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 Lots of fashion designers impress with their innovations on tailoring, sportswear, print and pattern, but Brunello Cucinelli's mastery is simply in his ability to achieve elegant simplicity. There's nothing groundbreaking about a houndstooth blazer, but there's a love and softness that go into hisblazers that make them feel so luxurious (and thus desirable). Now, that same level of detail and care that goes into his jackets, sweaters, and trousers is available in sneaker form. 

 Apple opened an iOS app development centre in Italy, the vendor’s first in Europe, which will give students practical skills and training for the platform. The centre, located at a partner institution in Naples 

"The next wave of Italians has come to America," a 2010 commercial for the Fiat 500 proclaimed.
Brightly-colored examples of the itty-bitty city car slid around typical Italian alleyways paved with cobblestones and then ... dove suddenly into the sea, to then emerge from the depths on the beaches of Brooklyn. 

 Ettore Scola, a Golden Globe winner and five-time Oscar nominee who was considered among the great directors and screenwriters of Italian cinema, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 84. 

 “Enrico Baj” at Luxembourg & Dayan is a hoot and an eye-opener. Surveying about 16 years of works in several modes, the exhibition reintroduces the Italian artist Enrico Baj (1924-2003) to New York after an absence of three or four decades.  

 One evening this past September, more than 300 people squeezed into a narrow room at BookCourt bookstore in Brooklyn for the launch of “The Story of the Lost Child,” by Italian author Elena Ferrante. The author, whose true identity is a closely held secret, was absent. Instead, the crowd whooped and cheered for the headliner of the evening: the book’s translator, Ann Goldstein.

 It was vulgarity and not elegance that ruled the day in Italy when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was simultaneously running the country and staging “bunga bunga” bacchanals. Mr. Berlusconi was hell on traditional Italian cultural values, his years in office a prolonged populist takedown of the high-minded intellectual and aesthetic achievements that defined Italian architecture, art, industrial design and, not least, its fashion for much of the 20th century. 

 
Medieval castle was home to former debutante who entertained Beat poets and invented the modern bra 

 The Grim Reaper has got his work cut out in Sellia in southern Italy, thanks to a decree ordering the village's elderly and dwindling population to stay in good shape. 

 Here are some tips on how to navigate Ms. Ferrante’s Naples. (A note for those who haven’t read the novels, including the latest, 

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