For decades, the topless sunbather was one of the enduring images of the French Riviera, a symbol of a certain Gallic ease with the body that the more buttoned-up world found by turns scandalous and enviable. That image is fading fast. Survey after survey confirms that far fewer French women go topless on the beach …
You have finished a wonderful dinner in Rome, the plates are long cleared, and now you are ready to pay and go. So you wait for the check. And you wait. The waiter drifts past, unhurried, attending to other tables, and the bill simply never appears, until you begin to feel invisible, wondering if you …
The Italian kitchen functions on a set of small habits that most Americans never learn. None of them are technically difficult. None of them require special equipment. They are simply embedded in Italian cooking culture in ways they are not embedded in American cooking culture, and the cumulative effect across thousands of meals is the …
On Tuesday mornings, Susan does the Mercado Central run: two kinds of tomatoes, a bag of clementines, whatever fish the woman at stall 87 says is good, and a coffee standing up on the way out, all of it for less than the parking would have cost at her old supermarket in Ohio. Susan is …
Two words that sound almost identical get confused constantly, and the confusion causes no end of muddled conversations. Polyamory and polygamy both begin with poly, both involve more than two people, and both make many people uneasy, so they blur together in the popular imagination as if they were the same thing. They are not. …
Walk into almost any American restaurant that calls itself Italian and the menu will be full of it: chicken alfredo, chicken penne, grilled chicken over spaghetti, chicken tossed into every creamy sauce on the page. To an American, chicken and pasta go together as naturally as peanut butter and jelly, a default pairing nobody thinks …
In America, a prenuptial agreement is a fraught and famous thing, the document couples argue over, lawyers grow rich on, and romantics regard with suspicion, because it is the only way to spell out in advance what happens to a couple’s money if the marriage ends. Across most of Europe, prenups in that sense are …
In Spain today, if you line up ten newborns, the odds are that one of them was born to a mother in her forties. That single statistic, roughly one in ten Spanish babies born to a mother over 40, is the highest share anywhere in Europe, and it is not close. It is roughly double …
Tell an American that in much of Europe the average person does not marry until their mid-thirties, and that in some countries the typical groom is pushing thirty-seven, and you will often get a look of frank disbelief. In the United States, where people still tend to marry around their late twenties, the European timeline …
The useful comparison is not that Italians are magically cleaner. It is that many Italian homes treat hygiene as daily order, not as a weekend rescue project after the house has already lost control. An Italian kitchen can look almost too simple. A sponge where it belongs. A dish towel that is not used for …
Gram for gram, real saffron is one of the most expensive substances you can buy in a grocery store, worth more than silver by weight and creeping toward the price of gold, which is exactly why the jar on the shelf so often lies. The world is awash in fake and adulterated saffron, cut with …
For decades, olive oil has been celebrated as a friend to the heart, the golden centerpiece of the Mediterranean diet, praised in study after study for its effect on cholesterol and cardiovascular risk. So when a team of Harvard scientists followed more than ninety thousand Americans for twenty-eight years and looked at what olive oil …