Faenza’s tin-glazed maiolica gave French faience its name; its museum, bombed in 1944 and rebuilt, now sits in a city that joined UNESCO’s Creative Cities network in 2025 for a craft still practised in working kilns today.
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The stonemason who renamed himself and reshaped the Veneto
Andrea di Pietro della Gondola became Andrea Palladio under a patron’s tutelage, then built farm villas across the Veneto whose 1570 pattern book reached Inigo Jones and Thomas Jefferson.
Cremona still builds violins the way Stradivari’s teacher did
From Andrea Amati’s sixteenth-century workshop to Antonio Stradivari’s 650 surviving instruments, Cremona’s violin trade won UNESCO recognition in 2012 and, in 2019, closed its streets to record priceless instruments for a digital archive.
Ivrea’s typewriter town and the designers who reinvented it
Adriano Olivetti built Ivrea around his typewriter factory, hiring Nizzoli and Sottsass to design objects as considered as its buildings; the town became a UNESCO site in 2018, three decades after Sottsass founded Memphis in Milan.
Inside the blue room Giotto painted for a moneylender’s son
Giotto’s 1303–1305 fresco cycle for Enrico Scrovegni broke with Byzantine convention and used ultramarine more lavishly than any chapel before it. It now forms part of a UNESCO site inscribed in 2021.