I'm an Italian with too many interests: art, travel, food, photography and diving, roughly in that order. This blog is mostly about art and travel in Italy and beyond, with my photographs (the least bad ones) and whatever else the road throws up. Expect opinions, a bad temper, sarcasm I can rarely hold back, and a moderate impatience with the mainstream.
Read the manifestoIf you only read three posts, read these.
Four visits, five hours, one thesis: you would need a week. Room by room, from the Laocoön to the Crivellis nobody stops to look at.
All the guides →
Twenty rooms, the highest concentration of Bernini sculpture in the world, six Caravaggios and a building that counts as one of the works on show. A complete guide...
All the guides →
Discover the masterpieces of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, home to Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio. Explore the Renaissance treasures of one of Italy’s most renowned museums.
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Explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York with this analytical guide: a detailed journey through masterpieces, must-see sections, and practical visit tips.
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Secondhand information for people who would rather press play than open a book. A love letter to art, disguised as a tantrum.
All the rants →
In the age of contactless payments, the Church still demands one-euro coins to light up its Caravaggios with its coin operated timers. A Rant on Vatican venality, vanishing...
All the rants →
United Airlines now kicks off passengers who refuse to wear headphones. A rant celebrating this glimmer of hope for civilisation, packed with creative insults for every acoustic criminal...
All the rants →
Avios Points and the Bureaucratic Hallucination of Iberia, British Airways, and Qatar Airways Customer Service
All the rants →
The Rant. The Unwritten Rules of Civil Coexistence on Airport Moving Walkways.
All the rants →
Once a year Florence licenses its oldest instinct: a Renaissance procession of staggering beauty, then twenty-seven men on a sand pitch.
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Who are the Maasai of Tanzania? Their real history, the Ngorongoro and Loliondo evictions, and whether tourist village visits are anything but staged.
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A classic Neapolitan osteria reached only by crossing the Pallonetto Santa Lucia past house-arrest checks and bullet-riddled murals. Inside: spaghetti alla Luciana that suggest someone is locked in...
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Call Sardinian a dialect and you will start a fight, and for once the linguists side with the locals. One island, many tongues: a language closer to Latin...
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Not the schoolbook saint, not the fridge magnet logo. A long, honest guide to Michelangelo from Florence 1475 to Rome 1564: sculpture, the Sistine, architecture, poetry, homosexuality, the...
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A critical look at great white shark behavior: shark attacks, predation cases, and the limits of the mistaken identity theory.
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Antonio Canova’s Paolina Borghese: marble, vulgar glamour, and aristocratic embarrassment set to the beat of banlieue hip-hop. Un poil de chatte tire plus qu
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A homage to Cairo’s traffic and its taxi drivers in the style of Stefano Benni—may the Luisona rest lightly upon him.
More stories →Built on the same research and the same opinions as the blog.
FlâneurA day-by-day art itinerary, built around the works you choose. Opening hours, closures and where to eat included.Plan your art trip →
ArtAtlasFind any artwork on a map, by artist or by city, before you decide where to go.Open the map →
DiveAtlasPick the species you want to see: it tells you where to dive, and in which months.Find your dive →Frescoes, sculpture, mosaics, and the occasional Byzantine detour.
Art
Twenty rooms, the highest concentration of Bernini sculpture in the world, six Caravaggios and a building that counts as one of the...
Art
Six million visitors a year march through the Vatican Museums towards the Sistine Chapel and miss almost everything else. Here is an...
Art
The Pontormo Rome exhibition opens in October. Here is a better use of the wait than counting down days: thirteen of his...
Art
Audio guides: secondhand information for people who'd rather press play than open a book. A love letter to art disguised as a...
Art
Flâneur: an itinerary engine for people who travel because of the art. Eleven cities, 22,000 catalogued works, three traveller profiles, a thousand...
Art
In the age of contactless payments, the Church still demands one-euro coins to light up its Caravaggios with its coin operated timers....
Art
Not the schoolbook saint, not the fridge magnet logo. A long, honest guide to Michelangelo from Florence 1475 to Rome 1564: sculpture,...
Art
To most visitors the Accademia is the David museum, and they devote ninety percent of their time to a single statue. That...
Art
Ninety-five per cent of visitors accelerate past the four half-carved giants to photograph the David, treating them as the appetiser before the...
Art
Stand before Bernini's David at the Borghese Gallery and see how a 23-year-old redefined sculpture, capturing the split second before the stone...
