[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]During WWI, Ernest Hemingway, while stationed as an ambulance driver at Villa Ca’ Erizzo on the banks of the Brenta, often came to Nardini Distillery in Bassano for a shot of grappa. Grappa also figures prominently in many of his works, especially those dealing with...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In the 1948, after the complete destruction of the Ponte Vecchio at the end of the second World War, the covered bridge in Bassano del Grappa was completely rebuilt with private funds collected by the Alpini soldiers. Alcide De Gasperi, the first Prime Minister of...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The mother of Queen Elisabeth knew Nardini grappa and it was so loved that it was the only Italian hard liquor served at her daughter Queen Elisabeth II wedding. In 1987, the Queen Mother, who, passing by Nardini on an official visit, impelled her escort...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In the final years of the 1800’s the tumultuous romance between actress Eleonora Duse and writer Gabriele D’Annunzio brought them often to Asolo and Bassano del Grappa, and inevitably to Nardini, to have a drink at “ their table” in the back room in a...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] The first rent contracts and private letters addressed to the aristocratic Agostini family that mention the presence of a café on the ground floor of their residence in Pisa dates back to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but the name “Caffè dell’Ussero” first...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]“Thirty seconds at the Turchino!” In sports cafés and balancing on windowsills to bring the news to those in the street below, radio sets blared out Coppi’s lead over the Frenchman Teisseire in the Milano-Sanremo. Thirty seconds had stretched into five minutes at the Voltri...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]e film director Alfred Hitchcock adored the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este in Cernobbio and used to spend his summer holidays here from 1925 – when he shot a short scene for his first feature film, The Pleasure Garden in the hotel park – until 1970. It...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] From 1988 to 1992, the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este in Cernobbio was the venue for the Festival di Hollywood. Many famous actors and actresses turned up: Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, June Allison, Joseph Cotten, and Claire Trevor, to name but a...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Grand Hotel Villa d’Este in Cernobbio opened to guests in 1873 and the first to step through the door was the publisher Giulio Ricordi, who took over an entire floor of the Regina d’Inghilterra wing for the whole season. Giuseppe Verdi was one of...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Forty thousand items. Rare, unusual, antique. Period implements used by peasants and craftsmen in Val Venosta. Long-forgotten workplaces, furnishings, and collections of Tyrolese memories. But also furnishings and objects that once belonged to Emperor Franz Joseph and his wife Sissi. This is the extraordinary K.u.K....