer Series article, you’ll already have heard of Gabriele D’Annunzio, who that article describes as a “patriota e nazionalista … che a quel tempo è il poeta più famoso (e scandaloso) d’Italia”. That article would have given you an idea of what he was capable of – invading someone […]

Buondì. Our kids are away, visiting their grandparents in Britain. As they’re adults now, and as we’ve done the same trip each year for a quarter of a century, we decided to let them go on their own. I had in mind a reduction in the number of meals to cook and dishes to wash, […]

Buondì. OK, so after Wednesday’s historic defeat, today we have another big battle, and this time it’s the sort that Italians name streets after. There’s a Via Vittorio Veneto in Bologna, where I live, and probably one in most other Italian towns and cities, too. Does that give you a clue? Google Maps, when giving […]

Buondì. Running an online business – actually now businesses – for ten years has taught me at least one thing – always be nice to customer service staff! Or at least try. Sometimes it’s hard when you’re ‘not pleased’, I accept that. I’m particularly prone to losing my temper, so when a supplier utterly messes […]

Buondì. The weekend was fun, spent in part responding to abuse from BOTH SIDES in the Ukrainian conflict. First there was a very well-written young lady (I couldn’t fault her English, at least) who was angry that I was repeating Russian ‘talking points’, specifically that Ukraine has a corruption problem, which the Russians apparently think […]

Buondì. The war’s started. No, not THAT war, not Putin’s unprovoked invasion of a peaceable if rather corrupt European state, which has filled Italy and other European countries with desperate refugees, caused the deaths and maimings of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, and raised my heating bills. World War One. I’ve been looking […]

Buondì. Below is the link to episode eight of our thirty-part Summer Series of FREE articles (with online audio): Episodio 8. Le premesse alla Prima Guerra Mondiale e la Triplice Alleanza (1913-1914) We’re up to the various diplomatic manoeuvrings which eventually resulted in the outbreak of WWI in 1914. I remember studying this at school […]

Buondì. Just a quickie today, to introduce installment seven of our thirty-part Summer Series of FREE articles (with online audio): Episodio 7. La triste impresa coloniale italiana: lo scatolone di sabbia (1911-1912) It’s a short one, perhaps because it deals with just a single year from the twentieth century. Not much can happen in a […]

Buondì. If you’ve been keeping pace with our FREE Summer Series of Italian articles with online audio, then you’ll recall that we left off, on Wednesday, at the point at which Italy’s crafty king had seized Rome from the Pope and made it the country’s capital. So far, so good! I was eager to find […]

Buondì. Italian history is replete with emperors, kings, princes, and various grades of aristocrat – dukes, counts, and the like. But let’s not be forgetting the popes! Wikipedia has a list of all two hundred and sixty-six of them. They weren’t all ‘Italian’ of course (neither were all the emperors and kings), and they weren’t […]