Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site
Main
Page This family-friendly site celebrates Italian culture for the enjoyment of children and
adults. Site-Overview
Please visit my Italophile
Amazon.com Shop
Lots of great gift ideas, including Panettone!
Italy
gifts from Zazzle, a top-rated, secure, internet store that sells
all sorts of products from clothing to stationary to mugs... The Bible in Italian makes a wonderful gift for your
religious Italian speaking friends.
Hand carved and painted wooden pieces for a Crèche
or Nativity Scene or Presepe are made in Italy and sold
around the world. Dolfi
is an Italian company that makes them. Porcelain statues of Saints Mary and Joseph
and the newborn Jesus and the other figures of the usual crib or crèche are made in Italy and sold around the world.
Top brands are Roman, Inc
selling the Fontanini brand, and
Euromarchi.
Fontanini products at
Amazon.com
Each Italian holiday has its associated food and sweets. The
packaging for Italian products are often more attractive than the
products, but in the case of these holiday gifts, it's a tie. You
can check my Sweets
page for more ideas and direct links to Amazon.com items for
sale. Perugina chocolate kisses, 'baci' Chocolate eggs filled with toys, an Easter specialty Panettone, Christmas fruit cake Pandoro, Christmas cake La Colomba, Easter dove shaped cake Click here
to go to my page with the Gospel according to St. Matthew's passages
about the birth of Jesus, in Italian and English. Or click on
Giotto's fresco of the Nativity, above. Click here
to go to my page with the Gospel according to St. John's passages
about the resurrection of Jesus, in Italian and English. Or click
on Giotto's fresco of the Resurrection, above. Here are some gift ideas for friends and relations who enjoy Italian
culture. While I provide some links to on-line sales sites, these are not recommendations. Actually, I think it's most enjoyable to research your purchases
on-line, then go out to the nearest Italian shops to buy them. Then you can wander into the nearest Italian bar and enjoy a caffé,
or caffé con Vov, or cappucino, then stop in an Italian bakery, to
nibble on a brioche, or pane, or focaccia. I
think you get the idea... If you're home-bound, short on time, or don't have any Italian shops
nearby, by all means try the Internet shops. Italian herbs make a wonderful gift for the Italophile cuoco
o cuoca, fresh herbs in pots, or dried herbs. I know from
experience, the best dried herbs can be found in your nearest Chinatown,
where you can purchase huge sacks of oregano, thyme, nutmeg, rosemary,
sage, pepper, hot peppers, at reasonable prices. Majolica is Italian pottery. You can buy one piece or a
whole dish service. Whatever you get, it's always beautiful.
You can check out my Majolica page to get an
idea of what I'm talking about.
Italian Majolica There is always the gift of Italian music. CD Roots is a
site that lets you listen to samples of from each CD before
buying it. Another music site that has Italian CDs for sale on-line is CD
Universe. And the ItaliaMia site offers a link to Amazon via their list
of Italian Artists
available on CD. Check out my Music
page for some ideas. I also offer links to collections at Amazon.com
of Modugno, Mina and Verdi. Italian coffee and coffee-makers always make good gifts.
The Go Espresso site has lots
on offer. But they are generally available everywhere now, so I recommend you buy
it locally in case anything goes wrong and you need to return it, or
from an online retailer you know well. Italian coffee and the classic moka coffee-maker But for the more discerning coffee drinker, a coffee grinder and
roasted beans might make a better gift. Visit my Coffee
page for more information and some more store links. The expensive
gift is of course the all-in-one espresso-maker-grinder-water
holder-milk-whipper. Beware, you tend to drink a lot more coffee
if you own one! Italian wine, Liquors, Aperitivi and Digestives make wonderful gifts.
You can find out a bit about it on my Wine
page. But remember, wine is best when it sits for a while after
traveling, and it's best not to have it travel too far. Some Italian Digestives, 'Digestivi' You can buy an Italian film on DVD or a film set in
Italy. The In
Italy site offers films at the on-line seller Amazon
grouped by director and even by location in which the film is set.
The Italia Mia site offers
a listing of Italian films, actors, directors... You can visit my Film
page for more information, and some direct links to Amazon.com. Books about Italy, and books set in Italy make a nice gift for an Italophile.
The In Italy site has Italian
related categories that then link through to Amazon.com. My Book
page may give you some ideas for the classics. And I've pages dedicated to
genres, with links to works sold at Amazon.com: Italian fashion accessories can be purchased on-line and, of
course, in the designer stores around the world. Check out my
Fashion and Beauty page for
more. Here are some direct links to shops with storefronts at
Amazon.com. They can give you an idea of what's out there and the
prices you should expect to pay. You could always give the gift of Italy itself, in the form of a
Holiday in Italy, maybe a winter ski holiday? I'll leave the details up to you but try my Travel
page for some ideas and resources.
