The Italy Now Podcast

We step inside Palazzo Diedo in Cannaregio with curator Adriana Rispoli, where Berggruen Arts and Culture has staged Strange Rules, 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 Mediterranean, where founder Massimo Lentsch is rebuilding Aeolian viticulture 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, the design-led Aeolian retreat that 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 meet Ilaria D'Uva in Venice, where she has just given a voice to the city's Naval Museum and where two million people a year already hear her words at the Duomo of Milan, the Pantheon, Pompeii and Assisi. She grew up, as she puts it, on bread and audio guides, the daughter of the man who created Italy's very first audio guide in 1959, after Florence said no and the future Pope Paul VI in Milan said yes.Ilaria tells us how one Florentine family came to hold the keys to so many of Italy's most iconic sites, why she now writes every narration herself as a piece of theatre set to original music, and how she uses AI all day long while remaining certain it can never reproduce the one thing her work lives on. Emotion.From a café on the island of San Giorgio to the Treasure of San Gennaro in Naples, and now the audio guide she is writing for Villa Adriana, where she has quietly fallen in love with the Emperor Hadrian, this is the story of how Italy finds the words to speak to the world, one voice at a time.

We step inside the Procuratie Vecchie on Piazza San Marco in Venice, a 500-year-old palace closed to the public for five centuries and 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 Veronica Sabbag in Cannes at the World Women Foundation, the Brussels based international lawyer and former EU diplomat who left twenty years of conflict management to pick up a different instrument of peace, music.She is the founder of United Voices for Peace and the force behind Global Women in Music, a project born with the United Nations Symphony Orchestra to put female composers and conductors back where they belong, on the world's greatest stages. And it began in Italy. Veronika tells us how a chance meeting at UNESCO with the late artist Patricia Atkinskisi led to a landmark concert with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, celebrating the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through pieces written by women.It's the story of a promise kept, of an idea that travelled from Rome to New York, and of an Italy that, from the Venice Biennale to the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, has always known that culture is the most powerful form of diplomacy there is.A conversation about closed doors, open stages, and what the next generation of Italian girls picking up a violin needs to hear.

We meet Sohrab Mirmont at the World Woman Foundation during the Cannes Film Festival, just as he prepares to shoot his new film in Venice with the cinematographer who once worked alongside his uncle, the late Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.The producer behind Riddle of Fire, which premiered at Directors' Fortnight in Cannes edition 2023, tells us how a single ride on a Venetian water taxi sparked the idea for his next project, why he sought out Luca Bigazzi, the cinematographer of Certified Copy, to shape its visual language, and how Italian actor Riccardo Scamarcio came on board after a long dinner at the St. Regis in Rome that had almost nothing to do with the film itself.It's a conversation about family legacy, the gravitational pull of Italy on global cinema, and what happens when an American filmmaker steps into a 1,500 year old city where every corner is already set design.A new name to keep on your radar, and you heard it here first.

We catch Turkish actress and producer Selin Yeninci in Cannes, fresh from a panel and even fresher from her second appearance on Verissimo, where Italian audiences welcomed her as one of their own. As Saniye in Terra Amara, the Turkish drama that ran for 121 episodes and travelled to more than 150 countries, she became a household name from the Amalfi Coast to Anatolia.Selin tells us about the mother and daughter who chased her down a Positano street at half past six in the morning, the Napoletano café owner who FaceTimed his grandmother on the spot - and then watched her leave the house for the first time in years just to meet her favourite actress, and the journalists at Mediaset who unearthed details about her childhood she didn't think existed online.We also follow her on the road: Milan, Florence, Naples, a rented car all the way down to Sicily and back, and the dream of one day producing a Turkish-Italian co-production of her own. It's a conversation about two Mediterranean cultures that, as Selin puts it, share the same daily rhythm - and recognise each other on sight.