Irene Zion shows that a child’s comprehension of the world is determined by what she has learned.

Demoralizing, revolting and exhilarating scenes from a butcher shop in rural Italy.

A dispatch from an Internet Cafe in Rome, where the giant cloud of volcanic ash is actually enhancing Megan Power’s trip to Italy.

In her review of The Frozen Thames, Dika Lam discovers that it is possible to step in the same river twice (in this case, 40 times). In Valeria Parrella’s For Grace Received, there’s a “mamma,” and young men who live at home, and even a mention of an escarole pizza, but if you long to be under the Tuscan sun, you’re in the wrong solar system.

Matthew Gavin Frank, while stumbling through a rainy market in Alba, Italy, encounters a “tiny knuckle of a man” who, via near-wordless verve, reinvents the fig.

Matthew Gavin Frank reports from Alba, Italy’s white truffle fair, where he finds what appears to be a mute pirate with a generous streak.

Matthew Gavin Frank reports from Torino, Italy’s Salone del Gusto, where he tastes the elusive and endangered salamina da sugo, an anarchic sausage that epitomizes gustatory illegality.

Matthew Gavin Frank, after an exhausting day of picking wine grapes for Barolo, Italy vintner Luciano Sandrone, loses a bit of his mind and thinks way, way too much about ants.

Raffaele says those home for the summer never order water at Il Fosso. Instead they ask for empty bottles and take them out to the spring where the water comes cold and sweet. He says it reminds them of their former lives. He says in the evening serpents glide across the road, that there’s snow [...]