Episodes

"Art is not a medicine… but it can help a lot to feel the beauty, to feel the joy, to feel the lightness. Art can help people heal." - Lucia Montuschi Can looking at a painting actually make you feel better? In April 2026, Italy's Ministries of Health and Culture signed a protocol so doctors can prescribe museum visits. And today's guest has been doing a version of this for about 35 years. Georgette and Valentina sit down with art historian, art therapist and guide Dott.ssa Lucia Montuschi, who...

This Friday might be raining here in Florence but let us take you two hours south to a place that is special to our hearts. Here are flamingos in the lagoons, cowboys working long-horned cattle, a beach where there is finally peace from the summer crowds, and some of the clearest (and cleanest) water on the Italian coast. Georgette and Valentina travel the Maremma coast north to south from one home base: ZoWorking's villa in Punta Ala, the pine-forest resort town shaped in many ways by Florenti...

Are wine windows, flambé cheese wheels, and viral affogatos ruining Florence’s food culture—or is there room for a little culinary theater? In this episode, Georgette and Valentina sit down with Florence-based private chef, journalist, and Saporita supper club founder Sara Cagle to unpack the city's rampant "food trend fatigue." From TikTok-driven bucket lists to historic gelato spots overwhelmed by algorithms, we examine how social media and post-pandemic tourism have transformed how people eat...

Unpacking the popular narrative that European (and specifically Italian) women have a healthier, more relaxed relationship with their bodies than American women — and testing that narrative against lived experience and actual data. A viral Substack essay claimed European women don't hate their bodies the way American women do. Many people disagreed. Georgette and Valentina dig into the actual argument, and the messier truth underneath it: it's not that Italy has fewer body issues, it's that ever...

We knew that by the time we recorded, edited and released this episode, things would have advanced even further and sure enough they have. While we are currently seeing tech bros lament the too-fast progress of the machines they created, here us regular humans are trying to wade through what to think about it all... but what about Italy? Italy was the first country in the EU to pass a comprehensive AI law. It ranks seventh in the world for AI research, and yet, fewer than one in ten of its sma...

We're back and doing what we do best: talking honestly about guilt. Not the tidy "here's how you can fix it" version, but the real thing: the guilt of dropping your daughter at camp while she clutches her stuffed hedgehog, the guilt of taking a vacation you've worked two years to earn, the guilt of being a working mother (or not being one), and the exhaustion we all seem to currrently embody. Georgette on leaving for Scotland and Northern Ireland mid-launch of Vivace Media; Valentina on why "l...

Wellness has become a $4 trillion global industry and somewhere between sleep, movement, and nutrition, it started selling us anxiety as often as it sells solutions. In our first-ever guest episode (and Season Two opener), Georgette and Valentina sit down with Ilaria Di Donato and Gloria Fuson of Relax Firenze to talk about what wellness actually means once you strip away the LED masks, the 4am influencer routines, and the supplement cabinets. We trace "mens sana in corpore sano" back to its re...