We step inside Palazzo Diedo in Cannaregio with curator Adriana Rispoli, where Berggruen Arts and Culture has staged Strange Rules, the first curatorial reflection on protocol art ever mounted in Italy. Beneath restored 18th-century frescoes, algorithms run underfoot.

Adriana walks us through new commissions from Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, Trevor Paglen's 25-minute AI hypnosis piece, and the wider conversation behind the show. She explains why the new medium is the protocol, where the artist sits in a co-production with AI, and what Gramsci's monsters have to do with the algorithms shaping our lives.

Running alongside the 61st Venice Biennale, it is a show about the strange rules of our technological epoch, and the people still trying to keep hold of the controls.

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We climb to Tenuta di Castellaro, 350 metres above the Mediterranean, where founder Massimo Lentsch is rebuilding Aeolian viticulture vine by vine.

He tells us how a volcanic archipelago once known for its wines came close to losing them altogether, and what it has taken to bring the vineyards back to life on this windblown stretch of rock and sea.

It is the story of an estate, an archipelago, and a quiet act of restoration carried out one harvest at a time.

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We meet Pierpaolo Tiretti on the Vulcanello promontory at Therasia Resort, Sea and Spa, the design-led Aeolian retreat that occupies a piece of Italian television history. The villa was once the hideaway of Mike Bongiorno, the man who effectively invented Italian TV, and his celebrity rolodex laid the groundwork for what is today one of the islands' most discreet hotels.

Pierpaolo, himself from Ischia, runs the property for the Polito family, who began at Parco Maria in the late 1960s and arrived on Vulcano in 2001. He tells us about Michelin-starred dining on a volcano, the raw chaos of the sulphurous fanghi baths where heads bob in the mud as the sea bubbles nearby, and the season Michael Jordan dropped anchor in the bay.

It is a story of an island, a family and the quiet conviction that the real luxury is time, space and a sunset that falls differently every day of the year.

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We meet Ilaria D'Uva in Venice, where she has just given a voice to the city's Naval Museum and where two million people a year already hear her words at the Duomo of Milan, the Pantheon, Pompeii and Assisi. She grew up, as she puts it, on bread and audio guides, the daughter of the man who created Italy's very first audio guide in 1959, after Florence said no and the future Pope Paul VI in Milan said yes.

Ilaria tells us how one Florentine family came to hold the keys to so many of Italy's most iconic sites, why she now writes every narration herself as a piece of theatre set to original music, and how she uses AI all day long while remaining certain it can never reproduce the one thing her work lives on. Emotion.

From a café on the island of San Giorgio to the Treasure of San Gennaro in Naples, and now the audio guide she is writing for Villa Adriana, where she has quietly fallen in love with the Emperor Hadrian, this is the story of how Italy finds the words to speak to the world, one voice at a time.

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We step inside the Procuratie Vecchie on Piazza San Marco in Venice, a 500-year-old palace closed to the public for five centuries and reopened in 2022 after a complete restoration by David Chipperfield Architects.

Emma Ursic, CEO of The Human Safety Net Foundation, tells us how Generali transformed this extraordinary space into a global home for social innovation, reaching more than 1.3 million vulnerable people across 25 countries since 2017.

From a refugee turned Parisian barber giving back to his community, to free exhibitions, family workshops & very good Italian coffee, this is the story of a building, a foundation & a quietly radical idea: that the most famous square in the world should also be a place where people rise by lifting others.

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We meet larger-than-life French actress Marianne Borgo in Cannes, where she was practically born into the film festival itself — her uncle was one of the four men who, on a train back from Venice just before the war, decided France needed a festival of its own.

But Marianne's heart belongs equally to Italy. She tells us about her grandfather, an Italian count who gave up everything to follow a young Scala singer to France, the elegance of Italian women on set in the

1960s, and the morning a purple Saint Laurent shirt cost her the role of a lifetime with the great Dino Risi in Profumo di donna.

It's a story of two countries, one career, and the quiet wisdom of an actress who has walked the Cannes red carpet forty-nine times — and still believes the best is yet to come.

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We meet Veronica Sabbag in Cannes at the World Women Foundation, the Brussels based international lawyer and former EU diplomat who left twenty years of conflict management to pick up a different instrument of peace, music.

She is the founder of United Voices for Peace and the force behind Global Women in Music, a project born with the United Nations Symphony Orchestra to put female composers and conductors back where they belong, on the world's greatest stages. And it began in Italy. Veronika tells us how a chance meeting at UNESCO with the late artist Patricia Atkinskisi led to a landmark concert with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, celebrating the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through pieces written by women.

