Italy is the country of the Amalfi Coast, pizza, and pasta; the Vatican, Venice, and Portofino; Berlusconi, mozzarella, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But every dish, monument, and landscape is layered with history and complexities. “Let’s get one thing straight,” the Italian essayist Beppe Severgnini wrote. “Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It’s alluring, but complicated.”
Since founding the online publication Italy Segreta, along with its much-followed Instagram account, Marina Cacciapuoti has been making the same point but in a different way. By broadening awareness of the country, she’s also helping to ease the damaging pressures of overtourism in the towns that appear on our postcards and fridge magnets.
