Assisi’s Piazza Matteotti is not just an accessible parking lot on the east end of town….. …but also site of vestiges of Roman Asisium: the parking area was built on the…
Read Article
Covid has deprived the asssisani of their beloved May medieval festival, Calendimaggio, for two years now….….but on a mid-June evening, the superb Assisi choir, i Cantori di Assisi, filled the vaulted 11th-century Romanesque Church…
Two atti prodigiosi – “prodigious acts” – are inextricably linked to Bolsena’s Basilica di Santa Cristina, named in of honor one of the town’s patron saints, Cristina. According to local legend, young Cristina was…
The imposing medieval castle of Bolsena overlooks Lake Bolsena, the largest volcanic lake in Europe. The lake was a volcano about 300,000 years ago, its shores were settled probably in the Neolithic…
Bolsena celebrates in floral splendor the Feast of Corpus Domini, for after all, this feast promulgated in the 13th-century – and also known as “Corpus Christi” – originates with a miracle here…
As I recently entered the gate leading into the cloister of the 11th-century Church of San Giacomo de Muro Rupto (St. James in the Broken Wall), I noted the sign indicating the…
Due to cataracts, Signor Vittorio – age eighty-two – doesn’t have a needle in his hands to embroider these days. When I met him recently near the Assisi souvenir kiosk of his…
“There isn’t a day that I don’t have a needle in my hand,” Antonietta told me as we talked about her passione for the embroidery of the punto Assisi (the Assisi stitch). She grew up…
As a child growing up in Assisi, craftsman of medieval stringed instruments, Luca Piccioni, would have been familiar with such instruments from an early age. School trips in elementary school would have…
The creative output of many Assisi artisans is owed to the inspiration of family members of past generations. And so it is for the assisano wood-carver, Rossano Rondoni, great-grandson of Domenico, art…