Cloud-riding is forbidden.
Freaky-thinking is forbidden.
Access to vandals is forbidden.
Upside-down bus transit is forbidden.

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Do you have any alternatives to watching the same old TV programs?
I’m building a tall stack of books on my coffee table for those long nights and Sundays in autumn!

On top is The Road Home by Rose Tremain, winner of the latest Orange Broadband Prize. It’s a contemporary story about a man named Lev who comes to London from Eastern Europe to get work and send money back to his family. It’s the struggle of a foreigner adapting to the English way of life.
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Black as chocolate.
My beloved chocolate is going to be celebrated in many different ways, to the delight of gourmets, during Play Chocolate in Perugia, running until 26 October!
If the traditional tour of the producers’ stands is too risky, perhaps it’s better to train your noses at the “Golonaso” exhibition, where you can have fun with the olfactory tasting of all kinds of chocolate bars. Well, that will be very hard for me as I have a bad cold!

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Eco-monsters: areas turned into chaotic parking lots, posters and signs disfiguring monuments, abandoned cement skeletons and illegal buildings in uncontaminated seaside resorts.

Enough! Let’s save Italian cities from ugliness!

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Vintage and retro, that’s what everybody is talking about on the web these days! I love to go rummaging around in vintage markets such as the Montagnola in Bologna or Portobello Road in London. Perhaps this year, with my leather jackets and bags “stolen from my grandma”, I’ll be trendy!

 Karl Lagerfeld is setting trends based on the Chanel icon database. Everywhere you go, you see double Cs, pearls and bouclé women suits.
Emerging brands are inspired by the 50s or the Sex Pistols’ punk wave and are showing innovative, but not impossible, women’s wear.

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Dilemma: online or paperback guides?
Well, considering the vast number available, the only thing I know for sure is that we need a “guide to guides“!

Before planning a trip, which can be a real investment, it is best to get some tips.

The pocketbook guide Wallpaper is very stylish looking and available for 60 different world capital cities. When I was in London, I made a great impression  on a Scottish friend of mine who told me that the roast beef with applesauce was better than her grandmother’s! Perhaps it was due to the placebo effect created by the restaurant’s Buckingham Palace style furniture. Anyway, as a native of Bologna, I prefer my beloved lasagne!

For major world destinations, you can find suggestions at Tripadvisor, where users are gurus of “do-it yourself” tourism. The blogs at Moleskine are a bit more romantic and written in travel diary style similar to Chatwin. Unfortunately, the number of cities is quite limited.
The next time I go to the States, I’ll check out Zagat to avoid the usual mega-calorie fast food meals. They present just one risk: side effects due to extensive mouthwatering!

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Seasonal trends evoke a romantic style with modern élan.

Romantic and exquisite.
Precious as treasure.
Rare and ornate.
Ancient fabrics mixed with fragile silks and refined jacquards.

Past and future. A meeting of two worlds.

Our history holds the key to our future. We don’t wish to emulate the past, just use our imagination to generate modern ideas.

Originals are the starting point, revisited with humor and imagination to obtain new creations.

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In our region, when people say “Via Aemilia“, it makes us think of traffic jams, the elderly playing cards on balconies and kiosks selling melons. We’ve forgotten that the Milan-Rimini roadway is of Roman origin! And, actually, it still looks good after two thousand years! Along with the energy of our forgotten past and the frenzy of our modern real estate growth, we have discovered that “Via Aemilia” is also the “road of contemporary art“.

Starting from Reggio Emilia, we are greeted by the white sails of Calatrava’s bridges stretching skywards over the A1 highway. In the city centre, we can encounter the minimalist statue “Less Than” by Robert Morris, which rejuvenates the San Domenico Cloisters. The city’s students get to study under a multicolored ceiling in the public library painted by Sol Lewitt.

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Are you a fashion movie expert? I’m a sort of modest “movie spin doctor”.
On one hand, it’s due to all those Sunday cinema marathons of my teenage years, on the other hand, to a university ‘History of the Cinema’ course. I suffered through all the great masterpieces from Nosferatu (the great grandfather of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula) to the Battleship Potemkin!

Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a completely different experience! I was amazed by Audrey Hepburn’s elegance. She certainly didn’t need Givenchy to become such a style icon. And I’ve realized that cinema is an important marketing tool for fashion.

Do you remember Richard Gere in American Gigolo?
He was certainly helped by Giorgio Armani, who was very adept at exploiting the image of the emerging actor.

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