Travel
Step inside Saint Savior in Chora, Istanbul's hidden Byzantine gem, and explore the most breathtaking medieval mosaics you've likely never heard of.
Art
A boy from Naples, a block of marble, and an idea that should have been impossible. Bernini
Slower, more obsessive, and significantly less photogenic.
Travel
Airport: Brussels Zaventem (BRU), Terminal A, Airside (Schengen area) Access: Priority Pass / Business Class (partner airlines) The Diamond Lounge at Brussels Airport is...
Travel
A honest review of the Montale lounge at the Malpensa Airport (MXP) in Milan
Travel
Once a year Florence licenses its oldest instinct. Between a Renaissance procession of staggering beauty and a sand pitch where twenty-seven men...
Travel
Who are the Maasai of Tanzania? Their real history, the Ngorongoro and Loliondo evictions, and whether tourist village visits are anything but...
Travel
United Airlines now kicks off passengers who refuse to wear headphones. A rant celebrating this glimmer of hope for civilisation, packed with...
Travel
Forget the Maldives caption. Sardinia's real beauty is older and harder than its beaches: a maquis you smell before you see it,...
Travel
A joint check in for two separately purchased Qatar Airways tickets kept failing with a bogus frequent flyer error, one the call...
Diving
A free tool that lists the dive destinations worth travelling to for a specific species, with the months when the encounter is...
Travel
A no-nonsense guide to trains in Italy for foreign travelers: Trenitalia vs Italo, how to book, ticket validation, strikes, unwritten rules, and...
Travel
A loading port carved into a sea cliff in the 1920s, facing the tallest stack in the Mediterranean, with a beach of...
Travel
Ruins by the sea and columns against the blue: everything a brochure wants. But most of what Tharros once held is scattered...
Travel
Call Sardinian a dialect and you will start a fight, and for once the linguists side with the locals. One island, many...
Travel
Thirty kilometres of Jurassic limestone dropping straight into the sea, no roads, no buildings, and beaches reachable only by boat or on...
Travel
Sixty islands of three-hundred-million-year-old granite, water so clear it looks engineered, and a beach that a man from Modena spent thirty-two years...
Reviewed honestly, with a score I am willing to defend in court.
Food
A classic Neapolitan osteria reached only by crossing the Pallonetto Santa Lucia past house-arrest checks and bullet-riddled murals. Inside: spaghetti alla Luciana...
Food
After a couple of restaurant missteps on our last day in Japan, lunch at Sumi Kappo Hirac, a charcoal kappo restaurant in...
Food
Looking for where to eat sushi in Osaka? After my go-to budget spot closed for good, I went looking for a replacement,...
Food
DIY or professional, stone or HORL3, Japan or back home: an honest, detailed guide to sharpening a Japanese knife and buying the...
Food
Why a hinoki cutting board is the natural second purchase after a Japanese knife: what the wood is, where to buy one...
Dive trips chosen for what lives down there, not for the resort.
Diving
Stone-paper pages, a neoprene cover, and you can write on them underwater with any pencil. Atlaua makes waterproof notebooks by hand in...
Diving
Review of the book Shadow Divers, the story of two technical divers and their obsession with a U-boat wreck
Diving
Scuba diving travel isn’t a tropical holiday with colorful fish. It’s currents, logistics, risk management, and smart decisions. If you actually want...
Diving
Diving in the Maldives: if you want to wake up to ABBA playing in the background while whale sharks cruise below you,...
Everything else, newest first.
Food
A corporate dinner the night before left my stomach negotiating a ceasefire, which means this review of Trattoria Natalino in Florence comes...
Food
A single-bevel yanagiba bought at Jikko in Osaka, the six-hundred-year history of Sakai's blades behind it, and why the shopping experience felt...
Food
The dreaded Koshari: the monumental collective prank Egypt played on the world
Books
Review of the book The Eloquence of the Sardine by Bill François. An enjoyable and occasionally surprising read for those who love...
Travel
Sardinia's "little Sahara" is really a living coastal dune system, still reshaped by the mistral, fronting a seven-kilometre beach and backed by...
Travel
A food-and-wine walk through the Supramonte: nine stops, centuries-old olive groves, prehistoric fairy houses carved into the rock, dozens of suckling pigs...
Travel
Walls over 500 metres high, a vanished seabed full of fossils, and a flower that grows almost nowhere else. Gorropu is one...
Travel
Grown men in tailcoats persuade very expensive white horses to hop, and people have been paying to watch for four and a...