Buying a house in a small Italian town was not something I had in mind when I initially arrived in Italy in 2015 as a graduate student. As someone who enjoys big cities, I was all about the Milans and Johannesburgs of the world at the time. The bigger and more chaotic the town, the better. But in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic tested my affection for...

From the beaches of Sicily to the medieval wonders of Florence, you’d need a lifetime to see everything that Italy has to offer. And while you may have visited Milan, the capital city of the northern Lombardy region, there’s a good chance that two of its close neighbours, Bergamo and Brescia, have slipped under your travel radar. If so, 2023 is the...

Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute and Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor at Northeastern, has been elected as a Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The group is the world’s largest “general scientific society” and publisher of perhaps the most widely recognized prestigious academic...

In the first few months of 2020, huge swathes of Northern Italy were hit by the COVID-19 virus. Soon the death toll in the city of Bergamo reached such heights that an army convoy had to transport coffins out because its cemeteries and crematoriums were full. In his powerful doc “The Walls of Bergamo,” which world premieres on Friday in Berlin’s En...

Italy has ordered COVID-19 antigen swabs and virus sequencing for all travellers coming from China, where cases are surging, the health minister said on Wednesday. Italy, which was the first nation in Europe to be hit hard by the virus in February 2020 after it emerged in China, is now the first to impose mandatory tests on people arriving from the...

It’s not every day that you find yourself locked down in the midst of a global pandemic with a one-toothed puppet of Italy’s legendary La Befana, but through a mix of serendipitous circumstances, that some might call fate, I spent the pandemic living out an urban version of ancient Italian legend. For those who may not know, in Italian folklore, th...

Italy will no longer require commuters to wear masks on public transport, with effect from Saturday 1 October, the health ministry confirmed last night. This means that Friday 30 September is the final day that FFP2 masks will be required on Italy's buses, trains, subways, trams and ferries, as one of Italy's last remaining covid restrictions comes...