It's the story of a promise kept, of an idea that travelled from Rome to New York, and of an Italy that, from the Venice Biennale to the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, has always known that culture is the most powerful form of diplomacy there is.

A conversation about closed doors, open stages, and what the next generation of Italian girls picking up a violin needs to hear.

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We meet Sohrab Mirmont at the World Woman Foundation during the Cannes Film Festival, just as he prepares to shoot his new film in Venice with the cinematographer who once worked alongside his uncle, the late Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.

The producer behind Riddle of Fire, which premiered at Directors' Fortnight in Cannes edition 2023, tells us how a single ride on a Venetian water taxi sparked the idea for his next project, why he sought out Luca Bigazzi, the cinematographer of Certified Copy, to shape its visual language, and how Italian actor Riccardo Scamarcio came on board after a long dinner at the St. Regis in Rome that had almost nothing to do with the film itself.

It's a conversation about family legacy, the gravitational pull of Italy on global cinema, and what happens when an American filmmaker steps into a 1,500 year old city where every corner is already set design.

A new name to keep on your radar, and you heard it here first.

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We catch Turkish actress and producer Selin Yeninci in Cannes, fresh from a panel and even fresher from her second appearance on Verissimo, where Italian audiences welcomed her as one of their own. As Saniye in Terra Amara, the Turkish drama that ran for 121 episodes and travelled to more than 150 countries, she became a household name from the Amalfi Coast to Anatolia.

Selin tells us about the mother and daughter who chased her down a Positano street at half past six in the morning, the Napoletano café owner who FaceTimed his grandmother on the spot - and then watched her leave the house for the first time in years just to meet her favourite actress, and the journalists at Mediaset who unearthed details about her childhood she didn't think existed online.

We also follow her on the road: Milan, Florence, Naples, a rented car all the way down to Sicily and back, and the dream of one day producing a Turkish-Italian co-production of her own. It's a conversation about two Mediterranean cultures that, as Selin puts it, share the same daily rhythm - and recognise each other on sight.

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We sit down with Lorenzo Marsili, philosopher, writer and founding director of Berggruen Institute Europe, inside Casa dei Tre Oci, the 1911 artist's studio on the Giudecca that now serves as the Institute's European home.

Marsili explains why a global think tank founded in Los Angeles chose Venice over Berlin, Paris or Rome, and how three Venetian buildings have quietly become a gathering place for some of the most provocative minds of our time, from Carlo Rovelli and Giorgio Agamben to Slavoj Žižek and Peter Sloterdijk.

From a Joseph Kosuth solo show at Casa dei Tre Oci to a Hans Ulrich Obrist exhibition on protocol art at Palazzo Diedo, this is the story of a city that has always traded in ideas, and the next chapter being written from a window on the Giudecca.

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We sit down with Luca Vullo, actor, director, author and cultural ambassador, to explore the gestural language that runs beneath Italian speech like a second grammar. And makes Italy unlike anywhere else on earth.

Luca has spent years cataloguing and teaching the more than 250 recognised Italian gestures, touring his one-man show La Voce del Corpo from San Francisco to Sydney, often with his mother Angela on stage beside him. He tells us why a Roman hand in motion can say more than a paragraph, how regional gesture dialects survive alongside a shared national code, and why he is fighting to have Italian gestural language recognised as UNESCO intangible heritage.

By the end, you may find yourself gesturing along, and wondering how you ever communicated without it.

Photo credits:Cinzia Capparelli.

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We travel to Gragnano, a hilltop town outside Naples where the mountain wind, sea air and light conspire to create conditions unlike anywhere else on earth. And where Pastificio Di Martino has been making Pasta di Gragnano IGP for over a century.

Giuseppe Di Martino walks us through 260 handcrafted shapes, each one designed not for beauty alone but for the precise company it will keep on the plate. He speaks about 100 percent Italian wheat, bronze dies and slow drying at low temperature, and about a family philosophy as old as the town itself: pasta will never make you rich, but it will never let you go hungry.

From a landmark collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana that gave rise to the Devozione restaurant in New York, to the pastificio's sponsorship of the San Carlo opera house in Naples, Giuseppe draws a straight line from pasta to Puccini, and traces how this most Italian of arts travelled with emigrants to every corner of the world.

