Missing Serie A, Pasta, and Friendship
A letter from the coronavirus quarantine.
Great articles, every Saturday.
A letter from the coronavirus quarantine.
Wright Thompson ESPN Mar 2020 30min Permalink
It wasn’t until death rates began to soar that society began to take the outbreak seriously enough.
Vernon Silver Bloomberg Businessweek Mar 2020 15min Permalink
How the museum-quality 55,000 film collection that an East Village video store gave away ended up in a small, possibly mob-run village in Sicily.
Karina Longworth Village Voice Sep 2012 Permalink
An American mystery writer and an Italian journalist join forces to identify a serial killer that targeted couples having sex in cars in the rolling hills above Florence.
Douglas Preston The Atlantic Jul 2006 Permalink
Every year, thousands of teenagers from one city in Nigeria risk death and endure forced labor and sex work on the long route to Europe.
Ben Taub New Yorker Apr 2017 45min Permalink
How the refugee crisis has made a lot of people very, very rich.
Malia Politzer, Emily Kassie Huffington Post Dec 2016 Permalink
The intricate dance between highly organized ultras fan organizations, the teams they support, and the mafia for control of the center of curva and the lucrative ticket-touting opportunities that come with it.
Tobias Jones The Guardian Dec 2016 20min Permalink
An Italian town plagued by mysterious fires turns to science, the church, and the law in a search for answers.
The Atavist Magazine Nov 2016 45min Permalink
When the battered body of a Cambridge Ph.D. student was found outside Cairo, Egyptian police claimed he had been hit by a car. Then they said he was the victim of a robbery. Then they blamed a conspiracy against Egypt. But in a digital age, it’s harder than ever to get away with murder.
Alexander Stille The Guardian Oct 2016 20min Permalink
On the Italian island Lampedusa— “politically Europe, but geographically Africa”—as a wave of African immigrants is due to arrive from Libya by boat, ruining the tourist season.
Eliza Griswold Poetry Jan 2012 20min Permalink
They were florists working in Amsterdam’s largest flower market. They were also members of one of the most powerful arms of the Italian mafia. An investigation into how organized crime has gone global.
Steve Scherer Reuters Apr 2016 Permalink
The disappearance of the Ghost Boat and its 243 passengers off the Libyan coast.
Eric Reidy Matter Oct 2015 10min Permalink
How an Italian businessman facing fraud charges and a Brazilian politician turned a billion dollar project to build the high speed Rio-São Paulo rail line into a farce.
Leandro Demori Medium Aug 2015 30min Permalink
Since exposing the Neapolitan mafia by publishing Gomorrah at age 27, Roberto Saviano has lived for nearly a decade under armed guard, shuttling between anonymous hotels and army barracks.
Roberto Saviano The Guardian Jan 2015 15min Permalink
“‘It’s like a novel,’ a newspaper editor once told me, shaking his head. When I recently asked Ruggeri, the chief investigator, to sum up the case, she stared at her desk and just said ‘incredible’ four times.”
Tobias Jones The Guardian Jan 2014 20min Permalink
Tracing the steps of migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the Kent countryside.
Daniel Trilling New Statesman Dec 2014 20min Permalink
How seven Italian scientists came to be convicted of manslaughter following a catastrophic quake.
David Wolman Matter Aug 2014 20min Permalink
On Silvio Berlusconi’s hedonism.
Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites—except that he’s supposed to be running the country.
Ariel Levy New Yorker May 2011 40min Permalink
Rosario Crocetta is a reform-minded leader in a highly corrupt place that hates change. That’s only one of the reasons his life is in danger.
Marco De Martino New York Times Magazine Sep 2013 20min Permalink
On paleopathologist Gino Fornaciari and his investigations into murders from centuries past.
Tom Mueller Smithsonian Jul 2013 11h10min Permalink
A journey into the world of Italy’s racist soccer thugs.
Wright Thompson ESPN Jun 2013 40min Permalink
Inside the most sensational murder in the history of study abroad.
Nathaniel Rich Rolling Stone Jun 2011 30min Permalink
How Bernardo Provenzano, “boss of all bosses of the Sicilian Mafia” and fugitive for more than 40 years, got caught.
Devin Friedman GQ Mar 2007 35min Permalink
The profile of a crime syndicate which dominates the European cocaine trade.
Andreas Ulrich Der Spiegel Jan 2012 20min Permalink
A profile of fashion designer Roberto Cavalli.
It’s 11 a.m. Cavalli has just risen from his wolf-fur-covered bed and said good morning to Boy, his tiger-striped Bengal cat, and Gino, his miniature monkey. At a breakfast table covered with a cloth of one of his swirling bird patterns, on which are placed four packs of cigarettes and two cigars, Cavalli sinks down on a leopard-print cushion. While he eats applesauce and drinks orange juice from Cavalli tableware, he is surrounded by his four parrots and three beautiful publicists. “Give me some bad questions,” he tells me, lighting a cigar. “I will try to be nice.”
Mark Seal Vanity Fair Aug 2009 20min Permalink