Our dear friends, Tim and Julie, have arrived for a visit.  We’ve traveled to Italy many times over the years with Tim and Julie and always think of them whenever we see anything new or have a wonderful experience (which is quite often).  We share the same world view...

I’ve said this before and I’ll probably say it more times, but Anghiari is really a small town.  One of our neighbors, an older gentlemen who speaks absolutely no English, lets us know about all the insider events going on around town.  He recently told us about something on...

I tell people when they come to Italy that you have to look up.  You can’t just look at eye level or you miss so much.  Especially in an old village like Anghiari. The buildings in the hill towns are the original high rises.  They go up four and...

We thought the summer was the prime season for festas, but they keep coming.  In fact, there are so many coming up that we have to keep a notepad handy to write them all down when we come across them.  We can’t miss one.  I can’t possibly write about...

Myra’s flight left from Rome, so we saved doing all that was Rome for the end of her trip.  By then she had visited Florence, Venice, Tuscany and Umbria.  She had dined in Italian homes, met and got to know families, walked hill towns, sampled the unique local products...

We planned a lot of trips and sightseeing for Myra, but we also wanted to have some time just to stay around Anghiari.  It’s a small town, but there are an incredible number of things to do here.  There are several restaurants that we had to take her to,...

As part of Myra’s great Italian adventure, we took the train to Venice for a couple of days.  Venice is incredibly touristy, almost always crowded, outrageously expensive (but not as bad as Switzerland), and easy to get lost in.  But it’s Venice.  It’s like no other place on earth...

We took Myra on a tour through Umbria, which is the region just to the east of Tuscany.  It’s just as beautiful as Tuscany and not quite as tourist laden, although it’s being discovered more and more.  Umbria is called the “Green Heart of Italy” because its landscape it...

After Florence, we drove back to Anghiari through the Chianti country.  We did the same trip with David and Edith last month, but it is completely different now.  The colors are different, more gold than green, the grapes are all gone – being made into wine that we will...

Our own personal Italian cooking instructor asked us back for a pizza making lesson.  I think this is because we showed such promise as pasta makers, she thought we were ready to branch out to other food groups.  Pizza is one of my favorite foods on earth and I...