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Dripping with chocolate, covered with strawberries or laden with cream, there is a gelato to tease the tastebuds of every ice-cream lover. It's no surprise to learn that thousands of foreign tourists who come to Rome take time out to scour the cobbled streets of the Italian capital in search of the perfect gelato.

“There are two phone calls parents don’t ever want to get from their children,” the writer Adriana Trigiani once said. “No. 1 is: ‘I’m in prison. Come fetch me.’ And No. 2 is, ‘I’ve written a novel . . . and it’s set in your hometown.’ ” As far as I can tell Trigiani has never done time, unless you count writing for TV (she worked on “The Cosby Show” and other sitcoms), but she did set her first three novels in the Blue Ridge Mountain town of Big Stone Gap, Va., where she grew up. Since then she has frequently turned to her Italian-American heritage for material; her 12th novel, “The Shoemaker’s Wife,” which slides onto the hardcover fiction list at No. 5, is based on the lives of her immigrant grandparents.

ROME — Woody Allen brought “To Rome with Love” to the city that inspired his latest film, but some homegrown critics are grumbling that the American director’s new work is loaded with old-fashioned Italian stereotypes. At a news conference Friday in Rome following a screening for Italian journalists, Allen exuded a fuzzy, love-struck view of the country.

On a day in late winter in a valley in the Italian Alps, about a hundred people set off on a walk. Their path took them by steeply terraced vineyards, through a small village, and over the crest of a hill to where the riot police were waiting for them. The officers stood in small knots, behind a fence topped with razor wire, spread out across a patch of cleared land where the government plans to break ground on an €8.2 billion ($10.8 billion) project to connect Italy and France by high-speed rail. Soldiers clustered nearby. A camouflage-painted Lince—Italy’s answer to a Humvee—moved in a lazy patrol. A medic’s jeep squatted under a concrete overpass.