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Blogs abound on Italy – ranging from food and wine, to culture, travel, language, cycling, gardening, daily life, and many other topics, they provide an endless insight in to all things Italian. Written by funny, zany, intelligent and knowledgeable people, they cover the length and breadth of Italy.
With so many sources of information, which ones should one read? Obviously, subject will dictate one’s first choice, but how do you decide on the best? With huge difficulty is the answer.
The Index of Top Blogs for Lovers of Italy is a quantitative measure of how a blog performs. It is driven by publicly-available measures that include Technorati’s Authority Score, adjusted by Google blog hit scores, Google blog hit scores over the past month, and influenced by IceRocket scores. It does not measure the quality of what a blog says, how often it is updated, or who links to it. It aims to show the popularity, or authority, of a blog. If other people are linking to it a lot, one must presume that it has some interesting content.
The blogs included in the overall rating were chosen from my own list of blogs, which I believe to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date available in this area. I have excluded the political commentators. The index is my own work and was inspired by similar indexes that deal with other topics. The index is still in its development stage – the plan is for a more graphical and transparent display of the scores used to compile the index and also to expand the number of blogs in the index.
I have done my best to ensure that the ranking is as accurate as you can make this type of thing. However, this is not an exact science, and you will find there are different ways of measuring influence. Mine is just one, so please feel free to disagree with it, or ignore it. Do let me know if you have ideas on how I can improve it.
So here it is, the first Index of Top Blogs for Lovers of Italy based on influence:
I have done my best to ensure that the ranking is as accurate as you can make this type of thing. However, this is not an exact science, and you will find there are different ways of measuring influence. Mine is just one, so please feel free to disagree with it, or ignore it. Do let me know if you have ideas on how I can improve it.
By far the most interesting new blogger on life in Italy is thepisanheathen (newer even than me!) . Irreverent, controversial, challenging and highly original - he will make you laugh out loud and change your view of Pisa forever. His is not the traditional tourist view of Pisa, thank goodness, but rather of life as it is for the inhabitants. Free wifi? Italian style tips? How to score? The Pisan Heathen has a fresh take on it all. And to keep you laughing, his responses to tourist tweets on Pisa reflect exactly what we were all thinking but weren’t brave enough to say. Definitely, a refreshing new blog on expat life in Italy and it wouldn’t surpise me if he becomes responsible for tourists spending more time in the city in future to experience the alternative Pisa.
It is a warm and beautiful spring in our corner of Lunigiana. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a camera with me when we went up the bosco on the weekend. Where we cleared brambles over the last year or two, there are now wild primroses and violets. Fortunately, Path to Self Sufficiency has a beautiful photo of wild primroses to share. The violets were also gorgeous.
Rumour has it that the always enthusiastic mayor of Villafranca in Lunigiana is proposing a thermal waterpark using the ‘special’ high salt content water found in a spring near the Magra river.
Other proposals from the mayor include an 18-hole golf course (there are currently practice tees but not much more) and Villafranca’s very own motorway exit on the SS62.
An unlikely blog to follow I know, but every week I learn something new from Italian Cycling Journal. This week, legendary car maker Maserati unveiled two bikes, one for road racing and the other for more leisurely use. According to Italian Cycling Journal, Maserati bikes were available in the 1970s and has a photo to prove it.
Carlo Maserati, one of the brothers, certainly had an early involvement with bikes having started his career in a bicycle factory near Milan, where he developed an internal combustion engine for a motorised bike. He rode this splendid machine in a number of races winning several titles for his efforts.
Learning about the Maserati bike reminds of my surprise when I saw my first Lamborghini tractor in Italy. It was partly hidden in a barn close to the excellent restaurant, Gavarini, in Mocrone in Lunigiana.
As in other places, in Italy things don’t always go the way they should. Empty holiday homes can be prime targets for burgers, who often systematically work their way through an area in a couple of days before moving on, one step ahead of the police. 2 Italy discusses the problem in southern Marche, where over 120 burglaries took place in the summer.
There are around 1,000 travel strikes a year in Italy, which can cause the unsuspecting a real problem. Zoomata points outs that if the Italian Parliament is successful, Italians will have to go on a ‘virtual’ strike at some point in the future in order to guarantee basic public services.
Web scaping, or the systematic stealing of someone’s web content, is a nasty business. Italian Food Forever had a shocking time this week when the content of her website was plagiarised. Happily, she successfully had the rogue website taken down.
Food is always an important topic in Italy. Wanted in Rome news reports the outrage of parents and politicians to the introduction of a Lent menu in Rome’s schools. Meantime, the children are denied meat in their school meals until 5 April.
Whilst Genoa’s environmental department is busy turning off Genoa’s lights, Ciao Amalfi- points out that Amalfi still has its Christmas lights on, and hints at rumours of it being used as a film set. But presumably, not a movie about the environment.
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