Temperatures are set to plummet with the risk of several centimetres of snow in Rome on the night between Sunday 25 February and Monday 26 February.
https://www.wantedinrome.com/image-wall/rome-snow-warning-on-25-february.html
The same cold front from Russia (with love?) will smack down the U.K. It even has a name: the east beast!
It seems like in every season, something wonderful is in bloom in Italy. Right now it is mimosa.
Also beginning to bloom are the camellias
I walked down a wide avenue in western Florence yesterday, where I noticed a long line of street trees that have been severely pruned in the Pollarding method, a pruning system involving the cutting of long branches of a tree, done to promotes a dense head of foliage and branches.
Pollarded trees look brutal against gray winter skies.
The Italian Alps and the Dolomites will experience some of the lowest temperatures of the winter in the next week and many domains will also see significant fresh snowfall. The heaviest snowfall will be above the Aosta Valley where Cervinia (1,520m) can expect up to 45cm of fresh powder. The resort already holds close to 4 metres of snow base beneath top station at 3,480m and when the visibility is decent the skiing is epic. However next week the daytime temperatures here will be far below 0ºC, -7ºC the average high at resort level, so skiers will need to bulk up thermal layers. Today in Cervinia all 15 lifts are open and skiing is on fresh and dry groomed snow at all elevations.
Read this interesting article by Dr. Susan Steer, an art historian specialising in Venice. Her MA concentrated on the city’s art and architecture and her PhD on Venetian Renaissance altarpieces.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/tours/venice-things-to-see-and-do-beyond-st-marks/
If you admire great paintings, you’ll be even more in awe when you consider that for most of history, artists had to make their own paint from oil, pigment, and sometimes eggs. Watch this video to see the process and as a plus, you can practice your Italian skills!
Here it is:
The National Gallery in London celebrates how it hid priceless paintings from Nazis in a Welsh mine. The gallery’s display will recall the summer of 1940 when, following Dunkirk, the British feared invasion.
The new exhibition shows 24 archival photographs detailing how paintings were removed, packed, transported and stashed in a disused slate mine in Snowdonia, along with a picture of how it looks today.
A new 30 minute film about the rescue mission, capturing an “immersive” dance and spoken word performance, has been commissioned to accompany it, to be broadcast on BBC Two.
In 1940, the Bristish feared for the safety of the national art collection: Winston Churchill is known to have personally intervened to veto a plan to take them to Canada by ship, fearing a u-boat attack could leave paintings lost at sea.
Instead, curators agreed to hide works in the Manod mine, enlarging its entrance with explosives and building small brick “bungalows” inside to protect them from damp.
Monitoring the conditions the paintings were kept in further led to “valuable discoveries” about how best to protect them, a spokesman for the gallery said, explaining air conditioning was then added to the renovated London gallery after the war.
The technique and materials are made clear in this excellent video. Then, all you need is talent!
get back, lauretta! 
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