The Caffè della Pace, one of the loveliest bar-cafés in the center of Rome, is fighting to avoid eviction from its premises and has collected thousands of signatures in support of its struggle. The 19th -century café two blocks from Piazza Navona is located in a building owned by the Pontifical Teutonic Institute of the […]
One of the reasons it is so hard to modernize Rome (the others are excess bureacracy, corruption, political deadlocks and plain old inefficiency) is because every time anyone digs below the surface, they come up with anicent ruins that are considered too important to ignore. During work being done on the Via Portuense leading out […]
An administrative court in the Lazio region today rejected requests by Silvio Berlusconi’s lawyers to get his passport back and be able to travel outside of Italy. The court, the Lazio TAR, said that since the former prime minister’s year-long sentence for tax fraud is still underway, he was not allowed to leave Italian territory. […]
This ship has (finally) sailed. This morning the wreck of the Costa Concordia giant cruise ship steamed slowly out of the gulf of Giglio Island off the Tuscan coast on it’s final voyage to the port of Genoa where it will be dismantled. The sea journey of the hulking wreck, pushed by tug boats onits […]
What a surprise! Yesterday, a Milan appeals court overturned a lower court’s conviction of former premier and media magnate Silvio Berlusconi for paying for sex with an underage prostitute and strong-arming court officials into releasing her when she subsequently was arrested for theft. The verdict by a three-judge panel thus cancelled the seven-year prison term […]
Italian and American naval engineers today began refloating the giant Concordia cruise ship, freeing it from the reef on which it ran aground in April, 2012 in a partial shipwreck that took the lives of 32 passengers and crew. After closing waters around the island of Giglio where the Costa cruise line ship has lain […]
It will be a while yet until we’ll be able to see what a cleaned up Coliseum will look like but as of now we can have an idea. Yesterday morning, a year after renovation work began, workers removed a portion of scaffolding, thereby revealing the five arcades of the 2000-year old monument that have […]
Anyone visiting Rome who is interested in theater et al might want to check out the Rome Fringe Festival 2014 which began on June 7 and continues through July 13 at Villa Mercede, Via Tiburtina 113, in the San Lorenzo neighborhood. For the program go to: News or Calendario Programmazione
A brilliant idea! Finally, you can get an up-close look at Trajan’s Column without having to climb up scaffolding as I once did when the monument was being cleaned up some 30 years ago. Now the city of Rome has transformed the marvelous relief that snakes up the column into a into a photographic reproduction […]
