The Italy Now Podcast

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, 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, 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 larger-than-life French actress Marianne Borgo in Cannes, where she was practically born into the film festival itself — her uncle was one of the 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 the 1960s, 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.

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.