Inarea Had we been living in ancient Rome, today would have been a major festivity. The season is inclement (after all, these are the shortest days of the year) and the harvest is meagre. That’s why the period from 17th to 23rd December used to be days of liberty, revelling and topsy-turvy: gifts were exchanged, the … Read more
The above escape took place before the 1962 one immortalised in the Clint Eastwood film. But the two episodes and their outcomes are quite similar: files and sharp objects to pierce the fortress, old tyres used as rafts, no news of the missing fugitives: did they survive among the fogs banks of San Francisco? Who … Read more
Italo Marchioni was an Italian immigrant who worked on Wall Street – selling ice creams. Although business was tickety-boo, the cups and containers were a problem: when they didn’t get broken by careless customers, they had to be washed… which was a hassle. So, on 15 December 1903, Italo Marchiony (his name had already been … Read more
The first person to sketch the concept for aerostatic navigation actually lived a hundred years earlier: it was in 1670 that a Jesuit priest called Father Francesco Lana devised a vacuum airship that was lighter than air. Fr. Lana wrote that should there be improvements to his intuition, he would be happy to accept them … Read more
As we prepare, almost 800 years on, to speak of the life of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, we can’t help thinking of Italian pop idol Lucio Battisti’s song about his clever friend who knew how to fix everything, needing nothing but a screwdriver to work miracles. Frederick was, first and foremost, … Read more
If we were to search for one single word to describe Frank Sinatra, it would waft towards us just like the steam rising from the ground in New York. And that word could only be: “American”. Whether his career was an epic or a pastoral, it was marked by that sheer magnitude that is, without … Read more
What’s a parenthesis? A means of catching one’s breath from the world or from an overly-long sentence, depending on how you look at it. Quite permissible, as long as it’s a visible suspension: let’s say a break from work or a longed-for weekend. A parenthesis is perfect when it comes to self-management and always knows … Read more
In a well-known Italian novel, a certain Professor Bellavista, while giving one of his philosophy classes to his condominium neighbours, explains to them that Mankind is divided in two categories: “men of love” and “men of freedom”. The former prefer having a bath, because it’s a moment when they can let their imagination run free, … Read more
Frozen food existed long before this gentleman came onto the scene, but the quality was so bad that New York State even banned it from its prisons. Clarence Birdseye got his breakthrough idea watching fishermen in Labrador preserving their catch for the winter months: the fish was frozen instantly under thick ice, reaching the required … Read more
If one considers that the Church has a history of over 2,000 years, today’s feast day is a relatively recent one: it was instituted by Pope Pius IX only in 1854 and established, once and for all, that the mother of Jesus was conceived without sin. Whatever one’s religion is, this date gets the ‘metronome’ … Read more
