Mark Hinshaw

Friends who had been through the procedure assured me that it was “not that bad.”

My hunt for onion rings took me to the Old Wild West, an Italian restaurant chain that aims to satisfy the Italian yearning for the American frontier.

Our Italian guests are often perplexed by the placement of all the food on one large plate.

Italy has hundreds of — perhaps even a thousand — such farms, all part of a fast-growing movement known as “social farming.”

It’s interesting to see what's left in a box that could tell someone the story of your life.

Italy's two-week collective vacation period is an intense time of festivals, performances, concerts, entertainment for children, community dinners, and other events in public places. My family and I feel fortunate to have experienced this continual “social weaving” ourselves.

The reward for Italy’s diligence has been that this year the country received an EU allocation of €191 billion ($210 billion) for infrastructure projects. The program is known as the National Resilience and Recovery Plan.

Living in Italy is like living inside multiple, simultaneous movies, with an endless selection of historic periods, subjects, and surroundings.

Italy is a land of family farms, and as expats there we enjoy produce, meats, and dairy products as fresh as possible, with daily deliveries via small trucks that ascend to our hilltop village in the early morning.

I chose Dante’s little shop to begin my series because it seemed to me a microcosmic metaphor for Italian culture as a whole.