Food – do you get tired of hearing about it?  I guess if you do you would have stopped reading a long time ago.  Some people may think I’m obsessed with food.  They’re not far off.  I wouldn’t say it’s an obsession, but I would say that food is...

Since we’re counting down the days until we pack up and go home, we feel like we need to make every moment count.  This weekend was an example of how we plan to pack as much in as we can. Our landlord and friend, Giovanni, has two sons who...

Remember the nebbiolo grape from the Piemonte region?  How it’s named after the fog (nebbia) and how pervasive the fog is there all the time?  The fog there starts out dense in the morning, but then burns down to a haze for the rest of the day.  Here there...

The holidays are over.  All the feasts have been eaten, all the candles have been extinguished, all the concerts have been heard.  What starts on January 2 in the U.S. starts on January 7 here.  Back to business. It went out with a bang here.  On January 5, the...

There’s a little town about 10 minutes from here called Le Ville.  It’s really just a spot in the road on the way to Arezzo.  We’ve been through it dozens of times and nothing has ever made us want to stop and look around.  We found out that they...

We spent New Year’s Eve with Michelangelo and Rosella, and her cousins Paola and Carlo.  We were with them the week before on Christmas and they were gracious enough to welcome us back into their home to celebrate the new year.  It wasn’t unlike New Year’s celebrations in the...

We have just over five weeks left here in Italy.  I remember our first day here so well.  We were so eager to explore, meet people, fit into the community and learn about the food and culture that we jumped right into the fabric of the society here.   We...

Yesterday we had the kind of day that reminds us of why we’re here.  We went to Perugia, which is about 45 minutes away and had lunch with our dear friend Ludo and his wife Sonja.  We’ve known Ludo for over 12 years and think of him like family. ...

Christmas in Italy is not unlike Christmas in the U.S.  People get together with friends and family and have a feast.  Here, almost everyone goes to church, whether they’re particularly religious or not.  Most people go to midnight mass on Christmas Eve, then come back home and have a...

Only in Italy.  Late this afternoon, Christmas Eve, there was an event in the piazza.  We saw the signs around town and thought we’d go, even though we and Google Translate couldn’t really decipher the signs.  We knew it had to do with kids, because the signs had pictures...