Olga Golubeva

Sixty kilometres east of Rome, in the hills above the small town of Olevano Romano, a quiet renaissance has been underway for fifteen years. The Cesanese — the indigenous red grape of southern Lazio, almost extinct in the 1980s — is being recovered by a small constellation of family producers who have, in less than … Read more

Forty-five minutes north-west of Rome, the via Cassia descends into the Sabatini volcanic crater, and the traveller arrives at one of the most cinematic small landscapes in the Lazio region: Lake Bracciano, a perfectly circular volcanic lake of fifty-seven square kilometres, ringed by three medieval villages, and dominated by the silhouette of the Castello Orsini-Odescalchi … Read more

Seventy kilometres east of Rome, in the dramatic Aniene valley of the Simbruini mountains, a Benedictine monastery has been carved into a vertical cliff for nine hundred years. The Sacro Speco di Subiaco — the «sacred grotto» — is the cave in which Saint Benedict spent three years in solitary meditation between 497 and 500 … Read more

Roman luxury shopping has a geography. It is not the via del Corso (too commercial), nor the via dei Condotti alone (which is now mostly the same global flagships available in any capital). It is the triangle formed by three intersecting streets — the via dei Condotti from the Spanish Steps, the via Margutta running … Read more

In the heart of the Regola district, a few minutes from Campo de’ Fiori, there is a small palace, the Palazzo Spada, in whose garden Francesco Borromini constructed, in 1652, what is probably the most elegantly intelligent piece of theatre in all baroque Rome. The garden gallery — known to art historians as the «prospettiva» … Read more

A traveller who has crossed the Colosseum a dozen times rarely climbs the narrow ramp of the via dei Santi Quattro — and yet, two hundred metres from the amphitheatre, behind a fortified gate that looks more like a 9th-century military stronghold than a church, lies what may be the most extraordinary single room in … Read more

A wet day in Rome is, for travellers, often a missed day. The luxury guest who has flown to Rome for five clear days and finds, on the third morning, that the forecast is rain through the next forty-eight hours, often surrenders the day to the hotel — or worse, to the shop. This is … Read more

Mosaic, in the Roman imagination, is a Pompeian floor or a Byzantine ceiling — a finished surface admired in a museum. The work itself — the cutting of marble tesserae from a slab with a hammer and a mallet, the laying of those tesserae into a bed of lime mortar, the slow making of a … Read more

The Italian aperitivo is a code. To order a Spritz at the wrong hour, to mistake an apericena for an aperitivo, to ask for a Negroni at the table reserved for the Negroni Sbagliato — these are not catastrophes, but they betray the visitor. The aperitivo is, in its proper Italian form, a forty-five-minute ritual … Read more