The Italy Now Podcast

Bread, voices & emotion. The family that gave Italy its voice

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. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Five centuries, one square & 1.3 million lives: inside the Procuratie Vecchie

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. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Cannes, cinema & a count's cinema passion: Marianne Borgo's Italian roots

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. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Music, peace & diplomacy. The woman bringing female composers to the world's stages

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. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Venice, lineage & cinema. An Iranian American filmmaker comes home to Italy

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. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.