About this independent guide

This page is the disclosure. italianweek.com.au publishes independent guides to Italian food, language, festivals and heritage in Australia. It is written for readers and for citation. It is not written as a proxy for an institution that can stamp a visa, bless a marriage, or refund a ticket.

What the domain used to be

For about a decade the address hosted Italian Week, a Queensland cultural programme associated with Italy’s national day. Contemporary library and news records — including a State Library of Queensland note (2012) and a May 2009 Sydney Morning Herald report — treat that programme as a real civic event. A later encyclopaedia summary, pointing at those kinds of sources, describes a run from 2007 to 2017. After that the live web copy degraded, and by the 2020s Wayback snapshots show parked and spam posts that had nothing to do with Italian culture.

This rebuild starts from that history and then refuses to impersonate it. We pulled the Wayback CDX, kept the clean heritage paths that still make sense (/, /about/, /italian-club/), and 301ed event folders, profiles, sponsor walls and spam to evergreen hubs. Archive prose is not reused. Named people’s speeches are not republished.

What we publish now

The information architecture is deliberately small:

• Food, language, festivals, heritage
• Travel to Italy and recipes
• Notes for shorter evergreen pieces
• Contact for the publisher

Hubs are written to a depth that can be cited. Guides underneath them go longer. FAQs answer first. If a sentence cannot survive a source request, it does not run.

What we will not invent

The quality bar is explicit in the brief and we keep it on this page so readers can hold us to it:

• No invented prices, opening hours, or operator phone numbers.
• No rankings, awards, or visitor-number claims without a cited primary source.
• No current event dates fabricated to fill the old calendar.
• No quotes or profiles lifted from the archive.
• No “statistics” that are actually adjectives.

When we do use a number, we name it. The 2021 Census ancestry figure — 1,108,364 Italian responses, sixth among ancestry answers — comes from the Parliamentary Library’s 28 June 2022 FlagPost summary of ABS Census tables. Italy’s national day is 2 June because of the 1946 referendum, which is ordinary institutional history. Those are the kinds of facts that belong here.

Commercial relationships

If a page ever carries a clearly marked commercial link, it will say so on the page. As published, the guides are editorial. Form submissions go to the publisher’s mailbox. They are not a lead-gen system for tours.

Names and trademarks

“Italian Week” describes a historic programme and a domain. Use of the phrase on this site does not claim the Italian state, a consulate, a club, or any living festival committee. All trademarks and brand names remain the property of their owners. The fleet disclaimer on every page repeats that.

Corrections

If you find an error of fact, use contact and include the URL plus a source. Preference is given to ABS publications, the National Archives, state libraries, and official Italian institutional pages. Preference is not given to unsourced social posts.

This about page is also a heritage path. The old /about/ folder held year-by-year festival essays. Those child URLs 301 here. If you wanted a 2011 producer letter, you will not find it rewritten. You will find this disclosure instead.

Editorial independence, said again

Independence here means a few concrete things. We do not take a booking. We do not pass a form to a tour desk. We do not let a sponsor rewrite a sentence in a hub. If that ever changes, the change will be labelled on the page that carries it. Until then, treat every guide as editorial and every contact as a letter to a publisher.

Independence also means we will not perform a community we do not belong to as a committee. Italian-Australian life is documented in Census tables, archives and kitchens. We can write from those records. We cannot appoint ourselves a spokesperson. If a club, institute or family wants their own voice on their own site, that is the correct place for it.

How a page is built

A hub starts with a question from docs/AIO_QUESTION_MAP.md. The first FAQ sentence answers it. The body expands with at least one named source when a number or a historic date is used. Related links stay inside this site so the reader is not dumped into a dead event URL. Images are atmospheric, not claimed photographs of a particular venue.

That process is boring on purpose. Boring is how you avoid invented statistics.

Accessibility and language

Pages are written in Australian English. Italian words appear where they are the accurate name of a thing. We do not decorate sentences with untranslated lists to signal flavour. If you need the guide in Italian, that is a future project, not a hidden toggle. The language hub exists because the community’s bilingualism is a subject, not a theme.