English names for things are more and more popular in Italy. The original famous Italian cookie Pan di Stelle (star bread) is a rich, caloric, chocolate and hazelnut cookie. The Mooncake is a slightly less caloric, and creamier spinoff.

Mario Aprile, president of the Trifolao Association in Piedmont, gives us some tips about the characteristics of white truffles: their growth, the ideal way of storing them and of course some excellent recipes.

In Italy, Easter is the time for special, traditional desserts, which, apart from being delicious, were conceived to represent symbols of life and rebirth.

Easter Monday is, traditionally, "picnic day" all over Italy. It's affectionately called Pasquetta (little Easter). This video is from RAI 1, one of the principal TV stations in Italy. At this particular picnic, "primordial" cooking is the protagonist.

Three little cooks prepare a delicious pasta dish dedicated to the tricolore (the Italian flag). See more of their videos: uChef

Alberto has a wine shop at the Lido di Venezia and he tells us about his world renowned business, which exclusively sells local and Italian wines.

Ilaria is from Lido di Venezia, a small island near Venice. She tells us about the specialties they offer at the bar where she works, a bar that makes its own desserts. How about having a "Spritz" at the bar?

Marco Lombardo, the chef of a well-known restaurant in the Langhe (a hilly area in Piedmont), demonstrates how to prepare a typical dish of the area: Eggs en cocotte with white Alba truffles.

Who doesn't love pasta? Marika talks about this extremely popular Italian food: the history, where it's produced, and how to cook it.

Marika divides the types of pasta into different categories and explains their characteristics, ranging from ingredients to shelf life, to cooking time, and consistency.

There are different kinds of flour used to make pasta. "Flour" is a generic term but it's not always accurate. Marika explains it all.

There is an amazing variety of fresh and dried pasta shapes and sizes in Italy, referred to as formati (shapes and sizes). Their names have to do with their surface (smooth, rough, grooved), their size, expressed with a suffix, such as -one, -etto, -ino, etc, and/or what they resemble. Marika makes some sense of the vast assortment of pasta found in Italian supermarkets.