Category: Italian Travel

We have good friends who asked us to retrieve a left behind suitcase in Spoleto.  Of course we trust them completely and didn’t think the suitcase was filled with bundles of cash, but there was still an air of Tony Soprano to it.  Spoleto is about an hour and...

Sunday was bright and sunny and beautiful.  Perfect for a little excursion to explore some of this country.  Where to go?  Somewhere we’ve never been, but not too far away.  A finger hovered over the map and landed randomly on Civitella di Val di Chiana.  Never heard of it...

Fiendish Wind We’ve been having a struggle with the weather this week.  We started the week with snow, which was beautiful and magical and we loved it.  Then the sun came out and it was clear and bright and we loved it.  With the sun came the wind.  It...

Arezzo is about 30 minutes away and is the biggest city near us.  It’s about 100,000 people and we go there for many things.  It’s where we both got our booster shots, we spent many happy times in the Questura (police headquarters) there trying to get our permesso di...

We’re trying to experience as much of the Christmas spirit as we can in our corner of Italy.  We planned to spend a day in Florence and the morning we were to leave, I did a quick search for hotels just see what was available.  We found a very...

We traveled to Rome last week to spend the night before Steve’s flight to the US.  One of the things we love about where we live is that we’re about two hours from Rome by train. Rome is one of the great cities of the world.  The Roman Empire...

We took a road trip recently to the Adriatic coast.  We’ve decided that now that things are somewhat settled for us, we should take an overnight trip about once a month.  We’d like to go to places we’ve never been, but since we’ve been traveling here for over 20...

Germans and Italians have a history.  Well, Germans and a lot of people have histories, but the one with Italy is complicated.  They’re neighbors, but completely different in their worldview.  They’re both European, but with very different sensibilities.  They both flirted with Fascism, then took very different path forward. ...

Late summer and fall are prime festa times in Italy.  This year, however, COVID has put an end to the festas.  It’s very sad for us, but I’m glad they’re taking things so seriously here.  Festas are celebrations, usually to mark the harvest of some crop or to honor...

Few things are as iconic of the Italian landscape as the cypress tree.  This is especially true in Tuscany, where you see them lining curving drives and punctuating even the most humble vistas.  Their neat, columnar shape make them ideal for wedging into a garden to provide vertical structure. ...