These gift are actually shipped from Italy... Italian (Sicilian) cookies
baked with figs, almonds, pistachios, candied orange, sesame seeds, and
Amarena cherries. Shipped from Agrigento Italy by Adriana's
Italian Gourmet Cookies. (If you feel like baking your
own, check out my Sweets
page.) If you wish to send someone a religious gift from Italy, the Italian
Rosaries site
specializes in Catholic related gifts. They send a post card from the Vatican City with
each gift. They also run, from California and Rome, a gift site
called Rome Gift Shop. The Viccarone family in Sicily have a very complete site selling jewelry. They are visitors to this site and have
asked me to put up their link for 18kt Italian-Sicilian
gold jewelry. (You can buy religious jewelry from the
Religious Jewelry Store via Amazon.com Italy-by-mail is an on-line
shop that sells Italian Products like coffee, biscotti, pasta, oil,
pasta sauces, chocolates, and Nutella hazelnut spread. But
you can find many of these things in specialty shops and Italian shops
outside of Italy, too. Some even sell gift baskets full of
goodies. The Internet Bookstore Italia offers Italian books for sale
on-line. This link
is to their top 20 list, so you can see what's being read in Italy.
I've put two bestsellers in the left column. They've both been
made into films that have been released around the world. (Or you
can search for the translations from Amazon.com at the bottom of
this page.) Hand carved and painted wooden pieces for a Crèche
or Nativity Scene or Presepe are made in Italy and sold
around the world. Dolfi
is an Italian company that makes them. There are some images of
their work in the left column. Statues of Saints Mary and Joseph
and the newborn Jesus, and the entire crèche ensemble, are made in Italy
and sold around the world. Top brands are Roman, Inc
selling the Fontanini brand, and
Euromarchi.
You can find some
Fontanini products at
Amazon.com Each Italian holiday has its associated food and sweets. The
packaging for Italian products are often more attractive than the
products, but in the case of these holiday gifts, it's a tie. You
can check my Sweets
page for more ideas, but here are a few: Holidays in family-oriented Italy, are naturally a family
affair. So if you are a foreigner with no relations, expect to be lonely.
However, you will be lonely in some of the most beautifully decorated
towns in the world, and you will eat some of the most delicious food
you've ever eaten in your life! Decorating Italian towns is a big thing. It's not just a matter
of sticking up a few trees and lights. There are contests between
major design studios to get the contracts to decorate the towns' major
streets and squares. Then everyone and their cousin critiques the
results and accuses everyone involved of kickbacks and nepotism.
It's part of the holiday fun; a seasonal tradition, of sorts.
Click here
to visit a page of photos of some Italian towns' decorations. Most holidays are related to religious festivals, but not all.
There is the famous May Day celebration, when the Communist party
organizes big outdoor musical festivals around the country, for example. Traditional
Christmas cards are generally preferred in Catholic Italy. I've
collected together some images you can use to create your own, or to
send a traditional card in a modern way, via e-mail.
Click
here,
to go to a page of images you can print, send with an e-mail, save to your PC, or set as the background of your PC's main
window.
I've resorted to custom-making some traditional Christmas cards in
Italian. They're special cards for Italophiles to send their
friends and family, to share their love of Italian culture. They are for sale at my shop hosted at Zazzle.com, a large,
family oriented, on-line
custom-products seller. They ship around the world at reasonable
rates. You can pay by secure credit-card payments. The text inside the cards varies: Christmas and New Years
greetings in Italian or English, a recipe, or the
Lord's Prayer or Hail Mary in Italian. I also have cards with
prayers in English by St. Francis of Assisi. I've left the option
for you to add your own
greeting to the card, or an image inside on page 2 of the card, so you
can customized them for your family.
Notti Italiani's
Christmas Traditions
The story of the
birth of Christ illustrated by famous paintings at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
This link
is to an
informative site about Bethlehem and the Christian traditions
there.
This Santa, or Babbo Natale, was snapped in
Florence by an amateur photographer who has other photos of Italy at
Christmas on her website which you can view by clicking here,
or on the Santa in
the photo. A Christmas market in Trento. The two previous images are from an Italian
language website run by the town of Trento featuring special Christmas
events. Click here,
or on the image above to visit the site.
Christmas service is broadcast around the world
straight from St. Peter's Square in the Vatican City in Rome.
Click here,
or on the image above to check the TV schedule from the Vatican for
December.
Gift
Ideas for the Italophile, and Christmas in Italy
Introduction
Gift Ideas for the Italophile
Gifts from Italy
Holiday Gifts
Holidays in Italy
Traditional Christmas Cards
Some Christmas Sites
