The Italy Now Podcast

We speak to entrepreneur Marco Trombetti just days after being named one of Italy's newest Cavalieri del Lavoro honourees. He tells us how he went from studying astrophysics in France whilst chasing the origin of the universe, to building Translated with his wife Isabelle Andrieu in 1999, right when nobody else thought internet translation was worth building.What makes his story stand out is his refusal to pick sides in the AI versus human debate. While giants like Google and DeepL race to replace translators, Trombetti built something else, a system where machines learn from human corrections and get smarter every time, while people focus on the parts only they can do. It's why the company now supports 237 languages, works with over 700,000 translators worldwide, and counts Google, Airbnb and Uber among its clients.He's also convinced this could only have happened in Italy, where language barriers are felt every single day, not once you cross an ocean. This is a story about patience, naivety, and building a global business by keeping people at the centre of it.

In the lobby of Rome's Hotel Mediterraneo, guests check in under the gaze of a second-century marble goddess, hidden for decades. She spent over thirty years locked in a museum storeroom before anyone thought to bring her out. We meet Tracy Roberts, founder of Love Italy, who's on a mission to get Italy's hidden art off dusty shelves and into daily life through her project Arte Fuori dal Museo.The scale of the problem is wild. About 85 per cent of Italy's state-owned art sits in storage, unseen, while everyone crowds into the Colosseum and the Vatican. Tracy's solution is simple: hotels adopt a forgotten piece, pay to restore it, and display it around the clock, no ticket, no closing time. The goddess in the Mediterraneo was the first, discovered tucked in a corner of the National Roman Museum's storerooms. Tracy talks about finding her almost like meeting someone, not just uncovering an object.Ten hotels in Rome are already on board. Tracy's dream is bigger, though, with more museums, more cities, eventually banks, post offices, and maybe even hotels abroad. This is a story about art that's been waiting in the dark and one woman's case for finally letting it out.

We climb to a terrace clinging to a cliff high above Amalfi, in the Valle dei Mulini, where Italy's brightest lemons are still picked by hand. Italy's brightest lemons are still picked by hand, knee and back. We meet Salvatore Aceto, whose family has worked these near-vertical slopes since 1825, seven generations of a job so steep and punishing that he sometimes struggles to explain how it was ever possible, and how it still is.The prize at the top of all that climbing is the Sfusato Amalfitano, the coast's yellow gold, prized for its huge fragrant zest and its wealth of essential oils, grown organically with a few closely guarded secrets. Now Salvatore is preparing something new for the harvest. Drones. After a first demonstration just weeks ago, he believes he is ready to deploy them within the year to carry loads up and down terraces too steep for any machinery, a change he calls a revolution not only for growers but for the coast's many abandoned buildings.From spaghetti al limone and scialatielli to his wife's lemon cake and a properly served limoncello, poured cold like a white wine rather than frozen into a bomb of alcohol, this is the story of a fruit, a family and a vertical world finding a way to keep going.Climb up here once, taste the zest, and you will understand why they refuse to let go.

We step inside Palazzo Diedo in Cannaregio with curator Adriana Rispoli, where Berggruen Arts and Culture has staged Strange Rules. Berggruen Arts and Culture has staged Strange Rules there, the first curatorial reflection on protocol art ever mounted in Italy. Beneath restored 18th-century frescoes, algorithms run underfoot.Adriana walks us through new commissions from Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, Trevor Paglen's 25-minute AI hypnosis piece, and the wider conversation behind the show. She explains why the new medium is the protocol, where the artist sits in a co-production with AI, and what Gramsci's monsters have to do with the algorithms shaping our lives.Running alongside the 61st Venice Biennale, it is a show about the strange rules of our technological epoch, and the people still trying to keep hold of the controls.

We climb to Tenuta di Castellaro, 350 metres above the sea, where founder Massimo Lentsch rebuilds Aeolian wine vine by vine. Founder Massimo Lentsch is rebuilding Aeolian viticulture here, vine by vine.He tells us how a volcanic archipelago once known for its wines came close to losing them altogether, and what it has taken to bring the vineyards back to life on this windblown stretch of rock and sea.It is the story of an estate, an archipelago, and a quiet act of restoration carried out one harvest at a time.

We meet Pierpaolo Tiretti on the Vulcanello promontory at Therasia Resort, Sea and Spa, a design-led Aeolian retreat with a storied past. The design-led Aeolian retreat occupies a piece of Italian television history. The villa was once the hideaway of Mike Bongiorno, the man who effectively invented Italian TV, and his celebrity rolodex laid the groundwork for what is today one of the islands' most discreet hotels.Pierpaolo, himself from Ischia, runs the property for the Polito family, who began at Parco Maria in the late 1960s and arrived on Vulcano in 2001. He tells us about Michelin-starred dining on a volcano, the raw chaos of the sulphurous fanghi baths where heads bob in the mud as the sea bubbles nearby, and the season Michael Jordan dropped anchor in the bay.It is a story of an island, a family and the quiet conviction that the real luxury is time, space and a sunset that falls differently every day of the year.

We step inside Procuratie Vecchie on Piazza San Marco in Venice, a 500-year-old palace closed for five centuries, now reopened at last. It reopened in 2022 after a complete restoration by David Chipperfield Architects.Emma Ursic, CEO of The Human Safety Net Foundation, tells us how Generali transformed this extraordinary space into a global home for social innovation, reaching more than 1.3 million vulnerable people across 25 countries since 2017.From a refugee turned Parisian barber giving back to his community, to free exhibitions, family workshops & very good Italian coffee, this is the story of a building, a foundation & a quietly radical idea: that the most famous square in the world should also be a place where people rise by lifting others.

We meet larger-than-life French actress Marianne Borgo in Cannes, practically born into the festival her uncle helped create. Her uncle was one of four men who, on a train back from Venice just before the war, decided France needed a festival of its own.But Marianne's heart belongs equally to Italy. She tells us about her grandfather, an Italian count who gave up everything to follow a young Scala singer to France, the elegance of Italian women on set in the1960s, and the morning a purple Saint Laurent shirt cost her the role of a lifetime with the great Dino Risi in Profumo di donna.It's a story of two countries, one career, and the quiet wisdom of an actress who has walked the Cannes red carpet forty-nine times — and still believes the best is yet to come.