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Have you been to Marengo, Iowa lately? A town of 2,500 situated just north of Highway 80, featuring a National Register of Historic Places listed courthouse, a Carnegie library, and a venerable cemetery with a Civil War memorial, it is intricately connected to French history, just like Iowa City, which developed out of a settlement named Napoleon....

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Born in Austria to Neapolitan parents, Patrizio Buanne believes that Naples is more than just his ancestral home, it’s part of his cultural identity. “Think Tom Jones, Italian-style.” That’s how The Boston Globe described the voice and music of multilingual Neapolitan pop crooner Patrizio Buanne, who has sold more than 10 million records around the...

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Sunday, January 14, 2024 , 1:00pm-4:00pm. Edgartown Library 26 Edgartown - West Tisbury Rd. - Edgartown, MA. Based on the tragic life of Anne Boleyn, second wife to Henry VIII, Donizetti's Anna Bolena is the first of his "Three Queens" operas. This 2011 production from the Vienna State Opera stars soprano Anna Netrebko as the doomed queen, mezzo El...

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Chef Massimo Bottura will be the protagonist of two episodes - those of January 5 and 12 - of the American television series Dream of Italy. The program-which boasts more than sixty million viewers-is to dedicate the two episodes in question to the city of Modena and more generally to the Food Valley of Emilia Romagna: Massimo Bottura, in this cont...

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Bill Ronayne was just 7 when he became a fan of Mario Lanza, the tenor who was born in South Philadelphia in 1921 and made the cover of Time in 1951, when he starred in “The Great Caruso.” That fandom continues – even more so – today, with Ronayne semiretired and devoted to Lanza as president of the Mario Lanza Institute and Museum in Philadelphia,...

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The amazing life and career of composer Ennio Morricone is explored in a new documentary, Ennio, which will be in theaters on February 9. Via Rolling Stone: The documentary, which was made by filmmaker and regular Morricone collaborator Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso) before the Maestro died in 2020, premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival...

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A Charlie Brown Christmas, which first aired on Dec. 9, 1965, was the first full-length animated special created by Charles Schulz, featuring the Peanuts gang. Even though the comic strip was popular in the early 1960s, it wasn’t until the iconic characters appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1965 that studio executives took an interest in br...

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Comedian Red Buttons once quipped of Dean Martin and his songs, “Let me put it this way: If Dracula bit him in the neck, he’d get a bloody Mary!” While Martin did admit that he enjoyed his cocktails, he long asserted that his boozy, lazy image was more the stuff of legend. “Down deep, [people] know I’m not a lazy guy. If there’s ever a benefit [and...

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Tony Bennett, the Astoria native and late singer who gained international fame, will soon have a street co-named after him. The city council passed a bill Wednesday that will see the intersection of 32nd Street and Ditmars Boulevard co-named Tony Bennett Place, in honor of the singer who died in July at the age of 96. Bennett, who grew up in an apa...

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The first event in Washington Concert Opera’s 37th season, on Dec. 2, was the D.C. premiere of Gioachino Rossini’s “Ermione,” an opera that “immediately sank into oblivion” in 1819, according to WCO co-founder Peter Russell. Why did it fail? Musically, Rossini “might have just pushed the envelope a little too far” for the Naples audience, suggested...

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