Tavern Wine Bar Al Brindisi
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The most ancient tavern in the world, as certified by Guinness, it was certainly already open in the year 1100 for the workmen who built the cathedral. Known as the Hostaria del Chiuchiolino (from “chiù”, drunk), its patrons included Cellini, Titian and Torquato Tasso. Ariosto mentions it in hi...
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Hotel Quattro Fontane
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A fairytale chalet, it was built over the former sixteenth-century Palladian casino, which the patrician Daniele Pisani had built for the pleasures of the aristocracy at the Lido. In the nineteenth century it was an inn, as recalled by the Victorian poet Robert Browning, and from 1905 to 1926 it was...
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Tenerelli and the Museum
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Nicola Mucci was aged just fifteen when he made his first confectionery for his father’s shop. It was 1894, and he had been working as an apprentice for just a few months at Caflish, the elegant Swiss chocolate shop in Naples. Back home, he immediately tried out his new art and, after five years a...
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Amaretti di Voltaggio
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The almonds are Italian, exclusively from the Bari area, and the paste is stone-milled. The shape is created by hand, and so is the moulding on the baking tin and the sweet-style banding. The taste is a symphony of sweet almond. First created in the late nineteenth century by Attilio Cavo in a littl...
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The "Ricordi Floor" at Villa d'Este
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The Grand Hotel Villa d’Este in Cernobbio opened to guests in 1873 and the first to step through the door was the publisher Giulio Ricordi, who took over an entire floor of the Regina d’Inghilterra wing for the whole season. Giuseppe Verdi was one of the publisher’s first guests, and he was fo...
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Hollywood Festival
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From 1988 to 1992, the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este in Cernobbio was the venue for the Festival di Hollywood. Many famous actors and actresses turned up: Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, June Allison, Joseph Cotten, and Claire Trevor, to name but a few.In the photos: the preside...
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Hitchcock and the Photographers
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The film director Alfred Hitchcock adored the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este in Cernobbio and used to spend his summer holidays here from 1925 – when he shot a short scene for his first feature film, The Pleasure Garden in the hotel park – until 1970. It is said he became absolutely paranoid wheneve...
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Caffè Piccardo and Coppi's final sprint
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“Thirty seconds at the Turchino!” In sports cafés and balancing on windowsills to bring the news to those in the street below, radio sets blared out Coppi’s lead over the Frenchman Teisseire in the Milano-Sanremo. Thirty seconds had stretched into five minutes at the Voltri crossing. It was a...
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Salon Fellini
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In the enchanting Sala Grande of Caffè Poliziano in Montepulciano, the film director Federico Fellini used to enjoy sitting in the little lounge number two (the first on the left in the photo). In August 1992, Fellini came, with his wife Giulietta Masina, to the Caffè as a special guest: he was to...
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The debut of the Ussero
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The first rent contracts and private letters addressed to the aristocratic Agostini family that mention the presence of a café on the ground floor of their residence in Pisa dates back to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but the name “Caffè dell’Ussero” first appears officially in...
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Hotel restaurant Locanda San Vigilio
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A dream location on Lake Garda. A sixteenth-century inn with a little harbour and inn on the San Viglilio cape, set among cypresses and age-old olive trees, this is one of Italy’s oldest hotels. With just seven luxury rooms and seven fabulous suites with antique furnishing, it has a restaurant on ...
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Café pastry-shop Arione
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A city institution, it was in this elegant salon under the nineteenth-century arcades of Piazza Galimberti that the “Cuneesi al rhum” chocolates, of Europe-wide fame, were invented. In 1954, Hemingway was advised to come here by his publisher, Arnoldo Mondadori, and the writer had time for an ap...
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Café pastry-shop Tagliaferri
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In the beautiful town hall in the heart of the ancient Byzantine town, the same family has run the establishment for four generations. Recently restored, it has lost none of its original appeal and still makes its historical Christmas torrone, including the “Torrefatto” with ground nuts, “Giug...
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Café pastry-shop restaurant Salza
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The brainchild of Federico Salza, who expanded the confectionery business his father had started up in Turin in 1898 and whose son Silvio brought “banqueting” to Italy in about 1950, this is the quintessential pastry shop of the Pisans, to whom he brought the delicacies of Piedmont. The shop was...
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Croce Bianca Leisure & Spa Hotel
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Five generations. Originally the “L’ost d’l bosch” (“the hostel in the woods”), the establishment was set up for the sale of wine and aquavit. Under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the “Weisses kreuz” received a licence in 1882 to provide accommodation for guests, and in 1905 it was enl...
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Confectioner's Mario Mucci and the Comfit Museum
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This lovely “Liberty” style building in the old part of town, just near the cathedral, was the ancient confectionery factory set up by grandpa Nicola Mucci, who perfected the art of confectionery from the legendary Caflisch of Naples. In 1930 he made the confectionery for the wedding of King Hum...
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Café pastry-shop restaurant Balzer
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Set up in 1850 in Palazzolo sull’Oglio by the Balzer family, who were originally from Lichtenstein, it moved in 1936 to its current location under the arcades of the “Sentierone”. Since then it has been the salon of Bergamo, the most elegant place for a rest on the Sunday promenade. With its t...
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The first goliard
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In 1820, there was a famous episode of goliardery at the Caffè dell’Ussero in Pisa, which was described by Ersilio Michel in Maestri e scolari dell’Università di Pisa nel Risorgimento nazionale (Sansoni, 1949). A certain Ricci, a student from Livorno, stood up on a table and read out a witty s...
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