With an open kitchen, a beautiful bar displaying colorful bottles of wine and spirits, exposed brick throughout the restaurant and water served in wine goblets, the impression when walking into the dining room at Nonna’s Italian Bistro is that you’re in for a first-class dining experience (with a food tab to match). While the eatery does offer such...

Riccardo Levi-Setti, an Italian-born Holocaust survivor who became a pathbreaking physicist at the University of Chicago, uncovering subatomic particles while traveling the world in search of trilobites, ancient arthropods he called “the butterflies of the seas,” died Nov. 8 at a nursing home in Chicago. He was 91. His son Emile Levi Setti said the...

The contrast would look trite in fiction. Facing Lincoln Park, the luxurious Lincoln Park 2520, where condo prices soar toward $6 million a unit. The building, opened in 2012, has two pools, a movie theater and a private garden. Designed by Chicago architect Lucien LaGrange, the center 39-story tower is flanked by a pair of 21-story wings, given a...

Today, Portillo’s proudly announces a new partnership with the six-time World Champion Chicago Bulls. The Chicago icons are collaborating on a new post-game promotion called Fourth Quarter Franks, which awards home game attendees with a complimentary hot dog if the opposing team misses two consecutive free throws in the Fourth Quarter. Bulls ticket...

Family-owned Buona, The Original Italian Beef will debut in Chicago's West Loop on Nov. 24 and plans to celebrate the opening of its 24th store with free beef sandwiches. The 37-year-old fast casual’s newest location is at 804 West Washington Blvd., and is the second to open in downtown Chicago, according to a press release. There is seating for 56...

Celebrated Italian tenor Enrico Caruso once famously said that all that was needed for Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il trovatore” to excel were the four greatest singers in the world. Lyric Opera of Chicago might not have fully delivered on that near-impossible formula in the second revival of the company’s 2006-07 co-production of the beloved Italian melodra...

Join Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia for Hell in a Handbag Productions' annual benefit, THE SOPHIA PETRILLO ITALIAN DINNER & TALENT SHOW on Sunday, December 2, 2018 from 5 - 10 pm at Our Lady of Eternal Guilt aka Ebenezer Lutheran Church, 1650 W. Foster Ave. in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood. Tickets ($75 in advance) are currently available...

In the thick of battle during the Vietnam War, Sam Scardino was so severely wounded in a landmine explosion that doctors initially thought he had perished in the blast. The second of five children, Samuel Scardino was born in Chicago to Samuel and Doris (Marquardt) Scardino. The family lived in the Italian neighborhood of California and Arthington...

Prof. Emeritus Riccardo Levi-Setti, a pioneering physicist and Holocaust survivor whose wide-ranging interests spanned cosmic rays to microscopy to trilobite fossils, died Nov. 8 in Chicago at age 91. Referred to as a “Renaissance man” by his colleagues, Levi-Setti was active in exploring subatomic particles called strange quarks before pioneering...

For more than a decade, Tamara Wilson has sung leading soprano roles on the world's great opera stages. Yet Wilson, who grew up in Naperville, is only now making her Lyric Opera of Chicago debut this season in "Il trovatore" ("The Troubadour"). "A lot of my family and friends from the suburbs would go, 'Are you sure you're an opera singer? Because...