As anyone in Italy over the past months knows, the weather has been really awful, like the Dr. Seuss book says: The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play. So we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day. And so two of the biggest […]
Yearly Archives: 2013
Liguria is, more than anything else, a long thin coastal stretch with mountains at its shoulders, and its entire complex of history, culture, and society is tied up to the sea and these geographical factors. And so the winds of Liguria are of great importance. There’s an easterly wind howling […]
Erica and I recently bought our first house, which was a surprise to us more than anyone, for when we made the decision to move permanently to the Cinque Terre area and put down roots in Levanto, we always figured that buying a house would be the last thing to […]
Levanto is a wonderful town for families … if it weren’t, my wife and I wouldn’t have uprooted our family from Parma to move here permanently. But more importantly, Levanto is a wonderful destination for families. It has a lot to offer. Clean water with beaches that slope gently into […]
As of about a year, the City of Levanto, resident population ca. 5,500, has undertaken an experiment in becoming a zero waste municipality. This is the mark of serious change, not to mention an example for the future, because if you can get Levanto to do this, then anyone can […]
The wonderful lemon festival that takes place every year in Monterosso in the Cinque Terre has been pushed back a week due to bad weather, which is no surprise, because the weather has been lousy all spring. Scheduled for yesterday, the new date is Sunday May 26th. It has been […]
Having only moved to Liguria a couple of years ago, I have also only recently become aware of the great Ligurian artists, so many of whom come from Genoa, the most underrated city in all of Italy. These include the violinist Niccolò Paganini, the Nobel Prize winning poet Eugenio Montale […]
For a series of causes, the name of Massimo Amfiteatrof has been running across my radar a lot recently, so I wanted to let you all know about the excellent classical music festival that is held every summer in Levanto. Named after Massimo, a virtuoso cellist and longtime resident of […]
Despite all of the stereotypes and legends, the truth is that American tourists are usually no better nor no worse than any other group of tourists. What they may lack in terms of linguistic capabilities (which is much in comparison to tourists from any other country), is often made up […]
Popular legend says that Liguria has an unusually high number of nonagenarians running around. While I have never seen any statistics about this fact, casual observation seems to bear it out. Any number of the people I know in Levanto, be they friends or acquaintances, have grandfathers, grandmothers, or great-grandparents […]