Mia Margherita, located in Bridgeport’s Charles Pointe development, is the only restaurant in West Virginia offering its customers artisan, handcrafted pizzas cooked in a coal-fired oven. Scott Duarte, who operates the restaurant for owners CP Hospitality, said the restaurant puts a contemporary spin on the culinary classic. “The thought was to try...

Nardelli’s Grinder Shoppe will be celebrating the grand opening of its Torrington location on Tuesday at 10 a.m., according to a release. Store owner Elizabeth Begley will host a ribbon cutting with Torrington Mayor Elinor Carbone at the shop at 1268 East Main St., in the BJ’s plaza. Nardelli’s Torrington will also be unveiling its “Local Favorites...

Fairfield University, whose patron is the Jesuit cardinal and theologian St. Robert Bellarmine, is celebrating this year the 75th anniversary of its founding. Linda Wolk-Simon, the imaginative and energetic director of the University Art Museum, had an audacious dream—indeed, she readily admits, it was “quixotic”—to bring to Fairfield the magnifice...

When you’re a kid, your neighborhood is the center of your universe. Everything that you know, you learned there — at home, in school and with your friends right there on the street where you lived. Growing up in New Haven’s Wooster Square gave me an opportunity to have an experience that I still treasure and appreciate. How can you not appreciate...

Between family tension, health issues, a destroyed reputation and exile from the community of Roman Catholic nuns she helped found, Clelia Merloni could have easily given up. But instead, Merloni bore those trials quietly and without complaint and chose to love those who persecuted her. It’s one of the reasons the nuns of the Hamden-based religious...

Before he blossomed into an All-American at Yale, before he shared the ice with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in Pittsburgh, before he was chosen to represent the United States at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Mark Arcobello worked as a busboy for an Italian restaurant in Bridgeport. But Arcobello, who was in high school at the...

Except on one occasion, when it traveled briefly to an adjacent building, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s bust of the 16th century Italian Jesuit priest Roberto Bellarmino has for nearly 400 years sat aloft and out of sight in a niche, well above the high altar in the Church of the Gesu, in Rome. But for the coming three months, the bust will be brought dow...

Gastronomes descend daily on the thriving restaurant row on Bedford Street. Now, the thoroughfare has a new retailer catering to their meals at home. Opened last month, Stagecoach Olive Oil & Vinegar Co., at 180 Bedford St., sells more than 60 varieties of olive oils and vinegars. Owner Rick Doyle, a former restaurateur in New York City and Las Veg...

In 1965, during my sophomore year at Yale, football coach John Pont abruptly resigned to take a more prestigious job at a Big Ten school. Instead of tapping another WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), the school replaced him with an Italian American, assistant coach Carmen Cozza. I still remember how outraged the alumni were. Yale had always had W...

Chester’s Grano Arso, a new seasonally inspired Italian restaurant, came together quickly and fortuitously for first-time owner Joel Gargano. The chef, a native of Branford, became familiar with the charming community a few years ago while buying produce at the town’s popular farmers’ market. In the years following, he lived and worked in New York...