Unlike other popular brands from the 1980s, Super Mario has endured, with more iterations of the game offered continually. Like other forms of video games, Super Mario commands various cognitive and motor skills, thus contributing to brain plasticity. Super Mario has inspired a corpus of psychology research. Here are seven interesting findings from...

In Italy, brass and wind bands – known as bande musicali – are everywhere: they perform in town squares, lead religious processions, train local youth, and preserve centuries of musical tradition. Still today, they are a central feature of social life in many villages, and their history is strictly connected to that of Italy as a nation.  In the ea...

Operagoers have been warned they will be banned from entering Milan’s prestigious La Scala theatre if they turn up wearing shorts, tank tops or flip-flops. Kimonos, however, are acceptable. The venue’s management team reminded people how not to dress for an opera after complaints that some spectators were donning attire more suitable for the beach....

Rome authorities on Monday evening inaugurated the Vela landmark, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, ahead of the Jubilee of Youth in the southeastern Tor Vergata suburb. The project to redevelop and complete the futuristic structure, which was abandoned for more than 15 years, was financed with €80 million allocated by Italy's econo...

Upon touching down at LAX, after 12 hours in the air, I walked non-stop to the 7-11 convenience store near the baggage claim belt for a Big Gulp to quench my thirst. The attendant at the counter, an earnest young man named Corey, asked politely where I had been? “Bologna, Italy…it is in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region,” I answered. “For business or p...

What does the Amalfi Coast with a sports car from Maranello? Everything. Because where the Mediterranean meets the Italian art of living, a new icon is born of the Prancing Horse: the Ferrari Amalfi. Presented as a world premiere in the city from which it takes its name, together with its Spider version, the new berlinetta 2+ will collect the legac...

Building cars is a pretty global affair these days. Everybody seems to have a factory everywhere, and even tiny specialist automakers source major components from overseas. Sixty years ago, it wasn’t as common to find the best of the Old World mixed with the best of the New, but it did happen, usually in the form of a European chassis and body powe...

Miceli Dairy is a staple in northeast Ohio and their location in Cleveland, which is where they were founded, has been open since 1949. Maria Miceli, the vice president of marketing for the company, explained their expansion plan. “We’re renting space all over the city for storage, for cold storage, for dry storage and it got to the point where we...

There’s something a bit magical about life in an Italian village. Winding cobbled lanes, neighbours who know your name, the slow chime of church bells and the promise of an afternoon spritz under the shade of a vine-draped pergola. Moving to an Italian village means trading city noise for mountain views or rolling fields, swapping big supermarkets...

Boggi Milano is continuing its U.S. retail rollout with the opening of a third New York City store at The Shops at Columbus Circle. The 4,735-square-foot, two-level store offers street access as well as an entrance from inside the mall. The Columbus Circle store joins a single-level 1,800-square-foot store at 115 Mercer Street in SoHo that opened i...