There must be one.  Of all the things that Italy does well, food tops almost every list.  Certainly, it tops mine, as my ever-rounding belly suggests.  Michelangelo and Rossella brought us a huge tray of figs and plums from their garden.  This added to the things we got when...

Sunday evening we went to the I Giorni di Bacco Sagra in Castiglion Fiorentino with Michelangelo and Rossella.  This means The Days of Wine Festival.  Wine is actually vino in Italian, so Bacco refers to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine.  Castiglion Fiorentino is about 30 minutes from here,...

It’s Sunday morning and that means porchetta at the Monterchi market.  The Monterchi market is something else.  It is more flea market or bazaar than fresh foods.  They have that, too, but most of the stalls are clothes, toys, power tools, flowers, and chickens.  Live chickens clucking away in...

We’re farmers.  OK, not really.  We inherited a robust garden that is populated with all manner of horticultural specimens.  We have olive trees, grape vines, figs, lavender, rosemary, artichokes, roses, sunflowers and many indeterminate species.  It’s quite wild right now with almost everything blooming, just finished blooming, or about...

Life is beautiful.  I don’t know why it seems so much more here than in Atlanta.  Maybe because I’m almost always on vacation here.  I do some work – this morning I worked first thing before I did anything else.  Maybe because the landscape here is just so darn...

We’re back in our Tuscan home.  We arrived Tuesday and are settling in.  Our flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam was wonderful – the plane was very sparsely populated and we each got our own row to spread out in.  I got more sleep than I usually do when I’m...

Moving through this area you are reminded of just how ancient this civilization is.  Thousands of years of groups of people coming together to make a place to live.  Improvement upon improvement – and it’s all still there.  This amazes me as an American because we’re such a young...

So much food, so little time.  Heavy sigh.  The food here is just incredible.  So simple, so fresh, and so wonderful.  And so cheap.  We’ve had meals that made us cry they were so good and we paid about a third of what we would have paid for a...

This trip is happening faster than I can keep up with.  This will be a catch-up post – just to let you know that wonderful things are happening here. Between getting the apartment set up and visiting with friends we seem to have very little time.  Rough life, I...

Here’s our home – hope you like it!...