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How do you solve a problem like Maria, and unveil her place in art history? Maria di Ormanno degli Albizzi, a 15th-century Italian nun, was one of the earliest females in Europe to audaciously paint her own self-portrait. Forgoing the demure profile view that male artists customarily used in their depictions of refined quattrocento ladies, this min...

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Palazzo Vecchio is preparing to host 500 students in the Salone dei Cinquecento for Welcome Day, a celebration of the close to 15,000 North American young people who annually enroll in Florence-based study abroad programs. Presiding over the February 5 event will be Dario Nardella (Mayor of Florence), Benjamin Wohlauer (Consul General of the United...

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Empoli native Enrico Cecconi, coordinator of Italian language studies at University of Bath, UK, and my former Italian professor at Accademia Europea di Firenze, expressed this pride in Italian to me. “Speaking Italian is more than the pleasure of producing beautiful and musical sounds or using gestures and more than just a linguistic skill. It has...

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Dante called it “the cursed and unlucky ditch.” Half a millennium later, Tuscany’s Arno river would more than live up to that title. Just before dawn on November 4, 1966, the rain-swollen river abruptly broke its banks; its waters surged through Florence at speeds of 45 miles per hour and flooded the city with 18 billion gallons of mud and grime. Y...

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This year marks the bicentennial of U.S. diplomatic presence in Florence, making it the second oldest continuous U.S. diplomatic establishment in Italy—after Naples, where we set up shop in 1796. The terminology “diplomatic presence” is chosen deliberately, as over the last 200 years we have had many faces and roles. There have been 46 principal of...

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Data from the Italian Statistical Yearbook 2018 outlines the dominance of cultural sites, monuments and museums in the central Italian regions of Lazio and Tuscany, especially in Rome and Florence. Just over 50 million people visited state museums, archaeological sites and monuments in 2017 across Italy. More than half of those were in the regions...

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One of Italy's top art galleries has appealed to the German government for help in returning an artwork stolen by Nazi troops in 1943. The chief of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Eike Schmidt, released a video calling for the return of the painting, "Vase of Flowers," by 18th-century Dutch artist Jan van Huysum. Until the original is returned, a...

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Just Google, “10 greatest geniuses of all times,” and it is highly likely that two of the names on that list will be Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei. Now, think about what you would do if you were put in charge of bringing their legacy into the 21st century, in all its complexity, as neither man can be reduced to one simple label, say “artist...

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Michelangelo has left us amazing masterpieces, adored in the entire world: the Pietà, the iconic David, Moses, Laocoön, the unparalleled frescoes for the Sistine Chapel, and dozens of other works. Yet it is impossible for us to really know his private life, what he felt and lived as an artist and man of his time. Perhaps an interesting and little-k...

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Important restoration work on Michelangelo’s funerary monument in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence has been completed and visitors can now admire the Monument to Michelangelo in all its glory. The restoration project, known as ‘In the Name of Michelangelo,’ was carried out by the Opera di Santa Croce, the non-profit organization that has been...

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