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Viva! Viva gli spaghetti, la pizza, il pomodoro, l'olio d'oliva, il caffé espresso e il cappuccino!
Ma è tutta qui la cucina italiana? No di sicuro. L'Italia ha davvero mille piatti diversi, centinaia di specialità gastronomiche, una infinità di gustosissimi prodotti tipici, grazie ad un sistema agroindustriale moderno e avanzato ma attento a conservare i sapori e i valori (anche dietetici) tradizionali.

La preghiera di San Francesco di Assisi

The modern understanding of Italian folk music has its roots in the growth of ethnomusicology in the 1940s and 1950s and in the resurgence of regionalism in Italy at the time. The Centro Nazionale di Studi di Musica Popolare (CNSMP), now part of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, was started in 1948 to study and archive the various musical styles throughout Italy. In the 1950s, a number of important field recordings were conducted by American Alan Lomax and Italians Diego Carpitella, Franco Coggiola, Roberto Leydi among others. Toward the end of the decade, a special effort was made to capture the folk traditions of the meridionale (southern Italy), including an important study by Carpitella and anthropologist Ernesto de Martino of the tarantella, and especially Pino Pontuali.

Italian folk music has a deep and complex history. Because national unification came late to the Italian peninsula, the traditional music of its many hundreds of cultures exhibit no homogeneous national character. Rather, each region and community possesses a unique musical tradition that reflects the history, language, and ethnic composition of that particular locale.These traditions reflect Italy's geographic position in southern Europe and in the center of the Mediterranean Sea; Arabic, African, Celtic, Persian, Roma, and Slavic influences, as well as rough geography and the historic dominance of small city states, have all combined to allow diverse musical styles to coexist in close proximity.

Italian folk styles are very diverse, and include monophonic, polyphonic, and responsorial song, choral, instrumental and vocal music, and other styles. Choral singing and polyphonic song forms are primarily found in northern Italy, while south of Naples, solo singing is more common, and groups usually use unison singing in two or three parts carried by a single performer. Northern ballad-singing is syllabic, with a strict tempo and intelligible lyrics, while southern styles use a rubato tempo, and a strained, tense vocal style. Folk musicians use the dialect of their own regional tradition; this rejection of the standard Italian language in folk song is nearly universal. There is little perception of a common Italian folk tradition, and the country's folk music never became a national symbol.

Una corrida que dura menos de 2 minutos, es tema de debate y competencias durante todo el año y es motivo de fuertes discusiones entre hombres y mujeres: es el Palio, las más grande e importante fiesta de la tradición senese.