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Deirdre Pirro, author of Italian Sketches: The Faces of Modern Italy, Famous Expats in Italy and Royals in Florence, published by The Florentine Press, is an international lawyer who lives and works in Florence. Her writing focuses on modern Italy, its people, history and customs. Follow her on Twitter @dp_in_florence or contact her at ddpirro@gmail.com.
On March 20, 1944, a member of the Royal House of Karadjordjevic and the last king of Yugoslavia, Peter II married Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark in a ceremony ...
Many will remember the story of Renzo in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, who sets off to visit the lawyer Azzeccagarbugli in order to seek advice about resolving the situation regarding ...
Florence hides many unexpected jewels, but they take time for the visitor to find, visit and savour. One of these is the Indian Museum, an anthropology and ethnology section of ...
For five days between September 20 and 25, as part of Estate Fiorentina, several major Florentine cultural organisations will celebrate the 90th birthday of Sylvano Bussotti, one of the city’s ...
Note it in your diary today so you won’t miss this unique upcoming event. From September 16 to 19, the 27th edition of the Artigianato e Palazzo exhibition will be ...
The son of Antonio Carletti and his wife Lucrezia Macinghi, Francesco Carletti was born in Florence in either 1573 or 1574. His father was a descendant of an old merchant ...
To encourage trade through the port of Livorno, Grand Duke Ferdinand I de’ Medici passed an edict in 1595 that allowed freedom of religion to all merchants. Soon, an English ...
A friend telephoned me a month ago and said, “I’m coming by to take you to see a real piece of industrial archaeology”. He did that and so much more. ...
On November 29, 1924, aged 65, the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died of a heart attack as a result of radiation treatment he was undergoing for throat cancer at the ...
Bob Marley wrote “Buffalo Soldier” with Noel “King Sporty” Williams, but the song was released by Bob Marley and the Wailers in 1983, two years after the singer-songwriter’s death. It ...
The court case lasted almost 20 years and created a sensation at the time because it involved one of Italy’s most beloved authors and a prestigious French publisher, who had ...
Every year, the first thing I do when preparing for the festive season is to hang a circular Christmas wreath on my front door. I used to make my own ...
When in via della Scala, take a moment to pause outside number 50 and look at the plaque on the wall. It translates into English: In this palace which was ...
On May 15, 1896, a small, slender woman with a baby in her arms lay down across the tram track in Brozzi, a town on the outskirts of Florence. Her ...
When William Magee Seton left New York on board the sailing ship “Sheperdess” on October 2, 1803, he could not have imagined he would never return to his homeland. Born ...
Locals have called it “la Passeggiata”, or the promenade, since 1902 when it was inaugurated in Viareggio, the seaside town called the “pearl of Versilia” in the province of Lucca. ...
Looking for ways to pass the time before the gradual ending of the lockdown, I pulled down from the shelf one of the volumes of my old stamp collection, which ...
From April 21 to 24, 1969, Sotheby’s of London held its first auction in Italy. At the request of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, it sold important Italian and French furniture, ...
In 1829, at the peak of his superstar fame as the composer of more than 40 operas including L’Italiana in Algeri, La Cenerentola, La gazza ladra, La donna del lago, ...
One of the earliest masterpieces by the 19th-century French impressionist artist and collector Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, who later adopted the simplified version of his name, Edgar Degas (1834–1917), hangs in ...
The road to arrive there is now only open at specific times, mainly to allow mourners to visit their dead at the local cemetery, while the remnants of the settlement ...
In the days running up to Christmas, many patisseries and bakeries around Florence display a Yule log or, as the French call it, bûche de Noël, in their windows. This ...
After ten troubled years, the magnificent—although at the time controversial—cast iron and glass construction of the Vittorio Emanuele II gallery, which linked the city’s cathedral to the Scala theatre in ...
Protests about the gender equality gap in the film industry continued to rumble on as the lights of the 76th annual Venice International Film Festival went out at the end ...