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We arrive at Masseria Potenti near Manduria, a 16th-century fortified farmhouse in the heart of Puglia, where a family's dream of sharing their corner of southern Italy has quietly grown into one of the region's most beloved destinations.

Maria Grazia Di Lauro and her daughter Chiara Tommasino tell us how a holiday home became an agriturismo by accident, shaped entirely by the guests who loved it first. And they reveal what comes next: a monastery in Nardò, six years in the making, where the ancient philosophy of healing through craft, connection and slowness is being brought back to life.

It is a story about olive oil, whitewashed walls and the particular kind of hospitality that only happens when a family opens its home and never quite closes the door.

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We sit down with Albiera Antinori, at the Forum della Cucina Italiana in Manduria, where the 26th generation of Italy's most storied winemaking family talks dynasty, disruption and the long view.

She tells us how Tignanello broke every rule of late-1960s Chianti Classico, why wine and food are inseparable in Italian culture, and what a 27th generation is already bringing to one of the world's great wine estates.

Six hundred years in, the direction has never been clearer.

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We sit down with Miriam De Rienzo Gazzola at Palazzo Maresgallo in Lecce, a sixteenth-century residence rescued from sixty years of abandonment and brought back to life as one of Puglia's most extraordinary boutique hotels and art spaces.

Miriam tells us how she and her husband Lionel gave up two years of their lives to a restoration that their own architect told them was madness — and how Helen Mirren, at the grand opening, offered the word that made it all make sense: anima, soul.

With twelve suites hung with works from their private collection, a noble floor given over to contemporary exhibitions, and a frescoed grand salon overlooking Lecce's Roman theatre, this is the story of a place built entirely out of love. And occasionally, a very beautiful kind of madness.

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At Tenuta Donna Anna, a working country estate in the heart of Salento, food is not a product — it is a memory. Carlo Cascione and his family grow Senatore Cappelli, an ancient variety of wheat that nearly disappeared in the twentieth century, mill it themselves, and turn it into pasta shaped by hand at a table where guests from across the world come to learn, to eat, and find themselves, more than once, moved to tears.

His mother's cooking and the shared experience of working the dough made of ancient grains are the heart of the estate: less a class, more an initiation into the southern Italian art of being together.

Mettere le mani in pasta — to put your hands in the dough — is, here, an act of belonging.

We also discover how sustainable cycling is quietly opening Salento to a new kind of traveller, who pedals through the inland villages, stops at the cheese farmer, lingers at the small winery, and leaves having seen a part of Italy that most tourists never find.

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We step inside the cellars of Produttori di Manduria, the oldest active wine cooperative in Puglia, where more than 300 grape-growing families have been tending the same ancient vines since 1932.

Anna Gennari, who leads hospitality at the cooperative, tells us how Primitivo arrived in Manduria as a bride's dowry in the 19th century and grew into one of Italy's most celebrated appellations.

From star-vaulted cellar rooms turned community museum to a sweet red wine conquering China, this is the story of a wine, a town, and the quiet persistence of the people who kept both alive.

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We step inside the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna with Professor Robin Cormack, one of the world's leading authorities on Byzantine art and author of Byzantine Art for Oxford University Press.

Standing beneath some of the most breathtaking mosaics ever created, Robin explains why this small city in Emilia-Romagna holds a place in art history that Rome, Florence and Venice simply cannot match. From the shimmering gold tessera that lines every surface to the famous panels of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora, he brings one of the ancient world's greatest achievements back to vivid life.

King Charles made a special pilgrimage here during his 2025 royal tour of Italy.

Once you see it, you will understand why.

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We go inside Palazzo Mignanelli in Rome, where the Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti has unveiled Venus, a stunning exhibition running through May 2026 that brings together art and fashion in spectacular fashion.

Curator Pamela Golbin walks us through the most breathtaking pieces, from the vision behind the show to the surprising collaborations that made it possible.

It's the Rome exhibition everyone is talking about, and we got a front-row tour.

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We sit down with Mario Mozzetti at Alfredo alla Scrofa in Rome, where fettuccine Alfredo was born and where the art of mantecatura has been passed down through three generations.

The third-generation owner of Alfredo alla Scrofa tells us how this iconic dish conquered the world, from Hollywood legends to Masterchef Turkey, and why the secret is still in the hands.

It's a love letter to Roman tradition, family pride and the perfect plate of pasta.

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In this introductory episode we unveil the blueprint to the Italy Now podcast.

Meet us, understand our approach, and get a glimpse of the stories ahead.

Consider this your press pass to the real Italy.

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